Tootfinder

Will we ever decode the writing system used by the Inca?
Gift article, no paywall.
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archiv

Unraveling the Secrets of the Inca Empire
For hundreds of years, Andean people recorded information by tying knots into long cords. Will we ever be able to read them?

@… about his decade of using #Emacs #Orgmode:

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…

Will we ever decode the writing system used by the Inca?
Gift article, no paywall.
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archiv

Unraveling the Secrets of the Inca Empire
For hundreds of years, Andean people recorded information by tying knots into long cords. Will we ever be able to read them?

Writing a Technical Book for Manning
#bookwriting

This essay (ht @… ) offers a lot to chew on: some gems, some flubs, some quibblable provocations, some big insights. This sentence in particular stood out to me (context for it in the screenshot):
“Whether we’re reading or conversing, we want something to be meant, not just said.”
https://slate.com/life/2025/06/ai-chatgpt-generator-grok-gemini-writing.html

I like this so much!
I'm sorry i finished reading it.
#reading #books

I really should quit hitting enter after every sentence, just kinda makes everything look messy. Not exactly a vibe.
#Fediverse #Writing #Style

AlErNaTiNg cAsE.
aka Ransom Note case.
#Engish #writing

#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/

"Writing is one of the most disruptive technologies ever invented after agriculture. Before writing, people could pass information in the current moment, to those who were close enough to hear noises made by other people. Writing allows people to communicate across space, passing written information to readers without the physical presence of the author. And it allows them to communicate across time, leaving evidence of thoughts long after the thinker had died."

Why My Team Writes
Writing is one of the most disruptive technologies ever invented after agriculture. Before writing, people could pass information in the current moment, to those who were close enough to hear noises made by other people. Writing allows people to communicate across space, passing written information to readers without the physical presence of the author. And it allows them to communicate across time, leaving evidence of thoughts long after the thinker had died.

Fact: It is my birthday.
Fact: I run a free & ad-free newsletter about keeping tech/UX design accountable, called Product Picnic.
Conclusion: legally, you have to subscribe to it. The word of the birthday boy is law!
https://productpicnic.beehiiv.com/

The Product Picnic
Writing on UX and product management to connect today's discourse with classic insights that the industry forgot.

#WritersCoffeeClub 25th May 2025. Tell us about a non-writer who has had the most influence on your writing.
Let me assume that my teacher when I was 10 wasn't a writing person and say that their efforts to hold a poetry-Friday had an immense effect on me. We had a reason to write, and of course, we read each of the others writing. I have no idea whether our teacher wrote things …

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…

The writing that Creative Commons is also "AI"-pilled has been on the wall for a while, and here we are are, wasting time and money on some useless signalling to "AI" scrapers that already don't care for any existing limitations…
https://creativecommons.org/2025/06/25/introducing-cc-signals-a-new-social-contract-for-the-age-of-ai/

As part of my spam this morning, from Indian telecoms provider Airtel: "to find the right information in seconds" 🙄.

Working with an #acting #coaching client just now, and found how to make the really good writing we're working with have its levels open up. The optimism on the part of the character propelled the pace in one take whereas approaching from pessimism found more dis-regulation on another.

from my link log —
The one-more-re-nightmare regex engine for Common Lisp.
https://applied-langua.ge/posts/omrn-compiler.html
saved 2025-06-24

Writing anything on iOS is such a PITA. What a joke of useless UI this shit has become. The autocorrect. The selection shenanigans. The copy and paste. The undo. The scrolling. The autocorrect. The positioning of the cursor. The autocorrect.

Sat writing up my Algeria trip at last. I’ll post a link once I get better internet and can upload more photos.

What I really like about Rust is how much it feels like the code is practically writing itself thanks to all the excellent crates out there.
Once again, I am making great use of the zerocopy crate, specifically Ref:
https://docs.rs/zerocopy/latest/zerocopy/struct.Ref.html

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…

Well put, the “averaging effect of #AI.”
What’s the equivalent for writing? That’s what’s on my mind recently. Sure, keep your style. But do we need smth else? Add more styles, punctuation hacks, whatnot?
h…

Graphic artists in China push back on AI and its averaging effect
Copycats, unrealistic expectations, and budget cuts are AI’s gifts to graphic artists.

