2026-08-17 04:01:14
Anthropic's text watermark alters word probabilities to embed a fingerprint, which could degrade Claude's writing, despite its claim of no impact on quality (John Gruber/Daring Fireball)
https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/ant
Anthropic's text watermark alters word probabilities to embed a fingerprint, which could degrade Claude's writing, despite its claim of no impact on quality (John Gruber/Daring Fireball)
https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/ant
Morning all!
A day of podcast edits, blog writing, client meetings and online community admin. I also need to make some progress on a new guide to beating #procrastination that I'm writing.
(Grateful for my coffee machine ☕️)
Dear friends
You know I've been writing a lot lately about people in #Gaza whose verified accounts have been suspended in the crackdown on #Palestinian accounts on mastodon.social.
Nourhan is someone I've been corresponding with for some time; she's an academic, a very dignified…
Ukraine is the victim of a lawless, brutal, unprovoked invasion by a politically backward and dysfunctional would-be empire ruled by a murderous autocrat.
That assessment was obvious on Feb. 24, 2022 when the full-scale invasion was launched,
and it was obvious in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea.
The challenge of writing about the war is that once you’ve said that,
saying it again just feels repetitive.
This is a bigger problem than one columnist’s selfish de…
Just finished the game "Arco". It's a masterpiece. Wonderfully evocative setting and writing, excellent systems with top-notch ludonarrative harmony, and complex characters that you love while also seeing their not-so-great sides.
For once in a violence-centric game I get to be murdering colonizers instead of metaphorical stand-ins for indigenous people? Feels excellent.
The systems and abilities did a great job of keeping things balanced too, with definite power growth but growing costs too, letting the tactics remain important throughout. After playing Flamberge, I was worried it might feel too fiddly, but it doesn't at all, and the ghosts mechanic really pushes you to play quickly.
#Games
Happy 5787 to all my Jewish friends.
This Olam is getting a little long in the tooth, isn't it?
Shanah Tovah!
#ShanaTova
from my link log —
Mainstream adoption and Agile's second chasm.
http://williampietri.com/writing/2011/agiles-second-chasm-and-how-we-fell-in/
saved 2019-09-29
The Voice Goes Off: Writing My Half of Back to Willowbrook
On the first day of my classes at New York University, the voice goes off. I stand at the front of the room and I do not speak, and no one else will speak for the rest of the semester, because the language my students have come to learn does not live in the throat....
I am likely to be chastised for my latest post in a (private) mailing list, but IDGAF.
"I do appreciate your transparency in making it clear that your message was from a LLM. If you didn't bother writing what you submit, I certainly will not bother reading it.”
@… IMO updating the code would be overkill, to your own point in the book: It's not supposed to be a book about writing react apps in typescript.
If I were in your shoes, I would leave an open issue and/or update the Readme on the example repo, so anyone like me in the future can relatively easily find the information that: The code still works, if you use the…
What is a Morgan Motor Car?
More than a car, an English tradition
https://medium.com/never-stop-writing/what-is-a-morgan-motor-car-9889583729f8?sk=e97350ac198546785974a0949598faa6
We finally got round to watching #deathofaunicorn last night. Sure there was some fairly saccharine writing and shonky #cgi but we still found it a very funny creature feature with loads of Easter eggs and nods to classic horror tropes. Considering it's budget I think it understood the assig…
Grades are a 1-pixel approximation to a large, complex picture.
https://dandrake.github.io/writing/grades_1_pixel/grades_are_a_1-pixel_approximation_to_a_complex_picture.html
I think a lot about grades and assess…
They say nobody reads poetry. Almost nobody reads *anything* any more except for posts and tweets and toots. But keep on writing. Maybe someday ...
#poetry
🎬 #auteur is a #ClaudeCode #AgentSkill that directs a website like a film: one art direction committed in writing before any markup, and an executable anti-slop linter that gates every shi…
OpenAI launches Astra for Law, combining GPT-6 Astra with a legal search index and instructions for legal analysis and writing, initially for select law firms (OpenAI)
https://openai.com/index/astra-for-law
I haven't finished that quilt, its been quilted for a few weeks now but needs binding. I started on it tonight. Why? Because I should be writing a paper and I don't want to, so I found something else to do instead. The binding is now ready to go, its supposed to rain all day tomorrow so maybe I can finish it by tomorrow night.
