Why Clay Has an AI Writing Policy - The GTM with Clay Blog
https://www.clay.com/blog/ai-writing-policy
As of 2026, AI models — despite their coding ability — are not yet at a point where their unedited output will achieve this goal; you as an author need to take the time to make sure that all of the ideas in the writing are the ideas that you personally intend to convey (including the structure and wording that determines which ideas are emphasized) and that the documents are a good use of your readers’ time.
On the Death of Amazon’s Writing Culture - by Steve Huynh
https://alifeengineered.substack.com/p/on-the-death-of-amazons-writing-culture
AI should definitely be used for brainstorming, organizing your thoughts, research, making sure your documents are consistent, and grammar. But, as we would say at Amazon, the human should always take the pen.
The era of cmd + tab
https://era-of-cmd-tab.vercel.app/?ref=sidebar
Thoughtfulness about our craft and our relationship to the tools seems like an antidote to atrophy of mind. In an era where we can make literally whatever we want, what parts of the output or process are non-negotiables?
hughhowey/neo: A novel-writing tool created by a novelist.
https://github.com/hughhowey/neo
A novel-writing tool created by a novelist.
It's time to talk about my writerdeck
https://veronicaexplains.net/my-first-writerdeck/
Of course, I'm a Linux user, and I have any number of options. I could have gone with a simple desktop or window manager and just not installed a browser, but I wanted something that really broke the desktop OS muscle memory and forced me into thinking about my words with intention.
I opted for a tty-based setup, using Debian (Trixie at the time of writing). Console only- no x11 or Wayland, no desktop getting in my way.
Stop Trying to Distinguish AI-Generated Writing From Human Writing Because You Can’t – James Zhan in real life.
https://journal.james-zhan.com/ai-writing/
Believing that one can distinguish between human writing and AI writing via some kind of “tells” is naive, simply because both human and AI writing can be good and bad.
RIP Claude – Rands in Repose
https://randsinrepose.com/archives/rip-claude/
As a writer, no sweat, right? I write my own content. I bang on my own keys. Here’s the issue. Each of the following actions watermarks text:
Synthesis
Proofreading
Translation
Summarization
Critique1
And most infuriating, the entire burden of their unannounced rollout is on me, and none of it is on them.
My writing is not 100% organic anymore | Heitor's log
https://heitorpb.github.io/bla/ai-transparency/
My writing is now ~95% organic. The remaining ~5% is English mistakes that an LLM fixed or a few small suggestions here and there. But a year from now, will this 5% grow? Will my personal satisfaction of doing it myself vanish in favour of supervised writing? What skill will I develop further: writing or prompting? If writing is thinking and I outsource it, am I still thinking?
I would never accuse anyone of using AI
https://tofutush.github.io/posts/2026-08-18.html
Ultimately my point is, no matter how much I'm certain something is AI, I would not say it out loud, because I always have a capacity to hurt a real artist in doing so. I just want people to stop going "uuhhh guys I think this is AI look at the tells" because it only hurts real people and is simply just really annoying.
How Claude's text watermarking works \ Anthropic
https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-text-watermark
Future Claude models will generate text that contains a watermark. This is a way of determining the likelihood that Claude was involved in writing the text, and we, along with several other major AI providers, are implementing this change to comply with the EU AI Act.
If you can’t be bothered writing it, I can’t be bothered reading it. — Crooked Timber
https://crookedtimber.org/2026/08/04/if-you-cant-be-bothered-writing-it-i-cant-be-bothered-reading-it/
I totally get the pressure to produce. Academics have been long turned into content churners. ‘Publish or perish’ in some regions and institutions meant how much could you produce in how little a time. As a postgraduate student I attended a workshop where a senior professor describes turning the same conference paper into five publications FIVE!? Who do they think was going to read all this samey shit?
Clicks have killed the Inverted Pyramid
https://gordonmeyer.com/blog/clicks-have-killed-the-inverted-pyramid.html
Writing students once learned that putting the most important information first in an article was the preferred, humane way of reporting on a situation. This allowed readers to quickly decide if a story interested them without having to read further.
How to manage this Hugo based page from my Android phone in 2026 | foosel.net
https://foosel.net/til/how-to-manage-this-page-from-my-phone-in-2026/
I recently got a new phone and thus had to re-do the setup of my mobile blogging pipeline. So, basically, allow me to checkout, modify, test, commit and push the sources of this Hugo based static page under Android. While doing so I noticed some necessary changes and improvements, and also wanted to make use of my Taskfile which does most of the heavy lifting now, so here are my updated steps.
handwritten.danieljanus.pl
https://handwritten.danieljanus.pl/?ref=vhbelvadi.com
A blog written by hand
Thinking about AI
https://a.wholelottanothing.org/thinking-about-ai/?ref=a-whole-lotta-nothing-newsletter
So far, the "killer app" aspects of AI is helping me create/iterate/finish things I've wanted for many years, but couldn't find time or energy enough to do completely on my own.
You are falling behind because you haven’t fed the insincerity machine in the last 5 minutes | Christian Heilmann
https://christianheilmann.com/2026/03/28/you-are-falling-behind-because-you-havent-fed-the-insincerity-machine-in-the-last-5-minutes/
As an actor or author you don’t send your body or stunt double to attend interviews or sell autographs at comic con. Don’t create a virtual double that posts for you on social media when you can’t be arsed or feel overwhelmed. Take that overwhelming feeling and write about it, showing the world that your mental health is as fragile as the one of the people who follow you and read your work. Be human and only there when you can be there.
matduggan.com
https://matduggan.com/markdown-ate-the-world/
I think about this sometimes when I'm writing in Vim at midnight, just me and a blinking cursor and a plain text file that will still be readable when I'm dead. No filesystem-within-a-filesystem. No sector allocation tables. No 5,039-page specification. Just words, a few hash marks, and never having to think about it again.
