The Case of the Robot Web Thief
If you ask an AI agent to build you an application, can you be sure it's not helping itself to somebody else's code?
Coyote Tracks
Watts Martin's sporadically-updated website
Latest posts
AI's Chicken Sandwich Problem
Generative AI may have more uses than its critics allow, but the ethical quagmire isn't merely how you use it.
Bring Back the Insert Key on Emacs
Are you old and/or weird enough to want the [Insert] key to actually toggle between insert and overwrite modes on Emacs? I have a function for you.
The Best Worst Email Client
The Emacs-based mu4e email client is ugly, painful to set up, difficult to configure, and might be exactly what a tiny percentage of you are looking for.
Soylent Confessions
Soylent is frequently held up as a poster child of everything wrong with Silicon Valley, which makes it hard to admit that I liked it.
Ready for the Revolution
Technology needs another revolution. It's just not the one the industry seems hellbent on delivering.
"How are you leveraging AI in your technical writing?"
It's a question I expect to be asked in the future. I have an answer, but I can't help suspect it's the wrong question.
What You're Allowed to Do
On real restrictions in computing life versus imagined ones.
“Trim Silence”: Threat or Menace?
While I don’t think Apple Podcasts itself has a “trim silence” feature, it’s popular in a bunch of podcast players. Overcast probably kicked it off with its “Smart Speed” function, but it’s in Pocket Casts , Castro , and I’m sure a bunch of other ones. The idea is that the player “listens” for silences in the podcast and (hopefully subtly) shortens them, so you’re saving a little time even when…
Is AI Helping You to Do Work, or Just to Do Stuff?
For someone who’s neither all-in on AI nor a passionate anti-AI crusader, I think about it a lot. From 2018 through 2023, I worked for Viv Labs, a startup from the folks who built Apple’s Siri; they had been bought by Samsung in order to fix Bixby, their much-maligned assistant. (The punchline here is that, to a large degree, they did fix it, but nobody noticed.) And my novel Kismet has emergent…
Emacs and Shortcuts
It’s a match made in…frankly, I’m not sure where. But I’ve been experimenting with using org-journal as a replacement for Day One, and while it’s pretty good, there are two things that I immediately missed: The way Day One records my location and the weather for every entry. Being able to quickly insert photos that I’ve taken into an entry. Emacs can’t do that directly, but there are Shortcut…
Apple Wins Me Over Again, but It’s Getting Tougher
Whenever I make a big purchase—a TV, a new computer, a car, an A/V receiver—I inevitably enter a long period of internal debate, arguments and counter-arguments, pros and cons. It doesn’t matter whether I’ve set money aside for this, how sure I am that yes, I do need/want/carnally desire the thing in question. Post-purchase, I can look forward to an immediate period of regret and…
The Emacs for Everything Obsession
If you poke around the Emacs community, you’ll quickly find some—all right, loads of—users who want to do everything in Emacs. Not just writing, not just programming, not just publishing their blog. No. They want to read and write their email in Emacs. Read their RSS in Emacs. View their PDFs in Emacs. Manage their tasks and their calendars in Emacs. Browse the web in Emacs, even though as far as…
Collaboration or Privacy: Pick One
Matt Novak, writing at Gizmodo on October 22 : President Donald Trump is currently demolishing the East Wing of the White House in one of the more shocking acts of his second term. Trump plans to build an enormous $250 million ballroom in its place, a structure that will dwarf the existing White House. But who’s paying for it? As it turns out, a bunch of private companies and individuals. And,…
If Not the Mac, What?
