*opens Instacart* *orders all the popcorn*

The Verge@theverge.com · last wk.

X Money is launching in the US starting today

The answer to "if you don't adopt AI you'll be left behind" should be "yes, please go away and leave me behind, that sounds ideal"

While this article in Science is getting dragged for leaving ChatGPT trackers in links, there's a subtler issue. The author states "[T]he ability of large language models (LLMs) to predict protein structures and to accelerate the discovery of new materials has revolutionized both fields." (1/7)

Jed Brown@jedbrown.org · 3w ago

Editor in Chief of Science: AI in scientific publishing: Slower, worse, and more expensive.

One thing you as a writer can do to distinguish yourself as human? Be divisive. Slop is sycophantic; it grovels & apologizes as it tries to give you what you want at all times. You're not a sniveling slop bot. You're an artist. So stop trying to tell readers what they want to hear. Give them art.

This survey on AI use in book publishing is short, and unlike many AI-use surveys has options for stating a position against AI. I encourage authors, editors, illustrators, etc., including freelance and indie, to take a few minutes for it.

Tanya Gold | Editor & Translator 💕📚 (they/iel)@tanyagold.bsky.social · last mo.

North American book publishing people 👋🏻 If you've got five minutes, this survey on AI use is worth filling out. (I was expecting to get pissed off while doing it, but it actually allowed acknowledgement of how problematic AI is.) www.surveymonkey.com/r/MWGQV9W #AmEditing #xl8 #WriterSky #BookSky

I have immediate availability for: Academic editing Copyediting for all types of fiction except extreme horror, religious fiction, and things containing a dialect I don't speak. Copyediting for general interest non-fiction (except religious). Line editing for science fiction, fantasy, and erotica.

For my editor friends, this sounds like a useful trick, though I haven't tried it myself yet. Moving wherever directory Word puts normal.dotm in to Dropbox may also work to help with recovering from Word deciding we no longer need all those fancy macros.

Django Wexler@djangowexler.bsky.social · 2mo ago

If you are, like me, trapped by industry standards into Windows and Word, and you use some other autobackup (I use Dropbox) with full change logging, you can add the Word temp files directory to your backups. (3/4)

Is the Microsoft Office Ribbon causing people to have fewer children? A provocative new working paper explores the persistent drop in birth rates since Office 2007 was introduced nearly two decades ago.

New feed aggregating calls for papers, abstracts, and so forth. #cfp #academicsky bsky.app/profile/wes....

not sure if everyone can access this, but I just learned about some dramatic changes to SSRN from Steve Bainbridge's Substack. This is really bad; SSRN has been how I keep up with scholarship in my field from a variety of researchers www.stephenbainbridge.com/p/the-social...

The Social Science Research Network Has Jumped the Shark

Significant and unwelcome changes to what had been legal academia's major open source scholarly repository and notice system

stephenbainbridge.com

ja fragt euch mal

I've done a big update to the 'Against Generative AI' bibliography, including a link to today's papal encyclical. Enjoy! catherinedenial.org/blog/uncateg...

BIG NEWS!!! I’m starting #StetChat, an hourlong live conversation on Bluesky for the #editing community. Each chat focuses on a specific editing-related topic. ✅ Please go follow @stetchat.com !!!!!!! I wrote about why I wanted to start this project here: carolinavonkampen.com/starting-ste...

Why I’m Starting #StetChat, a Bluesky Chat for Editors

I’m starting #StetChat, an hourlong live conversation on Bluesky for the editing community. Read why I'm starting it and how to join the chat.

carolinavonkampen.com

I like this description of the so-called AI-writing detectors: they are "very good at detecting LLM usage, even when it's not there."

Chris Miller@thelittlepakeha.net · 3mo ago

It was a little while ago when they were even worse than they are now but I recall once explaining to someone that those tools were very good at detecting LLM usage, even when it's not there.

Good thread on the dangers off LLM-based transcription products changing the meaning of historical documents. Earlier OCR tools make transcription errors, but they are generally misrecognitions rather than fabrications. The tool described here appears to recognize the text but then alters it.

Caitlin G. DeAngelis@caitlindeangelis.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Recently, FamilySearch digitized and uploaded tons of microfilmed records, including many from 18th-century Massachsuetts. They're using some sort of AI to transcribe/summarize the handwritten documents. I've noticed that the AI strips out references to race and enslavement in 18thc documents.

