I thought that surely this one would get a sensible answer, since so many retro game streamers have made a thing of Wed-NES-day. But no, Google still finds ways to surprise me…

The National Spelling Bee finals are starting in 5 minutes, airing on Ion and various other channels (also via streaming sites like Tubi or Pluto). As is tradition, I'm probably going to be posting about it as someone who was there 29 years ago. (It does not feel like it was that long ago!)

The last three books about the Choctaw language & culture that I've bought have *ALL* turned out to be just AI-generated junk🤬 It's genuinely infuriating to see this careless nonsense happening, as it dilutes the actual language and culture and makes it harder for me to learn about my own humanity

I am never going to get over the fact thar so many Americans died that corpses stacked up in nursing homes and hospital morgues, that refrigerator trucks had to be brought in for the overflow, and that the big takeaway from Important Pundits is there should have been *less* mitigation.

As a child this use of arithmetic as a gate keeping function also made me incredibly angry - because I recognized how stupid, cruel, and irrational it was even then.

I really do think this is an excellent metaphor for the moment.

can't believe they brought back the .com bubble too

Definitely getting ".com bubble" and "crypto bubble" vibe from all the AI-related Super Bowl ads this year. One ad got me curious enough to look up who owned the incredibly generic (but certainly expensive) domain name in it, and… uh… yeaahh, no comment.

That ad managed to make a *puzzle hunt* unappealing to me.

Has NBC somehow managed to screw something up with their Super Bowl broadcast so that none of the commercial breaks are airing with closed captions for the past hour and a half? (To be fair, none of the ads have interested me enough to *want* to know what's being said…)

As someone who really struggles to understand overlapping voices and yelling in general, and particularly when stressed, I know that it would be so easy to “disobey orders” when several cops are screaming them all at once

Something I will never understand is why so many people using AI generators for text and images don't even review or proofread the output before sending it out into the world. Like, I expect this kind of trash from faceless slop accounts. But from writers publishing under their real names?!

A student on TikTok has been documenting her journey with a professor who “wrote” the anatomy textbook and it’s all a bunch of AI hallucinations. She’s saying that, understandably, the students are doing super poorly! Behold what we’re teaching the healthcare professionals of tomorrow:

It's interesting to me that several of these quotes mention using AI tools provided by Westlaw or LexisNexis, under the assumption that big names in legal research wouldn't have put out a product this flawed. (An honestly reasonable assumption! But clearly not a correct one…)

Tech bros: "AI will replace human translators any day now!" The AI:

Every time people are like "but I need genAI to make my comics!!", I think about how at least three iconic webcomics from the early '00s (Get Your War On, Wondermark, Dinosaur Comics) were illustrated using clip art.

I know I keep saying this, but it really does bear repeating: How, in the year 2025, are organizations and politicians *still* posting Extremely Important Statements on social media as images of text that's unreadably tiny on a phone, with no alt text and no link to a more readable version?

What gets me about the linked article is how it repeatedly asserts that people are only avoiding GenAI at work because they haven't tried using it. A big part of why I'm so skeptical about GenAI for work is *because* I've toyed around with it on my own time!

Seeing "everyone in red states voted for this and deserves to suffer!" discourse on my timeline again, and it finally dawned on me what it reminds me of. Teachers who would grade everyone equally poorly on a group project, when one person did most of the work while everyone else slacked off.

I'm pretty sure I pointed this out over on the other site, but July 14 is simultaneously Bastille Day, Shark Awareness Day, and Nonbinary People's Day. There are some funny mental images to be made from this. Involving Blåhaj, of course.

Heads up — the National #SpellingBee finals are starting in just under 10 minutes, airing on ION, Bounce, Laff, and a few other networks (check your local listings, or stream on Pluto TV). I'm going to be commenting on it with that hashtag, so go ahead and mute if you're not interested…

Congrats to Sarv for being the first Georgian to make the #SpellingBee finals since 1997! (I may know a thing or two about that... 😉)

What's really fun about this that you can ask the same question in two separate browser sessions, and the AI may possibly invent two completely unrelated meanings for the same fake expression.

Every time I see people saying stuff like this, I remember my high school biology textbook mentioning that some people have an odd number of sex chromosomes. Over two decades ago. In Georgia.

Today, thanks to a satirical article, I learned that "polemic" is pronounced with a short /ɛ/ sound. (I could've been that person!)

I keep seeing posts, from people I thought would know better, with what to me are *very obviously* AI-generated pictures of billboards or signs. Gibberish logos at the bottom or on signs in the background. Blatant typos in *the text of the sign itself*. Do people just…not notice these things?

