Synonyms for Wanderer and Fun with IA (Spanish for AI)
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kirby urner
Dec 10, 2025, 8:29:02 AMDec 10
to WWWanderers
Not to overdo it with the AI experiments, which I know many of us tire of; I wanted to prompt a large language model to generate some text around this Wanderers-related prompt:
Talk about the meaning of flaneur, how it relates to flannery. Is it that the idle observer or chronicler who is also the most pensive and in some sense polymathic regarding his own time? Consider this quote from Benoit Mandelbrot“Science would be ruined if it were to withdraw entirely into narrowly defined specialties. The rare scholars who are wanderers-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines.” Might we say a flaneur is a “wanderer by choice”?
What happens if you click here to see the answer is some popup box will ask for your email but you can just hit the close button at the bottom, and X (close) any other boxes on the side, so you have an unobstructed view of what the language the model generated. It doesn’t recompute any output at this point, just remembers what it wrote at the time.
What I learned from its reply is I’ve long confused "flânerie" with "flannery" whereas the latter really doesn’t fit. The LLM was “nice” about how it corrected me though.
Speaking of LLMs being “nice”, I explore the concept of “AI sycophancy” (aka infantalization) some more in a recent (as in yesterday-published) Medium paper, Experimentos con IA. Only the title is in Spanish, don’t ask me why (I don’t know, I’m thinking I might start mixing languages more).
In case you’re interested, here’s a Friend Link bypassing the paywall (from which I derive a handsome income (just kidding, I think I made about $5 last year off Medium writings)).
Finally, I’m gonna add two other synonyms for Wanderer to my theasaurus besides “flaneur” and those are:
1. Rechercherian (introduced by Ryan, our Wanderer in Roseburg)
2. Epistemic Forager (introduced by Daniel in Crescent City, Cascadia)
Kirby
kirby urner
Dec 10, 2025, 8:42:49 AMDec 10
to WWWanderers
Apologies, I provided the paywalled members-only link to Medium by mistake.
Speaking of Wanderers lore, check out this old ISEPP web page for the memories:
Oh, and speaking of Medium, here’s another write-up of Silicon Forest lore I did recently, featuring Wanderers!
There’s no paywalled version of that one.
Kirby
On Wednesday, December 10, 2025 at 5:29:02 AM UTC-8 kirby urner wrote:
Speaking of LLMs being “nice”, I explore the concept of “AI sycophancy” (aka infantalization) some more in a recent (as in yesterday-published) Medium paper, Experimentos con IA. Only the title is in Spanish, don’t ask me why (I don’t know, I’m thinking I might start mixing languages more).In case you’re interested, here’s a Friend Link bypassing the paywall (from which I derive a handsome income (just kidding, I think I made about $5 last year off Medium writings)).
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