Long Links (with Pangram)

Good heavens, I haven’t done a Long Links since June. I’ve been opening these with something along the lines of “nobody else could possibly have time to read all these but one or two of them might enrich your day.” Now that I think on it, there are plenty of other people who are less than fully employed and also fast readers with inquisitive minds, so I apologize all of them. And I do hope that whatever you bother to dip into here rewards the dip.

Now… about AI · I do make a conscious effort to keep That Stuff in a minority position here in Long Links, which is difficult, because it seems that’s what people want to talk about (and presumably read about?), mostly. Then while drafting this I was rudely shocked by learning that I’m not that great at slop-spotting.

Specifically, on Mastodon I recommended STORIED · COLORS, then Lachlan Cooper replied “I love this concept, but the writing here is absolutely pure, grade A slop, right from the first sentence.” In my defense, I’d mostly gone there for the colors, which are cool, had only skimmed the historical background. The replies to Lachlan’s reply are worth a glance.

I’m a bit unsure what to think. I am pretty solidly, at this moment in history, anti-LLM. The negative externalities are enough for me, whether or not the stuff is affordable (it isn’t) or useful. As for “useful”, my position would have been something like “maybe, for code and math, but for human communication?” I dunno, STORIED · COLORS kind of works for me, and when I fact-checked a couple of colors I found no problems.

Pangram · This isn’t the first time I’ve been fooled by LLM output. And on several occasions, I’ve run across recommendations for Pangram as the state of the art in slop-spotting. Its Web site makes strong accuracy claims, and Wikipedia’s sources are generally supportive, in a measured way. I wouldn’t fire a professor or shoot a spy based only on a Pangram report, but I’d take that input into account.

So, based on my experience with STORIED · COLORS, I threw everything I was planning for this Long Links at Pangram. But my free access ran out halfway through, so I signed up for a $20/month account.

Let’s turn our attention back to STORIED · COLORS for a moment. The author claims to be a human named Vinu and they’ve provided About and Methodology pages that discuss, among other things, their use of AI. You might want to read them. But you might not, because Pangram says they’re both 100% AI output. Assuming Vinu is a real person, I wish they hadn’t done that.

Methodology · Each of the following Long Link segments includes a Pangram report. This was generated by copying a few screens-full of the publication and pasting it into Pangram. In the cases where the result is neither 100% AI nor 100% human, it’s interesting to look at Pangram’s highlighting, AI in red and human in green. But there’s just not enough room here to dive into that. For the moment, I’m not tossing out anything I’d selected for Long Links just because it’s AI in whole or part. I’ll have to think about that policy.

Now I’m tired of writing and/or thinking about AI, so I’ve discarded a few of those Long Links. Maybe later. Instead, let’s do…

Politics · Most reasonable people are, in November of 2026, in a better mood than they were in October, what with several tens of millions fewer Americans casting MAGA-flavored ballots. Yay! But everything here (except Hegseth) is pre-November.

TikTok Doesn’t Want Us To Talk About the News is from back in June, and is really just another illustration of how bad and dangerous it is to have social media that is owned and operated by billionaires and why we need the Fediverse. Pangram: 100% human written.

The BIG Newsletter is an anti-monopoly blog founded and run by Matt Stoller, long-term gadfly, a not-terribly-polite person, who is nonetheless essential on the subject, and it’s an essential subject. He’s on paternity leave so How Expedia Rigs Travel Markets and Raises Your Hotel Prices is written by Lee Hepner. You can’t understand the pathologies of late-stage capitalism, I think, nor can you plan a way forward, without an appreciation of how massively monopolized the economy has become. I suppose there must be such a thing as principled capitalist true believers, and they would necessarily agree that the current way we are doing things is Wrong.

Anyhow, the Expedia/hotel story is powerful. Pangram: 100% human written.

I don’t know who “VoteHub” is, but The Political lean of pro sports. is amusing. They’re talking specifically about the politics of the athletes, not the owners or fans. Which differ in interesting but, once you think about it, unsurprising ways. Before you look, rank the NFL, MLB, and the WNBA in increasing order of liberal-ness, then see if you’re right. Pangram: 36% of this text is AI.

Here are the articles of impeachment against Hegseth. A long read, but important stuff. Pangram: 14% of this text is AI.

Has America Crossed the Asshole Threshold? is about the destructiveness of corruption, namely the second-order effect when people start believing that everyone’s corrupt and are then more prone to stepping over the line themselves. Which is fairly self-evident, but then there are a few societies that have been on that slope but climbed off it. Pangram: 100% of this text is AI. (another sample: 96%)

Let’s close the Politics section with Bruno Dias’s This is a Conflict and there are Sides, which was the toast of the Fediverse so quite likely you’ve already read it. From which, “… we are in a hybrid conflict against a loosely-defined but very much unified set of forces: tech corporations, fossil fuels, and international fascism arrayed together.” OK, but I think it’s only a slight re-spin to call the opponents simply “the ultra-rich”. Pardon the Class Reductionism, back to the Long Links, and Pangram: 14% of this text is AI.

Human communication · The world has no better nonfiction writer than Laurie Penny. Recently, she’s turned her hand to a course entitled How to Write Like A Person; the latest offering is Let’s Learn How To Actually Tell Stories. Regrettably it’s on Substack but, like almost everything else Ms Penny writes, it’s excellent. Highly recommended if you think being a better writer, especially now that you have to compete with an infinite swarm of bots, might be good. Pangram: 100% human written.