Using Claude Code to help me write | Andrew Wheeler
https://andrewpwheeler.com/2026/03/20/using-claude-code-to-help-me-write/
There are two big issues currently with LLM writing:
it is potentially wrong
current LLM writing has a particular style that is itself becoming noticeable
The first bullet, you need to review what it writes. It is much easier to have it write on content you are an expert in, so it is easier to review and spot errors. (It is the same current problem with using the tools to help you write computer code – they are boons for seniors but can write a ton of slop that more neophyte coders have a hard time spotting issues.)
The second bullet, having the style mimic your own, is what I am going to discuss here. It is worth understanding at a high level how generative AI LLMs work – if you ask “answer question X” vs “here is a book, …., answer question X” the LLM will generate a different response. The first part in the former prompt, “here is a book, …” is what is referred to the context. Current models have context windows (how large of a potential input) at around 500,000 words (technically they are around 1 million tokens, one word is often multiple tokens though).
PTPL 171 · The Surprisingly Powerful One-Page Notebook That’s Always With Me - Ellane W
https://ellanew.com/2025/09/01/ptpl-171-edc-one-page-notebook
Introducing what I have affectionately dubbed my One-Page Notebook (1PN). The One-Page Notebook is simply a regular sheet of paper, folded in half three times. It’s big enough to write on without needing a card cover, and small enough to fit in a pocket or in whatever you’re using to carry your stuff.
I made a one-page notebook
https://joelchrono.xyz/blog/i-made-a-one-page-notebook/
I grabbed a piece of paper, folded it in 8 sections, cut in the middle to turn it into a little book, and started to write on it!
Chimera's Lair
https://crescentchimera.substack.com/feed
Newsletter magazine with a focus on solo ttrpgs!
No. You can't tell it was written by AI
https://segunfamisa.com/posts/no-you-cant-tell-it-was-written-by-ai#fn:5
First, they made us learn English. Then we did it so well, that we started to use words that are uncommon to them. Then, they had us do the grunt work of training the AI models. Next, the AI models started sounding like us, and now we are being accused that we are cheating.
I'm Kenyan. I Don't Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me.
https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-like-chatgpt
Before you point your finger and cry "AI!", I ask you to pause. Consider the possibility that what you're seeing isn't a lack of humanity, but a form of humanity you haven't been trained to recognise. You might be looking at the result of a different education, a different history, a different standard.
You might just be looking at a Kenyan, writing. And we’ve been doing it this way for a very long time.
The Zurich protocol
https://werd.io/the-zurich-protocol/
They lined up the editors first, zip tying their hands together and leading them into vans downstairs. Then they began to gather the rest of the journalists. Laptops were gathered from desks. The server room, such as it was in the wake of zero trust and enterprise cloud services, had its door kicked in, switches and rack servers ripped out of their frames. One IT support engineer objected and found a gun in his face, the safety off, its owner ready to make them into an example.
The Colonization of Confidence., Sightless Scribbles
https://sightlessscribbles.com/the-colonization-of-confidence/
"No," I say. "It chose 'stone' because statistically, in the petabytes of training data scraped without consent from the internet, the word 'stone' appears in proximity to 'lump in throat' with a probability of 0.04 percent, which is higher than 'wet creature.' It isn't a choice. It's a math problem. It is a predictive text algorithm on steroids. It doesn't know what a throat is. It doesn't know what fear feels like. It is predicting the next token based on mediocrity."
Flash Fiction Online – Bold. Brief. Beautiful. Fiction in Fewer Words.
https://www.flashfictiononline.com/
Bold. Brief. Beautiful. Fiction in Fewer Words.
Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models
https://arxiv.org/html/2511.15304v1
We present evidence that adversarial poetry functions as a universal single-turn jailbreak technique for large language models (LLMs). Poetic framing achieved an average jailbreak success rate of 62% for hand-crafted poems and approximately 43% for meta-prompt conversions (compared to non-poetic baselines), substantially outperforming non-poetic baselines and revealing a systematic vulnerability across model families and safety training approaches. These findings demonstrate that stylistic variation alone can circumvent contemporary safety mechanisms, suggesting fundamental limitations in current alignment methods and evaluation protocols.
i’m sure i’m in here, somewhere – WIL WHEATON dot NET
https://wilwheaton.net/2025/11/im-sure-im-in-here-somewhere/
I really believe that Art chose me. I don’t know why, and I don’t know that I would have chosen acting if I’d been supported rather than controlled and manipulated. But I do know that when I am in a cast, when I am preparing a role, when I am discovering moments in rehearsal, and when we are putting it all together on the set, on the stage, or in a sound booth, it just feels right. It’s a place where I fit. And if I’m going to choose to be there, I will make that choice for me, to make me happy or satisfied or even just healed. I won’t make that choice from a reactive place. It will come from a thoughtful, empowered place.
Eruditorum Press
https://www.eruditorumpress.com/
On Incomputable Language: An Essay on AI – Eruditorum Press
https://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/on-incomputable-language-an-essay-on-ai
The truth, however, is that consciousness is a wonder beyond its own comprehension. Perhaps the universe is nothing more than cold, calculable matter—that, as Galileo posited, “the laws of nature are written in the language of mathematics.” But the laws of consciousness are written in language. Indeed, I suspect that rather than language being a development of consciousness it is a precondition of it. More specifically, I would suggest that consciousness and thought emerge from the idea of representation—that it is when we developed the idea that something can be a metaphor for, imitation of, or reference to another thing that we began to think. I would go so far as to say that, in fact, this miraculous imprecision is what thought is.
