October 9, 2025
Large language models (LLMs) cannot understand full sentences the way humans do — they need text broken into smaller, consistent chunks called tokens to handle any kind of input systematically and learn patterns that let them predict what comes next.
A glitch token is token that causes unexpected or glitchy outputs when used in a prompt. Such output may include the model misunderstanding meanings of words, refusing to respond or generating repetitive or unrelated text. Prompts that cause this behavior may look completely or mostly normal.
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October 6, 2025
Mar-a-Lago face is a plastic surgery and fashion trend among American conservative and Republican individuals such as excessive makeup, fake tans, fake eyelashes, dark smokey eyes, and full lips.
The trend has been described as a status symbol among Donald Trump’s inner circle, purportedly signaling wealth, privilege, and alignment with Trumpism. Some commentators and surgeons have described the look as engineered and overdone, and have linked it to the aesthetics and aspects of Trump-era politics. One cosmetic surgeon listed facial surgery, fillers, and cosmetic dental work among the procedures constituting the look.
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September 18, 2025
John Gall (1925-2014) was an American author, scholar, and pediatrician. Gall is known for his 1975 book ‘General Systemantics’ (republished two years later as ‘Systemantics: How Systems Work and Especially How They Fail’).
Gall’s Law is derived from Systemantics and states: ‘A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.’
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September 16, 2025
Fewer versus less is a debate in English grammar about the appropriate use of these two determiners. Linguistic prescriptivists usually say that fewer and not less should be used with countable nouns (e.g. apples or cars), and that less should be used only with uncountable nouns (e.g. water or happiness).
This distinction was first tentatively suggested by the grammarian Robert Baker in 1770, and it was eventually presented as a rule by many grammarians since then.
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September 13, 2025
The Groypers, sometimes called the Groyper Army, are a group of alt-right, white nationalist, and Christian nationalist activists led by Nick Fuentes. Members of the group have attempted to introduce alt-right politics into mainstream conservatism in the United States and participated in the January 6 United States Capitol attack and the protests leading up to it. They have targeted other conservative groups and individuals whose agendas they view as too moderate and insufficiently nationalist.
The Groyper movement has been described as white nationalist, homophobic, nativist, fascist, sexist, antisemitic, and an attempt to rebrand the declining alt-right movement. Groypers are a loosely defined group of Fuentes’s followers and fans. After him, there is no clear second in the Groyper hierarchy. Groypers are named after a cartoon amphibian named ‘Groyper,’ a variant of the Internet meme Pepe the Frog.
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September 8, 2025
Clanker is a slur for robots and artificial intelligence software. The term has been used in ‘Star Wars’ media, first appearing in the franchise’s 2005 video game ‘Star Wars: Republic Commando.’ In 2025, the term became widely used to discuss distaste for machines ranging from delivery robots to large language models. This trend has been attributed to anxiety around the negative societal effects of artificial intelligence.
Whereas AI slop describes low-quality output from artificial intelligence, clanker belittles the underlying robotic systems. While other science fiction media includes pejoratives for robots, such as ‘skinjob’ in ‘Blade Runner’ and ‘toaster’ in ‘Battlestar Galactica,’ clanker is believed to have gained popularity because its usage is intuitive and flexible.
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August 28, 2025
A data broker is an individual or company that specializes in collecting personal data (such as income, ethnicity, political beliefs, or geolocation data) or data about people, mostly from public records but sometimes sourced privately, and selling or licensing such information to third parties for a variety of uses.
Sources, usually Internet-based since the 1990s, may include census and electoral roll records, social networking sites, court reports and purchase histories. The information from data brokers may be used in background checks used by employers and housing.
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August 11, 2025
Slopsquatting is a type of cybersquatting. It is the practice of registering a non-existent software package name that a large language model (LLM) may hallucinate in its output, whereby someone unknowingly may copy-paste and install the software package without realizing it is fake. Attempting to install a non-existent package should result in an error, but some have exploited this for their gain in the form of typosquatting.