The Cornell gang-rape incident highlights a terrible pathology in certain male groups. A lot of us males will loudly proclaim that They Would Never. OK, but they (including me) need to proactively combat outbreaks of that flavor of evil. How, specifically, should a man going about doing that? It’s not easy. Fortunately, GOTN’s How to be difficult explains how, in simple and luminously clear language. Highly recommended, especially for people who have Y chromosomes.

A word of caution. GOTN (for “Girl on the Net”) is a sex blogger and her site is full of joyfully filthy sexual storytelling, often featuring colorful kinks. You have been warned.

Also she’s a good writer. Pangram: 100% human written.

Speaking of language and reading and writing and speaking, back in 2023 Douglas Hofstadter wrote Learn a Foreign Language Before It’s Too Late. It’s touching and challenging. A few decades ago I could get along fine in French, and I retain scatterings of Spanish and Arabic. It’s one of my keenest regrets that I never really buckled down and became fluent in any of them. Pangram: 100% human written.

I just mentioned Arabic, and I enjoyed every word of An interactive introduction to the terrific experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt at “La Vita Nouva, or, the personal site of Saleh.” This is partly because I grew up in Lebanon and went to kindergarten and first grade there at a mostly-Arabic school. That educational system is French-influenced and thus emphasizes dictation. Let the record show that in Grade One at that school in Zahlé, I was regularly top of my class in Arabic Dictation.

I never really learned Arabic very well. But its script is quite purely phonetic so once I’d learned the alphabet (oops, it’s not an alphabet, it’s an abjad) and how to connect the letters, I could do the dictation just fine.

Note that “connect the letters” in the last sentence? Arabic’s notion of how characters and words are written is really different from those of us who use alphabets; Arabic letters seldom stand alone.

Here’s my name in Arabic: تم براي

Pardon the long introduction. The An interactive introduction piece linked above describes the technical issues involved in displaying Arabic on a computer screen and reveals that it basically just couldn’t be done well on the Web until quite recently. I think many readers would enjoy this trip into an entirely foreign writing system.

But… Pangram: 100% of this text is AI.

I don’t know what to think? Perhaps “Saleh” is not a native speaker of English and uses AI to shore up a lack of confidence. This has always felt to me like a forgiveable use of LLMs. I just don’t know, “Saleh” is not very transparent about their identity. But back in January 2026, they published I'm not consulting an LLM, which is very negative about using AI. About which, Pangram: 45% of this text is AI. Once again, not sure what to think.

I can’t think of a better way to close this “Human communication” section than with Legos, lexicographic humor from the excellent Zach Weintersmith. OK, it’s not long. But on the image, Pangram: No AI.

Technology · Here are a couple of entries concerning AWS, my former employer. First, Amazon SQS turns 20: Two decades of reliable messaging at scale. SQS was and is, by a mile, my favorite AWS service. It’s easy to understand what it does, and what it does is going to be important to almost any large server-side application. As far as I know it’s never lost a message. As for the linked piece, Pangram: 100% of this text is AI. Sigh.

I’ve promoted a variety of technologies over the decades, and I think this Tweet is my single most effective piece of evangelism.

Over at Ars Technica there’s Iran strikes on Amazon data centers caused permanent loss of customer data. As far as I know, this is the first direct encounter between a war and AWS’s Region/Availability-Zone architecture. The outcome was sobering. It’s hard to get too exercised about single-AZ data loss, because nobody should store data that matters in a single AZ. But in Bahrain, some combination of the attacker having quality intelligence, smart planning, and good luck apparently led to regional data loss. Ouch.

One of the ongoing debates when I was at AWS was whether or not it’s cost-effective to run multi-regionally with an eye to data preservation. I was generally unconvinced that it was worth the extra effort because AZs, used correctly, provide a lot of backup-to-the-backup.

But you know, if you’re in the middle of a war zone… Anyhow, Pangram: 100% human written.

Let’s turn our attention to silk, the stuff that spiders and silkworms make. People are figuring out how to use it in data transmission, and I mean Teraherz-range, which is to say Really Freaking Fast, data transmission. Here’s the upstream science, in Nature: Hierarchical materials from fused silk (Pangram: 97% human written) and in BGR, Silk Might Be The Reason 6G Internet Is Coming Sooner Than You Think looks at plausible implications Pangram: 100% human written.

Your executable is a SQLite database provoked a lot of buzz. You have to know quite a lot about executable file formats to really appreciate it, but damn it’s convincing even if the cost of building and socializing means it’ll probably never happen. A lot of people pointed out that the software is pretty well pure vibe-coded and thus not suitable for production. As for the post: Pangram: 100% human written.

Unclassifiable · Yuval Fogelson’s Uninterrupted is a compendium of long urban walks from around the world: Vancouver, Victoria, New York, Paris, and Seoul. Interspersed are thoughts on the nature of urban walking and how it interacts with thinking.

I enjoyed it, but Pangram: 35% of this text is AI. In this case, I suggest dropping the text into the free service at Pangram.com; the distinction between the sections marked as AI and human is non-obvious and, to me, interesting.

Lime Bike Jousting is a short documentary shot in London about, well, bike-share jousting. The people on both sides of the camera are having really a lot of fun; I’d call this one a morale-booster for a dark autumn day.

And finally, here’s a new sport in the world: Horse racing on an oval track, but for each rider there are multiple horses and they have to change from one to the next. Looks like it might make great TV. Check out the videos at CBC’s “The gift comes from the horse”: How this growing Indigenous sport is staying grounded in tradition. Pangram: 100% human written.

Until next time.