Tom Scheinfeldt

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I Asked 5 Social Media Managers for the Best Clickbait Headline—They All Said the Same Thing

@DKThomp Authorship has always been more complicated than we care to admit. The lone genius at the typewriter is a flattering fiction.

@DKThomp Think about how many classical thinkers used an amanuensis. Do we really imagine those people (often wives and other women ignored by history) never added a word or turn of phrase to the dictation?

Writing is thinking, and people who outsource the full writing process to AI will find their screens full of words and their minds empty of thought. But also: All writing involves and has always involved “outsourcing”—reaching outside of the writer’s mind to pull in pieces of the world, before and after the work of making words. Writers draw their ideas from other people, books, articles; after writing they often rely on outside copy editors, fact checkers, transcribers. Some of this stuff is just going to be done by AI in the future, and the boundaries between “good behavior” and “bad behavior” will have some blurry lines, and we should be honest and open about the blur rather than declare everybody with an open Claude window a part of the slopclass. Anybody who says AI transcription of long interviews obliterates the identity of a writer is being a little silly. But what about copy editing? Claude is a fast and decent copy editor, but it is inhuman to rely on it for that function? Is it moral to google “Econ papers on income transfers for child poverty” but immoral to write the same thing as an AI prompt? What about throwing 500 muddled words into ChatGPT and saying “does this make any sense? what do you think I’m trying to say here?” That’s going to be useful for some people. At an aesthetic level, I don’t like copy-pasting AI paragraphs into articles and pressing publish. That feels like me cheating myself. It feels like de-skilling. But the idea that “using AI” is anathema to the identity of being a writer is, in a few years, going to sound an awful lot like claiming that “using a computer” is a violation of the craft of writing. (Which, haha, maybe it is and we should all just go back to Steinbeck and his pencils; but talk about ships that have sailed.)

Has a finance quant reverse engineered the history seminar? (No, but it’s good click bait.) New blog post ICYMI. foundhistory.org/future-tokens-…

Wait a minute.Two air traffic controllers on duty for all of LaGuardia?? There are currently two cops on duty monitoring the hole in the ground on my street!!

My latest post explores Jordan Rubin's Future Tokens project, which aims to make common analytical moves "callable." Functionally, the project identifies repeating patterns of thought and builds them into Claude Skills. Rubin arrived at these operations trying to solve problems in finance and product work. But they map surprisingly well onto moves historians have been teaching graduate students for generations. foundhistory.org/future-tokens-… #AI #DigitalHumanities

@rbthisted Also, the humanities are busy teaching the students while the sciences are out chasing grants.

The denominator seems relevant here (as total humanities funding is shown in the green line bouncing along the bottom of the figure): bit.ly/3PuK77h

“Where we’re paying about a third of the costs of research in science and technology, we’re footing the bill for almost all of the costs in the #humanities … It’s a substantial investment on the part of the universities." bit.ly/4rSGm9e

Just an Ice agent being paid to stand behind a TSA agent who's doing all the work but not getting paid at all

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I teach history and build software for historians

I need this

New on my "Briefly Noted" Substack: DOGE's ChatGPT humanities purge; Digital history after vibe coding; Musk's orbital data centers; Testing and education; AI reliability vs. trust; and more. Go ahead and subscribe! foundhistory.substack.com/p/briefly-note… #AI #Humanities #NEH #Education #DH

🌿Springtime in Maine is a great time to think about your research. We're here at NEA, not just for the lobsters, but to help you research! 🦞Learn about how we can help here: sourceryapp.org ✨More about NEA: newenglandarchivists.org/spring-2026 #RemoteResearch #NEA2026

@Wisedog4 @NedStaebler @PeterMeijer GE relocated to Boston and promptly went out of business.

@NedStaebler @PeterMeijer GE moved its HQ from Connecticut to Boston because of workforce issues as a principal driver (and a vague notion of hostility to business in CT). My tech company was founded in Boston for workforce issues. But I thought everyday about moving it to Austin because of taxes.

To make this clear, the doom loop goes: 1. City/state hike taxes to raise revenue 2. Corporate/individual taxpayers leave (Washington State is here) 3. Tax base shrinks, tax revenue falls 4. Either cut spending (lol) or raise taxes; if latter go to 1 and repeat

@Timodc The median Fox viewer thinks it’s 1986.

Now Ari Fleischer is on talking about how Iran was on the cusp of weapons of mass destruction and this war is what “victory looks like.” Maybe the median Fox viewer is just in a haze and thinks it’s 2003.

The AI market all depends on the time horizon. If you had bought one share of Amazon at its IPO in 1997, you’d have spent $18. In 1999, you’d have $76 and would be flying high. In 2001, you’d have $10 and lost half your money. Today, you’d have $240. #AI #History #Tech #Stocks #Investing