I’m visiting my corporate office in a couple of weeks, and I have 30 people signed up for a TDD workshop I’m running then.
I guess I should start writing this workshop…

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

#Scientists, the public needs to hear your story and learn about your work. Write a McClintock letter with help from the folks at Cornell: https://www.defendresearch.org/take-action

Calamus 44 Here my last words
In which the poet outs himself through talking about his poetry.
It's a short piece of Whitman talking about his own writing. But he's so twisted up!
Here I shade down and hide my thoughts—I do not expose them,
And yet they expose me more than all my other poems.
I read this as him talking about Calamus, the cluster of gay poems. And directly telling us that he's censored and hidden what he really wants to say. And yet still these poems still expose his true self. It makes me feel sad for Whitman, imagine his writing if he felt less fettered.
Still, he published some of the most clear gay poems of the 19th century. And got famous and mainstream doing it.

Shut up and play yer banjo!
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2025/05/dear-james-banjo-work-life-balance/…

Dear James: I Miss Playing the Banjo
But I also have to make a living. Is there a way to balance both?

This is one of the most profound statements about writing/art that I've ever come across. When I was in music school it was hinted at in terms of songwriting but never approached as directly.
Don't remember where this came from, because it's been an open tab in my browser for ages 😅
https://w…

Today FaSh and me discovere a very nice bagel place right around the corner of the Validad office, where we spent a hot day writing & deploying code: https://www.budapestbagel.com/ (horrible website, at least they have one)

First sighting on my Mastodon instance of a properly rendered quoted post. It's beautiful and appropriately nerdy.

This review is about Writing for Developers by Piotr Sarna and Cynthia Dunlop from Manning.
I started this blog as a hobby 17 years ago, in April 2008. At the time, I had no clue about technical writing.Since then, the landscape has changed a lot, to the point that companies hire for technical writer positions.
I was curious to compare what I learned by doing to the structured approach of a book. Here’s my review.

Shut up and play yer banjo!
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2025/05/dear-james-banjo-work-life-balance/…

Dear James: I Miss Playing the Banjo
But I also have to make a living. Is there a way to balance both?

Can theory-driven learning analytics dashboard enhance human-AI collaboration in writing learning? Insights from an empirical experiment
Angxuan Chen, Jingjing Lian, Xinran Kuang, Jiyou Jia
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19364

Can theory-driven learning analytics dashboard enhance human-AI collaboration in writing learning? Insights from an empirical experiment
The integration of Generative AI (GenAI) into education has raised concerns about over-reliance and superficial learning, particularly in writing tasks in higher education. This study explores whether a theory-driven learning analytics dashboard (LAD) can enhance human-AI collaboration in the academic writing task by improving writing knowledge gains, fostering self-regulated learning (SRL) skills and building different human-AI dialogue characteristics. Grounded in Zimmerman's SRL framework, t…

#WritersCoffeeClub 25th May 2025. Tell us about a non-writer who has had the most influence on your writing.
Let me assume that my teacher when I was 10 wasn't a writing person and say that their efforts to hold a poetry-Friday had an immense effect on me. We had a reason to write, and of course, we read each of the others writing. I have no idea whether our teacher wrote things …

No, writing _is not_ thinking. But writing is an activity that pushes you to think in a way that gets results you can actually put into words.

So SEO people are rebranding to AEO (getting a brand to appear in the ‘AI’-driven results) and GEO (writing content to appear in ‘AI’-generated responses and local search)?
Neither drives traffic. One seems to provide *more* content for stealing. Neither seems to offer a good way to measure success. One is pointless if you’re not a local business.

Yessir!!!!
That's how it's done!
Crossroads | Song Around The World | Playing For Change x Visit Mississi...
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=RCisGFYDrKQ&si=o7yVpkElkTyFWG_x

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #VarietyMix
Travis:
🎵 Writing to Reach You
#Travis
https://philmetzler.bandcamp.com/track/writing-to-reach-you
https://open.spotify.com/track/5mj5Y0kWPa0rNR4Du3iKPe

Sky writing above the #EAA #AirVenture

#EroticMusings week 4: Is your MC the kind of person you’d want a relationship with? How would they feel about you?
I would love to have Fabiola as a friend (though without the additional benefits - while I enjoy writing about this kind of relationship, it's not something I personally want. What I'm into when writing and outside of it are actually pretty different things). S…

I have always been a copyright sceptic but I wouldn't have wished AI to be the force to crash it. Time to think for new models of how to keep writing and music alive. Maybe a society deciding to prioritize guaranteeing giving everyone the possibility of a safe basic income, food, housing and health care instead of forcing them into competition hell could help? Maybe?

