@orionkidder@writing.exchange

Orion (he/him) @orionkidder@writing.exchange · Jul 22, 2026

Replying to @ramsey@phpc.social

@ramsey@phpc.social @DanielMReck@mas.to @MaryAustinBooks@mstdn.social Without knowing when the spelling of "weird" was determined, I couldn't say, but that's the question most of the time: what did it sound like when scribes wrote it down?

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Orion (he/him) @orionkidder@writing.exchange · Jul 21, 2026

Replying to @MaryAustinBooks@mstdn.social

@MaryAustinBooks@mstdn.social Speaking as a writing instructor: yes! Write like yourself. Write like you're a person with a point of view. Write like you're not a machine. I can give you a grade for that.

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Orion (he/him) @orionkidder@writing.exchange · Jun 07, 2026

Replying to @gotofritz@hachyderm.io

@gotofritz@hachyderm.io @RnDanger@infosec.exchange @elfburgerman@mastodon.social @AccordionBruce@mastodon.social @grammargirl@zirk.us It's a marketing tactic. And the problem with the metaphor of hallucination was explained at the top of the thread. I'll be blocking you if you keep playing ignorant.

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Orion (he/him) @orionkidder@writing.exchange · Jun 07, 2026

Replying to @RnDanger@infosec.exchange

@RnDanger@infosec.exchange @elfburgerman@mastodon.social @gotofritz@hachyderm.io @AccordionBruce@mastodon.social @grammargirl@zirk.us Exactly. Making machines seem like magic, seem like they have no internal mechanism, is a common tactic. It's why we refer to external hard drives that we don't own or control as "the cloud."

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Orion (he/him) @orionkidder@writing.exchange · Jun 07, 2026

Replying to @elfburgerman@mastodon.social

@elfburgerman@mastodon.social @gotofritz@hachyderm.io @RnDanger@infosec.exchange @AccordionBruce@mastodon.social @grammargirl@zirk.us I think this is true. Like I said above, I have zero expectation that my language use is going to make a damn bit of difference at scale, but in individual conversations, refusing the metaphor of consciousness can help reframe. It's just an error. The machine is faulty. It makes errors a lot.

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Orion (he/him) @orionkidder@writing.exchange · Jun 07, 2026

Replying to @danielmunoz@maly.io

@danielmunoz@maly.io @grammargirl@zirk.us This is why I refer to its "error rate." It's a machine that produces false answers to such a large degree that it shouldn't be trusted. It's simply faulty.

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Orion (he/him) @orionkidder@writing.exchange · Jun 06, 2026

Replying to @orionkidder@writing.exchange

@grammargirl@zirk.us To me, that feels like a brute-force workaround, a kludge, not an improvement in the tech itself. It's like saying, my car is too slow, so I'll attach a second engine to the hood.

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Orion (he/him) @orionkidder@writing.exchange · Jun 06, 2026

Replying to @orionkidder@writing.exchange

@grammargirl@zirk.us If I understand correctly, it shoves every query through the "AI" multiple times and tests whether it does the thing it's asked to do, but of course, it hides all of that from the user.

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Orion (he/him) @orionkidder@writing.exchange · Jun 06, 2026

Replying to @grammargirl@zirk.us

@grammargirl@zirk.us I'm seeing people claim the error rate is lower with other models, and I'm not sure I believe that since this industries just piles lies on top of lies, but the only plausible explanation of the lowered error rate I've seen is for Claude code.

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Orion (he/him) @orionkidder@writing.exchange · Jun 06, 2026

Replying to @grammargirl@zirk.us

@grammargirl@zirk.us This is a good example of why that term is so dangerous. Thank you for posting it. That said, while I have zero hope of making that term go away, we also have the word "slop" as a counter. "Ugh. It had a hallucination..." "Yup. And the results are now slop." That said, I don't myself use "hallucination" in the "AI" context. I refer to the error rate, which last I checked, hovered around 40%.

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Orion (he/him) @orionkidder@writing.exchange · May 09, 2026

Replying to @raven@fedi.raventhemaker.com

@raven@fedi.raventhemaker.com @LJ@zirk.us Ugh. Sorry. I didn't think to check.

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Orion (he/him) @orionkidder@writing.exchange · May 08, 2026

Replying to @LJ@zirk.us

@LJ@zirk.us Try these folks? Their physical factory appears to be in NY state. https://www.stickermule.com/

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Orion (he/him) @orionkidder@writing.exchange · May 06, 2026

Replying to @daisy@cloudisland.nz

@daisy@cloudisland.nz Swap out a few keywords, and this *exactly* what it feels like to mark slop essays (I'm an English prof). Why should I bother putting comments on this when you didn't bother writing it?

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Orion (he/him) @orionkidder@writing.exchange · May 01, 2026

Replying to @Violinknitter@wandering.shop

@Violinknitter And the inverse is being "good" with autistic kids, whose ways of being and interacting are extremely wide and varied, and also can be unspeakably frustrating if you're allistic. Kids are people, and like all people, they aren't always easy.