The attention economy is inverting - by Sam Schillace
https://sundaylettersfromsam.substack.com/p/the-attention-economy-is-inverting
But what happens in the generative world? In that world, the signal is broken - a complex, well-crafted artifact is much easier to build, so it’s appearance is no longer a proxy for quality. This is a familiar effect. But the other thing that’s happening is that the attentional transaction is now “inverted” - I may have spend a small amount of my time and attention to take up a large amount of yours. I’m no longer “paying” you with attention, or transferring value to you, I’m taking it away.
obra/the-elements-of-style: William Strunk Jr.'s Elements of Style (1918) in markdown format for AI agents
https://github.com/obra/the-elements-of-style/
William Strunk Jr.'s Elements of Style (1918) in markdown format for AI agents
This one weird trick makes the AI a better writer.
https://blog.fsck.com/2025/10/13/this-one-weird-trick-makes-the-ai-a-better-writer/
My current Markdown version of The Elements Of Style clocks in at about 12,000 words. That's enough tokens that I wouldn't include in every session, but having my robot buddy read it before creating prose docs for human consumption is something I find quite useful.
Victorian diary-writers kicked off our age of self-optimisation | Aeon Essays
https://aeon.co/essays/victorian-diary-writers-kicked-off-our-age-of-self-optimisation
Nineteenth-century diaries show a growing middle class engaged in a constant quest for self-mastery and productivity. With the invention of printed commercial diaries came a new way of looking at life and new organisational possibilities. The future could be mapped out, goal-oriented, solution-focused. The Victorians were great innovators, but progress was Janus-faced. For every leap forward, a renewed pressure to go further, and faster, to do better, be better. The age of progress was also an age of anxiety.
Remember to not leave all the work to the AI : Global Nerdy
https://www.globalnerdy.com/2025/11/12/remember-to-not-leave-all-the-work-to-the-ai/
I have nothing against using AI as a writing assistant. It’s fantastic for checking spelling, grammar, and flow, it can help you out of writer’s block, and it can do something that you could never do, no matter how smart or creative you are: it can come up with ideas you’d never come up with.
So yes, use AI, but you have to do some of the work, and you have to double-check it before putting that work out in the world!
u/Quick_Butterfly_4571 passionately explains why geeky 80’s kids are confused with ChatGPT : r/bestof
https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/1ovxrk6/uquick_butterfly_4571_passionately_explains_why/
So, it is the vernacular of the first globally connected generation of kids, who — working in tandem and free from constraints, oversight, or rules — developed an epistolary style designed to facilitate belonging by wire to communities that were virtual and spread across the globe. To connect with other lonely oddballs who were thrilled to discuss geeky things.
It is the first ever, democratically developed, global, epistolary style and the first consistent style developed in the age of the internet for the internet.
We also drew boobs and said vulger things and developed new ways of slinging insults and enraging each other. Like, it wasn't a utopia.
Some context on why some 80's kids keep getting mistaken for GPT
https://www.reddit.com/r/diypedals/comments/1ovmx4l/comment/nokigif/
So, when you got online, you pulled or copied or saved all your messages, drafted up what was...essentially an essay of a response — trying to anticipate follow up questions or points of confusion. You planned it ahead of time. You studied your ass off to equip yourself with knowledge in the hopes of getting some replies off the same day you read them (it sounds stupid now, but that was fucking incredible — send and receive a letter same day!? Eesh. I am getting old).
Also, because communication was fast, but our time was limited, it was more like faster letters at first than it was like texts. It was a horror to waste round trips on misunderstandings — the person you were collaborating with might only get online Wednesday afternoons. If you were ambiguous, you might waste a whole week of progress just by not being clear! So, we were explicit.
Wendy N. Wagner | editor • writer • foot traveler
https://winniewoohoo.com/
endy N. Wagner grew up in a town so tiny it didn’t even have a post office. With no television reception, she became a rabid reader, waiting impatiently for the bookmobile’s fortnightly visit to her tiny hometown. Today, her family struggles to find room for her expanding book collection in their Portland, Oregon, home. She really likes books about horror movies, ecology, running, and vegan cooking.
cassidoo/cardstock: A clean Obsidian theme
https://github.com/cassidoo/cardstock
A clean Obsidian theme
aaaaalexis/obsidian-cupertino: A native look and feel Obsidian theme designed for a clean, focused, and mobile-friendly writing experience.
https://github.com/aaaaalexis/obsidian-cupertino
A native look and feel Obsidian theme designed for a clean, focused, and mobile-friendly writing experience.
Blogging After 8PM – Climb to the Stars
https://climbtothestars.org/archives/2025/11/08/blogging-after-8pm/#comment-1671214
I am on my never-ending quest to squeeze more writing into my life (it’s the ugly truth – the squeezing – I know), without sacrificing anything else (I know, I know), and I’m thinking that evenings could be a good plan. The day before yesterday, I managed to eat at a decent time, and get myself ready for the night, and then have time ahead of me to write.
Chiron's Doom by Nick Bate
https://ickbat.itch.io/chirons-doom
Chiron's Doom is a storytelling game about an ill-fated expedition to explore a mysterious monument. Designed as a solo journalling experience, Chiron's Doom can also comfortably accommodate up to 3 players. All you need to play is a deck of cards!
Whispers in the Walls 2e by Pandion Games
https://pandiongames.itch.io/whispers-in-the-walls
This is a solo journaling RPG about the knowledge of the walls. You play it by yourself in the dark.
As you draw cards, you’ll be directed to prompts to write as the P.I. trying to solve a mystery. Throughout the game, you’ll draw cards from your constructed Whispers Deck to learn what the walls, ceiling and floors are telling or showing you, keep notes on what you think it all means and ultimately conclude the truth.
A session takes between 15 and 60 minutes and is highly replayable. Each session is unique.
Transformation: A solo RPG about the monster you are becoming – Absurdist Productions
https://www.absurdistproductions.com/product/transformation/
Transformation is a solo, journaling, role-playing game about becoming a monster and how your changes affect those around you. Transformation is presented as an 86-page 8.5″ x 11″, perfect-bound soft-cover or hard-cover book. Transformation is printed in full color.
