They say the best way learn a language is from a girlfriend or boyfriend. I've never had that—I mostly studied dead languages! I just got an ad for an app that seems to be trying to meld "AI girlfriend" and "language learning." What a profoundly weird world we live in.

Birthplaces of authors on LibraryThing, linear and log. A remarkable graph. You'd expect authors to move to New York, the center of publishing, but it turns out just being born there is a huge help.

Music sucks today because there's no necessary connection between being good at music and being young, gorgeous and thin. Both are rare and the intersection is tiny. Believe it or not, it didn't used to be this way.

Okay, WITHOUT GOOGLING, can you guess the states based on their nine most popular authors?

Who has written a synthetic account of the cycle of sacred-languages? Vernacular spreads a message → vernacular becomes sacred → language ossifies → language grows obscure → gets translated → translation becomes sacred → [repeat]

Syracuse—Syracuse!—axes their Classics degree. What ignorant times we live in. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/01/n...

I asked ChatGPT who invented the fielded wiki and it said… me. This is incorrect and irritating. I was inspired by the late Aaron Swartz's Infogami. I'm still not sure if he invented the idea, or was its first implementor; he may have been. Anyone got a better answer?

Top authors in two groups that share an important thing. What are the two groups?

1/2 Maine Dems are up in arms over Mills vetoing the anti-data center bill. I run a Maine tech company. Only two of ten employees are in Maine, because our tech sector is weak and I can't find local people. (You can get a CS degree here, but then you need to leave.)

I don't support this, but it's directionally right.

Mine is pachycephalosaurus—for both the dinosaur and the name. But I have just been alerted that there is a *small* thick-headed lizard species—namely micropachycephalosaurus!

1/3 A lot of the library world has turned decisively against AI—hard. It's not measured, thoughtful engagement with problems and challenges, which are certainly many, varied and important to discuss, but a rigid, totalizing ideological certainty that AI is immoral,

I'm trying to get Claude Code to code in a more "LibraryThing" style, so I had it do an extensive review of the current style, honed over 20 years. This is exactly right, and (IMHO) good advice for every coder.

New feature alert! TinyCat libraries can now enable a Restrict Catalog Access mode. If enabled, all visitors need to enter their credentials to view or search your catalog. #BookSky #libraries #💙📚

I found it—the best author-disambiguation fail! Bill Nichols, author of the field-defining "Introduction to Documentary," now in its fourth edition, also wrote, according to Amazon, "Satisfying Sasquatch."

"The average age someone stops being seen as desirable to hire is 55." Just turned 55 <gulp>

Mythos may be a fake scare, but I thought Amodei was promotionally lying about how rapidly and completely LLM coding would take off. He wasn't. It did. So he gets one free prediction from me.

How many dimensions can the human mind conceptualize directly? I picture three as a point within a clear cube, four as a line of cubes, five a grid of lines, etc. But it occurs to me one could say that a particular point in space has an x of 4, y of 10, z of 2, and is hot, blue and stinky.

Is having programmers pass simple, FizzBuzz-like questions more important in the age of LLM coding, or less?

1/ Here it is: The argument against the "Oxford Comma." Aesthetic preferences are fine, but be real: The Oxford Comma touches a tiny, tiny percent of the ambiguity inherent in language—and it's a mostly notional, almost imaginary part.

Portland, Maine now has a MAGAZINE SHOP—a shop that sells just magazines. That's crazy, maybe? But it's got a great selection, and I wish them luck. If you come to town, check Bold Magazine Shop, 604 Congress, roughly in between The Green Hand Bookshop and Longfellow books.

We've added an image editor to LibraryThing! Now when you upload a cover, author photo, or any other picture, you can crop, adjust, and fix it right there — no need to open another app. #💙📚 #Booksky Come read more about it, and tell us what you think! www.librarything.com/topic/383170

“Mr. Buria told Mr. Driscoll that President Trump would not want to stand next to a Black female officer at military events, the officials said.” www.nytimes.com/2026/03/27/u...