Back in the dark ages (the 1990s), I was an inveterate operating system switcher. At various points, I ran DR-DOS with DESQView/X (what Windows 3.1 should have been), FreeBSD, several distributions of Linux, Windows 2000, QNX Photon, and BeOS. With the exception of QNX, I didn’t just run them, I used them. Used BeOS? Full-time? For more than a year, very productively—but that’s another…
Seriously, Markdown
Every so often, there’s a surge of “here’s why no one can do serious writing in Markdown” articles. They don’t come on any obvious schedule, or with any obvious trigger; usually, somebody complains about something Markdown can’t do that {reStructured Text, AsciiDoc, Org Mode, DocBook, DITA, LaTeX, Pollen, Typst, a Selectric Composer you found at a garage sale} can, it gets picked up on Hacker…
It's the Heat and the Humidity; Also, the Fascism
“It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity” isn’t as much an aphorism as a punchline, as people point out—often with an unwarranted hint of smugness, as if nobody else had made this observation before—that 95° F is too damn hot no matter how humid it is. And, I mean, sure, but imagine these two scenarios: Tampa: The high today will be 95° F. The low will be 75° F and the relative humidity will be 70%,…
Dr. Neckbeard, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Emacs
So, you might know that I’m a text editor junkie. At a job in the 1990s, I used a great Windows-only editor called HomeSite for web development. When I moved to the Mac in 2001, I wrote to Allaire, the developers, and asked if there was a Mac version in the works. They wrote back and explained they’d written it in Delphi, a Windows-only development environment, so probably not. But, they added,…
Maybe the Waiting Is Actually the Easiest Part
The common wisdom seems to be that Apple is critically behind in AI, but that makes some 'AI triumphalist' assumptions that bear examining.
The Robots Have Come for Your Em Dashes
There's a claim running around that em dashes are a sign of AI writing. That might say something bleak about the level of writing polish we expect from humans.
What Makes an App Feel “Right” on the Mac?
I always think of myself as a big proponent of Mac apps that are as Mac-like as possible, but what does “Mac-like” really mean?
Having to Think About Essential Computerness
The Mac’s allure has always been that its power didn’t require users to understand “computerness,” while still rewarding those who wanted to dig in. But it feels like that’s slowly changing.
Just Slap an LLM on the Front End—How Hard Can It Be?
LLMs are hit-and-miss for generative output, but what about as front ends to other systems? Would that be more reliable and simpler? Apple’s “Personalized Siri” travails suggest no on both counts.
The Reluctant Technologist
On hating what's happened to technology over the last quarter century, yet still kind of loving it in spite of it all.
The Pressure to Stay Genteel
Musings on Micro.blog and the features and flaws of 'gentle' social media in our current age.
Platforms Are Not Neutral
I’ve been thinking a bit about two pieces that talk about Substack, the massively popular and occasionally controversial newsletter platform: Anil Dash’s “ Don’t Call it a Substack ” John Gruber’s “ Regarding—and, Well, Against—Substack ” They both come to the same conclusion, essentially: that you shouldn’t put your writing on Substack. As Dash writes, The reason Substack wants you to call your…
On Evacuations and Hurricanes
It’s so easy, watching on the news, to scream at people who don’t evacuate ahead of oncoming storms. I get it. I scream at them, too. It’s often a fitting reaction. And yet. Evacuation is a process. It’s not “throw a handful of things in an overnight bag and floor it.” You still need to put in the time, money, and effort of preparing your house (or condo, or apartment) for the storm, to maximize…
Generative AI Comes for Imaginary Friends
On LinkedIn, the social network of mandatory happiness, software engineer Michael Sayman writes about his new product : Introducing SocialAI, a private social network where you receive millions of AI-generated comments offering feedback, advice & reflections on each post you make. I will admit my first thought about this was: this is a prank, right? This is a fake product that somebody who hates…
How Much of Yourself Do You Put Online?
It’s as much of an age-old question as anything of the internet age is, but I think about it every few years. Slapping up a web page full of personal thoughts in 1999 didn’t carry the same weight that it does in 2024; employers, even ones literally in the internet space, didn’t necessarily do a web search on your name to see what came up. Now, though, I don’t know. Now everyone does that kind of…
Conservatives Are the Real Snowflakes
There’s been plenty of words written already explaining why calling Trump, J. D. Vance, and the rest of the MAGA branch of the Republican Party—which is to say, the Republican Party—weirdos seems so effective. These conservatives have spent years, so the thought goes, asserting their worldview is the standard, the default, the normal worldview, and everything that deviates from it is wrong,…