i used to use this app called Writeroom to write without distractions.

it takes over your whole screen and is just a cursor and text. no  messing with the font, changing the spacing, or anything liek that.

just you and your text. like a typewriter

it hasn't been updated in awhile and i don't write as much as i used to. But I still use it when i want to write something semi-long and want to minimize distractions. It works.

this recent New Yorker article takes a fresh look at the current landscape of distraction-free writing apps and hardware, and it's just great.

here's an excerpt:

But focus mode on an everything device is a meditation room in a casino. What good is it to separate writing from editing, formatting, and cluttered interfaces if you can’t separate it from the Internet? Even a disconnected computer offers plenty of opportunities for distraction: old photographs, downloaded music, or, most treacherous of all, one’s own research. And so, just as savvy entrepreneurs have resuscitated the “dumb” phone as a premium single-tasking communication device, it was perhaps inevitable that someone would revive the stand-alone word processor.

Released in 2016, the Freewrite Smart Typewriter is a hefty little lunchbox of a machine with a noisy mechanical keyboard and an e-ink display the size of an index card. The user can type and backspace but not much else, and, with the default settings, only ten lines of text are visible at a time.

Bike sharing is a service you can use that lets you rent a bicycle in your city. They typically have "docks" from which you retrieve and return said bicycle.

Citi Bike is the bike sharing service of New York City.

Here's a photo I recently took of a Citi Bike docking station near my apartment.

Now that we're on the same page about Citi Bike, check out an excerpt from this article in The New Yorker about two people who are trying to say they visited all of the 1,600 Citi Bike stations in the city:

Citi Bike had recently introduced a map denoting which docks a user had and had not visited: an invitation, basically, for the George Mallorys (Q. Why climb the mountain? A. Because it’s there) of socialized self-propulsion. Partway through his quest, he heard distressing news. A rival had been zigzagging across the city, checking off the same stations and surmounting the same obstacles—hills, dying cell-phone batteries, malfunctioning docks that nearly cost each the twelve-hundred-dollar lost-bike fee. In the end, Ambinder was beaten to the finish. He was bummed. When he completed his own journey, he thought, I gotta meet this guy.

Highly entertaining read. Do it.

This story/essay(?) is so good please just go read it.

here's an excerpt

I had always avoided writing about my sister’s death. At first, in my reticence, I offered GPT-3 only one brief, somewhat rote sentence about it. The AI matched my canned language; clichés abounded. But as I tried to write more honestly, the AI seemed to be doing the same. It made sense, given that GPT-3 generates its own text based on the language it has been fed: Candor, apparently, begat candor.

In the nine stories below, I authored the sentences in bold and GPT-3 filled in the rest. My and my editor’s sole alterations to the AI-generated text were adding paragraph breaks in some instances and shortening the length of a few of the stories; because it has not been edited beyond this, inconsistencies and untruths appear.

see also: another time i wrote about gpt-3

This recent story about a 65,000+ page diary of a now-deceased publisher/printer/professor named Claude Fredericks, goes some unexpected directions.

This is one of my favorite passages... about the author's feelings after reading many parts of the journals:

This experience generated a profound dissonance. For all the effort that Fredericks put into completing his journal project—and promoting it to others—an essential element is missing: he was not a good writer. He did not instinctively make judicious choices on the page, whether recounting a dramatic episode or offering a lengthy evocation of the pleasures of gardening in Vermont at the height of summer. His prose rarely displays the ingrained sense of control that true writers have even when jotting off a postcard.

At the end, the author ultimately deremines that, after devoting several years of his life to the reading of the journals... that he "sometimes wonder[s] if it would have been better had the vaults never been open."

Either way - this article is worth opening.

The Most Ambitious Diary in History by Benjamin Anastas in The New Yorker.

This is my favorite thing on the internet right now. Each week, the folks at The Pudding try a get a computer to win the New Yorker’s weekly cartoon caption contest.

Here’s this week’s attempt:

You can sign up for their email newsletter to help train the algorithm at their website.  

I liked this short story by Keith Ridgway in The New Yorker. It's about about an older woman whose young neighbors are having a party has so many good lines in it.

Here's an excerpt:

He was pulling some sort of, what on earth, headphones? Big black things, with the big fat pads for the ears.

—Headphones here, for this, which is this old

A small . . . a phone?

—An iPod. My old iPod. And I don’t know what you like obviously, or even if this is a stupid idea, you might not want to listen to anything at all, but there’s playlists on there, some easy-listening things, some pop stuff, and some classical as well, you can, will I show you what, will I show you how this works?

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See also: other things to which I've linked.

