An expert witness testifying in a lawsuit about liability
for a Houston explosion that killed three people and destroyed roughly 200 homes
used ChatGPT to write significant portions of his “expert report.”
The man, who was hired by the industrial product conglomerate 3M, exposed his AI prompts publicly.
They showed that he asked ChatGPT to help him “create an exceptional expert witness report defending the standard of care at 3M,”
and that the report should “s…
If you didn't bother to write the PR or code yourself, why should I bother reading your slop?
An NYT reporter finds AI-generated, unauthorized biographies of herself and other journalists on Amazon, where AI-made books with elusive "authors" proliferate (Kashmir Hill/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/…
Beabadoobee - Write Me A Letter (Official Video)
#music
Organising conferences I've tended to do a call for full papers but it's always felt awkward. Like why require people to write 4 pages to apply to do a talk? Especially when it's unpaid work (sometimes even pay-to-speak), and when people generally don't just read out their paper anyway so the paper ends up fairly unrelated to the talk.. Like writing and speaking can be just very different things.
So I think for the next @…
> That's probably how most of the code I write ends up. I start with an idea in my mind. I think it's brilliant, maybe it’s a way to restructure the code, an overall design, or a specific paradigm. But when I start writing it, something else pops up. Seeing it halfway down the page, I realize it's not quite what I was imagining, and I change direction.
I love working with Nick. I've worked with him for a very long time, and couldn't recommend him highly enough.
I would also love to continue working with Nick. If you've got a project for us (or just for him), reach out! https://sloan.host/@nick/117112429900657125
ok where gen-AI falls flat for images is it lacks intentionality. beyond what's prompted, everything is random and "average" in ways no person would do.
AI coding gets around this by having the agent first write out detailed intention-shaped documents that are basically different types of expansion of the prompt, which then become the cinematic universe of the prompt.
these intention-shaped docs are still uncanny, but they're enough of a simulacrum of intention …
Hot damn, new NAS can burst, old one would do 100 - 170 items on average - max. The new one just boosted to 5 - 10 times that. Seen it write up to 200MB/s back to it. Measures in place to keep Raspberry Pi nodes in the thermal safe zone even kicked in. They did 1.8TB in 9 hours, old NAS would need the full day to handle this much traffic.
If you were writing a story, how would you write "Who gives a?"
... this may be an Australianism. The implied last word of the sentence begins with f
Should it be "Who gives a _ _ _ _?"
In spoken English, the "a" is pronounced with emphasis, but that's not obvious on a page.
I'm also curious what level of politeness you'd say this has (whether you're Australian or not) #AmWriting
Creation and destruction often come hand in hand.
On my free Substack, I write about holding tension without falling apart—and building something beautiful in the midst of unraveling. https://substack.com/@bricchapman
Yesterday we had a regular message from university about when and what to do.
Today woken up woth 15 replies to that message, apparently some students were lazy to write an email to some workers from uni and just replied to anouncement which goes to ALL groups from uni, one student replied with laugh emoji, while worker replied "Dont laugh youre expelled" )
Something I tell myself several times a day: stop trying to write replies to emails so quickly. It takes Outlook a few seconds to catch up, meaning that the "a" in "Dear" will only result in the email being archived.
Also, WTF MS? Can't you produce a less shitty web app?
"Why do I find it hard to write the next line"
Guitar, tenor sax, grand piano, drum kit, Tony's vocals & 5 dudes in really sharp suits...that'd play in 2026, wouldn't it, ladies? 😁
▶️ Spandau Ballet - True (HD Remastered)
https://youtube.com/watch?v=AR8D2yqgQ1
I am gonna expire the fiend that decided I will write this technical manual in simplified technical english (it me)
just tested a full functional restore of my #Vaultwarden setup on a different machine. Confirmed I'm able to login to my vault and see my content in there. Now documenting this for myself and will eventually also write a blog post about this.