Last Tea Shop Expanded Edition by Spring Villager
https://springvillager.itch.io/last-tea-shop-complete
Last Tea Shop Complete is a revised and expanded version of a one-page solo game about tea and conversation. Set up your stall and wait for visitors to emerge out of the mist. Over a cup of tea, chat to the visitor about their life and help prepare them for their trip into the Lands of the Dead. Record their thoughts, fears, dreams and hopes in your journal for posterity.
Artefact by Jack Harrison
https://mouseholepress.itch.io/artefact
ARTEFACT shifts the focus to the perspective of a single magical item, and its history as it passes through the hands of many different keepers. You’ll feel the weight of time as the item is lost or abandoned again and again, the dust & decay piling around it until it’s found again by someone new.
jrnl - The Command Line Journal
https://jrnl.sh/en/stable/
Collect your thoughts and notes
without leaving the command line.
Frank Chimero · Beyond the Machine
https://frankchimero.com/blog/2025/beyond-the-machine/?ref=sidebar
If working in the Rubin style puts you under the machine, Eno works beside it. He sets up a system with his inputs and samples, then listens, selects, and continues to shape. Eno often says while making music he feels like a gardener: planting loops and textures, then watching them sprout into something unexpected with the potential to become incredibly beautiful with a little bit of care and pruning. The machine may produce material, but the job of shaping it into something meaningful still rests with him. It is creativity as cultivation.
Main :: Causality Story Sequencer :: Hollywood Camera Work
https://www.hollywoodcamerawork.com/causality.html
Causality is a new kind of writing app where you develop your story visually,
giving you an incredible overview of even very complex stories.
This is where I write my Journal on my iPhone | Phong's blog
https://phong.bearblog.dev/this-is-where-i-write-my-journal-on-my-iphone/
The flow of journaling feels effortless and light. Take a few photos, record a few videos, jot down a few thoughts underneath, put the phone down to fully enjoy the moment, come back later and write down some new feelings or thoughts, then move on with life. What’s important is to be honest with myself and live in the moment.
One Compliment – Rands in Repose
https://randsinrepose.com/archives/one-compliment/
When I hit publish, I broadcast to Mastodon, Threads, BlueSky, and the Rands Leadership Slack, and I’m looking for straightforward feedback on having devoted ten to fifteen hours of my life. A compliment.
The Blank Page Revolution - by Steven Johnson
https://adjacentpossible.substack.com/p/the-blank-page-revolution
The most surprising insight, I think, revolves around the significance of the fundamental substrate of all modern notebooks until the digital age: paper. Before reading Allen's book, I had mostly thought about paper in terms of Gutenberg and the printing press democratizing knowledge and information by making it much easier to publish and read printed information in the form of books. But somehow I hadn't fully thought through the more intimate revolution that it enabled—a revolution of self-knowledge and private record-keeping, executed not with a printing press but with a pen.
Who Will See My Comment? – Climb to the Stars
https://climbtothestars.org/archives/2025/09/15/who-will-see-my-comment/
Bluesky, Mastodon and Twitter (yeah, and Threads) feel more fragmented. It’s more difficult to follow for lots of people. They are faced with bits and pieces of conversations flying about, and access to the context of those is not frictionless. Part of this, I think, has to do with how publication audience is managed (I’ll definitely have to do a “part 4” about this in my Rebooting the Blogosphere series). And another, of course, is the primacy of non-reciprocal connections on those platforms.
Where Have All The Bloggers Gone? – Climb to the Stars
https://climbtothestars.org/archives/2025/09/15/where-have-all-the-bloggers-gone/
What is happening for me right now is interesting. During my Facebook exile, I reconnected with the social networks that I had been present on in a very passive manner these last years. I also wrote more on my blog (here!), and made an effort to get back into reading other blogs, even though I have never been a really huge blog reader in my past. I installed an RSS reader, and started subscribing, process which is now pretty frictionless. To my surprise, there are lots of blogs! Lots of people still blogging! Lots of people who took up blogging way after the Golden Era of Blogs! I see them show up here and there on Mastodon and Bluesky, and of course, in blog posts.
On em dashes – Manu
https://manuelmoreale.com/on-em-dashes
Yes, we can still use em dashes. And no, I’m not going to stop using them because fucking chatgpt is abusing them. What if they tweak the instructions next week and tell it to use more full stops or commas? What are we gonna do then? Stop using those as well? Hell no. I’ll keep writing however I want, and if someone decides to stop reading what I write because they suspect it’s AI-generated because I use too many em dashes, or parentheses, or any other punctuation or word or whatever, well, good riddance. I’m not gonna miss you.
Cloudflare's Matthew Prince has a plan to get Google and the AI oliigarchs to pay for your content even though many are used to getting it for free. He might have enough leverage to make them.
https://crazystupidtech.com/2025/08/30/cloudflares-ceo-wants-to-save-the-web-from-ais-oligarchs-heres-why-his-plan-isnt-crazy/
how to stop feeling lost in tech: the wafflehouse method
https://www.yacinemahdid.com/p/how-to-stop-feeling-lost-in-tech
My AI-Driven Identity Crisis
https://dusty.phillips.codes/2025/06/08/my-ai-driven-identity-crisis/
So I can still write for fun, even if we end up in a world where AI is definitively better at it than I am. I have no idea if I actually would. I don’t know exactly what my motivation would look like in that world.
I don’t even know if I’m going to write this next book.
AI must RTFM: Why technical writers are becoming context curators - passo.uno
https://passo.uno/from-tech-writers-to-ai-context-curators/
I’ve been noticing a trend among developers that use AI: they are increasingly writing and structuring docs in context folders so that the AI powered tools they use can build solutions autonomously and with greater accuracy. They now strive to understand information architecture, semantic tagging, docs markup. All of a sudden they’ve discovered docs, so they write more than they code. Because AI must RTFM now.
