Coyote Tracks
Coyote Tracks
Watts Martin
I’m a science fiction/fantasy author and a technical writer. A few years ago I was known for being a technical blogger on Tumblr; now I blog right here. I left Twitter a while ago, but you can find me posting on Mastodon and Bluesky now. My pronouns are he/they.
Latest Posts
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.
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?
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.
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.
On hating what's happened to technology over the last quarter century, yet still kind of loving it in spite of it all.
Musings on Micro.blog and the features and flaws of 'gentle' social media in our current age.
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”...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
Two years ago, I moved back to Florida for family reasons; a year in, I mused on the changes, both good and bad, that the move brought. Now two years in, the most obvious life change is, (probably) unfortunately, employment. The...
In which I fall down a rabbit hole with a purported “AI novel writer,” and wonder what the result tells us about generative AI’s future. I spent nearly six years as a technical writer at an AI company, and it was one of the best jobs...
There’s a maxim I see a lot among tech reviewers, which goes something like this: Buy a product for what it does now, not for what you hope it will do later. The product may never get a major new update at all, and it certainly might not...
About a year ago, I moved away from the San Francisco Bay Area, back to Tampa Bay, Florida, where I’d lived for (mostly) all my previous life. Florida is not the same place it was when I left. The metros feel more urban, more alive, than...