Tootfinder

New study on the effects of LLM use (in this case on essay writing):
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872
Quote:
"LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work. While LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four month…

Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task
This study explores the neural and behavioral consequences of LLM-assisted essay writing. Participants were divided into three groups: LLM, Search Engine, and Brain-only (no tools). Each completed three sessions under the same condition. In a fourth session, LLM users were reassigned to Brain-only group (LLM-to-Brain), and Brain-only users were reassigned to LLM condition (Brain-to-LLM). A total of 54 participants took part in Sessions 1-3, with 18 completing session 4. We used electroencephalo…

"Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task"
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2506.08872
"[…] While LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four mont…

Let’s not pretend this is all new. People have written funny/cryptic message on ammo for thousands of years, and the meanings are often inside jokes.
“But the British museum has sling shot, the actual projectiles used in slings and slingshots, that have funny little messages carved into them. Messages like ‘Catch!’ But, you know, the messages are written in Ancient Greek because they were carved 300 or so years before Jesus was born.”

Writing funny stuff on ammo is over 2000 years old
Do you have that buddy who scratches messages into his M4 rounds? Or maybe you're the sailor who Sharpies "This one's for you" onto JDAMs destined for a

Just received a friend request on Facebook by someone named Peter Waldmeier.
https://www.facebook.com/peter.waldmeier.865
He seemed such a nice person, I think he is a model in a Scandinavian country.
When I asked him why he was sending me a friend request he go…

A Short Survey on Formalising Software Requirements using Large Language Models
Arshad Beg, Diarmuid O'Donoghue, Rosemary Monahan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11874

A Short Survey on Formalising Software Requirements using Large Language Models
This paper presents a focused literature survey on the use of large language models (LLM) to assist in writing formal specifications for software. A summary of thirty-five key papers is presented, including examples for specifying programs written in Dafny, C and Java. This paper arose from the project VERIFAI - Traceability and verification of natural language requirements that addresses the challenges in writing formal specifications from requirements that are expressed in natural language. O…

A superpower that you can gain as you get older is to take a pause and realize when someone is actually talking about themselves when making statements. Obviously there's the "every accusation is a confession" of republicans, but often there's much more subtle things going on with people around you. Like, someone's cranky about how you've done something? Maybe it's because they're actually cranky about something else, like how *they've* done something.…

A.R. Moxon (@juliusgoat.bsky.social)
“Klein’s interest here isn’t honesty but flattery. It shows Klein isn’t writing about Kirk at all. He’s writing about himself and saying, ‘I’m doing politics the right way because I’m lauding someone who disagrees with me.’” [contains quote post or other embedded content]

Writing on my results part of the article, the writing takes forever - I think I'm a bit tired from starting up working. I hope some lunch will give me extra energy to finish the part before the weekend.

How are you doing these days? If you’re looking at the news or opening social media feeds, it’s a lot, I know.
I continue my practice of writing back to posts on social media. Also its antidote: writing back to works of art served up at random. It’s a little like surfing, taking the waves as they come. It’s a little like dancing. It’s one way to reclaim my attention, one way to stay alive to the present.
#Art

Ever-refreshing Hells and a few Heavens
Writings in response to social media posts and works of art.

Yes! God still loves us!
There's a new Spinal Tap movie!
😎🤘🏼
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/10/spinal-ta…

A 'Spinal Tap' Sequel Riffs on the End of Rock
Forty years after Spinal Tap, history’s most hapless band turns it up to 11 one last time.

I have so many drafts on my blog (https://blogs.linux.pizza/), that I dont know what to do with anymore.
It felt like a good think to do when I started writing the posts, but then I always gets stuck in some details and start taking breaks lol

There’s gonna be an open space on Python and complex applications tomorrow at 10am in room 223 224:
“Is Python suitable for writing maintanable (complex) software?”
I’ll try to be there & as far as I am concerned, Betteridge's Law of Headlines doesn’t apply! #EuroPython

“Sassy Outwater-Wright: Accessibility Champion and More, Dies at 42” by @…:
https://www.lflegal.com/2025/07/sassy-outwater/
The “and m…

Sassy Outwater-Wright: Accessibility Champion and More, Dies at 42
Sassy Outwater-Wright died on July 12, 2025 of cancer. She was the self-described Tumor Killer Girl in her fierce, honest, and often heart wrenching writing about the disease that ultimately took her life. As she said during a 2022 public radio interview “My superhero name is Tumor Killer Girl.

One of the problems with vibe coding is that the hardest part of software engineering is not writing the code, rather it's *choosing* what to code, and designing the system (and, later on, maintaining the code/operations/etc)
The barriers and investment cost to writing code is itself a *desirable* aspect of software engineering because it forces you to make careful, good choices before you invest in building something
Because the majority of the time spent writing, say, curl,…

🔊 #NowPlaying on #BBCRadio3:
#ThroughTheNight
- Ehnes Quartet: Beethoven alla Russia
The Ehnes Quartet explores two of Beethoven's legendary 'Razumovsky' Quartets that changed the landscape of writing for string quartet. Penny Gore presents.
Relisten now 👇
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002flwj

Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie is launching a biweekly column on Lachlan Cartwright's Breaker, a publication hosted on Substack rival beehiiv (Emily Sundberg/Feed Me)
https://www.readfeedme.com/p/one-of-substacks-founders-is-writing

One of Substack's founders is writing on beehiiv.
Good day to be the CEO of beehiiv.

Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie is launching a biweekly column on Lachlan Cartwright's Breaker, a publication hosted on Substack rival beehiiv (Emily Sundberg/Feed Me)
https://emilysundberg.substack.com/p/one-of-substacks-founders-is-writing
…

One of Substack's founders is writing on beehiiv.
Good day to be the CEO of beehiiv.

How Many Instructions Can LLMs Follow at Once?
Daniel Jaroslawicz, Brendan Whiting, Parth Shah, Karime Maamari
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11538 https://

How Many Instructions Can LLMs Follow at Once?
Production-grade LLM systems require robust adherence to dozens or even hundreds of instructions simultaneously. However, the instruction-following capabilities of LLMs at high instruction densities have not yet been characterized, as existing benchmarks only evaluate models on tasks with a single or few instructions. We introduce IFScale, a simple benchmark of 500 keyword-inclusion instructions for a business report writing task to measure how instruction-following performance degrades as inst…

Repairing General Game Descriptions (extended version)
Yifan He, Munyque Mittelmann, Aniello Murano, Abdallah Saffidine, Michael Thielscher
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10438 http…

Repairing General Game Descriptions (extended version)
The Game Description Language (GDL) is a widely used formalism for specifying the rules of general games. Writing correct GDL descriptions can be challenging, especially for non-experts. Automated theorem proving has been proposed to assist game design by verifying if a GDL description satisfies desirable logical properties. However, when a description is proved to be faulty, the repair task itself can only be done manually. Motivated by the work on repairing unsolvable planning domain descript…

1/ Feels a bit poignant to be putting finishing touches on the next vesion of my book (PLAI 3.2.5) knowing it'll be the last of the v3, and if my planned experiment goes well, it may be the last longform book I will ever write. I will truly miss longform writing: ↵

Notes on Critical Thinking and Writing https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/09/10/notes-on-critical-thinking-and-writing

Should we teach vibe coding? Here's why not.
Should AI coding be taught in undergrad CS education?
1/2
I teach undergraduate computer science labs, including for intro and more-advanced core courses. I don't publish (non-negligible) scholarly work in the area, but I've got years of craft expertise in course design, and I do follow the academic literature to some degree. In other words, In not the world's leading expert, but I have spent a lot of time thinking about course design, and consider myself competent at it, with plenty of direct experience in what knowledge & skills I can expect from students as they move through the curriculum.
I'm also strongly against most uses of what's called "AI" these days (specifically, generative deep neutral networks as supplied by our current cadre of techbro). There are a surprising number of completely orthogonal reasons to oppose the use of these systems, and a very limited number of reasonable exceptions (overcoming accessibility barriers is an example). On the grounds of environmental and digital-commons-pollution costs alone, using specifically the largest/newest models is unethical in most cases.
But as any good teacher should, I constantly question these evaluations, because I worry about the impact on my students should I eschew teaching relevant tech for bad reasons (and even for his reasons). I also want to make my reasoning clear to students, who should absolutely question me on this. That inspired me to ask a simple question: ignoring for one moment the ethical objections (which we shouldn't, of course; they're very stark), at what level in the CS major could I expect to teach a course about programming with AI assistance, and expect students to succeed at a more technically demanding final project than a course at the same level where students were banned from using AI? In other words, at what level would I expect students to actually benefit from AI coding "assistance?"
To be clear, I'm assuming that students aren't using AI in other aspects of coursework: the topic of using AI to "help you study" is a separate one (TL;DR it's gross value is not negative, but it's mostly not worth the harm to your metacognitive abilities, which AI-induced changes to the digital commons are making more important than ever).
So what's my answer to this question?
If I'm being incredibly optimistic, senior year. Slightly less optimistic, second year of a masters program. Realistic? Maybe never.
The interesting bit for you-the-reader is: why is this my answer? (Especially given that students would probably self-report significant gains at lower levels.) To start with, [this paper where experienced developers thought that AI assistance sped up their work on real tasks when in fact it slowed it down] (https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089) is informative. There are a lot of differences in task between experienced devs solving real bugs and students working on a class project, but it's important to understand that we shouldn't have a baseline expectation that AI coding "assistants" will speed things up in the best of circumstances, and we shouldn't trust self-reports of productivity (or the AI hype machine in general).
Now we might imagine that coding assistants will be better at helping with a student project than at helping with fixing bugs in open-source software, since it's a much easier task. For many programming assignments that have a fixed answer, we know that many AI assistants can just spit out a solution based on prompting them with the problem description (there's another elephant in the room here to do with learning outcomes regardless of project success, but we'll ignore this over too, my focus here is on project complexity reach, not learning outcomes). My question is about more open-ended projects, not assignments with an expected answer. Here's a second study (by one of my colleagues) about novices using AI assistance for programming tasks. It showcases how difficult it is to use AI tools well, and some of these stumbling blocks that novices in particular face.
But what about intermediate students? Might there be some level where the AI is helpful because the task is still relatively simple and the students are good enough to handle it? The problem with this is that as task complexity increases, so does the likelihood of the AI generating (or copying) code that uses more complex constructs which a student doesn't understand. Let's say I have second year students writing interactive websites with JavaScript. Without a lot of care that those students don't know how to deploy, the AI is likely to suggest code that depends on several different frameworks, from React to JQuery, without actually setting up or including those frameworks, and of course three students would be way out of their depth trying to do that. This is a general problem: each programming class carefully limits the specific code frameworks and constructs it expects students to know based on the material it covers. There is no feasible way to limit an AI assistant to a fixed set of constructs or frameworks, using current designs. There are alternate designs where this would be possible (like AI search through adaptation from a controlled library of snippets) but those would be entirely different tools.
So what happens on a sizeable class project where the AI has dropped in buggy code, especially if it uses code constructs the students don't understand? Best case, they understand that they don't understand and re-prompt, or ask for help from an instructor or TA quickly who helps them get rid of the stuff they don't understand and re-prompt or manually add stuff they do. Average case: they waste several hours and/or sweep the bugs partly under the rug, resulting in a project with significant defects. Students in their second and even third years of a CS major still have a lot to learn about debugging, and usually have significant gaps in their knowledge of even their most comfortable programming language. I do think regardless of AI we as teachers need to get better at teaching debugging skills, but the knowledge gaps are inevitable because there's just too much to know. In Python, for example, the LLM is going to spit out yields, async functions, try/finally, maybe even something like a while/else, or with recent training data, the walrus operator. I can't expect even a fraction of 3rd year students who have worked with Python since their first year to know about all these things, and based on how students approach projects where they have studied all the relevant constructs but have forgotten some, I'm not optimistic seeing these things will magically become learning opportunities. Student projects are better off working with a limited subset of full programming languages that the students have actually learned, and using AI coding assistants as currently designed makes this impossible. Beyond that, even when the "assistant" just introduces bugs using syntax the students understand, even through their 4th year many students struggle to understand the operation of moderately complex code they've written themselves, let alone written by someone else. Having access to an AI that will confidently offer incorrect explanations for bugs will make this worse.
To be sure a small minority of students will be able to overcome these problems, but that minority is the group that has a good grasp of the fundamentals and has broadened their knowledge through self-study, which earlier AI-reliant classes would make less likely to happen. In any case, I care about the average student, since we already have plenty of stuff about our institutions that makes life easier for a favored few while being worse for the average student (note that our construction of that favored few as the "good" students is a large part of this problem).
To summarize: because AI assistants introduce excess code complexity and difficult-to-debug bugs, they'll slow down rather than speed up project progress for the average student on moderately complex projects. On a fixed deadline, they'll result in worse projects, or necessitate less ambitious project scoping to ensure adequate completion, and I expect this remains broadly true through 4-6 years of study in most programs (don't take this as an endorsement of AI "assistants" for masters students; we've ignored a lot of other problems along the way).
There's a related problem: solving open-ended project assignments well ultimately depends on deeply understanding the problem, and AI "assistants" allow students to put a lot of code in their file without spending much time thinking about the problem or building an understanding of it. This is awful for learning outcomes, but also bad for project success. Getting students to see the value of thinking deeply about a problem is a thorny pedagogical puzzle at the best of times, and allowing the use of AI "assistants" makes the problem much much worse. This is another area I hope to see (or even drive) pedagogical improvement in, for what it's worth.
1/2