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Orion (he/him) @orionkidder@writing.exchange · Apr 26, 2026

Replying to @wdlindsy@toad.social

@wdlindsy Quite right. LLMs use them *because* they're all over the sample texts. In fact, before LLMs, I personally thought dashes were replacing all punctuation, slowly but surely. The issue isn't dashes, or the word "delve," or even the [shudder] "not just... but also..." structure. The issue is that LLMs are word-probability machines, so they use dashes and "delve" and all of that... blandly. LLMs by definition use them in the most average fashion. They're the prose equivalent of beige.

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Orion (he/him) @orionkidder@writing.exchange · Apr 25, 2026

Replying to @adhd_coffee@mastodon.social

@adhd_coffee Damn. Yup. Sigh.

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Orion (he/him) @orionkidder@writing.exchange · Apr 19, 2026

Replying to @ringles@bookstodon.com

@ringles This is a good point. Read the kind of prose you want to produce. Absorb it. Groove on it. Then write in that mode. It works for William Gibson. :)

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Orion (he/him) @orionkidder@writing.exchange · Apr 14, 2026

Replying to @kagan@wandering.shop

@kagan@wandering.shop @Prosybris@mastodon.social Yup. That's good old Uncle Al.

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Orion (he/him) @orionkidder@writing.exchange · Apr 12, 2026

Replying to @saposcat@indieauthors.social

@saposcat@indieauthors.social Thank you for hosting! It was really fun.

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Orion (he/him) @orionkidder@writing.exchange · Apr 11, 2026

Replying to @orionkidder@writing.exchange

@KurtHohmann@writing.exchange So we might have really critical things to say about the genre fiction we watch and read and play, but that doesn't mean we don't love it or think it's beneath us. It means we're ~fascinated~ by the construction. Like, Anita Sarkesian was never *anti* video games. She was studying them with a critical eye. A lot of MALE gamers declared a crusade against her for doing that, but it was done out of a deep love of the medium of video games. They were too reactionary to understand.

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Orion (he/him) @orionkidder@writing.exchange · Apr 11, 2026

Replying to @orionkidder@writing.exchange

@KurtHohmann@writing.exchange What I will say is that we watch and read and play games differently than most people. It's like watching sports with an athlete. We're not inherently smarter than anyone else. We've merely been trained to look for certain things that most people don't look for. So when I read, eg, Wells' MURDERBOT, I'm analyzing what she's doing with gender, how she's depicting neoliberalism vs. democratic socialism, how she's implicitly defining "human" against MB's nature as a sec-unit, etc.

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Orion (he/him) @orionkidder@writing.exchange · Apr 11, 2026

Replying to @KurtHohmann@writing.exchange

@KurtHohmann@writing.exchange Not at all! That might have been true at some point, but today, we're all a bunch of nerds. We grew up reading, and we didn't pick up Chaucer when we were five. My friend and colleague who studies modernist poetry has also published a major work on fantasy, is working on a book on science fiction, cowrote an article with me about Alan Moore, and fuckin' loves zombie movies. He's one of many examples. When I tell academics I'm a comics scholar, they say, "Wow, that's so cool!"

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Orion (he/him) @orionkidder@writing.exchange · Apr 02, 2026

Replying to @kkarhan@infosec.space

@kkarhan @cstross @smattymatty Yes, exactly. It's the overlap of: people fascists genuinely hate AND people the fascists can get away with hating in public

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Orion (he/him) @orionkidder@writing.exchange · Apr 02, 2026

Replying to @kkarhan@infosec.space

@kkarhan @cstross @smattymatty Yes, thank you! The trans hate is not new. None of this is new. The difference is that we're in an environment today where it's not socially or politically viable to be as blatantly antisemitic as it is to be blatantly transphobic. Of course, American fascists are drooling at the chance to be unrepentantly antisemitic, too.

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Orion (he/him) @orionkidder@writing.exchange · Apr 01, 2026

Replying to @cstross@wandering.shop

@cstross @smattymatty This is the tactic exactly. Pick a tiny group that's no threat to your fascistic movement but that a lot of people fear and hate so that you're entirely safe *and* you can terrify your bigot followers. This is why Nazis targeted Jews.

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Orion (he/him) @orionkidder@writing.exchange · Mar 14, 2026

Replying to @dianea@lgbtqia.space

@dianea@lgbtqia.space @catsalad@infosec.exchange There's an Egyptian god down there. It's going to eat you or give you vast cosmic powers. Choose.

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Orion (he/him) @orionkidder@writing.exchange · Jan 02, 2026

Replying to @cstross__dup_483@wandering.shop

@cstross@wandering.shop Agreed. I only got a few books into that series, but the whole point was that he was a crook living in the tiny margins of an extremely "efficient" society. Making an outlaw into a lawman is almost always a boring-ass storytelling choice. But then, I also just dislike cops. :)

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Orion (he/him) @orionkidder@writing.exchange · Nov 13, 2025

Replying to @cstross__dup_483@wandering.shop

@cstross@wandering.shop Don't ever change, Mr. Stross.

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