Shopware 6 Hidden Gems #2: Bulk imports done right — taming the indexers
Every Shopware developer has been here: you push 50,000 products through the Sync API and the import crawls. The writes themselves are fast. What kills you is everything that happens after each write — inheritance updates, cheapest price calculation, search keyword generation, category denormalization. Shopware calls all of this "indexing", and by default it runs synchronously, per request,…
#qemu's Google Summer of Code (#gsoc) projects have wrapped up and there is a summary #blogpost for those who want to see what was done. More details can be found by following the links to the individual write ups. Congrats to this years students:
🧠 Routing strategies: LLM-as-classifier, signal-driven stage router, escalation router (weak tier first, a judge decides whether to escalate), random split for A/B tests, or a custom algorithm you write yourself
🚀 Launcher path: uv tool install "nemo-switchyard[cli]", then switchyard launch claude --model switchyard to point #ClaudeCode, Codex CLI or OpenClaw at an open-sou…
Getting to the CRUX of it.
The last couple of days I've been hanging out in Crux Linux and I really enjoyed doing just that. Reason why I did a write-up and how-to about my exploration into this source based distro.
#crux #cruxlinux
I have a habbit of making (too) many (small) packages for functionality that might be reused in different context. {box} might be an alternative by making scripts into modlues that can be loaded: #RStats
Google renames NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook and rolls out an update giving every notebook a secure cloud computer, letting it write and execute code natively (Josh Woodward/Google)
https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/products/gemini-notebook/note…
I really like #Rust for making it easy to compose functions and write tests.
My current task involves migrating logic from another language, and the testability makes it super nice to develop.
10/10 #DX 🧡🦀
Creation and destruction often come hand in hand.
On my free Substack, I write about holding tension without falling apart—and building something beautiful in the midst of unraveling. https://substack.com/@bricchapman
Why do I want this stupid fucking "Commodore" phone? I never had or wanted a flip phone, and I don't long for the 1990s or 2000s (I remember them: they sucked).
I think I know why:
I wanted to be rid of my fartphone in 2018, and bought a Nokia KaiOS device. It wasn't all that useful because it lacked WhatsApp and Signal, making it unappealing to write a podcast client for it if I still had to carry around a second device to, you know, communicate with people.
Just typed in a RAM test program on my Series 7 BBC Model B - it passes clean; hmm - doesn't explain the instability then.
Also, I don't seem to be able to (reliably?) write to a floppy - hmm. save file, *. and find it's nto there. Hmm. Tried formatting and it's verifying bad. So some more debug todo.
(Also, hth did I type so much on a Model B keyboard, the keys are HARD)
In the year 2026, it would be nice to be able to buy an off-the shelf drive with a hardware write-disable switch.
I once used SD memory cards for this, I but found out shortly after the switch is typically enforced only by the operating system (most readers and most chips do not enforce the switch setting).
#WriteDisabledDrive
The hardest part, I think, about this program is that every semester I have to "come up with a topic for a research paper", and then write a paper. I'm working with PhDs who have to write something every 2 years or so for publication, and yet I'm expected to have 3 ideas every 6 months. I find the paper part not as hard as "come up with ideas and research questions." What saves me is they don't have to be great ideas, or get anywhere near published, but it is …
When I was first learning to write,
my letters and words ran from right to left, reversed as if in a mirror.
Being left-handed, I was imitating the hand strokes of my right-handed teachers instead of reversing their strokes to replicate the letters.
I gradually got the hang of writing in the correct direction, but it still feels natural for me to mirror-write.
I have a mirror-written childhood diary. Leonardo da Vinci, another lefty, did that too
I take issue with title & conflation of “AT” / screen reader (with no SR examples), but just from a readability perspective, yeah:
“How to write accessible times”
https://www.digitalaccesstraining.com/pages/articles?p=how-to-write-accessible-times…
I'm learning to write a short phrase (just six syllables) in Tamil and it is so hard. So many curves; so many similar ligatures. 😰
(I'm not even learning the entire script)
#learning #writing #struggle #Tamil
A lovely article by the excellent (and left-handed) Natalie Wolchover on left-handedness. I too was forced to write w/ my right; writing suffered for YEARS until I figured it out (and now I can't write with my left, though I'm leftie in all other respects!).
https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-am-i-le
Keeping dependencies up to date shouldn't be a chore. Today we're launching PatchBot on OpenCommit! 🤖
Built on Renovate, PatchBot runs version discovery across your on-boarded repositories, watching dependency files (go.mod, package.json, Dockerfile & more) and opening update PRs automatically.
Enable it in two steps:
- Add the patchbot topic to your repo.
- Invite patchbot with write access.
Read the details:
Good thing that came out of #FediDay for me: I pitched my idea for multilingual and disambiguated hashtags based on #Wikidata QIDs. After a great exchange of ideas I now have a very clear idea for a prototype and an FEP that I could write.
