2026-03-18 10:25:59
How AI's post-training process suppresses the creativity and whimsicality seen in earlier models like GPT-2, leading to bad writing from many top AI models (Jasmine Sun/The Atlantic)
https://www.
How AI's post-training process suppresses the creativity and whimsicality seen in earlier models like GPT-2, leading to bad writing from many top AI models (Jasmine Sun/The Atlantic)
https://www.
Ohio Newspaper Removes Writing From Reporters' Jobs, Hands It To an 'AI Rewrite Specialist' - Slashdot
https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/02/18/1746206/ohio-newspaper-removes-writing-from-reporters-jobs-hands-it-to-an-ai-rewrite-specialist
@… @… Currently we think before writing code, because writing it and changing it takes effort (and even for LLM-generated slop code it takes time, and burns money and rainforests, so it's better to get the spec right first)
from my link log —
Generating random numbers using C standard library: the problems.
https://codingnest.com/generating-random-numbers-using-c-standard-library-the-problems/
saved 2026-04-19
🇺🇦 Auf radioeins läuft...
Bill Callahan:
🎵 Writing
#NowPlaying #BillCallahan
https://billcallahan.bandcamp.com/track/writing
https://open.spotify.com/track/6Bh0i8updnT6EKpqd5bG5m
An Open Access article in Nature details how data can now be written in borosilicate glass hard drives so it can last 10,000 years.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-10042-w
Now, scientists are figuring out which memes and cat pictures to keep that long.
Thank you for expressing the argument eloquently, succinctly, and without aggression.
I confess, I often tire of reading information that's repetitive. My feelings go way beyond ennui when predictability is coupled with writing that's selfish, sloppy, and divisive. This wrong style of writing has become a norm for some of the people are right to be concerned.
I'm amongst the countless people who are, quietly, deeply concerned about the impact on Earth's resourc…
Recent Signings Put Writing on the Wall for These Raiders https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/onsi/las-vegas-recent-signings-put-writing-on-the-wall
It’s funny how people don’t ask _why_ LLMs seem to be doing relatively well writing code but are awful for writing anything else
@… in this logo and when writing an HTML parser, you’d never know it was a void element
Huh, heuristic for writing rust: if you get fields marked as unused code, that might need to be a separate crate, like a protocol implementation with a published struct as a core object.
I •do• actually expect to see some kind of shift over the next week. I don’t think their “Victory! Now we’re leaving(ish)!” press conference last week was something we can take at face value, but I also don’t think it was just a ruse.
After they murdered Alex Pretti, the writing was on the wall. One killing of a white observer they could try to write off; two is a pattern. They’re losing support they desperately need — from politicians, from the press, from judges, from less-extreme right-wingers — and the longer they continue doing what they’ve been doing, the further they dig themselves in a hole. I’ve been expecting for a while that they would declare MISSION ACCOMPLISHED and change strategy.
Microsoft macht Copilot in Notepad zu Writing Tools
In der Windows-Insider-Vorschauversion von Notepad heißen die KI-Funktionen nun Writing Tools. Zuvor hieß die Funktion Copilot.
https://www.
It is 56 degrees out there and I am sitting in my little room, writing code.
If you want me to write a document, please let me know what KIND of output you expect? What voice, what length, what level of detail, what audience. Ideally, give me something similar so I can infer these things.
(Goes off stage left, grumbling, to continue writing his grant application)
The OpenClaw repo itself has 36 PRs in the last hour:
https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/pulls
This seems to be its usual rate. The PRs are ~all AI-generated, judging by the writing. Some of them are dedicated agent accounts; some of them are human accounts where the human is…
Oh, Jings, my own execution traces are REALLY hard to read. It's my own fault: these are my traces in my software, there's no-one else to blame, but...
#Lisp
I am dreaming and writing of horses, but they need time to gather themselves and begin their fiery galloping. Meanwhile, this new year is still emerging from the old.
Tell me what you are carrying from the old year, and what you are wishing for in the new.
https://salrandolph.substack.com/p/the
The harmonic writing on this Lô Borges song is so gorgeous:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erCu0HKrIIE&list=RDerCu0HKrIIE&start_radio=1
"The April Fools' posts have since been deleted."
https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=hyperbridge-exploit
Good technical writing is hard. Here's some tips to make it less hard.
https://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/good-technical-writing
Cursor's recent experiment involved running hundreds of AI agents for nearly a week to build a web browser, writing 1M lines of code across 1,000 files (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog)
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/19/scaling-long-running-a…
Emails Reveal Space Force’s Hardest Mission Is Writing a Song https://www.404media.co/emails-reveal-space-forces-hardest-mission-is-writing-a-song/
Mediahuis is experimenting with AI agents for commissioning, writing, and more to "automate first line news", which is reviewed by humans prior to publication (Charlotte Tobitt/Press Gazette)
https://pressgazette.co.uk/publishers…
This remains much harder to talk about, family violence I hadn't really had in my mind for a long time. I had several entries from most days, writing after each treatment, fragments of thoughts that I may expand on later.