Good advice for writers
How to Use a Writing Cleanroom to Avoid Plagiarism - Plagiarism Today
https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2016/08/10/how-to-use-an-writing-cleanroom-to-prevent-plagiarism/
For me this age of AI is the time we should appreciate less polished handwritten texts for their authenticity. I see this happening during selection of job applications.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2026…
I'm the first to recognize AI is transforming writing, but for Harvard to shutter its Writing Center—where I once worked as a peer tutor—is to ignore the fact that we need even more attention to writing during this critical transformation https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/7/
Fields Medalist Timothy Gowers says most famous mathematics problems solved by LLMs so far have almost all been with counterexamples rather than proofs (Timothy Gowers/Gowers's Weblog)
https://gowers.wordpress.com/2026/08/12/what-sort-of-maths-are-llms-good-a…
@… I generally don’t. I may share a link to my blog here, or in a private text chat with my spouse or friends, but only insofar as I think they’d genuinely be interested in reading that particular thing.
Writing is, by and large, an exercise I do *for* me. It doesn’t need to ever be read for me to achieve that benefit.
[1/3]
A couple weeks ago, Jonathan Mosen shared his thoughts on ‘AI’:
https://mosen.org/ai/
Last night, Léonie Watson did the same:
https://
#WritersCoffeeClub July 14: How do you escape your comfort zone, writing-wise?
I'm a ho, I write what my audience demands. So whatever wins the polls (or is commissioned by a client) is what I'm gonna write and sometimes that includes new things I hadn't thought of.
Patrons can also make wishes that go into the prompt pool for my polls:
You could fill a (wildly boring) book with the emails I've started writing and failed to send.
'ShieldFont is an open-source project that offers a practical opt-out from unauthorized AI training and disrupts what is collected when that choice is ignored. It swaps 45.8% of content words (around 24.4% of all words) in a page’s source code for other (partially) random words, while the font restores the original text on screen. Readers see the work as intended; mass scrapers collect an altered version.'
(Unfortunately, it's an accessibility nightmare, but I just like to …
New York Magazine says it will stop publishing Ross Barkan's column because his work did not live up to its standards and updates 67 of his columns in archives (Max Tani/@maxwelltani)
https://x.com/maxwelltani/status/2088356584686583896
from my link log —
Ruminating about mutable value semantics.
https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/ruminating-about-mutable-value-semantics/
saved 2026-08-12
Just back from traveling in Scotland for a couple of weeks, and this time I went without a computer - Just Lightroom Mobile on iPad. I encountered a bunch of caveats and ended up writing this guide at Framespotting for people who want to try the same - you'll want to plan and practice to make this work well! Sorry about the dorky Gemini illustration.
"Despite never publishing a novel or short story, she was a major voice in American fiction."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2026/aug/15/how-will-history-remember-karoline-leavitt
Narrative Keyframing for Generative Creative Writing
Chao Zhang, Abe Davis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10337 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.10337 https://arxiv.org/html/2608.10337
arXiv:2608.10337v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We introduce narrative keyframing, an interaction technique for AI-assisted creative writing that lets writers specify different types of narrative constraints at selected moments in a story, then use AI to generate intervening prose. Inspired by the use of keyframing in animation, narrative keyframing offers a flexible way to connect story planning with adaptive control over generated text. We explore three types of keyframes: plot keyframes define significant events in a story, character keyframes represent how individual characters change over the narrative, and perspective keyframes capture how individual characters experience different events through first-person narratives. Plot and character keyframes offer a flexible way to adapt the type of high-level conditioning explored in previous AI writing tools to more customizable, iterative, and fine-scale control, while perspective keyframes add a new way to control characterization and focalization by using first-person narratives as an intermediary. Through a user study, we show that narrative keyframing supports a more controllable, transparent, and engaging way to use generative AI in creative writing.
toXiv_bot_toot
Trump praises ICE following killings:
'Doing a great job'
The felon-president called for traffic stops to resume, despite the administration ordering the agency to pause them on Tuesday
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/poli
Happy #PortfolioDay everyone. 🪴
I'm Sebastian. I like gazing at clouds, the crunching sound of dirt when I vacuum and writing stuff on the Internet. You can find some of it here.
https://finest.day/
…
RE: https://hachyderm.io/@thomasfuchs/117090411706296448
I stand by my paraphrasing.