#WritersCoffeeClub Sep 13 - What do you need to do before you sit down to write?
Not much. My mug, tea or coffee depends on time of day. My playlists with mood-music (I am easily affected by music). I've got a goal, 200 words/day, to reach and that's doable even on a bad day. And on a bad day, the 200 words is enough. A good day can produce significantly more. But I allow my …
“Now that we’ve gotten everyone vaguely scared, we think this is the time to propose solutions, namely massive third party oversight which we will pay for and control, gatekeeping of smaller competitors, toothless government legislation which we’ve already paid President Trump to let us write ourselves, and overall a whole lot less scrutiny over the massive house of over-leveraged cards we’ve built.”
"She played a fiddle in an Irish band but fell in love with an Englishman"
I've always thought that was a weird line for a supposed Irish Catholic to write.
England during the reign of Elizabeth I (~AD1600) was a dangerous time and place to write plays, such as Shakespeare’s “As You Like It”.
Better watch those metaphors. Public plays were studied closely for signs of treason.
Christopher Marlowe was arrested for atheism, a capital offense. Thomas Kyd was tortured on suspicion of treasonous activity. Ben Jonson was in dire trouble several times.
#History
Database table full, area locked, contention issues or not available are ABEND conditions. Record not found is an ERROR, not an ABEND. Decades ago they put in code that all non-zero return codes from DB calls is an ABEND. I keep harping that treating record not found as an error, write a report, skip that record and continue.
GPT 5.6 Sol came up with a smart solution to preserve native scroll behavior while having control over custom staggered scroll transitions. It makes me want to write a blog article for that, but it’s not technically “my discovery” 🤔
I was just about to write something positive about a German transport project - honestly! - but then I came across this.
How Congressional lawmakers and aides are using AI tools with little oversight to write speeches and news releases, sort constituent mail, and more (Anna Liss-Roy/Washington Post)
P.S. That was my pessimistic side. I also have an optimistic side, but this toot has not enough room for it. 🤓
Maybe I should write it all down for a blog post or talk at some point...
Thanks to @… for sharing the Tsimerman link in the first place.... but I dislike the X-FOMO that it generated.
Oh look, someone wrote the "cars are fascist" essay I wanted to write and it's pretty good:
https://brockpress.com/editorial-is-the-automobile-fascist/
Neat, "N'Ko uses a set of paired punctuation, U 2E1C ⸜ LEFT LOW PARAPHRASE BRACKET and U 2E1D ⸝ RIGHT LOW PARAPHRASE BRACKET, to indicate indirect quotations."
Wouldn't mind if English and other languages would get some more punctuation to express things better, especially as a lot more people these days write informal text.
For context, this is the inference provider I use; they serve Chinese models, right now primarily DeepSeek's latest releases. They retain no session transcripts, and are based in Europe (though their inference clusters are not all in Europe.)
Also notably they don't host any image or video generation models, and they are focused on coding. These models can do stuff like write fiction, but they're not actually that good at it. Software is where the money is.
This is still an energy-intensive business, but _look at those efficiencies_. There are orders of magnitude differences between providers and eras of this stuff.
Many (including me) have noted that the •efficacy• of a whole lot of our systems rests on trust, and people breaching trust by Doing Dumb Shit With LLMs They Clearly Should Not Be Doing are undermining those systems.
I'll add that the •efficiency• of a lot of our systems depends on trust, too. If someone wrote an academic paper or wrote some code, well, it used to be pretty obvious if they didn't think about it at all: knowing how to write something that •sounds• like a paper is at least a partial smoke test for actually knowing how to •think• about the paper. No longer so. Now it takes real time.
2/
RE: https://mastodon.social/@matthiasott/117225119315263175
If you write “fuck the AfD” on Instagram your comment doesn't even get sent, it's automatically blocked.
Why are eink displays so annoying to work with?
The generally write only nature of the interface is definitely part of it. No way to read back any config or status registers to see what's happening. You either get an image or not.
Trying to Write While Chair - A Tragedy.
#academia
For a bit less than 3000 SEK / 300 $ I got a 2018 macbook pro i7 and a magic keyboard with swedish layout. The trick to get a cheap mac is to buy one with a keyboard other than swedish/nordic. Few want them in Sweden...