Yessir!!!!
That's how it's done!
Crossroads | Song Around The World | Playing For Change x Visit Mississi...
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=RCisGFYDrKQ&si=o7yVpkElkTyFWG_x

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 …

Turns out in 2025, there are a million LLMs collectively writing every fathomable web page, including the complete works of Shakespeare.
🐒

The writing is on the wall.
When partitioning a disk I know by heart that the EFI system partition is of the type ef00.
The amount of totally irrelevant information stored in my grey matter is staggering.

My experience is limited to ASP.NET, SQL, and some Python at a Fortune 500 company, so take this with a grain of salt. When he talks about agents, it sounds like automation to me. I’ve been writing jobs (or agents) for decades to run automated tasks on a schedule. If you want to add another point of failure into your job, knock yourself out. Also, I’m wary of encouraging neophytes to outsource work they don’t know how to do. That’s a recipe for disaster.

"Doing the prescribed duties" vs "Doing the duties as prescribed".
The two seem the same but are subtly different.
#English #writing

CONFERENCE> California Buddhist Studies Graduate Student Conference, UCLA, Oct. 10-12
https://ift.tt/OcP8KqM
TOC: Dutch Crossing: Journal of Low Countries Studies, vol. 46, no. 3 (March 2022) Dutch…
via Input 4 RELCFP

DeepWriter: A Fact-Grounded Multimodal Writing Assistant Based On Offline Knowledge Base
Song Mao, Lejun Cheng, Pinlong Cai, Guohang Yan, Ding Wang, Botian Shi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14189

DeepWriter: A Fact-Grounded Multimodal Writing Assistant Based On Offline Knowledge Base
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various applications. However, their use as writing assistants in specialized domains like finance, medicine, and law is often hampered by a lack of deep domain-specific knowledge and a tendency to hallucinate. Existing solutions, such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), can suffer from inconsistency across multiple retrieval steps, while online search-based methods often degrade quality due to unreliable web content…

An MIT study of 54 ChatGPT users: using it for SAT essays led to the lowest brain engagement and poorer neural performance than using Google or writing unaided (Andrew R. Chow/Time)
https://time.com/7295195/ai-chatgpt-google-learning-school/

ChatGPT May Be Eroding Critical Thinking Skills, According to a New MIT Study
The study, from MIT Lab scholars, measured the brain activity of subjects writing SAT essays with and without ChatGPT.

This popped up on one of my feeds a while ago. Today I read it and I think it very well captures why #developing #software can be very hard at times.
"Why writing software is not like engineering"

Fabrication of oriented NV center arrays in diamond via femtosecond laser writing and reorientation
Kai Klink, Andrew Raj Kirkpatrick, Yukihiro Tadokoro, Jonas Nils Becker, Shannon Singer Nicley
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14047

Fabrication of oriented NV center arrays in diamond via femtosecond laser writing and reorientation
Nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond are widely recognized as highly promising solid-state quantum sensors due to their long room temperature coherence times and atomic-scale size, which enable exceptional sensitivity and nanoscale spatial resolution under ambient conditions. Ultrafast laser writing has demonstrated the deterministic spatial control of individual NV$^-$ centers, however, the resulting random orientation of the defect axis limits the magnetic field sensitivity and signal con…

Allen Iverson isn't writing about practice: What athletes won't sign at The National https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6507739/2025/07/22/allen-iverson-practice-autographs-the-national/

Setting aside copyright/commercial/other aspects, a thought about writing blog posts that LLMs train on. When people write posts, they (a) feel good about helping others, and (b) hope to get some credit and visibility for doing so.
When mediated through LLMs, no longer the satisfaction that your consumer is a human (who might comment, thank, share, etc.); nor the cred that comes from people remembering the author, posting on HN, etc.
That is, it totally destroys the incentive str…

I came across these guys during lockdown in 2020-21. It's been at the top of my list of #writing music ever since.
Totorro, Come To Mexico (Album, 2016)
https://totorro.bandcamp.com/album/com

"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…

Relevant to yesterday’s big argument: https://steveklabnik.com/writing/a-tale-of-two-claudes/

#writerscoffeeclub 28 Have you ever done a writing mentorship? What was your takeaway?
No, I haven't.

