Visual essays on language, public data, and the things worth counting — plus the tools to go digging yourself.
By Joseph Kato — creator of Vale, a prose linter downloaded nearly ten million times and used by Microsoft, GitHub, and GitLab.
Scientists are trained to qualify their claims. Across 2,400 arXiv abstracts, how much a field hedges turns out to track something simpler than caution — whether it observes the world or proves things about it. And despite the reputation, hedging isn't on the rise.
Codeberg's members just voted to ban vibe-coded projects, which is one way of saying the question has stopped being rhetorical. I build a prose linter, so I pointed it at a decade of GitHub instead — and the load turns out to be real, to land on pull requests rather than issues, and to look nothing like the tells everyone repeats.
At Supreme Court oral argument the justices share a fixed hour, and they split it about as unevenly as they split anything else. Six terms of transcripts show who spends the Court's time, who barely does, and the newest justice who out-talks them all.
Wikipedia has no editor-in-chief; disputes end when someone hits undo. Read the last five hundred edits of its own most-contested articles and the map of where the reverting runs hottest is not the one the culture wars would draw.