Writing in the Age of LLMs
https://www.sh-reya.com/blog/ai-writing/
My writing loop is built around one goal: keep the momentum going. I don’t want to get stuck staring at a blank screen or endlessly tweaking sentences that don’t quite land. Most of my writing, whether for a paper or a blog post, follows the same high-level loop: plan an outline (on paper or in my head), generate a draft, read what I wrote, critique it, and revise. The loop can run at different granularities—sometimes I work a sentence at a time; sometimes I write entire sections before editing.
Pages CMS: The No-Hassle CMS for Static Sites Generators
https://pagescms.org/
Tired of juggling Git and YAML to update your Next.js, Astro, Hugo or Nuxt website? Make it easy on you and your team, get a user-friendly CMS running straight on top of GitHub.
Embeddings are underrated
https://technicalwriting.dev/ml/embeddings/overview.html
Embeddings aren't exactly new, but they have become much more widely accessible in the last couple years. What embeddings offer to technical writers is the ability to discover connections between texts at previously impossible scales.
Doing weeknotes
https://gilest.org/doingweeknotes/index.html
What weeknotes are, how weeknotes work, and how to start writing weeknotes of your own
suitenumerique/docs: A collaborative note taking, wiki and documentation platform that scales. Built with Django and React. Opensource alternative to Notion or Outline.
https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs
A collaborative note taking, wiki and documentation platform that scales. Built with Django and React. Opensource alternative to Notion or Outline.
AI Slop, Suspicion, and Writing Back | Ben Congdon
https://benjamincongdon.me/blog/2025/01/25/AI-Slop-Suspicion-and-Writing-Back/?ref=sidebar
Undoubtedly, the sloppification of the internet will likely get worse over the next few years. And as such, the returns to curating quality sources of content will only increase. My advice? Use an RSS feed reader, read Twitter lists instead of feeds, and find spaces where real discussion still happens (e.g. LessWrong and Lobsters still both seem slop-free).
Ursula K. Le Guin — Ursula on Writing: A Rant about "Techonolgy"
https://www.ursulakleguin.com/a-rant-about-technology
Technology is the active human interface with the material world. ... We have been so desensitized by a hundred and fifty years of ceaselessly expanding technical prowess that we think nothing less complex and showy than a computer or a jet bomber deserves to be called “technology” at all. As if linen were the same thing as flax — as if paper, ink, wheels, knives, clocks, chairs, aspirin pills, were natural objects, born with us like our teeth and fingers — as if steel saucepans with copper bottoms and fleece vests spun from recycled glass grew on trees, and we just picked them when they were ripe...
Found Decades Later
https://www.twobraids.com/2024/12/found-decades-later.html
For two days, I have been obsessively poring over these documents and photos, reveling in the memories. I have a new window into my thoughts, emotions, tragedies and triumphs from lost decades. Long-dead friends and lovers whisper in my ears from within my own words.
You Exist In The Long Context
https://thelongcontext.com/
The current state-of-the-art Gemini model can fit roughly 1.5 million words in its context. That’s enough for me to upload the full text of all fourteen of my books, plus every article, blog post, or interview I’ve ever published—and the entirety of my collection of research notes that I’ve compiled over the years. The Gemini team has announced plans for a model that could hold more than 7 million words in its short-term memory. That’s enough to fit everything I’ve ever written, plus the hundred books and articles that most profoundly shaped my thinking over the years. An advanced model capable of holding in focus all that information would have a profound familiarity with all the words and ideas that have shaped my personal mindset. Certainly its ability to provide accurate and properly-cited answers to questions about my worldview (or my intellectual worldview, at least) would exceed that of any other human. In some ways it would exceed my own knowledge, thanks to its ability to instantly recall facts from books I read twenty years ago, or make new associations between ideas that I have long since forgotten. It would lack any information about my personal or emotional history—though I suppose if I had maintained a private journal over the past decades it would be able to approximate that part of my mindset as well. But as reconstruction of my intellectual grounding, it would be unrivaled. If that is not considered material progress in AI, there is something wrong with our metrics.
Don't call it a Substack. - Anil Dash
https://www.anildash.com//2024/11/19/dont-call-it-a-substack/
It's your newsletter, or your email, or your blog. Or just your writing. But it sure as hell isn't "your Substack".
Zibaldone - Wikipedia
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zibaldone
A zibaldone (plural zibaldoni) is an Italian vernacular commonplace book or notebook containing a wide variety of vernacular texts, copied into a small or medium-format paper codex[1] by citizens in late-medieval and Renaissance Italian city-states.
Named Blogs - Jim Nielsen’s Blog
https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2024/named-blogs/
I think it’s endearing when people name their blog.
Dead Labor, Dead Speech - by Nicholas Carr
https://www.newcartographies.com/p/dead-labor-dead-speech
If, as Marx argued, capital is dead labor, then the products of large language models might best be understood as dead speech. Just as factory workers produce, with their “living labor,” machines and other forms of physical capital that are then used, as “dead labor,” to produce more physical commodities, so human expressions of thought and creativity—“living speech” in the forms of writing, art, photography, and music—become raw materials used to produce “dead speech” in those same forms. LLMs, to continue with Marx’s horror-story metaphor, feed “vampire-like” on human culture. Without our words and pictures and songs, they would cease to function. They would become as silent as a corpse in a casket.
Tarot for Creativity – Chronicle Books
https://www.chroniclebooks.com/products/tarot-for-creativity
Tarot isn’t just for divination—it’s also a great way to connect to your creativity. Discover how tarot can help you stay inspired and make your best work with this practical guidebook.