Trying out a new setup to write with markdown (diving into the murky world of modal editors), and `harper-ls` keeps flagging my sentences when they get longer than 40 words.
Imagining writing a sociology paper with no sentences over 40 words is giving me a good chuckle but also making me think about the relative inaccessibility of academic writing.
(part of the issue is that in-text citations count toward the sentence length. And yes, I've managed to turn off the long-sentenc…

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

Fictional depiction of mild self-harm, blood.
#WritersCoffeeClub July 23: Share a description you're proud of.
I've been writing a vampire novel lately. Here's a description from the scene when the vampire character proves to the human protagonist that he's been telling the truth:
—
"It's okay, Ada," he gave me a reassuring close-mouthed smile. "Just watch."
He slashed across his wrist in a motion that made the matching scars on my left arm hum. I covered them with my right hand, as if to calm my skin that I wasn't hurting it like that anymore. That we were merely watching someone else.
The cut on Theodore's arm turned red and angry, as expected. And then, just before the wound pooled up enough to bleed, it closed. I watched time run backwards as it disappeared, the skin stitching itself together to leave no trace of the violence imposed on it by the blade.
"What?" I walked up to him as he handed his wrist to me for inspection. I ran the tips of my fingers over the spot where the cut was mere moments before - but Theodore's skin, cold as always, was smooth and unharmed.
—

writing json by hand in a janky Java console to get a network working is what I live for.
#Sysadminnery

from my link log —
How fast are Linux pipes anyway?
https://mazzo.li/posts/fast-pipes.html
saved 2025-06-22 https://dotat.a…

How fast are Linux pipes anyway?
Pipes are ubiquitous in Unix --- but how fast can they go on Linux? In this post we'll iteratively improve a simple pipe-writing benchmark from 3.5GiB/s to 65GiB/s, guided by Linux `perf`.

@… Are you going with vim or neovim?
If the latter, I definitely recommend writing your vimrc in Lua, rather than Vimscript. You’ll find many plugins are much easier to configure that way, if nothing else.

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,…

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.

An alternative interpretation of the Grioli gyroscope suspension points
Alexei A. Deriglazov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19819 https://

An alternative interpretation of the Grioli gyroscope suspension points
We present a detailed analysis of all possible regular precessions of a heavy asymmetric body with a fixed point not coinciding with the center of mass. The calculations are done in terms of the rotation matrix, by writing the Euler-Poisson equations with all involved vectors parameterized in the Laboratory frame. It is shown that a regular precession is possible if the suspension point is chosen on the straight lines (lying in the principal plane) which are frontiers of the regions where, as t…

Columbia University trustees removed control of the student disciplinary process from the University Senate,
with the trustees taking control themselves of the process through the provost’s office.
The intent was to make sure that any student guilty of violating university regulations during an anti-genocide protest would be severely punished.
One goal is to make sure that students engaged in such protest are removed from the university and can’t do it again.
Anot…

The Situation at Columbia XVIII
When I first started writing here about what was going on at Columbia, part of the motivation was that I didn’t understand myself a lot of what was happening, especially the actions of the tr…

#writerscoffeeclub 28 Have you ever done a writing mentorship? What was your takeaway?
No, I haven't.

So jealous of Word users. You want to write something: you fire up Word, you start writing.
Me, I first spend months on my authoring tool and whether it can give me all the abstractions I want. No two of my books have used the same tool. Nearly exhausted before I even begin!

"This isn’t to say that AI is uniformly bad—it’s clearly not—but that we must not fall into the trap of mistaking the outputs of writing (…) from the value of the cognitive process of writing (…).
It would be a catastrophically unwise decision for humanity to abandon a key step in training young brains simply because they can now clack a few keys and produce something that sounds intelligent even as they never become intelligent."

The Death of the Student Essay—and the Future of Cognition
One professor's reflections on the end of an era, as AI tools such as ChatGPT have murdered the student essay (RIP). Here's why that threatens the future of human cognition—and how to save ourselves.

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…

MIT Experiment Finds ChatGPT-Assisted Writing Weakens Student Brain Connectivity and Memory - Slashdot
https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/06/19/089201/mit-experiment-finds-chatgpt-assisted-writing-weakens-student-brain-connectivity-and-memory

A Systematic Review of Human-AI Co-Creativity
Saloni Singh, Koen Hndriks, Drik Heylen, Kim Baraka
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21333 https://

A Systematic Review of Human-AI Co-Creativity
The co creativity community is making significant progress in developing more sophisticated and tailored systems to support and enhance human creativity. Design considerations from prior work can serve as a valuable and efficient foundation for future systems. To support this effort, we conducted a systematic literature review of 62 papers on co-creative systems. These papers cover a diverse range of applications, including visual arts, design, and writing, where the AI acts not just as a tool …

#WritersCoffeeClub 5/27. What is a ‘load-bearing’ part of your non-writerly life that makes writing possible for you?
I have a limited amount of energy and my family comes first, and then obligations that I have to take care of. Work is necessary, not optional.
The time I have left is my spare time. We all have that, an hour or two when we're free.
During that time,…

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.