Writing isn’t just the act of putting words of an initial draft down.
Writing is deliberately chosen communication with other human beings (can even be yourself).
It includes research, outlining, drafting, editing, proofreading and revising. Just putting words down while stochastic algorithms simulate the other activities is meaningless.
#WritersCoffeeClub – 10th Sept. What's something you believe about writing which can't really be proven?
That your research, your knowledge, and your spirit shows in your writing. It shines through in the words you chose, the rhythm of your prose.
Amazingly, it's not (quite) sold out — but I don't think I can manage a short-notice trip to Canada. I adore "Slings and Arrows" though. What a night this is sure to be.
https://www.broadwayworld.com/toronto/arti
from my link log —
Speeding up (small) Ruby hashes with SWAR.
https://byroot.github.io/ruby/performance/2026/08/13/speeding-up-ruby-hashes.html
saved 2026-08-14
got into my dad's mini-stash of 3D #comics (plus his homemade 3D glasses) last night. ludicrous writing but grand ol' eyeball kicks. could get way into this format with better titles. the one on the left is from 1953, the middle is an '80s reprint, & "merlin realm" is from '85 (with the best art).
RE: https://coywolf.social/@recollect/116909142323948534
I have so much work to do updating my site and writing support docs. Still, I'm incredibly excited for what I can only describe as a transformational upgrade for my full-featured minimalist note…
Interested in learning about accents and dialects for your #writing or #voiceover work? Check out The International Dialects of English Archive (https://www.
I found this post by @… very inspiring and heart warming.
Thank you for writing it.
https://ploum.net/2026-01-19-exam-with-chatbots.html
I’m thrilled to be teaching a class next week with the amazing Sarah Kokernot, fiction writer, essayist, dharma friend, and author of the monthly, Your Wild and Radiant Mind.
The class, More Than Seeing: Writing From Art, will meet online next week Thursday (August 27).
I’d love to see you there!
#Art #writing
does anyone have a link for @…'s talk that involved a proof of concept steganographic encrypted OS that hides in the filesystem of another OS? I need it for a blog post I'm writing
#encryption
Today morning I finished my writing about the next day in the Fränkische Schweiz. Castles, Rocks, a Palace, fountains -we've seen quite a bit that day!
https://www.franzgraf.de/blog/2026/castles-rocks-and-forests-and-more-pal…
New #publication: “Writing versus automated text production by generative AI. Distinctions, disruptions, and the need for new models”
It’s a statement in the special issue of Didaktik Deutsch on “Writing with AI,” in which I argue for more accurate terminology. LLM-based chatbots neither “write” nor “generate text”
I also propose a dedicated research agenda for the writing resea…
Cops Search Thousands of Flock Cameras for Reasons of ‘LMAO,’ ‘IDK,’ ‘Hehe,’ and ‘asdfg’ https://www.404media.co/cops-search-thousands-of-flock-cameras-for-reasons-of-lmao-idk-hehe-and-asdfg/
Ask The Author With Jodi Gibson
A podcast answering all your writing and publishing questions in a no-frills, easy-to-understand way...
Great Australian Pods Podcast Directory: https://www.greataustralianpods.com/ask-the-author/
Why yes, I *am* writing that bicycle anarchist manifesto and I am on the section about how American motonormitivity reinforces white supremacy. Why do you ask?
For those that don't know, I help run a large women in technology chat group on Slack. It's been going for 11 years now! (ask me for an invite if you want one and that's appropriate!)
It has deeply shaped how I think about technology, especially the social side. There is so much embodied knowledge in that community, it's amazing. And it's also such a window into how much the mainstream of technology writing is dominated by men. We talk about it differently! We're much more likely to be critical, and to be critical of the _structures_ in tech. Sometimes that comes off as kneejerk "Ugh BRIAN!" to some of the bullshit men to do women in the workplace, but also embedded underneath is an understanding of rarely-mapped power structures in the field. So much advice out there is written assuming that there is no dissent, no silent frustration, no quiet abandoning the job when the pressures are unresolved. And so much of the tech world, press and on social media alike, has no insight that this attrition even happens.
Women, collectively, though, understand it. We notice the patterns of promotions. We understand the way that if we're in our 40s, we're rather likely to have a manager who is a decade younger than we are, with no particular experience. We notice when men are lauded for spending time with their family instead of work on occasion, but women are expected to be present at all times and rarely seen positively for doing the exact same things.
