On this day (1887): Herman Hollerith receives a patent for his punch card calculator.
Token. From my OED app: “Oxford Dictionary of English token /ˈtəʊk(ə)n / ▸ noun 1 a thing serving as a visible or tangible representation of a fact, quality, feeling, etc.: I wanted to offer you a small token of my appreciation; mistletoe was cut from an oak tree as a token of good fortune. ▪ archaic a badge or favour worn to indicate allegiance to a particular person or party: Ruthven was murdered and the assassin left his token. ▪ archaic a word or object conferring authority on or serving to authenticate the speaker or holder: you should have a token that will stand you in good stead if ever you should fall foul of the prince’s officers. ▪ a staff or other object given to a train driver on a single-track railway as authority to proceed over a given section of line. 2 a voucher that can be exchanged for goods or services, typically one given as a gift or forming part of a promotional offer: a record token. ▪ a metal or plastic disc used to operate a machine or in exchange for particular goods or services: a milk token. 3 a member of a minority group included in an otherwise homogeneous set of people in order to give the appearance of diversity: the next black actor or actress selected won’t know if it’s because of their ability and performance or if they’re just a token. 4 Linguistics an individual occurrence of a linguistic unit in speech or writing. Contrasted with type ▪ Computing the smallest meaningful unit of information in a sequence of data for a compiler. 5 Computing a sequence of bits passed continuously between nodes in a fixed order and enabling a node to transmit information. ▸ adjective [attributive] done for the sake of appearances or as a symbolic gesture: cases like these often bring just token fines from magistrates. ▪ denoting a member of a minority group included in an otherwise homogeneous set of people in order to give the appearance of diversity: the patronizing treatment of the token Middle Eastern character. – ORIGIN Old English tāc(e)n, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch teken and German Zeichen, also to teach.” • I thought the “ORIGIN” section was a little thin, so I went to my old favorite, The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots. As I susoected:
That token, dictate, index, vendetta, paradigm, and policies are all semiotic distributaries of Indo-European deik- is astonishing. What a fruitful result!
“What an LLM Actually Does With Your Prompt First” [SiliconOpera]. This is well worth a read. “The first thing that happens when you hit send is tokenization. The model doesn’t receive your sentence, it receives a sequence of tokens, which are chunks of text that usually correspond to whole words or common word fragments. The word ‘unbelievable’ might become two tokens: ‘unbel’ and ‘ievable’. The word ‘cat’ is probably one. A space before a word often gets folded into the token itself. This matters more than it sounds. Because tokenization is learned from the training data, common English words get clean, single tokens. Rare words, names, and technical jargon get split into awkward fragments. When you ask a model to count the letters in a word, it often fails not because it can’t count, but because it never sees the letters, only the token. The word “strawberry” is famously difficult for models to spell backwards for exactly this reason.”
“AI costs how much? GitHub Copilot users react to new usage-based pricing system” [Ars Technica]. “In April, GitHub announced that it was moving subscribers from request-based billing to a usage-based model for its AI-powered Copilot service. As that new pricing model goes into effect today, many GitHub Copilot users are reporting some extreme sticker shock as they realize just how quickly their previous “normal” usage is burning through their newly limited monthly allotment of AI credits.” Enshittification proceeds apace. More: “The precise number of Copilot credits used by a given prompt is determined by the number of input and output tokens used and the rates charged by the underlying large language model. That means pricing is highly dependent not just on the type of request but on the specific model that a user chooses. One million output tokens from OpenAI’s GPT-5.4 nano would run just $1.25 on GitHub Copilot, but that same level of output would run $30 on the frontier GPT-5.5 model (Copilot users who rely on “Auto” mode to pick the most appropriate available model for any request should be extremely careful, as some users report it can switch to expensive models for extremely simple queries).” • Surely not? That would be a really dark pattern.
‘The Coming Age of Digital Warfare” [Fabio Vighi, Compact]. “However the conflict with Iran is resolved, it is already possible to see one of its transformative effects: the weaponization of money. In the future, battles will be determined not simply by military assets but by the ability to freeze, redirect, or erase valuable digital token with a keystroke.” • Not the money in the coffee cans in my back yard!
“Abra’s Bill Barhydt says Wall Street’s next crypto bet is tokenization” [CoinDesk]. “Bill Barhydt built Abra around a simple idea: Crypto should function like a bank. Barhydt sees tokenization and DeFi-powered lending as the next major narrative for institutional investors, eclipsing the industry’s long-running focus on bitcoin prices.” • Ah, a narrative.