CW for the lined text: abuse dynamics, gun violence, #PTSD/#CPTSD stuff
https://hexmhell.writeas.com/decisions-ptss-5-day-1-entry-2
following jvns asking about good man pages, i have some thoughts about what i have liked and disliked when reading man pages, how i have tried to improve them, and guidelines i follow when writing them https://lobste.rs/c/chyw2a
perhaps that comment ought to be a blog post
RE: https://mas.to/@ChanceyFleet/116083424891788667
The one I use most frequently in email: animated Simpsons-yellow skin tone thumbs-up emoji.
Somebody once thought the email client was writing that automatically because it couldn’t show the image they …
I've just done some vibe coding*, writing .bat files** in Windows, and it didn't work. Copilot's suggestion stripped quotes, without which it wouldn't work.
*cut&pasted the example in the top of the AI summary on the search page.
**Like it's 1992.
How much does your museum fight about wall texts? Probably a lot! @… discusses different approaches to these interpretive devices.
https://hyperallergic.com/the-sticky-p…
RE: https://writing.exchange/@golgaloth/116235568184723460
@… might object
@… fans of Ray Bradbury might like this.
I remember dreaming, as the characters lived, inspired by writing. Flying, but not as a human, and the distinction didn't matter. Fire in my bones. Delicious fire.
Anyone else's head always this busy? I didn't even try to fit all my thoughts into this month's writing newsletter.
https://buttondown.com/megancarney/archive/traps-we-know-and-fall-into-anyway/
This week marks 200 consecutive weekly posts.
I’m writing about a major genealogy discovery, the realities of AI-generated fiction, and why qualified immunity makes civil rights cases so difficult to overcome in court.
Take a look and feel free to weigh in.
https://www.
I am seeing more and more testimonials like this one. It appears to list about every point of the other testimonials about coding with AI.
https://siddhantkhare.com/writing/ai-fatigue-is-real
Dropping the key headings/points below:
> AI fatigue is real and nobo…
I’ve had a renewed interest in #wicca lately and cast my first circle in years. I missed writing my own spells and stuff.
"LLMs work (somewhat) for coding computer programs. As everyone knows this is the highest form of human endeavor—unsurpassed by any other lesser activity such as project management, design, art or writing. Therefore LLMs will excel in every other field."
I really believe this is the crux understanding why so many programmers (including good programmers) fall for it in a way that can only be described as a cult, were any criticism is not only not allowed but reflexively is seen as either laughable or belligerent.
Anyway, LLMs are good* at writing code because writing code is easy and highly repetitive and doesn't actually take a lot of skill; unless it's novel ways to write code which LLMs cannot do.
Taking this as a sign LLMs can do other "lesser" activities is saying a lot about the hubris of programmers and not a lot of the capabilities of LLMs.
*for some definitions of "good"
Writing prompt - the person planning the heist accidentally recruits an eschatologist instead of an escapologist, but when the world ends it turns out that was exactly what they needed all a long.
‘AI will be the end of us’ – is Colm Tóibín right about the threat to creative writing? https://theconversation.com/ai-will-be-the-end-of-us-is-colm-toibin-right-about-the-threat-to-creative-writing-275898
Beautiful Numbness: The Book I Have Been Writing for Fifty Years
Every book has a birthday, but not every book has a conception date. Some books arrive late and fast, fully formed, demanding to be transcribed before they vanish. The Last Living American White Male was like that. Others accumulate across decades, assembling themselves in the background of a life, borrowing material from every stage and every failure and every standing ovation until the writer finally…
Quite a few folks - a couple credible developers - are trying to convince me that 'AI' code generation is great. They fail to realise that my issue isn't whether it's good at writing working ('pretty'?) code. It could be both (it isn't) but that misses my concern: to me conferring power to those without the understanding to the implications of different uses of that power creates a system inevitably prone to disaster - whether smallish now or colossal later. Anoth…
Rams' Blake Corum backs former college teammate J.J. McCarthy: 'He's still writing his story' https://www.nfl.com/news/rams-blake-corum-backs-former-college-teammate-j-j-mccarthy-he-s-still-writing-his-story…
Cowboys Signing Jalen Thompson Puts Writing on Wall for This Veteran https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/onsi/draft/dallas-cowboys-signing-jalen-thompson-puts-writing-on-wall-this-veteran
In late Middle English writing, 'a' and 'an' commonly were joined to the following noun,
if that word began with a vowel,
-- which caused confusion over how such words ought to be divided when written separately.
