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
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...
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...
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...
“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...
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...
The common wisdom seems to be that Apple is critically behind in AI, but that makes some 'AI triumphalist' assumptions that bear examining.
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,...