BYOK is a simple new writing tool designed to help perpetual procrastinators | Wallpaper
https://www.wallpaper.com/tech/byok-is-a-new-writing-tool-for-perpetual-procrastinators
This is the BYOK, billed as a ‘distraction-free’ writing device for those who need pure focus in order to channel their productivity as effectively as possible. The procrastinating writer oftens torments themselves with the idea that there’s a simple and effective solution to their woes, usually one that involves buying something – the perfect notebook or pen – or some studious or trivial ritual that helps get the words flowing. It’s an approach that does little more than perpetuate the procrastination and kick the idea of getting something done even further down the road.
BYOK: The Ultimate Distraction-Free Writing Tool by Nick Sjolinder — Kickstarter
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/byok/byok-the-ultimate-distraction-free-writing-tool?ref=73utr6&utm_source=prelaunch&utm_medium=button
Designed for those who take their writing seriously, BYOK eliminates distractions, so that you can fully immerse yourself in your creative process—for a seamless and fully focused writing experience.
And best of all: you get to use your own keyboard.
BYOK - A Deep Dive Into Our Distraction-Free Writing Tool - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKzeYtXwHWg
In this video, we give you an in-depth look into one of our prototypes to help you better understand the BYOK as well as highlight some key benefits of the device when compared to other writing tools.
GitHub - marktext/marktext: 📝A simple and elegant markdown editor, available for Linux, macOS and Windows.
https://github.com/marktext/marktext?tab=readme-ov-file
📝A simple and elegant markdown editor, available for Linux, macOS and Windows. - marktext/marktext
Humanity, Fuck Yeah!
https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/
We're a writing focused subreddit welcoming all media exhibiting the awesome potential of humanity, known as HFY or "Humanity, Fuck Yeah!" We welcome sci-fi, fantasy, and all other stories with a focus on humans being awesome!
Strategist Index Cards
https://baronfig.com/products/strategist?variant=1047391371289
Dot grid!
Highlight:Make lists, plan your next book, study for a test, design an app—you get the idea. Endless potential.
Plan your next book, study for a test, design an app—you get the idea. Endless potential.
ChatGPT is not ‘artificial intelligence.’ It’s theft. | America Magazine
https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2023/05/15/chatgpt-artificial-intelligence-theft-245283
But in calling these programs “artificial intelligence” we grant them a claim to authorship that is simply untrue. Each of those tokens used by programs like ChatGPT—the “language” in their “large language model”—represents a tiny, tiny piece of material that someone else created. And those authors are not credited for it, paid for it or asked permission for its use. In a sense, these machine-learning bots are actually the most advanced form of a chop shop: They steal material from creators (that is, they use it without permission), cut that material into parts so small that no one can trace them and then repurpose them to form new products.
ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web | The New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web
It’s possible that, in the future, we will build an A.I. that is capable of writing good prose based on nothing but its own experience of the world. The day we achieve that will be momentous indeed—but that day lies far beyond our prediction horizon. In the meantime, it’s reasonable to ask, What use is there in having something that rephrases the Web?
Tarot-Based Situation Generator ~ Clarity Flowers
https://clarity.flowers/wiki/tarot_sitch_generator.html
A tool for generating some characters and a situation using tarot cards.
novelWriter – A markdown-like editor for writing novels
https://novelwriter.io/
A markdown-like text editor designed for writing novels and larger projects of many smaller plain text documents.
novelWriter – A markdown-like editor for writing novels
https://novelwriter.io
A markdown-like text editor designed for writing novels and larger projects of many smaller plain text documents.
The Most Important Writing Lesson I Ever Learned – Steven Pressfield
https://stevenpressfield.com/2009/10/writing-wednesdays-2-the-most-important-writing-lession-i-ever-learned/
Nobody wants to read your shit.
Let me repeat that. Nobody–not even your dog or your mother–has the slightest interest in your commercial for Rice Krispies or Delco batteries or Preparation H. Nor does anybody care about your one-act play, your Facebook page or your new sesame chicken joint at Canal and Tchopotoulis.
It isn’t that people are mean or cruel. They’re just busy.
The Most Important Writing Lesson I Ever Learned – Steven Pressfield
https://stevenpressfield.com/2009/10/writing-wednesdays-2-the-most-important-writing-lession-i-ever-learned
Nobody wants to read your shit.
Let me repeat that. Nobody–not even your dog or your mother–has the slightest interest in your commercial for Rice Krispies or Delco batteries or Preparation H. Nor does anybody care about your one-act play, your Facebook page or your new sesame chicken joint at Canal and Tchopotoulis.
It isn’t that people are mean or cruel. They’re just busy.
Back To The Future written on Atari 8bit!? - Atari 8-Bit Computers - AtariAge Forums
http://atariage.com/forums/topic/288806-back-to-the-future-written-on-atari-8bit/
While watching this Back To The Future (1985) Retrospective (exact timestamp) today I noticed what appears to be an XE with an Indus disk drive being used by Bob Gale, co writer for the movie.
Back To The Future written on Atari 8bit!? - Atari 8-Bit Computers - AtariAge Forums
http://atariage.com/forums/topic/288806-back-to-the-future-written-on-atari-8bit
While watching this Back To The Future (1985) Retrospective (exact timestamp) today I noticed what appears to be an XE with an Indus disk drive being used by Bob Gale, co writer for the movie.
2007/09/25 - 0xDECAFBAD Bucket
https://decafbad.com/bucket/entries/2007/09/25
Once up on a time, before my writing brain had been *entirely* swallowed up by Twitter. One of the most productive daily public writing tools I used was the OPML Editor and a daily outline always open on my desktop ready to receive thoughts. Kind of like Twitter, I guess, except it was a *thing* that I added to over the course of the day. I could edit it, publish it whenever, not publish it until I had my words straight.
This is one of the best short things I wrote with it - meditations on my Dad after his passing.
Ficdown
https://www.ficdown.com/
Ficdown is a set of standards using the Markdown formatting syntax that can be used to create choice-based interactive fiction.
Ficdown
https://www.ficdown.com
Ficdown is a set of standards using the Markdown formatting syntax that can be used to create choice-based interactive fiction.
