Tootfinder

WGA West report: the number of members reporting earnings fell 9.4% YoY in 2024, while total earnings rose 12.7% to $1.5B in the same period, below 2022's $1.9B (Katie Kilkenny/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business

TV and Film Writing Jobs Grew More Scarce, Even If Earnings Were Up Slightly in 2024
The annual tally from the Writers Guild West shows that its members may have made slightly more money overall than during the 148-day strike year of 2023, but there's fewer jobs available.

How do Software Engineering Candidates Prepare for Technical Interviews?
Brian Bell, Teresa Thomas, Sang Won Lee, Chris Brown
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02068

How do Software Engineering Candidates Prepare for Technical Interviews?
To obtain employment, aspiring software engineers must complete technical interviews -- a hiring process which involves candidates writing code while communicating to an audience. However, the complexities of tech interviews are difficult to prepare for and seldom faced in computing curricula. To this end, we seek to understand how candidates prepare for technical interviews, investigating the effects of preparation methods and the role of education. We distributed a survey to candidates (n = 1…

Let this be a lesson: my point about editing above goes deep. It's not just about writing words and editing words.
It's about decisions of any kind.
While deliberative paralysis is a thing, when you make "do" easier than "deliberate" (and increasingly tip the balance toward "do"), what happens is what's easy, not what's good. It is an accelerator for all kinds of things, a great many of them bad, and even more suboptimal.

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…

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…

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/

#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…

"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…

After weeks of writing from news and social media, I decided to turn towards art for a while. I thought I’d be able to make an easy trade: from fresh hells to fresh heavens.
#Art
https://salrandolph.substack.com/p/…

What Fresh Heaven?
Writing in response to daily works of art instead of daily social media. It turns out heaven is harder than hell.

#WritersCoffeeClub 10: What is the line between homage and theft?
Theft is illegal, a copyright violation. You take someone else's words, paragraph by paragraph, and pass it on as your own. Plagiarism, while not strictly illegal, lands here in my opinion. It's artistic theft.
Homage, in my opinion, is writing something in someone else's spirit, honouring the origin…

Fire from The Atlantic.
#USPol #Tariffs

#WritersCoffeeClub
June 20: Solstice. What’s the most you’ve ever written in a single session? What made that possible?
---
I remember writing a story in three pages in a single go. Probably did even more before. Usually happens when I get to a part which I was going to and planning to write for a while - a culmination,a standoff, a cathartic scene, something like that. It l…

Prompt Variability Effects On LLM Code Generation
Andrei Paleyes, Radzim Sendyka, Diana Robinson, Christian Cabrera, Neil D. Lawrence
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10204

Prompt Variability Effects On LLM Code Generation
Code generation is one of the most active areas of application of Large Language Models (LLMs). While LLMs lower barriers to writing code and accelerate development process, the overall quality of generated programs depends on the quality of given prompts. Specifically, functionality and quality of generated code can be sensitive to user's background and familiarity with software development. It is therefore important to quantify LLM's sensitivity to variations in the input. To this end we prop…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.03295 has been replaced.
link: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=a

Examining Human-AI Collaboration for Co-Writing Constructive Comments Online
This paper examines if large language models (LLMs) can help people write constructive comments on divisive social issues due to the difficulty of expressing constructive disagreement online. Through controlled experiments with 600 participants from India and the US, who reviewed and wrote constructive comments on threads related to Islamophobia and homophobia, we observed potential misalignment between how LLMs and humans perceive constructiveness in online comments. While the LLM was more lik…

#WritersCoffeeClub
June 9: Have you ever done timed writing sprints? Did you enjoy it?
I did. I did not.
While "The War of Art" by Pressfield recommends treating writing as a craft (arguably that's the whole idea), I cannot produce word count on a short-term schedule. If the setting and characters are not decided, a day or even a week are simply not enough — an…