So now I can write code and articles on a decent laptop and just have to connect the keyboard when I need åäö
Someone took the time to write some interesting and informative copy for every sign we’ve encountered. Maybe this one isn’t the best example, but it’s good, and it occurred to me after reading a couple signs that the copy for new ones will likely be generated by LLMs and that mad me sad.
Hopefully it will be carefully edited and checked by a human.
Copy in the alt txt
Two more C23 math functions for picolibc, compoundn and pown. While doing this, I discovered that I'd used the wrong constant for Dekker's Split function for binary64 values. That took a while to find.
So far, my new 'math_two' environment is working out pretty well; it's pretty easy to write format-independent floating point code now.
Shopware 6: "Log the old and new value when this field changes" sounds simple until you write it — a second query, race conditions, deleted rows with no old value left to fetch. Shopware computes the diff inside the write transaction itself. One footnote in the docs, and that's it.
Porn platforms, payment processors, and opaque algorithms should not decide which bodies, desires, fantasies, or communities are allowed to exist online.
I am preparing a talk about decentralized networks, erotic art, privacy, furry and anime-inspired work, kink, fantasy, and creative freedom.
https://wr…
> write .htaccess rule
> rule works perfectly
> 2 days later
> /var/www/ is unmodified
> rule suddenly doesn't work
> ???
> write .htaccess rule
> rule works perfectly
> 2 days later
> /var/www/ is unmodified
> rule suddenly doesn't work
> ???
HTML Day – August 8th, 2026
HTML Day 2026, an annual celebration of HTML going 4 years. On Saturday, August 8th, 2026, we'll be gathering in places around the world to write and celebrate HTML.
🌐 https://2026.html.energy
@… Don’t underestimate the ability of a “We need to re-write the internals of this hot mess” project to take 10 years.
Some of us are building whole careers on that shit!
Ernest: Gilbert, you treat the world as if it were a crystal ball. You hold it in your hand, and reverse it to please a wilful fancy. You do nothing but re-write history.
Gilbert: The one duty we owe to history is to re-write it.
--Oscar Wilde, Intentions 1891
#QuoteOfTheDay
I need to write that "Bicycle Anarchist Manifesto" I've had in my notes for a while.
Please don't assume anything about the author of the piece you've been asked to peer review. Although you might get it right, you might also get it horribly wrong. In that case, your comments may be inadvertantly incredibly insulting.
Focus on the paper: what works? what doesn't? how can it be improved? Oh, and don't try to force the author to write the article you'd have written. Instead, help them write the best paper they want to write.
In 1925, 24-year-old graduate student Cecilia Payne calculated that the Sun and other stars were composed overwhelmingly of hydrogen and helium
—a result so contrary to accepted astronomy that senior astronomer Henry Norris Russell called it
“clearly impossible,”
leading her to write in her thesis that the enormous abundances she had derived were “almost certainly not real.”
Four years later, Russell reached the same conclusion by another method
In 1976, the Amer…
📋 #Laravel Vet is a dependency audit for #PHP that shows you the code #Composer update is about to write into your vendor/ directory
Just spend the same amount of time planning for success.
So here's the drill for your next big decision. Write the disaster plan the way you always do. Then spend the same amount of time writing what happens if it works. Get specific.
Facebook's silencing of a whistleblower
shines a light on a
private justice system
and a "post-state" future
where tech bros write the rules.
-- Or as we call them, "laws"
https://broligarchy.substack.com/p/silenced?triedRe…
In-depth look at OpenAI's model training, dangerous decisions, and cluelessness before the HuggingFace hack; despite delaying Astra, OpenAI still doesn't get it (Zvi Mowshowitz/Don't Worry About the Vase)
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/what-happened-openai-and-h…
A profile of Rachel Whetstone, who has led comms for Google, Meta, Uber, Netflix, and now Sierra, as her husband Steve Hilton runs for California governor (Emily Shugerman/The San Francisco Standard)
https://sfstandard.com/2026/07/06/rachel-whetstone…
What is a sanguine new congressional candidate to do
when the district they thought they were running in gets torn apart by a governor’s efforts to gerrymander his state at the president’s behest?
For Pia Dandiya, a first-time candidate for the Democratic party in Florida,
the answer was simple:
pick up some maps, hit the road, and embrace the challenge of conquering a different part of the state.
Dandiya, a professional educator dipping her toe for the first ti…
@cdarwin@c.im