When I first started working on mobile apps, the iPhone didn’t exist yet. We were writing J2ME code for devices like the Motorola Razr. And wow did the UI on those things suck.
By “suck,” I mean byzantine navigation and confusing state drenched in useless, gratuitous graphical flair. I mean UI designed for eye-catching ads and splashy demos — not for making the thing clear or pleasant to use.
It was design centered on how people imagined the the device made them •look•, not on what •experience• it created for them.
1/

Hi friends of research software 👋
The @… is running a free workshop on test-driven development on Monday.
https://events.digital-research.academ

Bref, l'intelligence artificielle n'a que celle que lui prête le miroir de notre idiotie. Quelle surprise.
Ben ouais, l'IA est toujours incapable d'entendement et d'interaction. Je dis encore une fois Š quel point il est atterrant qu'on résume l'intelligence au calcul ?
https://

Kashmir Hill (@kashhill@mastodon.social)
Attached: 1 image After writing about people going into delusional spirals with ChatGPT and having what look like mental breakdowns, I wanted to understand exactly how it happens. A corporate recruiter in Toronto who spent 3 weeks convinced by ChatGPT that he was essentially Tony Stark from Iron Man, agreed to share his transcript after breaking free of the delusion. We analyzed the transcript & shared it with experts. Now you can see the interactions & how delusional spirals happen: https…

good anthology of urbanist writing! fresh takes on topics like land trusts, urban noise, conservative business owners, fun guerrilla urbanist occupations, the ecological value of leaf litter
saw it at dog eared books and impulse bought!
https://

#European #Cloud Modules
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/european-cloud-modules/…

#WritersCoffeeClub
13. Talk about the joy writing has brought you.
14. Why do you write in the form you do? Why not in another format? (poem, short story, novel, etc)
15. How do your immediate surroundings influence your work?
---
13. A usual mix on neuromediators, I believe. Not sure if there's anything special about it. Hard to describe.
14. Trivial: that&…

Wrote a bit tonight, should have a small post coming in a bit. I write a lot in Jetpack or text files but sometimes just writing on a laptop is really nice, using a mouse, moving images around - easier and faster for formatting, really. Just so much faster and the placements feel more sure than on a phone, you can move the text around, copy and paste easier on a bigger screen. At least for me.
#writing

