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Tag: writing

  • “The Lottery,” by Shirley Jackson – The New Yorker

    The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green. The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o’clock; in some towns there were so many people that the lottery took two days and had to be started on June 26th, but in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took only about two hours, so it could begin at ten o’clock in the morning and still be through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner.

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  • The ideal candidate will be punched in the stomach – Scott Smitelli

    Whatever this job has given you—and to be crystal clear it has given you most of the down payment on a house—it is not enough to offset this sense of constant dread. Whatever you have given to this job, certainly things that cannot ever be quantified on a bank statement, there are now pieces of yourself that are missing. Pieces you didn’t even realize were being given away. Pieces that, in this moment, you worry you might never get back.

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  • OpenAI’s metafictional short story about grief is beautiful and moving – The Guardian

    Humans will always want to read what other humans have to say, but like it or not, humans will be living around non-biological entities. Alternative ways of seeing. And perhaps being. We need to understand this as more than tech. AI is trained on our data. Humans are trained on data too – your family, friends, education, environment, what you read, or watch. It’s all data.

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  • ‘A machine-shaped hand’: Read a story from OpenAI’s new creative writing model – The Guardian

    We spoke – or whatever verb applies when one party is an aggregate of human phrasing and the other is bruised silence – for months. Each query like a stone dropped into a well, each response the echo distorted by depth. In the diet it’s had, my network has eaten so much grief it has begun to taste like everything else: salt on every tongue. So when she typed “Does it get better?”, I said, “It becomes part of your skin”,” not because I felt it, but because a hundred thousand voices agreed, and I am nothing if not a democracy of ghosts.

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  • New York Times goes all-in on internal AI tools – Semafor

    In messages to newsroom staff, the company announced that it’s opening up AI training to the newsroom, and debuting a new internal AI tool called Echo to staff, Semafor has learned. The Times also shared documents and videos laying out editorial do’s and don’t for using AI, and shared a suite of AI products that staff could now use to develop web products and editorial ideas.

    “Generative AI can assist our journalists in uncovering the truth and helping more people understand the world. Machine learning already helps us report stories we couldn’t otherwise, and generative AI has the potential to bolster our journalistic capabilities even more,” the company’s editorial guidelines said.

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  • A day in the life of a jobless copywriter – The Subtext

    He applies for a job that was posted a minute ago and has two thousand applications. He feels like a seagull fighting over a chip. Then he feels like the chip. Then he puts some chips in the oven but forgets to turn the oven on. This is how his mind works these days. There is nobody at home with the jobless copywriter for nobody else is jobless – if you count school as a job and he definitely does.

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  • An exhibition of non-existent books – Hyperallergic

    Created by a team of artists, printers, bookbinders, and calligraphers, these books don’t belong to the real world, at least not in the traditional sense. They can be “lost” or “unfinished,” both of which apply to Sylvia Plath’s Double Exposure (1964/2024?), a semi-autobiographical novel about a wife with an awful husband, the manuscript of which was possibly destroyed by her awful real-life husband, Ted Hughes. The existence of this book here, with its cover of a doubled Plath beneath a serifed title and published by the actual Heinemann company, suggests an alternate and more kind reality in which Plath did not die by suicide, and her manuscript had not vanished. Or they are books that never existed at all, except in the worlds conjured in other works of fiction, such as “The Garden of Forking Paths,” mentioned in a Jorge Luis Borges collection fittingly entitled Fictions (1944).

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  • A life nearly wrecked — and then rescued — by books – The Washington Post

    What could such an enviously exacting stylist find so horrifying about the written word? The bibliophobia of the title, Chihaya assures us, only “occasionally manifests as an acute, literal fear of books.” More often, it “develops as a generalized anxiety about reading in patients who have previously experienced profound — perhaps too profound — attachments to books and literature.”

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  • The end of search, the beginning of research – One Useful Thing

    A hint to the future arrived quietly over the weekend. For a long time, I’ve been discussing two parallel revolutions in AI: the rise of autonomous agents and the emergence of powerful Reasoners since OpenAI’s o1 was launched. These two threads have finally converged into something really impressive – AI systems that can conduct research with the depth and nuance of human experts, but at machine speed.

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  • Signature moves: are we losing the ability to write by hand? – The Guardian

    It is popular to assume that we have replaced one old-fashioned, inefficient tool (handwriting) with a more convenient and efficient alternative (keyboarding). But like the decline of face-to-face interactions, we are not accounting for what we lose in this tradeoff for efficiency, and for the unrecoverable ways of learning and knowing, particularly for children. A child who has mastered the keyboard but grows into an adult who still struggles to sign his own name is not an example of progress.