In 'nickname', 'newt', and British dialectal 'naunt',
the -n- belongs to a preceding indefinite article 'an' or possessive pronoun 'mine'.
My naunt for "mine aunt" is recorded from 13c.…
"graphic languages: a visual guide to the world’s writing systems" – ein wunderbares buch für #schrift-nerds wie mich. 😊
https://www.slanted.de/product/graphic-lan
Just realised that I'm so far behind with processing my Zettelkasten inbox that the week numbering system I use is in danger of looping ... On the plus side that does mean I'm reading and writing again after what feels like too long.
Funny how you can sometimes feel "fine" but your executive function tells a different story, for me it shows up in unprocessed things (inbox, notes, photos, and laundry!)
There is a derivative of Amdahl’s law that applies to this whole « vibe coding » thing. I spend maybe 5% of my time designing and writing code and 95% maintaining it. As far as I know LLMs make the former faster, which is pointless, and the latter harder and more time consuming, which is actually both bad and stupid. Go figure.
#programming
What's that? I've published a new article on my website?
All other writing has been on hold until I finished it, but my data review of 2025 is finally done 😅 🎉
I have absolutely no idea if it will be of interest to anyone else, but I love these posts. And this year's was using **even more** of my own, home-grown data, captured directly via the very site it now lives on 😁
#IndieWeb #YearInReview #DigitalHomesteading
Yep, *that* Ken Starr...
Ken Starr Writing To 'My Friend, My Brother' Jeffrey Epstein - Above the Law
https://abovethelaw.com/2026/02/ken-starr-writing-to-my-friend-my-brother-jeffrey-epstein/
Got paid for a writing project that isn't going forward in its current form (paused) but feels good to be paid for the work I've done, and maybe it can have a slightly different life elsewhere too.
#writing
In der Juristerei wird das Aufkommen der LLMs begeistert gefeiert. Man versucht sich zu profilieren. Man ist vielleicht besorgt, dass die Stundensätze herunter gehen könnten. Aber sonst? Und dann diese Studie, die zeigt, dass bei Benutzung von LLMs die cognitive Kapazität und damit auch die Qualität dauernd nach unten zeigt. Kurz: Ein LLM-Anwalt bietet teure 0815-Soße, die man auch ohne Anwalt haben kann.
The technology of mechanical reproduction did not end the age of art.
Likewise, the technology of text synthesis will not end of age of human thinking.
https://woborders.blog/2026/04/14/ai-is-the-mechanical-reproduction-of…
"I'm writing a book on Actual Play -- and it's under contract!" - Critical Prof
#dnd
RE: #LesFicFri In my story about Demeter putting Minthe in her place for speaking ill of her d…
The Cleveland Plain Dealer says it has removed "writing" from some reporters' workloads; an "AI rewrite specialist" turns info gathered by reporters into drafts (Chris Quinn/Plain Dealer)
https://www.cleveland.com/news/2026/02/jo…
AI for writing documentation | The FreeBSD Forums
<https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/ai-for-writing-documentation.101700/>
@…
The Glorious Exclamation Mark: Carla Bley Interviewed | The Quietus (2021)
https://thequietus.com/interviews/carla-bley-interview/
I’m close to writing a piece in defense of replyguys.
As opposed to AI drug dealers (“why don’t you just try it, it will expand your mind”), at least replyguys are human, even if they are also annoying self-obsessed dicks.
from my link log —
Writing C with indent-based syntax similar to CoffeeScript or Python, via Guile.
https://sph.mn/computer/guides/c/c-indent.html
saved 2026-02-14
Der LeChat Writing Assistant schreibt ganz ordentliche offiziöse Korrespondenz im Englischen, die Rhetorik muss man halt ein bisserl runterdimmen auf weniger self-congratulatory. Sowas spart mir viel Zeit.
«LLMs are cliché machines, trained on a resilient human weakness for generating maximum content with minimum effort.»
Bingo.
Unfortunately, this too hits the nail on the head: «Bad art is something human beings love to do, in vast numbers. It’s part of who we are, and when abandoned by inspiration we trust in the same methods we’ve programmed into LLMs.»
