Allow me to think about my feeling lost. my skill in holding on was all I had. I live on my effort. I spent time taking chances. all these emotions in my dreams push me on. I make a choice. I have a feeling.

On people who use AI to think.

So this view, that ideas spring fully-formed, and then it’s mere toil to turn them into prose, is false. There is no ideating before writing, because the writing is the thinking. Writing is the ne plus ultra of thinking. A “thinker” who doesn’t write, who skips the step of “merely” synthesizing their vague thoughts into prose, is not thinking.

So when a scientific journal rejects an AI-written submission, they’re not rejecting AI. I’m sure poor old ChatGPT with its weird syntactic obsessions is a more honest scientist than many. They’re rejecting a human whose actions prove they are dishonest and irresponsible and too easily impressed.

The choice of an efficient document preparation system is an important decision for any academic researcher. To assist the research community, we report a software usability study in which 40 researchers across different disciplines prepared scholarly texts with either Microsoft Word or LaTeX. The probe texts included simple continuous text, text with tables and subheadings, and complex text with several mathematical equations. We show that LaTeX users were slower than Word users, wrote less text in the same amount of time, and produced more typesetting, orthographical, grammatical, and formatting errors. On most measures, expert LaTeX users performed even worse than novice Word users. LaTeX users, however, more often report enjoying using their respective software. We conclude that even experienced LaTeX users may suffer a loss in productivity when LaTeX is used, relative to other document preparation systems.

I have an attention problem.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to convert my old laptop into a writerdeck, a dedicated writing device free from the distractions of the modern internet.

Lots of folks build really elaborate offline devices for this, and I’d love to do that… someday. Right now I have no shortage of projects and the point is to get writing, so I used what I had: a six-year-old laptop which still runs great, has plenty of power, but isn’t getting much use anymore.

Crucially, this laptop has an excellent keyboard, and a matte screen, which makes it awesome to type on for long stretches, and functional enough in the daylight (I like to sit outside with my dog and write). It’s also a System76 Galago Pro (not sponsored), which means it’s already Linux friendly and has great support in the kernel.

One of the first things advanced students and instructors told me when I got my black belt was: from this point onward, you are learning and practicing. Before then, you were just learning. Maybe I’m just learning how to write novels right now. I’m stepping onto the mat and finding my bearings.

There are a few puzzles here—why are people comfortable giving advice without evidence? Why do people (including me!) listen to and sometimes even pay for such advice? But I’m interested here in a more fundamental question: Why does nobody know anything?

Solmaz Sharif reads “Social Skills Training” at Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2018: Poems of Provocation & Witness, April 20, 2018 in Washington, DC.

Ah. This makes much more sense now.

see: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/1580548/social-skills-training

by Solmaz Sharif

Studies suggest How may I help you officer? is the single most disarming thing to say and not What’s the problem? Studies suggest it’s best the help reply My pleasure and not No problem. Studies suggest it’s best not to mention problem in front of power even to say there is none. Gloria Steinem says women lose power as they age and yet the loudest voice in my head is my mother.

Browse hundreds of the best website headlines and explore creative, real-world examples from SaaS, B2B, and DTC brands to inspire your website marketing copy.

And why people who are motivated by impact (like you!) should post more often

via: https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/ozy-tells-80000-hours-how-to-write

Inspired by Terry Bisson and Jacques Lacan

Humans’ executive desires are weird.

Open-source tool to read, format, share and export .md files elegantly and 100% privately. File content lives in the URL fragment and never hits the server. CLI: npm i -g sdocs-dev.

Open-source tool to read, format, share and export .md files elegantly and 100% privately. File content lives in the URL fragment and never hits the server. CLI: npm i -g sdocs-dev.

A distraction-free space to write and share your story. Just you, and your words.