In 2023, security researcher Bar Lanyado noted that LLMs hallucinated a package named ‘huggingface-cli. While this name is identical to the command used for the command-line version of HuggingFace Hub, it is not the name of the package. The software is correctly installed with the code pip install -U ‘huggingface_hub[cli].’ Lanyado tested the potential for slopsquatting by uploading an empty package under this hallucinated name. In three months, it had received over 30,000 downloads. The hallucinated packaged name was also used in the README file of a repo for research conducted by Alibaba.
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July 25, 2025
Flâneur [flah-neyr] is a French term for a type of urban male ‘stroller,’ ‘lounger,’ ‘saunterer,’ or ‘loafer.’ Traditionally depicted as male, a flâneur is an ambivalent figure of urban affluence and modernity, representing the ability to wander detached from society, for an entertainment from the observation of the urban life. Flânerie is the act of strolling, with all of its accompanying associations. A near-synonym of the noun is boulevardier.
The flâneur was first a literary type from 19th-century France, essential to any picture of the streets of Paris. The word carried a set of rich associations: the man of leisure, the idler, the urban explorer, the connoisseur of the street. Drawing on the work of Charles Baudelaire who described the flâneur in his poetry and 1863 essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life,’ Walter Benjamin promoted 20th-century scholarly interest in the flâneur as an emblematic archetype of urban, modern (even modernist) experience.
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July 15, 2025
Pasta with strawberries (makaron z truskawkami) is a dish from Polish cuisine. It is made by pouring a strawberry and cream sauce over cooked pasta. The dish may be eaten at lunch or as a dessert, and is often served in schools. In Polish culture, pasta with strawberries is often considered to be a nostalgic food associated with childhood. The dish became famous worldwide at Wimbledon 2025, when Polish tennis player, Iga Świątek, said that pasta with strawberries is one of her favorite meals.
The origins of pasta with strawberries are unknown, but strawberries are popularly eaten with similar dishes in Poland. In Polish cuisine, strawberries may be added to rice and soups or stuffed into pierogi. Pasta with strawberries is commonly eaten in summer, as strawberry season lasts from May until July. During this time, strawberries are ripe and inexpensive. Kashubian strawberries are considered to be especially desirable for this dish, since they are reputed to have a high quality taste and aroma.
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June 29, 2025
Sensory processing sensitivity (SPS) is a temperamental or personality trait involving ‘an increased sensitivity of the central nervous system and a deeper cognitive processing of physical, social, and emotional stimuli.’ The trait is characterized by ‘a tendency to ‘pause to check’ in novel situations, greater sensitivity to subtle stimuli, and the engagement of deeper cognitive processing strategies for employing coping actions, all of which is driven by heightened emotional reactivity, both positive and negative.’
A human with a particularly high measure of SPS is considered to have ‘hypersensitivity,’ or be a highly sensitive person (HSP). The terms SPS and HSP were coined in the mid-1990s by psychologists Elaine Aron and her husband Arthur Aron, who developed the Highly Sensitive Person Scale (HSPS) questionnaire by which SPS is measured. Other researchers have applied various other terms to denote this responsiveness to stimuli that is seen in humans and other species.
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June 11, 2025
You Will was an AT&T marketing campaign that launched in 1993, consisting of commercials directed by David Fincher. Each ad presented a futuristic scenario beginning with “Have you ever…” and ending with “…you will. And the company that will bring it to you: AT&T.” The ads were narrated by Tom Selleck. One of the first web banner ads ever sold was part of an AT&T campaign that ran on HotWired starting October 27, 1994, asking “Have you ever clicked your mouse right HERE? You Will.”
In 2016, technology writer Timothy B. Lee commented that ‘overall, the ads were remarkably accurate in predicting the cutting-edge technologies of the coming decades. But the ads were mostly wrong about one thing: the company that brought these technologies to the world was not AT&T. At least not on its own. AT&T does provide some of the infrastructure on which the world’s communications flow. But the gadgets and software that brought these futuristic capabilities to consumers were created by a new generation of Silicon Valley companies that mostly didn’t exist when these ads were made.’
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