Related to understanding firearms, "rifles" and hand guns tend to be rifled. Rifling is grooving that runs in a helical pattern down the barrel. When purchasing a firearm, it's important to check the rifling.
First check that the firearm is unloaded. Empty or remove the magazine, cycle the weapon. Next, check again that it's unloaded by looking both down the barrel and into the magazine. Now, shine a light down the barrel and look down it. In the absence of a light, you may be able to reflect light off your thumbnail.
Rifling should look as though it's drawn on with a sharp pencil, and the barrel should look otherwise completely smooth and clean. If the rifling looks like bumpy mountains, then the owner probably used corrosive ammo and didn't clean it enough. It will probably still shoot, but not at all accurately.
Both the rifling and the pin can be used in forensic analysis to match a bullet to a gun. I don't honestly know how accurate this is because a lot of forensic "science" is just made up stuff that relies on the CSI effect and doesn't actually work as advertised.
However, not all firearms are not all rifled. Shotguns are "smoothbore" firearms, meaning they lack rifling. It is not possible to perform forensic analysis of a smoothbore firearm. It *is* possible to check for powder on the hands of someone who has used a firearm within the last few days, but it's not possible to distinguish between firing inside and outside a range.
I've been gathering all kinds of tidbits like this, partially just out of curiosity and partially because I've been wanting to write a story about a revolutionary group fighting a modern authoritarian society. I'm always happy to learn other bits, if anyone has anything else I could throw in my narrative (whenever I finally get back to writing it).

Henry Blodget is launching Solutions, an interview podcast in partnership with Vox Media, on August 18, focusing on challenges in science, business, and society (Max Tani/Semafor)
https://www.semafor.com/article/08/10/2025/with-new-podcas…

With new podcast, Blodget turns to ‘Solutions’ journalism
Henry Blodget talks to Semafor about getting back to the basics: writing and talking about what excites him in business and tech.

Do Students Write Better Post-AI Support? Effects of Generative AI Literacy and Chatbot Interaction Strategies on Multimodal Academic Writing
Yueqiao Jin, Kaixun Yang, Roberto Martinez-Maldonado, Dragan Ga\v{s}evi\'c, Lixiang Yan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04398

Do Students Write Better Post-AI Support? Effects of Generative AI Literacy and Chatbot Interaction Strategies on Multimodal Academic Writing
Academic writing increasingly involves multimodal tasks requiring students to integrate visual information and textual arguments. While generative AI (GenAI) tools, like ChatGPT, offer new pathways for supporting academic writing, little is known about how students' GenAI literacy influences their independent multimodal writing skills or how chatbot interaction strategies (passive reactive vs. proactive scaffolding) impact learning. This study examined 79 higher education students' multimodal a…

Validity Verification of the New TOEFL Writing Task Based on Classical Test Theory
Yinyu Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05347 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.…

Validity Verification of the New TOEFL Writing Task Based on Classical Test Theory
The TOEFL iBT has introduced the Academic Discussion Task (ADT) to assess test-takers' ability to engage in academic discourse, reflecting the growing emphasis on interactive communication skills in higher education. However, research on the ADT's validity and fairness particularly for culturally and linguistically diverse groups, such as Chinese students, remains limited. This study addresses this gap by employing Classical Test Theory (CTT) to evaluate the psychometric properties of the ADT a…

News sites with 100 ad-tech trackers running real-time advertising auctions based on compiled individual dossiers, writing stories about creepy resource-hungry AI.

The new window management in iPadOS beta is so good. We should have been doing it this way for 10 years.

Writer Ariel Courage on never feeling finished https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/writer-ariel-courage-on-ne…

Writer Ariel Courage on never feeling finished – The Creative Independent
Author Ariel Courage discusses hyper-individualism, MFAs, and writing as a social act.

"Justice Jackson on writing dissents: "I'm not afraid to use my voice""
Justice Jackson says state of US democracy keeps her up at night
https://www.axios.com/2025/07/11/justice-ketanji-brown-jackson-democracy-dissents

Notes on Critical Thinking and Writing
https://ift.tt/9z2KlDM
updated: Thursday, September 11, 2025 - 3:35pmfull name / name of organization: Double Helixcontact…
via Input 4 RELCFP https://…

I started writing about some code I worked on but it turned into an anti-AI rant and also covers punk rock.
#noAI

The Code Struggle
Searching for...

...and what court has decided that it's a genocide? Isn't it a legal term that can only be used if the goal post we keep moving is reached?
Not to draw away attention from the Sudan genocide amidst a brutal civil war, I just think it's adequate to point out how easy it is to name the perpetrator, victim, and the action of genocide by its name when Israel isn't involved.

This is amazing.
The World’s Hardest Bluffing Game
Why are some Iraqis so good at figuring out when a person is lying? Jason Anthony reports on the world’s hardest bluffing game:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archi

The World's Hardest Bluffing Game
Why are some Iraqis so good at figuring out when a person is lying?

I had started another visualization tool, this time for page tables - and so I did a live stream on it. If you want to watch me creating UI elements for that, writing the functions to translate a set of tables into graphs and such, go check it out! 🧑‍💻
https://www.youtube.com/watch?…

@… inb4 someone say "you could find someone at your org to write it". I asked. We have no one with any experience writing this kind of stuff. Or they all have self preservation instinct and refuse to admit it. The latter might be the case since I asked on a channel with 14K developers (big corp).