Science Fiction Writer Robert J. Sawyer: WordStar Under Windows
http://sfwriter.com/ws-vdos.htm
I'm a Hugo Award-winning science-fiction writer, and I've been using WordStar since 1983, writing all 23 of my novels with it. If you still have questions about getting WordStar to run under Windows after reading the notes below (updated in 2015), please e
The Builder’s High – Rands in Repose
http://randsinrepose.com/archives/the-builders-high/
The Builder’s High – Rands in Repose
http://randsinrepose.com/archives/the-builders-high
Title Capitalization Tool - Automatically Capitalize Your Title
http://titlecapitalization.com/
Automatically Capitalize Your Title
Title Capitalization Tool - Automatically Capitalize Your Title
http://titlecapitalization.com
Automatically Capitalize Your Title
Review: Composition Tools Fargo, Medium, Editorially, Marquee, and More | MIT Technology Review
http://www.technologyreview.com/review/520246/as-we-may-type/
In 1984, the personal-computer industry was still small enough to be captured, with reasonable fidelity, in a one-volume publication, the Whole Earth Software Catalog. It told the curious what was up: “On an unlovely flat artifact called a disk may be hidden the concentrated intelligence of thousands of hours of design.” And filed under “Organizing” was one review of particular note, describing a program called ThinkTank, created by a man named Dave Winer.
Review: Composition Tools Fargo, Medium, Editorially, Marquee, and More | MIT Technology Review
http://www.technologyreview.com/review/520246/as-we-may-type
In 1984, the personal-computer industry was still small enough to be captured, with reasonable fidelity, in a one-volume publication, the Whole Earth Software Catalog. It told the curious what was up: “On an unlovely flat artifact called a disk may be hidden the concentrated intelligence of thousands of hours of design.” And filed under “Organizing” was one review of particular note, describing a program called ThinkTank, created by a man named Dave Winer.
WriteMonkey - Home
http://writemonkey.com/index.php
Writemonkey is a Windows zenware* writing application with an extremely stripped down user interface, leaving you alone with your thoughts and your words. It is light, fast and free. With an array of innovative tools under the hood and full Markdown* support, it helps you write better.
lmorchard · Prose
http://prose.io/#about
Prose provides a beautifully simple content authoring environment for CMS-free websites. It's a web-based interface for managing content on GitHub. Use it to create, edit, and delete files, and save your changes directly to GitHub. Host your website on GitHub Pages for free, or set up your own GitHub webhook server.
Single source publishing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_source_publishing
Single source publishing, also known as single sourcing, allows the same content to be used in different documents (deliverables) or in various formats. The labour-intensive and expensive work of editing need only be carried out once, on one document. Further transformations are carried out mechanistically, by automated tools. You may also add new output formats in the future, as your organization's needs change.
WordPress › Support » Share a Draft
http://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-reviews/shareadraft
Let your friends preview one of your drafts, without giving them permissions to edit posts in your blog
Broken by Design: MongoDB Fault Tolerance :: Hacking, Distributed
http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/01/29/mongo-ft/
Look, I realize that we live in a TL;DR culture. I lived through 8 years of a non-reading president along with everyone else. I know that the brogrammers out there are constantly getting texts from their buddies to plan the weekend's broactivities, trying to decide in whose mancave they'll be setting up their lan party, and are thoroughly distracted in between futzing with their smart phones and writing a few lines of code per day by cutting and pasting it from stackoverflow. But it's really not ok to act functionally illiterate when you're not actually illiterate, when an advanced society that once put a man on the moon worked so hard to educate you.
Broken by Design: MongoDB Fault Tolerance :: Hacking, Distributed
http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/01/29/mongo-ft
Look, I realize that we live in a TL;DR culture. I lived through 8 years of a non-reading president along with everyone else. I know that the brogrammers out there are constantly getting texts from their buddies to plan the weekend's broactivities, trying to decide in whose mancave they'll be setting up their lan party, and are thoroughly distracted in between futzing with their smart phones and writing a few lines of code per day by cutting and pasting it from stackoverflow. But it's really not ok to act functionally illiterate when you're not actually illiterate, when an advanced society that once put a man on the moon worked so hard to educate you.
Sudden empty / blank page for large posts with WordPress
http://www.undermyhat.org/blog/2009/07/sudden-empty-blank-page-for-large-posts-with-wordpress/
It isn’t fair: you spend a few hours on creating your most marvellous blog post ever, the one and only that will surely enlist you in the Hall of Famous Bloggers, but then you click Publish or Preview and all you see is an empty post. Totally panicked you click “Edit” (never do that!) on that empty post only to find yourself in an editing screen that’s, well, empty (!!). Before you try to commit suicide, I hope you do a bit of googling and find yourself here or on one of the many other helpful / not so helpful posts on the subject.
Sudden empty / blank page for large posts with WordPress
http://www.undermyhat.org/blog/2009/07/sudden-empty-blank-page-for-large-posts-with-wordpress
It isn’t fair: you spend a few hours on creating your most marvellous blog post ever, the one and only that will surely enlist you in the Hall of Famous Bloggers, but then you click Publish or Preview and all you see is an empty post. Totally panicked you click “Edit” (never do that!) on that empty post only to find yourself in an editing screen that’s, well, empty (!!). Before you try to commit suicide, I hope you do a bit of googling and find yourself here or on one of the many other helpful / not so helpful posts on the subject.
John Resig - Secret Omens: Book Update
http://ejohn.org/blog/secret-omens/
To the point of Jeff’s post, I would absolutely not write a technical book again. It’s a tedious process and unless you LOVE writing and are really good at it (like Nicholas Zakas or Dave Flanagan) then I suggest that you stick with the medium that is truly successful: Writing long-form articles/blog posts and possibly spinning them off into purchasable ebooks. (As an example, I’d point to Juriy Zaytsev and Peter-Paul Koch both of whom could get any JavaScript position in the world purely based upon the quality of their articles and sites, without ever having written a book.)