Fun article about Sudowrite, which is a "deep-learning neural network that can auto-generate text."

Sudowrite works like this. You give it a sample of some writing — a research paper, a poem, a blog post — and it creates a whole lot more convincingly human prose based on the sample.

More from Stephen Marche, in the New Yorker:

GPT-3 hints at a world in which machines can generate language. The consequences are vertiginous. To spend ten minutes with Sudowrite is to recognize that the undergraduate essay, the basic pedagogical mode of all humanities, will soon be under severe pressure. Take an A paper, change a few words in the first paragraph, push buttons three times, and you have an essay that fits the assignment. Whatever field you are in, if it uses language, it is about to be transformed. The changes that are coming are fundamental to every method of speaking and writing that presently exists.

The article includes lots of examples of Sudowrite trying to write like famous authors like Kafka and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

See also: this episode of podcast All Consuming about writing tools, which is where I first heard of Sudowrite.

See also also: other posts about links and podcasts on this blog.

My bi-weekly shipments of coffee from Lancaster PA's Passenger usually come in a plain cardboard box. You know, the brown kind that you can fold up and put in the recycling bin.

But my most recent shipment came in an oddly sturdy black box that was made of this corrugated plastic-y cardboard material. (OK, I just did some research, and found that the material is corrugated polypropylene sheets.)
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Once open, the box introduced itself as Boox, a reusable box company. If I sent back the box to Boox, they'd reuse the box and I'd get a discount code from Passenger.

I like trying new things so I took them up on it. I flattened the box and slapped the prepaid shipping label on the front. Then I went to the blue USPS drop box near my apartment and crammed it in past the little steel anti-theft teeth they started putting in those blue boxes recently. It barely made it in, so who knows if I damaged it beyond reusable-ness. Hopefully it's on its way to California.

Which brings me to the true sustainability of this. On the Boox site, they say:

Boox reduces your environmental impact by 75% compared to single-use packaging. It's science, people!  👩🔬

Consumers (esp. Millennials) are choosing brands based on environmental impact. Boox helps your brand meet its goals and stand out from the crowd.

Which sure, but I can't tell if this take into account the environmental impact of me shipping the box back to them from Brooklyn to California. Maybe that's not a big environmental hit, but it seems kind of silly to be sending a fairly small box all that way.

See also:

• This interview with Boox founder
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• Article in the wapo about this
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• Other posts about coffee on this blog.

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Image taken from their site.

link one

Why Does the Pandemic Seem to Be Hitting Some Countries Harder Than Others? {new yorker}

"The usual trend of death from infectious diseases—malaria, typhoid, diphtheria, H.I.V.—follows a dismal pattern. Lower-income countries are hardest hit, with high-income countries the least affected. But if you look at the pattern of covid-19 deaths reported per capita—deaths, not infections—Belgium, Italy, Spain, the United States, and the United Kingdom are among the worst off.

"The reported death rate in India, which has 1.3 billion people and a rickety, ad-hoc public-health infrastructure, is roughly a tenth of what it is in the United States. In Nigeria, with a population of some two hundred million, the reported death rate is less than a hundredth of the U.S. rate. Rich countries, with sophisticated health-care systems, seem to have suffered the worst ravages of the infection. Death rates in poorer countries—particularly in South Asia and large swaths of sub-Saharan Africa—appear curiously low. (South Africa, which accounts for most of sub-Saharan Africa’s reported covid-19 deaths, is an important exception.)"

link two

Who cares about the Ivy League? {noah smith}

"But on a more fundamental level, how much does any of this really matter? How central are the Ivies and other elite private schools to our educational system in the U.S.? And how much would it change our country if they changed their admissions policies?

"My answer: Not very."

Semi-famous Brooklyn-based ice cream brand Ample Hills went from $19 million in total investments and 17 stores (including one in Disney World) — to bankruptcy in just a few years.

It's mostly a story about bad management. But it's also a story about how the allure of an ice cream factory is so strong you forget to keep track of how much stuff costs?

A former employee says...

Ample Hills began a pattern of aggressively opening new shops while the old ones languished [in 2014]. As freezers broke or fuses blew “we would have to throw away massive amounts of ice cream."

"They were all very simple things that could have been fixed or addressed. But they would say, ‘Oh, we just opened Chelsea so we have to put money into that shop.’” According to employees, the shops almost always were over budget and failed to meet ambitious targets. Smith doesn’t dispute that they prioritized expansion. “If something is working but just not working as well as it could, and your focus is on growth, then yeah, you’re going to make some of those mistakes,” he says.

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Full story here.