"Distinguished Professor Genevieve Bell is tendering her resignation from her role as Vice-Chancellor and President of the Australian National University."
#ANU #Canberra #Australia

The feeling when you find the root cause for a problem that has been bothering you for months. And it turns out to be fixable by adding a single letter. (To turn an "unsigned long" literal into an "unsigned long long" one.) (Actually I made it use the UINT64_C() macro from <cstdint>.)
Writing portable code is hard. And thanks, Windows, for keeping "long" as 32 bits even in 64-bit code.
Now, if only Clang or gcc on Linux would warn about such po…

Better Call Claude: Can LLMs Detect Changes of Writing Style?
Johannes R\"omisch, Svetlana Gorovaia, Mariia Halchynska, Gleb Schmidt, Ivan P. Yamshchikov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00680

Better Call Claude: Can LLMs Detect Changes of Writing Style?
This article explores the zero-shot performance of state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) on one of the most challenging tasks in authorship analysis: sentence-level style change detection. Benchmarking four LLMs on the official PAN~2024 and 2025 "Multi-Author Writing Style Analysis" datasets, we present several observations. First, state-of-the-art generative models are sensitive to variations in writing style - even at the granular level of individual sentences. Second, their accuracy …

AI copyediting: how Paperpal butchered my paper on AI-generated writing https://jilltxt.net/ai-copyediting-how-paperpal-butchered-my-paper-on-ai-generated-writing/

AI copyediting: how Paperpal butchered my paper on AI-generated writing
This morning I received the copy-edited version of a paper I recently submitted to a journal. This is always cause for celebration, another step towards publication accomplished! But this time the …

JD Vance is being lambasted for dismissing social safety net rollbacks under the Trump tax bill currently making its way through Congress.
On Monday night, Vance attempted to rally support for the bill in a post on X, writing,
“Everything else—the CBO score [the Congressional Budget Office cost estimate], the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy—is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.”
Many were rubbed the wrong way by…

Vance Says It Doesn’t Matter How Many People Lose Medicaid in Budget
JD Vance is being slammed after a twisted post on the costs of Republicans’ budget bill.

#HTTP is not simple
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/08/08/http-is-not-simple/

Today's my birthday! I've got five simple requests, based on what I've learned over the last... 50 years. I hope you'll take a moment to give them a look. And thanks to everybody who's taken a moment read my writing over the years. https://www.anildash.com/2025/09/05/five-f

Five for 50
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

On writing in the botanical garden. Take this, #AI frustration.
Ruhr-Uni campus life 🦋, bees all over the place

I’ve been discussing some agent swarm based development work on LinkedIn. So far it’s going well, I’m figuring out how to get the results I want from the tools. As I say there, it feels more like managing a team of experienced product managers and developers (which I’ve done a few times in my career) than doing developer work faster.

Update on my Swift/iOS app development work using Claude-flow. | Adrian Cockcroft
Update on my Swift/iOS app development work using Claude-flow. I took some time away from it but last week I continued cleaning up the code. The app was working for me but Claude had built over 200 tests, unit tests and UI automation tests and I spent a day focused on getting them all to work, which found a few issues in the app code. Claude isn’t as good at writing Swift as Python (which tends to work first time) but when the compile failures and test error logs are passed back to it, it d…

Even if “AI” worked (it doesn’t), there’s many reasons why you shouldn’t use it:
1. It’s destroying Internet sites that you love as you use chat bots instead of actually going to sources of information—this will cause them to be less active and eventually shut down.
2. Pollution and water use from server farms cause immediate harm; often—just like other heavy industry—these are built in underprivileged communities and harming poor people. Without any benefits as the big tech companies get tax breaks and don’t pay for power, while workers aren’t from the community but commute in.
3. The basic underlying models of any LLM rely on stolen data, even when specific extra data is obtained legally. Chatbots can’t learn to speak English just by reading open source code.
4. You’re fueling a speculation bubble that is costing many people their jobs—because the illusion of “efficiency” is kept up by firing people and counting that as profit.
5. Whenever you use the great cheat machine in the cloud you’re robbing yourself from doing real research, writing or coding—literally atrophying your brain and making you stupider.
It’s a grift, through and through.

alright yall im tryna decide what to read next, never read any of these before:
i have no mouth and i must scream
several short sentences about writing
house of leaves
no 44 (been on my list longest ajfkajd)
american psycho
one hundred years of solitude

Do you know someone who found their way out of a cult, or did you, and do they or you want to help others find their way out too?
I designed a t-shirt for that:
https://bit.ly/CultSurvivor-whitewriting

Call for Papers: ICMS 2026 Panel, "The Imagined Woman"
https://ift.tt/ncWBPp7
University of Alaska - Fairbanks - Alaska & Polar Regions Area Studies Bibliographer & Curator of…
via Input 4 RELCFP …

Tech bros: “Why does everyone hate us?”
Also tech bros: https://caneandable.social/@WeirdWriter/114782913349454383

"LLMs are okay at coding, but at scale they build jumbled messes. I’ve scaled back my use of AI when coding and gone back to using my brain and pen and paper."
https://albertofortin.com/writing/coding-with-ai

@… @… > Anyway don't bother if you want just to keep this as your personal journal.
More then happy to answer any questions. Also writing blog posts on parts of it once I'm fully happy with them:

2025-06-01
getting this one in early and I've been /
on the fence about writing it; I think it's
fun and cute but given the current climate
in the world - literally and figuratively -
I think it could easily be misinterpreted as
a cynical doompost, especially with my habit \________/\________/\___/____/
of writing files that are mired in double
meaning.