John Resig - Secret Omens: Book Update
http://ejohn.org/blog/secret-omens
To the point of Jeff’s post, I would absolutely not write a technical book again. It’s a tedious process and unless you LOVE writing and are really good at it (like Nicholas Zakas or Dave Flanagan) then I suggest that you stick with the medium that is truly successful: Writing long-form articles/blog posts and possibly spinning them off into purchasable ebooks. (As an example, I’d point to Juriy Zaytsev and Peter-Paul Koch both of whom could get any JavaScript position in the world purely based upon the quality of their articles and sites, without ever having written a book.)
Rands In Repose: Please Learn to Write
http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2012/05/16/please_learn_to_write.html
Writing appears more forgiving because there is no compiler or interpreter catching your its and it’s issues or reminding you of the rules regarding that or which. Here’s the rub: there is a compiler and it’s fucking brutal. It’s your readers. Your readers are far more critical than the Python interpreter. Not only do they care about syntax, but they also want to learn something, and, perhaps, be entertained while all this learning is going down. Success means they keep coming back - failure is a lonely silence. Python is looking pretty sweet now, right?
The Markdown Mark by Dustin Curtis
http://dcurt.is/the-markdown-mark
I'm making something that uses Markdown, and there's currently no great universal symbol for identifying Markdown support. So I created one.
Self-publish your in-progress book for great royalties on Leanpub
http://leanpub.com/
Self-publish your book as you write it, and earn great royalties!
Self-publish your in-progress book for great royalties on Leanpub
http://leanpub.com
Self-publish your book as you write it, and earn great royalties!
The end of ebook development – Baldur Bjarnason
http://www.baldurbjarnason.com/notes/end-of-ebook-dev/
In this world there wouldn’t be any ebook developers any more than you have .doc developers.
The fact that we have an industry of people whose job description is close to indistinguishable from ‘fixes office documents by hand in a hex editor’ is insane.
The end of ebook development – Baldur Bjarnason
http://www.baldurbjarnason.com/notes/end-of-ebook-dev
In this world there wouldn’t be any ebook developers any more than you have .doc developers.
The fact that we have an industry of people whose job description is close to indistinguishable from ‘fixes office documents by hand in a hex editor’ is insane.
Marked - smart tools for smart writers
http://markedapp.com/#extras
Pick your favorite editor: Marked's flexible Markdown preview will show you the final output of your document as you work, and its writing tools make your life easier from concept to publish.
PayPal Strong-Arms Indie Ebook Publishers Over Erotic Content | ZDNet
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/violetblue/paypal-strong-arms-indie-ebook-publishers-over-erotic-content/1097
Under the new PayPal policy, Mark Corker of Smashwords told all the Smashwords authors they would also have to remove paranormal romance that included shape-shifters - if the shape-shifters were to have sex in their non-human forms.
The fake chemical compound Isaac Asimov invented to punk science writers
http://io9.com/5887014/the-fake-chemical-compound-isaac-asimov-invented-to-punk-science-writers
the only way for the compound to be more soluble than it already was would be if it dissolved before it came in contact with the water. He decided this would be a good basis for another short story, and then realized this represented the perfect way to deal with his concerns about scientific writing
Introducing Playfic - Waxy.org
http://waxy.org/2012/02/introducing_playfic/
Playfic is a community for writing, sharing, and playing interactive fiction games (aka "text adventures") entirely from your browser, using a "natural language"-inspired language called Inform 7.
Introducing Playfic - Waxy.org
http://waxy.org/2012/02/introducing_playfic
Playfic is a community for writing, sharing, and playing interactive fiction games (aka "text adventures") entirely from your browser, using a "natural language"-inspired language called Inform 7.
Eternal Copyright: a modest proposal – Telegraph Blogs
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/adrianhon/100007156/infinite-copyright-a-modest-proposal/
Certainly we wouldn't want to listen to their other suggestions, which would see us broaden the definition of "fair use" and, horrifically, reduce copyright terms back to merely a lifetime or even less. Not only would such an act deprive our great-great-grandchildren of their birthright, but it would surely choke off creativity to the dark ages of the 18th and 19th centuries, a desperately lean time for art in which we had to make do with mere scribblers such as Wordsworth, Swift, Richardson, Defoe, Austen, Bronte, Hardy, Dickens, and Keats.
Eternal Copyright: a modest proposal – Telegraph Blogs
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/adrianhon/100007156/infinite-copyright-a-modest-proposal
Certainly we wouldn't want to listen to their other suggestions, which would see us broaden the definition of "fair use" and, horrifically, reduce copyright terms back to merely a lifetime or even less. Not only would such an act deprive our great-great-grandchildren of their birthright, but it would surely choke off creativity to the dark ages of the 18th and 19th centuries, a desperately lean time for art in which we had to make do with mere scribblers such as Wordsworth, Swift, Richardson, Defoe, Austen, Bronte, Hardy, Dickens, and Keats.
The Two-Fisted, One-Eyed Misadventures Of Sportswriting's Last Badass
http://deadspin.com/5863743
One week, George came in and typed up his piece, dropped it at the editor's desk, and went off into the night. The editor looked at the copy and it was utter gibberish. Lots of consonants. Remembering that George was a touch-typist, the editor took the piece, put his hands on the keyboard, but moved them one key to the side. The piece was perfect, except George had started one key over
My 10 years of blogging: Reflections, Lessons & Some Stats Too — Tech News and Analysis
http://gigaom.com/2011/11/26/10-years-gigaom
What does the future hold?
It is a good question. I have actually been thinking a lot about that lately and wondering how to reinvent the art form that I embraced over a decade ago. I don’t really have an answer, except that it is somewhere in the past and in the reasons why I fell in love with blogging.