Dad Joke of the Day: Why should you wear glasses in math class? It helps with division.
Reckless. From my OED app: “/ˈrɛkləs / ▸ adjective heedless of danger or the consequences of one’s actions; rash or impetuous: you mustn’t be so reckless; reckless driving. – ORIGIN Old English reccelēas, from the Germanic base (meaning ‘care’) of reck”
“State of Florida Sues OpenAI, Saying Sam Altman Showed ‘Utter Disregard for the Risk to Human Life’ ” {Futurism]. “In addition, [Florida attorney general James Uthmeier] ‘seeks to hold Altman personally liable for the harm he has caused Floridians through his reckless and willful conduct as founder and CEO of OpenAI, including his utter disregard for the risk to human life caused by his firms’ conduct.’” • Uthmeier is not only a Republican, he was Chief of Staff for DeSantis.
“I Must Attempt to Explain the LEGO Scandal Rocking YouTube, Entire State of Utah” [404 Media]. The deck: “The Bricks & Minifigs Reckless Ben beef is breaking containment and can no longer be ignored.” Oh-k-a-a-a-y: More: “In 2023, a man named Ed Mansell and his son Bryan asked a Bricks & Minifigs store in Salem-Keizer, Oregon, to sell their collection of LEGO bricks, which, according to the store itself, was worth ‘over $200,000.’ The store began to sell this collection, but then the owner of the franchise changed hands and was taken over by Bricks & Minifigs corporate. At this point, Bryan attempted to either get the unsold portion of his collection back or money for the collection. Bryan, apparently, was told to pound sand.” More: “Bryan then contacted a YouTuber with a million followers named Ben Schneider, who goes by ‘Reckless Ben’ on YouTube. Reckless Ben made a series of YouTube videos, starting with the hour-and-a-half-long ‘I tracked down the thief who stole $200,000 of LEGO,’ which currently has 4 million views.” • The police were called (why on earth?). Bricks & Minifigs tried to cancel Schneider’s Patreon account. Drama, but very complicated!
“A Child of the Weather Underground Looks Back” [Jacobin]. “The story of the Weather Underground still looms large in popular culture (most recently, for example, in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another), as it has repeatedly served as a warning that hope and idealism in the face of rising authoritarianism can transform into reckless adventurism.” • Or, today, targeted assassinations. plural.
Fortune: Brahma said: Well, after hearing ten thousand explanations, a fool is no wiser. But an intelligent man needs only two thousand five hundred. — The Mahabharata
Lawn. From my OED app: “/lɔːn / ▸ noun an area of short, regularly mown grass in the garden of a house or park: she was sitting in a deckchair on the lawn ; a croquet lawn [mass noun] a patch of lawn. –ORIGIN mid 16th century: alteration of dialect laund ‘glade, pasture’, from Old French launde ‘wooded district, heath’, of Celtic origin. The current sense dates from the mid 18th century.”
“Failure To Lawn” [Maggie Slepian, LongReads]. “It is September 2023, and I am standing in my front yard with a leaf bag over my head. A gap-toothed rake lies in a pile of leaves and a thistle stabs the side of my foot. My back aches. A blister pulses on my thumb. It’s sometime in the afternoon, but I’ve lost track of how long I’ve been out here. Three lopsided leaf bags sit like giant potatoes around the yard, but the fourth bag kept tipping when I tried to dump my rakeful of leaves. I snapped the bag open in a fit, reaching up inside to punch the seams open. Then I let it go, allowing it to settle over my head and fall to my waist. It is quiet inside the leaf bag, and in the visual break from my lawn and five cumulative years of failure, I start crying. The lawn has defeated me.” • As lawns will do. One more reason to get rid of them.
“Mowing the Lawn: The Genocide Industry” [Logic(s)]. “The phrase ‘mowing the lawn’ has long been used as shorthand for Israel’s strategy towards Gaza: bursts of horrifying violence—collective punishment of Palestinians for Hamas operations—followed by periods of ‘calm’ where survivors are left to clear the rubble and bury dead civilians, rebuilding increasingly less of their ailing infrastructure while Israel commits to deepening its occupation, expanding its settlements, and bolstering its apartheid regime.” • A fine example of normalization.
“Worker found dead in pond after getting trapped underneath lawn mower in horrific freak accident at golf course” [The Sun]. “A golf course worker has been found dead in a pond after getting pinned underneath a lawnmower in a freak accident. He was found in around three feet of water with the zero-turn mower. Mystery remains as to how [he] ended up in the golf course pond.” • A two-fer. Lawns and golf.