Jessica Wildfire
We live in a different world now.
https://archive.ph/V3CWG
On how scary it is to be a writing radical in the USA

#WritersCoffeeClub 1 Aug: Why are you writing your current work?
Because as the world has felt like it’s gotten darker and more hopeless in recent months, this project has become a lifeline of joy, hope, and love.
Doing this work and trying to do it well has kept me from spiraling. It keeps me sane. It gives happiness to days that otherwise sink me into pits of despair.
Gosh I know that sounds dramatic but sincerely my fragile mental health is holding on to writing this novel like a lifeline.

@… “You can watch 100 movies a day if you just read the descriptions on IMDB” is obviously a false statement. I think even these boneheads would realize those aren’t at all the same things.
It’s curious how writing is different to them.

Wow, how did I sleep on the catalog of neat small pen-and-paper RPGs on Itch? So many interesting concepts there. Particularly stuck on "They should have sent a poet", which self-describes as "a solo journalling game about searching alone for the impossible among the stars, and desperately, hopefully, unfathomably holding on to your mission and humanity." Seems like a really cool concept, definitely got to try this out, as story-writing and worldbuilding is catnip to me w…

They Should Have Sent a Poet by Telling Games
A solo journalling game about searching among the stars, and desperately holding on to your mission and humanity.

There's a couple of million dollars worth of baseball talent on the loose,
ready for the big leagues, yet unsigned by any major league. There are
pitchers who would win 20 games a season ... and outfielders [who] could
hit .350, infielders who could win recognition as stars, and there's at
least one catcher who at this writing is probably superior to Bill Dickey,
Josh Gibson. Only one thing is keeping them out of the big leagues, the
pigmentation of th…

Here are some details of the new #logseq DB variant (currently in alpha):
https://discuss.logseq.com/t/logseq-db-unofficial-faq/32508
TL;DR:
- you can't edit the …

First keynote at #DocEng25 by Debora Weber-Wulff @… on “Detecting and Documenting Plagiarism and GenAI Use.”
Her main message just on the first slide

Generative AI as a Safety Net for Survey Question Refinement
Erica Ann Metheney, Lauren Yehle
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08702 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.0…

Generative AI as a Safety Net for Survey Question Refinement
Writing survey questions that easily and accurately convey their intent to a variety of respondents is a demanding and high-stakes task. Despite the extensive literature on best practices, the number of considerations to keep in mind is vast and even small errors can render collected data unusable for its intended purpose. The process of drafting initial questions, checking for known sources of error, and developing solutions to those problems requires considerable time, expertise, and financia…

Call for Papers: ICMS 2026 Panel, "The Imagined Woman" https://networks.h-net.org/group/announcements/20121834/call-papers-icms-2026-panel-imagined-woman

I had an architecture class where the professor spent an entire class discussing doorknobs. It was one of my favorite classes.
So the headline was all I needed to click this link:
“On the Architectural Hostility of Doorknobs”
https://sightlessscribbles.com/writing

Should we teach vibe coding? Here's why not.
2/2
To address the bigger question I started with ("should we teach AI-"assisted" coding?"), my answer is: "No, except enough to show students directly what its pitfalls are." We have little enough time as it is to cover the core knowledge that they'll need, which has become more urgent now that they're going to be expected to clean up AI bugs and they'll have less time to develop an understanding of the problems they're supposed to be solving. The skill of prompt engineering & other skills of working with AI are relatively easy to pick up on your own, given a decent not-even-mathematical understanding of how a neutral network works, which is something we should be giving to all students, not just our majors.
Reasonable learning objectives for CS majors might include explaining what types of bugs an AI "assistant" is most likely to introduce, explaining the difference between software engineering and writing code, explaining why using an AI "assistant" is likely to violate open-source licenses, listing at lest three independent ethical objections to contemporary LLMs and explaining the evidence for/reasoning behind them, explaining why we should expect AI "assistants" to be better at generating code from scratch than at fixing bugs in existing code (and why they'll confidently "claim" to have fixed problems they haven't), and even fixing bugs in AI generated code (without AI "assistance").
If we lived in a world where the underlying environmental, labor, and data commons issues with AI weren't as bad, or if we could find and use systems that effectively mitigate these issues (there's lots of piecemeal progress on several of these) then we should probably start teaching an elective on coding with an assistant to students who have mastered programming basics, but such a class should probably spend a good chunk of time on non-assisted debugging.
#AI #LLMs #VibeCoding

At one of my previous jobs the Executive Director (who also had a law degree) once lost hours of work because they were writing a letter and not once saved the file.
Some applications require you to hit "Save" or to at least turn on the "auto-save" feature. They did neither of those things.
I use an online spreadsheet and while the (exported) file is just 2.6MB I got a warning that the history data was taking up over 600MB!
Our world has become ineffici…

The Federal Reserve System has not been the most craven of the powerful institutions who have attempted to placate Trump to defend themselves,
but it has not been the bravest institution either.
They were quick to concede to Trump on financial regulatory issues in the hopes that would get Trump off their back.
They also ignored the attack on the legal architecture propping up independent administrative agencies in the hopes that other agencies would receive the brunt of Tru…

Powell Will Hang Separately: The Federal Reserve Has Already Failed its Duty to Lisa Cook and the Constitution
This is a free Notes on the Crises article. A reminder to readers that the various activities run out of the still-new Notes on the Crises office cost money, while an enormous amount of time and effort goes into my writing and my constant dedication to refresh and deepen my