Apologies for the diatribes of strident writing I sometimes inflict on people here. When T is on "hot" mode for longer periods, sleep ain't there and I can't make music, indulging in poor cyber scribbling seems the healthiest therapy. 😄
As the news swirls constantly around us, I continue my practice of writing back to posts on social media. It seems I’ve been doing this for a year!
It’s a form of play that helps me reclaim my attention and connect to my sense of being.
I invite you to do the same!
https://salrandolph.substack.com/p/a-p
A software engineer explains AI fatigue, compounded by a FOMO treadmill of using labs' latest tools, thinking atrophy, and more, alongside boosted productivity (Siddhant Khare)
https://siddhantkhare.com/writing/ai-fatigue-is-real
'Melania' Is a Horror Movie
<em>Melania</em> Is a Horror Movie
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2026/01/melania-trump-documentary-horror-movie/685843/?gift=TPTA7XiYh…
Q&A with The Atlantic's Liz Bruenig on her hypothetical creative nonfiction measles essay, writing in second person, persuading parents about vaccines, and more (Laura Hazard Owen/Nieman Lab)
https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/02/the-atla
In January 2023, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti announced in a memo to staffthat the company was making a hard pivot to AI — years before the word “slop” was added to the public lexicon.
In the memo, which was published roughly two months after OpenAI unveiled its groundbreaking ChatGPT chatbot, Peretti said BuzzFeed would be using the software to enhance the company’s infamous quizzes by generating personalized responses.
The company’s stock price jumped aggressively, from around $3 …
Homeschooling Isn’t for Everyone—And Neither Is Writing Nice Obituaries
We upgraded my insulin pump this week, but the bigger upgrades were mental. From questioning our homeschooling choices to asking whether we owe the dead honesty in obituaries, this post wrestles with accountability, second thoughts, and telling the truth.
How to write chemistry by Greco Story Lab
#writing
Started writing about #selfhosting #movie #streaming using @…
The AI writing witchhunt is pointless. https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-ai-writing-witchhunt-is-pointless/
Good piece by @…
I’ve forgotten how to do whatever it was that I thought I was supposed to do and now the writing is writing itself.
https://salrandolph.substack.com/p/two-swords-are-crossed
from my link log —
Rust borrow checking surprises.
https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/borrow-checking-surprises/
saved 2026-04-08
Accel raised $5B, including a $4B Leaders fund, focused on writing large checks to late-stage startups globally, and a $650M sidecar fund, taking AUM to $36B (Rebecca Torrence/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20
"Every system has exactly one constraint. One bottleneck. The throughput of your entire system is determined by the throughput of that bottleneck. Nothing else matters until you fix the bottleneck.
That's the part most people get. Here's the part they don't, and it's the part that should scare you:
When you optimise a step that is not the bottleneck, you don't get a faster system. You get a more broken one."
from my link log —
Writing a PostgreSQL formatter / pretty printer in Rust.
https://blog.urth.org/2021/03/14/writing-a-postgres-sql-pretty-printer-in-rust-part-1/
saved 2021-03-18
From Family Trees to Qualified Immunity: Reflections at 200 Weeks
In my 200th consecutive weekly post, I reflect on a major genealogy discovery, the realities of AI-generated fiction, and the troubling doctrine of qualified immunity—where “functionally identical facts” can determine whether civil rights violations ever see accountability.
I'm actually believing this, the main reason "AI" hype has become this big is tech people being impressed by it "writing code".
Then they were wrongly extrapolating capabilities to other fields (because "programming is super hard, harder than any other vocation, therefore 'AI' can do anything!!!1!"). To them, it clearly appears be god because they see themselves as gods—because they can write quicksort and linked lists or something.
Meanwhile, LLMs are only passable at generating code because it is laughably easy, mainly because programming languages and "best practices" are extremely verbose, repetitive and clunky; requiring endless boilerplate and infinite layer cakes to achieve even the most trivial things.
Because other people that don't care about that shit are so dependent on technology, it gets pushed to everyone without consent.
Kind of like a hubris ouroboros.
Let's flood Congress with postcards!
Let your elected representatives know you care!
#TheMajorityProject: 12 Million Postcards to Congress – Signs Of Justice
https://www.signsofjustice.com/products/tmp<…
from my link log —
The best darn grid shader (yet).
https://bgolus.medium.com/the-best-darn-grid-shader-yet-727f9278b9d8
saved 2026-03-13