Excellent piece by a dear friend of mine about #censorship in our national parks. Read her piece and then use the #DefendResearch toolkits to call your elected officials and write a letter to the editor!

#WritersCoffeeClub 5/27. What is a ‘load-bearing’ part of your non-writerly life that makes writing possible for you?
I have a limited amount of energy and my family comes first, and then obligations that I have to take care of. Work is necessary, not optional.
The time I have left is my spare time. We all have that, an hour or two when we're free.
During that time,…

Show maravilhoso. Pena que é só šudio. O saxofonista é muito bom, suspeito que seja o Mšrio Seve. Bandolinista muito bom também.
Wonderful concert. I wish it had video. Great #sax player. Mšrio Seve, maybe? Great #mandolin too. And Paulinho.

from my link log —
Rewriting the Ruby parser.
https://railsatscale.com/2023-06-12-rewriting-the-ruby-parser/
saved 2024-12-26

Rewriting the Ruby parser
At Shopify, we have spent the last year writing a new Ruby parser, which we’ve called YARP (Yet Another Ruby Parser). As of the date of this post, YARP can parse a semantically equivalent syntax tree to Ruby 3.3 on every Ruby file in Shopify’s main codebase, GitHub’s main codebase, CRuby, and the 100 most popular gems downloaded from rubygems.org. We recently got approval to merge this work into CRuby, and are very excited to share our work with the community. This post will take you thro…

#WordWeavers 27 May
Do you specifically design your characters, or do they develop as you write?
I begin with a core, things happens that change that core. Like rolling a snowball in the snow. It grows, gets layered. I apply some pressure, see what happens.
It's a growing process mostly. I almost never begin writing at the beginning, but at a point earlier, so that i can hit…

Placement matters: "trying to literally rewrite history"; not "literally trying to rewrite history".
There's a figurative "rewriting history" which someone can actually attempt. There's no figurative "trying" to make literal.
#English #writing #nitpick #CNN

#WordWeavers 27 May
Do you specifically design your characters, or do they develop as you write?
I begin with a core, things happens that change that core. Like rolling a snowball in the snow. It grows, gets layered. I apply some pressure, see what happens.
It's a growing process mostly. I almost never begin writing at the beginning, but at a point earlier, so that i can hit…

I appreciated Hillel Wayne’s latest article on “typing is not the bottleneck”.
https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/maybe-writing-speed-actually-is-a-bottleneck-for/
Typing is not the bottleneck, but typing faster…

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.

Gounod totally ripped off his Ave Maria song from Schubert. Same words! 100%! 😯
#music

Gounod totally ripped off his Ave Maria song from Schubert. Same words! 100%! 😯
#music

StorySage: Conversational Autobiography Writing Powered by a Multi-Agent Framework
Shayan Talaei, Meijin Li, Kanu Grover, James Kent Hippler, Diyi Yang, Amin Saberi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14159

StorySage: Conversational Autobiography Writing Powered by a Multi-Agent Framework
Every individual carries a unique and personal life story shaped by their memories and experiences. However, these memories are often scattered and difficult to organize into a coherent narrative, a challenge that defines the task of autobiography writing. Existing conversational writing assistants tend to rely on generic user interactions and pre-defined guidelines, making it difficult for these systems to capture personal memories and develop a complete biography over time. We introduce Story…

#WordWeavers 5/25. Do you prefer writing wealthy, middle class, or indigent characters?
No preference really, there are fun characters to explore everywhere, and the WIP I'm working on has people from all levels of society.

#WordWeavers 5/25. Do you prefer writing wealthy, middle class, or indigent characters?
No preference really, there are fun characters to explore everywhere, and the WIP I'm working on has people from all levels of society.

The New MAGA World Order
“Rather than following a foreign policy that ignores values altogether,” writes @jonathanchait, “Trump has a clear preference for values that are, in the American context, historically anomalous or—to put it in less neutral terms—bad”:
(No paywall)

Trump’s Immoral World Order
This week’s Gulf tour revealed that Trump’s transactional foreign policy doesn’t lack values. It just has really bad ones.

The New MAGA World Order
“Rather than following a foreign policy that ignores values altogether,” writes @jonathanchait, “Trump has a clear preference for values that are, in the American context, historically anomalous or—to put it in less neutral terms—bad”:
(No paywall)

Trump’s Immoral World Order
This week’s Gulf tour revealed that Trump’s transactional foreign policy doesn’t lack values. It just has really bad ones.

I'm finally reading the Steppenwolf. It was one of my dad's favorites and he talked about it a few times.

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?