"Based on the dataset you shared, US and UK responses differ mainly in tone, intensity, and wording style, even though they express similar emotional states" New post on what happened when I got Copilot to do some data analysis: kucharski.substack.com/p/real-signa...

Real signals or artificial stereotypes?

Adventures with a cultural Copilot

kucharski.substack.com

Side note: Despite what some people are saying in the comments, "car bumps into students" is not in the passive voice. It's a crappy headline for different reasons. Let's dig into why, starting with an explanation of what the passive voice actually is.

Howard A. Rodman@rodman.bsky.social · 3mo ago

This story was broken by The Cornell Sun, which @nytimes.com nowhere cites. As a former editor-in-chief of The Sun — and in the name of brave, amazing college newspapers everywhere — do not treat student journalists as truffle pigs, taking what they've sniffed out without credit or compensation.

Looking for editor training taught by editors? The By Editors, For Editors database is free, sharing info on grammar, business, specialty topics, and more. zurl.co/7jtAY #AmEditing #FreelanceEditing

Boosting for the editors following me.

Ron J. Suresha@ronjsuresha.bsky.social · 4mo ago

A friend is looking for a freelance copy editor for several short stories of his erotic gay male fiction. His description of the work follows. Please DM me with name, location, experience (≤100 words), availability, and rates. Thank you for your consideration.

Sentiment analysis has been solved, y'all.

Huw Swanborough@huwroscience.bsky.social · 4mo ago

OMG. It made code that uses regexp to check for negative language. Something that LLMs were architecturally designed to do. This is hilarious when people think AI is conscious, this is AI failing the smudge test in the most hilarious way...

There's no reason to tack an LLM on this. You need a simple UI to build a list of include/exclude filters users can easily tweak as needed. (But wait, we already have tools that do that).

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 4mo ago

I love this for them.

This headline is getting a lot of attention here and it sounds scary, but it's also bullshit. The Treasury did not in fact declare the U.S. insolvent. It released the annual balance sheet that showed we have (quite) a lot of debt compared to assets. It's not the same thing. (1/3)

Allison Gill@muellershewrote.com · 5mo ago

NEW: "The Treasury just declared the U.S. insolvent. The media missed it." fortune.com/2026/03/23/u...

If you know anything about chess, this poster on Etsy is as funny as those fraudulent rat balls. www.etsy.com/au/listing/4... #chess #researchintegrity via u/MinuteRegular716

For all the people saying that Grammarly should be sued over its "expert review" feature, here is the Grammarly class action lawsuit, alleging violation of the right to privacy and the right of publicity: prf-law.com/current-case...

I've just learned from Jennifer Yankopolus (of Macro of the Month) that I can make a custom tab in the MS Word ribbon just for key-but-lesser-used macros. And in the doing I found I can change the order of tabs, too. Exciting! #EditorHeaven #Edibuddies macroofthemonth.substack.com/p/macro-of-t...

MaggyIt

Creates a Maggied version of a file

macroofthemonth.substack.com

Database of decisions/penalties in legal cases where "AI" was found to be used by either a litigator or a judge; does not count *All* cases of "AI" used in court filings, just those where it was a) found & b) officially remarked upon or penalized. Incredibly useful collection & arrangement of data:

Ken Applebaum@defendedbe.bsky.social · 6mo ago

@wolvendamien.bsky.social My editor-in-chief from our college newspaper @ethicking.com is now a pretty influential attorney, and she just posted this, which strikes me as a resource you may find useful. www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinatio...

People using Chrome may want to know about this. To disable the new default AI mode. Type chrome://flags in your address bar. Search for AI mode in the search box below and disable the three options displayed.

Any freelance editors available that can be hired to help me chop 10k-15k out of a horror comedy novel? Got a *very* positive response from an agent but the length of the work is the issue (currently 110k on a horror/comedy, need to get closer to 90k-95k).

This from 404 Media is inaccurate. The change at arXiv applies only to two types of CS papers, literature reviews and position papers, not original research. Those papers were already very limited by arXiv policy. blog.arxiv.org/2025/10/31/a...

404 Media@404media.co · 9mo ago

arXiv, a preprint publication for academic research that has become particularly important for AI research, has announced it will no longer accept computer science articles and papers that haven’t been vetted by an academic journal or a conference. Why? A tide of AI slop.