And yet, any given instance is always shrouded in deniability. The pattern generally holds, but is this one my fault? Do I not measure up? Or is it sexism?
That's what these structures rob from us: we never have the clarity in feedback that it is accurate, that is us that must change. When we stick to our guns, are we being obstinate, or are we correct? That information is denied to us by sexism. It only becomes clear in aggregate, and even then it is very hard to find action to take on it except to acknowledge it and move on.
I don't think people talk about that ambiguity enough: we're always looking for the clear sexism, the man speaking over the women, the trading sexual favors for advancement, the clear pattern of pet-to-threat that so many women experience as they age or gain skill in the field. But the bulk of sexism that we experience is in the structural poisoning of feedback.
Anthropic details Claude's text watermark: it only shows Claude was likely involved, is sparse in code and factual text, and disappears after a full rewrite (Anthropic)
https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-text-watermark
According to Wiz, while writing production code on June 18th, Copilot Autofix introduced a workflow injection vulnerability in one of Snowflake’s public repositories.
https://www.wiz.io/blog/red-agent-snowflake-copilot-cicd-bug
My #Tusky just crashed after writing a super long draft post... Ugh 😣
As always, Doctorow is a showman and states things with a theatrical touch that might gloss over a nuance or three. Such is opinion writing. But look…if there’s a cogent and realistic counterargument to the fundamentals he lays out in that video, I haven’t heard it from anyone.
@… How are you, man? I've been missing you.
I Don’t Care if A.I. is So Good We Can’t Tell it’s Not Human. That’s Not The Point.
#ai
The final Brigand fight felt like a meathead Zack Snyder battle.
Kara screaming into the void because of the deaths of 3 people she barely knew feels like poor writing.
Milly Alcock is a really good actress.
Lobo was insanely underutilized. They could have left him out completely.
#supergirl
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.
Beth Macy built her career writing about the plagues inflicted on rural America,
most famously the opioid epidemic in “Dopesick,”
but also the job losses from trade agreements that devastated communities across Appalachia.
Now running as a Democrat in the kind of House district she says she is uniquely qualified to reach,
she recited the 4-H pledge from memory
— “I pledge my head to clearer thinking,
my heart to greater loyalty,
my hands to larger se…
This might be my favorite movie review ever.
> One of the worst films I have a very screen. Terrible writing, acting and terrible dialogue.
#Movies
Thanks @… @… @… @… and everyone else not yet on Fedi for the writing and ideas that made it into this week's issue of the Product Picnic!
Surprising no one (who paid attention) Gruber is being a triple-A assclown again.
At least he’s been consistently a dick since his Musk-stanning days.
https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/anthropics_watermark_text_adulteration_in_claude_is_a_perversion_of_writing
I really like Go, the programming language.
The one thing I strongly dislike about it, is Google's marketing of it.
I wonder where it would be if Google wasn't the main supporter.
https://developers.googleblog.com/why-g…
Venture funding of fintech startups grew 22.7% YoY in H1 2026 to $28.6B globally, but deal count fell 25.7% and funding fell 17.3% vs. H2 2025's $34.6B funding (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)
https://news.crunchbase.com/fintech/funding-rises-deals-slump-h1-2026/…
Jimmy Kimmel's interview with Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico crosses 8M views on YouTube, with interview clips going viral on Instagram and Facebook (Sarah Rumpf/Mediaite)
https://www.mediaite.com/media/entert…
from my link log —
Solaris Turnstiles for mutex priority inheritance.
https://rdmsr.github.io/writing/turnstiles/
saved 2026-09-09 https://
Anthropic has revealed that it will soon watermark content that is processed
(not just generated!)
by any of its models.
In a support article, Anthropic explained that it was rolling out machine-readable watermarks to comply with the European Union’s AI Act,
which requires all AI system providers to watermark AI-generated or manipulated audio, image, text, and video outputs.
The law applies to any AI model released after August 2 and provides a grace period unt…
A new author lost his debut contract over allegations of #AI usage. How can you protect yourself? Here's one strategy. #amwriting
https:…
#WritersCoffeeClub Sept. 7: What's something you thought would help your workflow, but didn't work out?
Scrivener.
