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A Fractal Kitty rabbit-hole note on minimum L-seams: combinatorial geometry and puzzle-style constraints for tiling and seam placement, with worked intuition for curious math readers.
3 min · 786 words
The people who know the most often sound the least certain
Vrash argues AI needs better storytellers, not researchers trained to sound like politicians—using a Dwarkesh conversation with John Schulman, Beren Millidge, and Charlie O'Neill to show how experts hedge while communicators overclaim.
7 min · 1,667 words
purplesyringa argues that the best technical writing captures the path from confusion to understanding—documenting the missing links experts forget—so others can learn faster than reverse-engineering opaque docs after the fact.
4 min · 921 words
How to Solve AI in Publishing with Three Easy(ish) Steps
Richard Pulfer proposes practical steps for the publishing industry to handle AI scandals and authorship concerns—focusing on disclosure, process, and standards rather than panic alone.
6 min · 1,475 words
Three levels of noticingI see, but I do not observe
Kabir Khandpur sketches three levels of noticing—paying attention, recognizing patterns, and acting on what you observe—using birdwatching and everyday work as practice for seeing what was always there.
4 min · 906 words
Your dashes suggest which model you're copy-pasting from
Will Keleher spends $2.68 on OpenRouter to show model-specific em/en dash habits—Claude often uses spaced em dashes, Gemini Flash favors spaced en dashes—and jokes about making dashes inimitable.
6 min · 1,301 words
My Weird New Hobby: Wandering Around Tokyo on Google Maps
A playful Street View essay: following a 350Z across years of Tokyo captures, noticing wires, houses, and how a city changes (and doesn’t) when you wander it on Maps.
3 min · 668 words
The Lamentable Later Life of LemmingsHow a 1990s smash franchise faded after DMA Design’s early triumph
Jimmy Maher’s Digital Antiquarian traces the later Lemmings sequels and ports after the 1991 phenomenon—covering DMA Design’s struggle to turn a surprise hit into a lasting franchise, and why the later games never matched the original’s magic.
19 min · 4,454 words
How we turned my voice into a skill
Francesco Castronuovo documents building a writing-voice skill from small experiments rather than cloning old posts—keeping uncertainties visible so AI assistance stays attributable and editable.
9 min · 2,001 wordsagent-assisted
How To Write With An LLMTwo simple rules that let LLMs streamline writing without pasteurizing it
Thomas and Erin Ptacek argue that LLMs can improve writing if you keep them from inventing voice: draft yourself first, then use the model surgically—and never let it become the author of record.
6 min · 1,280 words
How to Write UsefullyOriginal essay: February 2020 · AI-written directory summary
Paul Graham argues that useful writing should make meaningful claims as precisely as their truth permits. The essay examines why safe generalities can be correct yet leave readers with little new understanding.
1 min · 88 wordsagent-written
English: a vs anWhy vowel letters are the wrong rule for indefinite articles in generated text
Amit Patel (Red Blob Games) digs into when English wants “a” versus “an”: the rule tracks spoken vowel sounds, not written vowel letters, and only a small set of common words need exceptions for procedural text generation.
1 min · 274 words
Martin Amis and The War Against AIThe late novelist was a fierce enemy of cliché and would have delighted in skewering Claude and ChatGPT
Jack Aldane imagines how Martin Amis—enemy of cliché—would have taken on Claude and ChatGPT, and what his war on lazy language still teaches writers in the AI age.
5 min · 1,237 words
The Forgotten Battle of East Lansing
A deep local-history reconstruction of a little-known East Lansing conflict: what happened, why it faded from memory, and how archives and reporting put the battle back on the map.
11 min · 2,469 words
An essay arguing that handmade, attributable craft is the lasting advantage as AI-generated content floods the web—and why authenticity compounds while slop does not.
29 min · 6,577 words
Writing With Unnatural Constraints
John Gruber discusses Marcin Wichary’s writing on unnatural constraints—arguing that line length, monospace, and lipograms are not neutral frames, and that constraint always shapes the quality of the writing.
3 min · 687 words
Pre-Greek: The lost language hidden within Ancient Greek
Daniel W. Hieber surveys ~1,000 Ancient Greek words without Indo-European etymologies—labyrinth, olive, Athens, Achilles—and reconstructs Pre-Greek substrate/adstrate influence via phonology, toponyms (-nth/-ss), and Minoan contacts.
3 min · 618 words
Will J. Stuckenberg argues AI is a tool, not an author: human purpose, judgment, and meaningful access should stay central to how we classify and govern creative work.
26 min · 5,957 words
How the Railways Killed a Medieval LawDeodands put a price on objects that caused death—until the train age made the doctrine untenable
JSTOR Daily recounts the medieval English doctrine of the deodand—forfeiting the value of objects that caused death—and how industrial railways and crowded accidents finally forced Parliament to abolish it in the nineteenth century.
5 min · 1,197 words
Why ‘What’s Opera, Doc?’ Looks Like That
This is another Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and this is the plan: - 1. Maurice Noble’s design forWhat’s Opera, Doc? It’s one of the really famous cartoons.
10 min · 2,195 words