Continuing to be amazed at the number of posters whose job centers around communicating with people — politicians, journalists, corporate PR — who consistently fail to make their social media posts comprehensible by blind and low-vision people.

All the discourse about using generative AI to produce NPC dialogue has me thinking back to the lying NPCs in Castlevania II. I can just imagine AI NPCs *unintentionally* spouting a bunch of hallucinated hints that make "get a silk bag from the graveyard duck" seem absolutely normal.

I keep seeing this kind of post from politicians, unironically, and I just don't understand it. If you're posting a statement on social media, I feel like it's kind of important to make the statement *readable*, even on a small screen. But what do I know? I'm not a highly paid comms person…

A statement on why text-heavy screenshots are inaccessible and need to have alt text added:

Sorry that I keep beating the #accessibility drum, but it keeps surprising me that "they're just new to Bluesky!" is an excuse I often see for missing alt text. I'm surprised they'd gone this long without knowing that their tweets, Facebook posts and blogs were just as inaccessible to blind folks.

I'm just…so tired. Is it just me, or does it feel like people with disabilities and chronic illnesses are still invisible to so much of the overall left, even when the Trump regime is absolutely making it clear how they feel about us?

I think every designer should write a love letter to a font at least once in their lifetime. This is mine: A 150-year-old font you have likely never heard of, and one you probably saw earlier today. aresluna.org/the-hardest-...

OK, maybe I should spell it out. Progressives, the following thread conveys what your posts sound like to blind people using screen readers or Braille terminals when you don't use #AltText. Every one of these is *verbatim* from an actual post I've found. #WhatYourPostsSayWithoutAltText

Roses are red The three blind mice aren't rats Hegseth uses more alt text Than some Democrats.

cc: @warren.senate.gov, @malcolmkenyatta.bsky.social, @sanders.senate.gov, @govpritzker.illinois.gov, all of whom I've noticed omitting alt text with some regularity over the past several days.

Progressive politicians of Bluesky: Are you OK telling your constituents with visual disabilities that you care less than *Pete Hegseth* about whether your posts make any sense to them? Guessing that's a "no"? Then add alt text to your images. Like he does.

Seriously, is there someone with more clout than me who could convince Democratic politicians that they need to add alt text to their image-based posts here? I constantly see people calling this out in the replies, but to no avail.

Sure, everyone jokes about Superb Owls this time of year, but this is the only year when it's possible to joke about Superb Owl Lix.

Seriously, do politicians' and journalists' teams just not get social media accessibility training anymore? Really disappointed in how many people whose job is to tell people what's going on completely failing at that for anyone who has trouble reading images of tiny text.

Another thing I'll never understand: the people who are regularly posting 100Kb+ JPEGs of a single sentence of text. Not any interesting typesetting or anything, just plain text on a plain background. (And no alt tag, naturally.) Maybe this is just me being an elder millennial, but…*why*?

One of the reasons I kept my ID as male is that, even though my current state recognizes non-binary gender, my state of birth doesn't — which would have introduced a constant mismatch for anything that requires birth cert and ID to match. In retrospect, that was a *best-case* scenario…

He also very directly and specifically blamed disabled people. And I am absolutely begging y’all to call it out and not leave us out of your activism. He literally named us. Why aren’t we on your list of at-risk groups?

This is going to be such a long four years for people with disabilities. The Republicans *specifically mention* disability as one of the things they're attacking in their anti-DEI screeds, and pundits will point out that it's racist and sexist while completely glossing over the ableism.

Yes! I've found alt text to be *immensely* useful on posts with things like letter-sized page scans or wide screenshots, which are a challenge to read on a phone display. And as a faceblind person, it's helpful in giving me a clue who that random person is that I'm expected to recognize in a photo.

Something I keep seeing on my Discover page that will never make sense to me: Why use genAI to produce a picture of a billboard with text on it? That's like one of the easiest things to do in a photo editor. (Especially if you'll need to edit the output anyway to fix all the typos!)

Is there any reasonably standard hashtag here for "I'm replying/reposting to add alt text to a post that didn't include it"? I want to start doing this for some posts I've been seeing on here, but want to make sure it's tagged so people can find it. #accessibility #a11y

Given how ableist this administration is going to be, it's absolutely critical that news about it, and info on how to resist it, is accessible to people with disabilities. *Please*, political accounts on here, try to include alt text for images and captions or transcripts for videos.