This is exactly what it looks like when you’re wrong about something but you hope that if you say it loud enough people will just believe you… right before you discover that they will not.

Other examples: Scotland is “Alba” in Gaelic. “Ireland” is “Eire” in Irish. I doubt that the Bretons and Basques share a common word for “France.”

Countries can have many different names within their own country, too! Someone in Canada might say they live in “Canada”, “Kanata”, “Québec”, or any one of hundreds of First Nations — and all of those would be correct names for the country they live in.

That sounds awesome! Yes the Basque were definitely a huge influence in the early contact years. Mark Kurlansky is one of the biggest propounders of this history, and especially the speculation about pre-Colombian contact.

This is excellent! I hate it when I try to insert a Unicode pictogram and it renders as an emoji.

Cillian Murphy. Morgan Freeman. Liam Neeson. Anne Hathaway. Tom Hardy. Gary Oldman. Marion Cotillard. Joseph Gordon Levitt. Michael Cain. Maggie Gyllenhaal.

Those movies could have been nominated in every acting category if they had been more concerned with character than convoluted plot line.

Nolan squandered an all-star cast in the Batman movies, and Heath Ledger is the exception that proves the rule.

Incredible.

By the 1600s the Basque settlements in Eastern Canada were all gone. So, how did Basque have such a profound influence on the Algonquin languages?

It’s not a great leap to imagine that the Basque might have been in Eastern Canada long before Columbus, though no definitive proof exists.

To get really conspiratorial, the Basque also had a shared pidgin with Icelanders, who knew about the Algonquin territory 500 years before Columbus. Columbus supposedly met with Icelander voyagers before his own trip, and Columbus’s ships were crewed by Basque sailors.

As far as we know, tribes from Quebec, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland used Basque terms when they met. And this was up to a century before France established the first European settlement in the northern Americas.

In Mi’kmaq (eastern Algonquin First Nations), the words for “king” and “shirt” come from Basque.

The Basque had such close trade relationships with the Algonquin tribes of Eastern Canada in the 1500s that a “Basque-Algonquin pidgin” became the regional language of trade.

And the association with the Netherlands is because the Dutch crown has a relationship to the House of Orange, from a town in France whose name is an unrelated homonym of the color, but the color and the jurisdiction got conflated so now we all associate the Netherlands with the color orange.

Gotta say — I'm researching some scary health stuff right now, and these AI-generated snippets feel like a personal attack. When you search "Is X a symptom of Y?" anxious for clarity and a plausible-sounding summary pops up... you forget for a moment that it's randomly-generated brain garbage.

An expression of support for the ad-hominem attack, passive-aggressively drawing a cryptic connection to an unrelated personal grievance: bsky.app/profile/litt...

A subtweet challenging a minor detail tangential to the article’s thesis without tagging the author. ericwbailey.website/published/a-...

This is the web developer equivalent of "aliens built the pyramids." Aliens built nodemon.

Being a web developer in 2026 is really cool because at this point there are technologies that are effectively ancient that still feel like magic. I've been using nodemon for almost ten years, but I just configured it for this slightly complicated codebase and it feels like alien super technology.

I just put in my application, and I would love to talk. Obsidian has been a huge inspiration to me in everything that I do.

I think the mind-stretching is very real. Along with new ways of understanding the world, studying new languages has also helped me understand grammar in ways that have made me a much better writer in English.

Sweeeet. New opportunities:

Render Svelte to prompts:

<p>Hi</p> ➡️ A paragraph that says “Hi”

Render Svelte to French HTML:

<le-p>Bonjour</le-p>

Render Svelte to overwritten HTML so it looks like you worked really hard:

<div><span><p class=“message”>Hi</p></span></div>

My hot take: the conflation of machine learning and “✨AI” is a very deliberate marketing effort by the chatbot industrial complex. There’s probably no point blaming people for their hostility after OpenAI and Grok and Gemini have ruined any chance of the public understanding the difference.

Sorry but your NFT meal planning app or whatever is actually just 500 overworked dietitians in a trenchcoat.

Most new products are priced at an enormous loss to appear “revolutionary,” when in fact they are just burning investor funding to sell repackaged old tech at a discount.

If you need to run LLMs for a week to build a UI mechanism, ask yourself if you might be fighting against your users’ interests and the platform built to serve them.

I have never once heard a developer or user complain that their text is not constantly reflowing around animated objects.

You know what I could imagine hearing them complain about?

Katherine Rundell · Consider the Greenland Shark I am glad not to be a Greenland shark; I don’t have enough thoughts to fill five hundred years. But I find the very...

Have you read this?

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Oh so cool! Thank you for sharing. I’m going to study this.

Any chance you could show me an example of either the source input or the HTML output? Im just curious to see how it challenges my own mental model.

This is something I’m thinking about for my rewrite of @vowel.cc. I suspect that your HTML, CSS, JS might not be totally arbitrary. If I’m right about that, then a hypothetical convention for storing web pages as structured data would let you render HTML from MD, ATProto, or anywhere else.