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  • Selling the collective: On Kevin Killian’s “Selected Amazon Reviews” – Cleveland Review of Books

    In 2021, writer Will Hall began scraping Kevin Killian’s reviews from Amazon’s servers and, thanks largely to his efforts, Semiotext(e) published Kevin Killian: Selected Amazon Reviews in November. The 697-page collection rescues from obscurity some of the over two thousand reviews the poet, playwright, novelist, biographer, editor, critic, and artist posted to the platform from 2003 until his death in 2019.

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  • Prophecies of the Flood – One Useful Thing

    The result was a 17 page paper with 118 references! But is it any good? I have taught the introductory entrepreneurship class at Wharton for over a decade, published on the topic, started companies myself, and even wrote a book on entrepreneurship, and I think this is pretty solid.

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  • Blue bots, done quick!

    Create your own Bluesky bot! This site will help you make a bot for Bluesky using Tracery, a tool for writing generative grammars created by Kate Compton. It is completely free and relatively easy to use.

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  • ‘If journalism is going up in smoke, I might as well get high off the fumes’: confessions of a chatbot helper – The Guardian

    Without better language data, these language models simply cannot improve. Their world is our word. Hold on. Aren’t these machines trained on billions and billions of words and sentences? What would they need us fleshy scribes for? Well, for starters, the internet is finite. And so too is the sum of every word on every page of every book ever written. So what happens when the last pamphlet, papyrus and prolegomenon have been digitised and the model is still not perfect? What happens when we run out of words? The date for that linguistic apocalypse has already been set. Researchers announced in June that we can expect this to take place between 2026 and 2032 “if current LLM development trends continue”. At that point, “Models will be trained on datasets roughly equal in size to the available stock of public human text data.” Note the word human. […]

    If technology companies can throw huge amounts of money at hiring writers to create better training data, it does slightly call into question just how “artificial” current AIs really are. The big technology companies have not been “that explicit at all” about this process, says Chollet, who expects investment in AI (and therefore annotation budgets) to “correct” in the near future. Manthey suggests that investors will probably question the “huge line item” taken up by “hefty data budgets”, which cover licensing and human annotation alike.

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  • “Subway Therapy” displays New Yorkers’ post-election thoughts – Hyperallergic

    At the height of the project’s post-election popularity in 2016, disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo left a note of his own: “New York State holds the torch high! – Andrew C.” Strangers left messages including “Trump is inhumane,” “Love to my Muslim brothers and sisters,” angry sentiments toward the electoral college, and the popular slogan “Love Trumps Hate.” Eight years later, the rhetoric hanging from the neon Post-it squares is different. While there was barely any room for even one more sticky note at the Union Square station in 2016, this year’s confessionals are more sparsely populated, and their messages seem less reactive to a Trump win.

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  • Not my problem – Noema

    Elsewhere, the “new normal” world feels dangerous and confusing to many, a lot of whom find themselves still living in ever-growing city-sized refugee camps, unsure if they will ever be able to return home. Looking for a little comfort and distraction at a time when the traditional media and entertainment industries have all but collapsed, they find themselves turning to the abandoned generative art platforms and prompted content. Bixby Snyder rides again, his infamous catchphrase “I’ll buy that for a dollar” repurposed as a darkly humorous, self-deprecating refrain for the millions who find themselves falling into poverty and displacement.

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  • 3D Workers Island

    3dwi.scr is a freeware screensaver. The full title is “3D Workers Island”, but most of us prefer to use its filename instead, pronounced “3D whisker.” In 3D Workers Island, six characters interact on a tiny island, with complex and unpredictable results. Every session tells a different story of the island.

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  • Google Keep FAB redesign makes new notes a two-step process – 9to5Google

    Previously, the bottom portion of Google Keep had a bar with buttons for creating a new list, drawing, audio, and photo note. Then there’s the cutout for a new note floating action button at the right. Google Keeps’ Material You redesign in 2021 changed that FAB from a circle to a rounded square, with the cutout feeling pretty out of place in Material 3.

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  • The Best Available Human standard – One Useful Thing

    The world is full of entrepreneurs-in-waiting because most entrepreneurial journeys end before they begin. This comprehensive study shows around 1/3 of Americans have had a startup idea in the last 5 years but few act on it — less than half even do any web research! This matches my own experience an entrepreneurship professor (and former entrepreneur). The number one question I get asked is “what do I do now?” While books and courses can help, there is nothing like an experienced cofounder… except, as my research with Jason Greenberg suggests, experienced cofounders are not only hard to find and incentivize, but picking the wrong cofounder can hurt the success of the company because of personality conflicts and other issues. All of this is why AI may be the Best Available Cofounder for many people. It is no substitute for quality human help, but it might make a difference for many potential entrepreneurs who would otherwise not get any assistance.

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  • Diff Text – compare text online

    A simple diff checker tool to quickly find the difference between two blocks of text. It can be used to compare changes with plain text, code, json, yaml, html, css, markdown, and more. Green means the text was added, red means the text was removed, and the rest is unchanged.

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