It vexes me. Somehow it manages to make my entire process about itself rather than the story I'm writing.
It turns writing time into binder-organising, metadata-tagging, corkboard-fiddling time. Instead of putting words on a page, I end up doing a…
Morning all! Another office-based day lies ahead: podcast admin, blog writing, a lovely in-person meeting, and a ton of writing for my new website. Whew!
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
It makes a solid case for the latent fascism of cars, but I would argue that cars actually play an even more active role in creating fascism. Which, I am actually arguing in the essay that I need to get back to writing.
RE: https://infosec.exchange/@lcamtuf/116902171696738201
If you didn’t spend your time writing it, I can’t justify spending my time reading it.
#WordWeavers July 7: What writing or publishing resource do you think everyone should know about?
I'm one of those people who write in a text editor. I'm using UltraEdit without AI bullshit. I create eBooks using LibreOffice and Calibre. It's not a particularly mind-blowing process but it works well for me and it is free except for the UltraEdit license if you don't pay…
Fatal critique of Andy Haldane's latest nonsense.
Not Keynes nor Friedman, but Marx.
Is Keynesianism dead? – Michael Roberts Blog
https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2026/09/10/is-keynesianism-dead/
Investigation: YouTuber Caleb Chan appears to be behind channels using AI-assisted scripts and paid actors to publish political clickbait targeting Democrats (Max Tani/Semafor)
https://www.semafor.com/article/09/02/2026
The Reflecting Pool Water’s Fine
The Reflecting Pool episode captures most of Trump’s governing pathologies—without any of the normal attendant consequences, Jonathan Chait argues.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/06/
from my link log —
Rewriting the heart of Dropbox's sync engine in Rust.
https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/rewriting-the-heart-of-our-sync-engine
saved 2020-03-17
Ukraine will only halt attacks on Russian energy targets if the enemy does likewise and the US guarantees it,
Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.
The announcement came after Donald Trump’s uncorroborated claim that both sides have agreed to such a ceasefire.
Neither Ukraine nor Russia had said so at time of writing.
The US president regularly claims to have brokered what turn out to be nonexistent or extremely shortlived deals between foreign adversaries or with his o…
Maybe we could market writing things yourself in a cool way.
How AI gutted Kenya's essay-writing industry, which at its peak paid 40,000 people in Nairobi to do overseas students' homework, leaving few paths back to work (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/05/technol
An analysis using Pangram: 10 out of 310 guest submissions to WSJ, WaPo, and NYT over the past month were 80% AI-generated, and 40 were partially AI-generated (Reed Albergotti/Semafor)
https://www.semafor.com/article/08/26/2026/ai-writing-has-…
Very nice, Mr @… !
Album - Consonance
https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_llgsYr3-nyGK…
A New Jersey judge ordered New Brunswick Today to remove surveillance footage of a school lockdown and barred the outlet from writing about the event (Matthew Haag/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/06/nyregion/news-site-video-school-arrest.html
from my link log —
Memory-mapped IO registers in Zig.
https://scattered-thoughts.net/writing/mmio-in-zig/
saved 2021-03-07 https://
Martha Lillard had just turned 5 when she was diagnosed with polio
and depended on an iron lung to live.
She died June 26 in Oklahoma,
the last U.S. polio patient who used the machine, her sister said. She was 78.
“They told her she wasn’t supposed to live past 20 years old,”
Lillard’s younger sister, Cindy McVey, told The Associated Press on Friday.
“She had the enthusiasm and the drive to continue living and make the best of her life.”
McVey attri…
ugh trying not to flame some shitty disjointed punchy writing, whose author complains about being accused of writing like an llm … i mean if they aren’t using an llm maybe they should put their effort into writing like a human
The US urged G20 members to avoid writing entirely new AI regulations, and instead focus on writing rules for "novel" situations that involve the tech (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-urges-hands-o…
from my link log —
Hard mode Rust.
https://matklad.github.io//2022/10/06/hard-mode-rust.html
saved 2022-10-07 https://…
from my link log —
BLUF: make your writing more powerful with the bottom line up front.
https://www.animalz.co/blog/bottom-line-up-front/
saved 2019-09-13
from my link log —
SELECT WAT FROM SQL;
https://scattered-thoughts.net/writing/select-wat-from-sql/
saved 2020-04-17 https://