I haven't seen an article make this point yet, but AI is going to be good for older devs. What are young devs good at? Focus, speed and keeping a lot of code in mind. AI is way better at all three. What are older devs good at? Judgment, taste, strategy, seeing around corners. AI is bad at that.

Perils of dictating in work Slack.

Send this one to your librarian and data-nerd friends—a deep dive into how movie and TV adaptations drive people into their libraries, looking for the original books. Researched and written by LibraryThing founder @librarythingtim.bsky.social proquest.syndetics.com/news/2026/03...

At some point Christians need to choose—this or the sadistic cancer that so many now embrace.

Working on a blog post about how adaptations drive library patron interest. Check out these charts of the Hail Mary Project and Bridgerton.

People on LibraryThing asked why I was working on a Saturday night and my brain glitched and I said it was because my wife was at a reading colony. And now everyone wants to go to a reading colony.

Meanwhile, Anthropic didn't waste its AI engineers making animated sexy-child mode.

Claude Code is helping me complete a book service idea I started in 2010. It seemed an obvious thing to me but some external API stuff defeated me. In 15 years, nobody has done it. This can only mean one thing: It's an AWESOME idea and will make me a millionaire!

My new favorite thing is watching musician-reaction videos to Angine de Poitrine, especially the ones that go past the first song. "Is that double microtonal guitar?" "What time-signature is THAT?!" www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrNk...

Impossible task, but here is my "Five Books That Define You" list www.librarything.com/list/47509/t...

The decline of Facebook, as seen in the percent of @LibraryThing members who sign up using Facebook button—15.6% to 1%, 2014–2025.

@librarything.com Something that I have always been curious about: In the list of genres to add a book to, why does Falconry have its own section?

I find it hard to believe everyone loved Pluribus after the first few shows. Nothing happened. Or rather the same things happened again and again. We get it—now get on with it! I'll cut a great work of art room for meditative slowness. (The driving scene in Solaris, anyone?) But it wasn't great.

1/ When displaying a row of covers, you have a basic choice, arising for the fact the covers come in different aspect ratios: 1. Crop to a "book" size 2. Fixed width 3. Fixed height 4. Adopt a hybrid approach, with a fixed height or width unless the w-h ratio is too high, then do 1, 2 or 3

I’ve always been a one-monitor person—one big display, laptop as a occasional sidecar. Working on an iOS app—with two codebases and AI coding tools—is the first time I’ve wanted two full-size monitors.

Apple has a set of icons (SF Symbols) that come built in for iPhone development. Today I found out I can't legally use any of them in web development. So I can't make anything look the same app-to-web, unless I pivot to some third-party set, like Font Awesome. Shooting themselves in the foot here!

One glorious thing about Turkish: Educated Istanbul Turkish is uncannily clear, crisp and articulate. Impeccable vowel harmony, consonants never dropped. Even speed is generally good. It's like they're all conspiring to make language-learners as comfortable as possible.

Sensational: A newly-discovered early 8c Christian universal chronicle from St. Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai. Arabic translation of a Syriac original, from Creation to 634. Complete text. Looks like a new, partially independent source for Arab conquest, etc.

It would be interesting to look at emojis as idiolects/familect. 🫕 means "I love you" (lit. I am fondue you) in my family. And 🕸️ means mesh, which is comes from being autocorrect for mwah. Anyone else?

First look: LIbraryThing genres on the app. Take a look; question in the next tweet.

First look: LibraryThing App "Your Books" pages.

LibraryThing app first look: Melvil Decimal System

Icons from the Kijkwijzer DVD rating system, used in Belgium and the Netherlands. You've got to love the "sex" one.

LibraryThing has a much-loved UI for Dewey Decimals, where you drill down the numbers row by row. This isn't going to work on mobile. Has anyone seen a good UI for DDC on mobile?

The libraries (blue) and bookstore (green) of Greenland from @librarything.com's local feature.

When I was designing LibraryThing's "genre" feature, I made a "Falconry" genre to see if my data crunching would work for highly-specific things. So I present to you, the 2025 most-read books on falconry and falcon-related topics in US public libraries! Eat your heart out, Falconry fans!