With enough ad and cookie blocking, it gets weird. Youtube Shorts decided for a while that I really want to watch videos of semi-automatic pipe welding tools being used by Asian women. At least twenty of those. Now that's niche.
Before that, there was a batch of rock crusher videos from India.
This week, the welding tools and rock crushers are gone, but there are many ads for cruise lines. Also, ads for cat food. I don't have a cat.
With tracking blocked, but an IP address that changes infrequently, that's apparently what the ad system does - tries batches of some random subject and see if there's any response. It can't lock onto anything effective.
Real men didn't type.
Even lawyers, whose job is producing written text, rarely typed; they wrote on yellow pads. Legal secretaries turned that into clean copy. Engineers on the Apollo program were still dictating to secretaries.
As an example, "sigma" could be used as "He's so sigma!" (positive connotations) or "What the sigma!" (negative connotations) or "Sigma skibidi Ohio!" (what the sigma?!?)
And then there are suffixes like "maxxing" which seem straightforward ("bench-maxxing") but can be used in creative combinations, like somebody used "second-story-maxxing" to mean "going upstairs." Not quite Shakespeare, but funny.
I am no linguist but this seems unprecedented. At least ChatGPT thinks there is precedence, but only gave examples of nonsense terms in literature (like "The Jabberwocky") and counter-cultural slang or art (like Dadaism) or meanings that shifted over time.
However this idea of semi-defined words and memes that get combinatorially and dynamically redefined -- or even undefined -- seems different. I think this is more than just The Algorithm, it's more a spillover of a subculture into the mainstream. It's like slang that has intentionally internalized trolling and arbitrary word-coining as part of normal discourse.
I would definitely recommend people to read them, in the order of their publishing, as internet speak changes fast enough to have a difference between 2019 and 2025.
For instance that Clavicular guy who was profiled in the New York Times claims he is having sex and it seems he was actually "dating" a female influencer when he was being interviewed by an NYT reporter.
Maybe it was my time spent in the book publishing industry, but it causes me pain every time I see it.
The horror: https://x.com/search?q=cause&src=typed_query&f=live