Phoenix: A Novel Context-Aware Voice-Powered Math Equation Workspace and Editor
Kenneth Ge, Ryan Paul, Priscilla Zhang, JooYoung Seo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07576 https://

Phoenix: A Novel Context-Aware Voice-Powered Math Equation Workspace and Editor
Writing mathematical notation requires substantial effort, diverting cognitive resources from conceptual understanding to documentation mechanics, significantly impacting individuals with fine motor disabilities (FMDs). Current limits of speech-based math technologies rely on precise dictation of math symbols and unintuitive command-based interfaces. We present a novel voice-powered math workspace, applying neuroscience insights to create an intuitive problem-solving environment. To minimize co…

Great blog post by @… on the Whatever machine. She talks about why crypto sucks, why LLMs suck, why hyped up clickbait sucks, and why calling writing and art 'content' sucks https://e…

The rise of Whatever
This was originally titled “I miss when computers were fun”. But in the course of writing it, I discovered that there is a reason computers became less fun, a dark thread woven through a number of events in recent history. Let me back up a bit.

When Prompt Engineering Meets Software Engineering: CNL-P as Natural and Robust "APIs'' for Human-AI Interaction
Zhenchang Xing, Yang Liu, Zhuo Cheng, Qing Huang, Dehai Zhao, Daniel Sun, Chenhua Liu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06942

When Prompt Engineering Meets Software Engineering: CNL-P as Natural and Robust "APIs'' for Human-AI Interaction
With the growing capabilities of large language models (LLMs), they are increasingly applied in areas like intelligent customer service, code generation, and knowledge management. Natural language (NL) prompts act as the ``APIs'' for human-LLM interaction. To improve prompt quality, best practices for prompt engineering (PE) have been developed, including writing guidelines and templates. Building on this, we propose Controlled NL for Prompt (CNL-P), which not only incorporates PE best practice…

#Grindr blocks users from writing "No #Zionists" on profiles but allows "No Blacks" - #LGBTQ Nation
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2025/07/grindr-blocks-users-from-writing-no-zionists-on-profiles-but-allows-no-blacks/

Open Source Planning & Control System with Language Agents for Autonomous Scientific Discovery
Licong Xu, Milind Sarkar, Anto I. Lonappan, \'I\~nigo Zubeldia, Pablo Villanueva-Domingo, Santiago Casas, Christian Fidler, Chetana Amancharla, Ujjwal Tiwari, Adrian Bayer, Chadi Ait Ekiou, Miles Cranmer, Adrian Dimitrov, James Fergusson, Kahaan Gandhi, Sven Krippendorf, Andrew Laverick, Julien Lesgourgues, Antony Lewis, Thomas Meier, Blake Sherwin, Kristen Surrao, Francisco Villaescu…

Open Source Planning & Control System with Language Agents for Autonomous Scientific Discovery
We present a multi-agent system for automation of scientific research tasks, cmbagent. The system is formed by about 30 Large Language Model (LLM) agents and implements a Planning & Control strategy to orchestrate the agentic workflow, with no human-in-the-loop at any point. Each agent specializes in a different task (performing retrieval on scientific papers and codebases, writing code, interpreting results, critiquing the output of other agents) and the system is able to execute code locally.…

alright im going through my old files again and rediscovered a shitty unfinished sci-fi epic poem thing i was writing sometime when i was 14/15/idfk. all i remember about it is that it was gonna keep doing this countdown and changing structure accordingly for a really long time, i was thinking of depicting the character finding love in an ethereal sorta way for the ending, and it was gonna incorporate a enochian number square for some reason.

How I fixed my blog's #performance issues by writing a new #Jekyll plugin
https://

A triptych on Starhawk, who developed some of the most poignantly insightful ideas in structural theories of power, among the many philosophers, sociologists, and psychologists who wrote about theories of power in the 20th century
Note that the second and third image come from the *same book*, in the first and second chapters
I…did not expect woo poetry on magic and sexuality in a book that's highly cited by writers on theories of power

The Fantasy Writing Show With Jed Herne
Great Australian Pods Podcast Directory: #GreatAusPods

Penalizing Transparency? How AI Disclosure and Author Demographics Shape Human and AI Judgments About Writing
Inyoung Cheong, Alicia Guo, Mina Lee, Zhehui Liao, Kowe Kadoma, Dongyoung Go, Joseph Chee Chang, Peter Henderson, Mor Naaman, Amy X. Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.01418

Penalizing Transparency? How AI Disclosure and Author Demographics Shape Human and AI Judgments About Writing
As AI integrates in various types of human writing, calls for transparency around AI assistance are growing. However, if transparency operates on uneven ground and certain identity groups bear a heavier cost for being honest, then the burden of openness becomes asymmetrical. This study investigates how AI disclosure statement affects perceptions of writing quality, and whether these effects vary by the author's race and gender. Through a large-scale controlled experiment, both human raters (n =…

Apple Health lets you export all your data, and gives you GPX files for activities, but you just get a pile of files with no way of telling biking from walking (I do both of those!)
But it looks like I could just write some code to separate them based on speed. Not looking forward to writing that code but I'll probably do it anyway.

Marco Rubio impostor reportedly using AI to contact multiple senior officials
According to a state department cable seen by the Washington Post, the impostor sent fake voice messages and texts that mimicked Rubio’s voice and writing style to targets including three foreign ministers, a US governor and a member of Congress.
The cable, dated 3 July, said the impostor “left voicemails on Signal for at least two targeted individuals” and sent text messages inviting others to communi…

Sources: Intel is considering ending marketing of its 18A process to new clients and writing off investments, focusing instead on 14A to compete with TSMC (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-co

Crazy but real headline of the day
Trump sues all federal judges in Maryland
All 15 of them.
Goodnight.
https://politicalwire.com/2025/06/25/trump-sues-all-federal-judges-in-maryland/

Trump Sues All Federal Judges in Maryland
"The Justice Department sued all 15 federal district court judges in Maryland on Tuesday over an order that pauses any deportations under legal challenge in the state for 48 hours," the Washington Post reports. "Legal

AI in the Writing Process: How Purposeful AI Support Fosters Student Writing
Momin N. Siddiqui, Roy Pea, Hari Subramonyam
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20595 …

AI in the Writing Process: How Purposeful AI Support Fosters Student Writing
The ubiquity of technologies like ChatGPT has raised concerns about their impact on student writing, particularly regarding reduced learner agency and superficial engagement with content. While standalone chat-based LLMs often produce suboptimal writing outcomes, evidence suggests that purposefully designed AI writing support tools can enhance the writing process. This paper investigates how different AI support approaches affect writers' sense of agency and depth of knowledge transformation. T…

"Whatever" is a brilliant essay on "AI" by @…:
"But I think the core of what pisses me off is that selling this magic machine requires selling the idea that doing things is worthless. Because if doing something has some value, then it must be somehow better than pushing a button and receiving Whatever for essentially no cost."

The rise of Whatever
This was originally titled “I miss when computers were fun”. But in the course of writing it, I discovered that there is a reason computers became less fun, a dark thread woven through a number of events in recent history. Let me back up a bit.

Call for Papers: ICMS 2026 Panel, "The Imagined Woman"
https://ift.tt/1MBUHxi
University of Alaska - Fairbanks - Alaska & Polar Regions Area Studies Bibliographer & Curator of…
via Input 4 RELCFP …

Media critic Erik Wemple says he has taken The Washington Post's buyout offer and will start covering media for The New York Times in September (@erikwemple)
https://x.com/erikwemple/status/1950646784360907069

ErikWemple (@ErikWemple) on X
After 14 very, very happy years writing opinions on media at the Washington Post, I am taking the newspaper's buyout offer. In September, I will begin work at the New York Times covering media from Washington for the paper's Business section.

One of my books is in here. Probably check for any of your professional (or less professional) writing and sign on:
https://mastodon.social/@Richard_Littler/115105862107138339

Funny, and so true.
#uspol #fascism
ICE Agent or Just Some Person?
"Your clothing should tell a story about you! Just not who you are or that you are acting in any kind of official capacity." @petridishes on the ICE dress code:

The ICE Dress Code
There’s a dress code to help you make that determination.

CoachGPT: A Scaffolding-based Academic Writing Assistant
Fumian Chen, Sotheara Veng, Joshua Wilson, Xiaoming Li, Hui Fang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18149 …

CoachGPT: A Scaffolding-based Academic Writing Assistant
Academic writing skills are crucial for students' success, but can feel overwhelming without proper guidance and practice, particularly when writing in a second language. Traditionally, students ask instructors or search dictionaries, which are not universally accessible. Early writing assistants emerged as rule-based systems that focused on detecting misspellings, subject-verb disagreements, and basic punctuation errors; however, they are inaccurate and lack contextual understanding. Machine l…

Dear Senator:
I am writing to urge you to take action on gun violence.
I have not always agreed with you over the years, but I have always respected your integrity.
I do not expect my elected officials to respond to polls, per se, but when 93% of the nation supports background checks,
I do believe that you should seriously consider the moral implications of betraying the will of the people.
Perhaps a story will help to clarify my views.
Just after gradu…

Active Shooter
A Personal Plea to End Gun Violence

Write on Paper, Wrong in Practice: Why LLMs Still Struggle with Writing Clinical Notes
Kristina L. Kupferschmidt, Kieran O'Doherty, Joshua A. Skorburg
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04340

Write on Paper, Wrong in Practice: Why LLMs Still Struggle with Writing Clinical Notes
Large Language Models (LLMs) are often proposed as tools to streamline clinical documentation, a task viewed as both high-volume and low-risk. However, even seemingly straightforward applications of LLMs raise complex sociotechnical considerations to translate into practice. This case study, conducted at KidsAbility, a pediatric rehabilitation facility in Ontario, Canada examined the use of LLMs to support occupational therapists in reducing documentation burden.We conducted a qualitative study…

Notes on Critical Thinking and Writing
https://ift.tt/WTgZGoh
updated: Thursday, September 11, 2025 - 3:35pmfull name / name of organization: Double Helixcontact…
via Input 4 RELCFP https://…

When your opponent is Donald Trump you escalate in response to threats;
you don’t try to appease him.
Jerome Powell must do everything in his power to compel the conventional wisdom of market traders to more adequately “price in” the degradation of the rule of law.
This must include tying the rule of law and the threats to the constitution to the credibility and standing of the Federal Reserve itself.
Powell’s term expires in less than a year anyway.
If defe…

Powell Will Hang Separately: The Federal Reserve Has Already Failed its Duty to Lisa Cook and the Constitution
This is a free Notes on the Crises article. A reminder to readers that the various activities run out of the still-new Notes on the Crises office cost money, while an enormous amount of time and effort goes into my writing and my constant dedication to refresh and deepen my