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Scott Rosenberg

@wordyard.com
1.5K followers 1K following 203 posts

Webbin' so long. Past: Axios editor, Wired/Backchannel contributor, Grist editor, Salon co-founder. Author of some tech books. Up next: Our Web (ourweb.is).

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Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 24/09/2026
I would not want to get within kicking distance of one of these clankers but it does seem like they're getting steadily more agile, at least in China. On-the-scene reporting and commentary from Julia Scott in Shanghai: www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-just...
linkedin.com
I Just Watched Robots Waltz with Humans. The Robots Led.
On Tuesday night, in a stadium in Shanghai, I watched five humanoid robots – their metal casings bedazzled like tuxedos – waltz five women around a stage with ballroom élan. It was very Uncanny Valley...
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John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Also notable about the recent vibe shift in AI is that it has made Jensen Huang – a plainly motivated CEO of the world's largest company, familiar sort of capitalist, and someone with a legible perspective on the industry surrounding him — sound like a heretic www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/o...
You're creating something, some entity, an agent, that is smart, that is capable, that is relentless - and the workings of its mind, we don't really understand. The chief scientist at OpenAI ——
You know, Ezra, look. I just don't want you to contribute to that. I don't think software's relentless.
Aren't they trying to make very persistent, highly persistent models?
Because I made it that way.
But that's how they're making it.
Yeah, but that's not persistence, it's just on. Persistence - there's willpower. There's no willpower here, it's just electrical power.I want to make sure I actually do understand where you are on that divide. Is this something fully new? Is this something that requires something new from us? Or is this more like something old? Are intelligent machines different from the machines we've had?
Well, almost all of technology and civilization is built on layers of understandable technology, which at scale becomes fairly extraordinary.
The fact that we can connect to the internet by just holding a phone up — I mean, it's kind of weird, you know? That we're connected to every piece of information in the world on this little tiny device, just in the air.So I'd like your perspective on R.S.I.
I think that R.S.I. is, fundamentally, how things are done. So we use software to design a computer to run software to design a computer to run software to design a computer. That's basically what we do — recursive self-improvement — because our computers are getting better every single year.
And in fact, it's getting better than, faster than that every single year, because we use software to make software better. That is called computer engineering. We've been doing this for a long time.
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Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 19/09/2026
@greatdismal.bsky.social's "The street finds its own uses for things" very much in action.
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Max Read @maxread.info · 10/09/2026
one takeaway i had from working in digital media in the 2010s was that it's pretty bad for your brain and your understanding of your career/the world when your industry becomes the main subject of twitter and twitter becomes the main context for your industry. also bad for the industry overall
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Elephant Mastodon @emath.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
Literary fiction is coming. It is going to revolutionize the economy. We know that China has already got a start on literary fiction. We can’t afford to be left out of the literary fiction economy. Think of your kids. They might already be engaging with literary fiction.
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(EEK!)ristina, PhD @bookishmalarkey.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
Read this excerpt ages ago and it always stuck with me
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Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 28/08/2026
Warsh said "“Oversharing policy deliberations and overcommitting to future decisions can lead markets, businesses and households astray." But all this time I thought markets function best when information is abundantly and equally available! Did something change?
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Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 18/08/2026
Dear New York Times: I am one reader who uses multiple browsers on multiple devices — not multiple users sharing passwords to a single account. I am not a "family" and don't wish to upgrade to a family subscription. Please stop requiring me to type in emailed codes and suggesting I pay you extra
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Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 23/07/2026
If you grew up listening to "Ziggy Stardust" then you get it: this is maybe the most bonkers yet fitting screwup that could ever be
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Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 23/07/2026
Here's a bit of a 🧵 with this one user's experience trying to get a little smidge of productivity out of generative AI coding. TLDR: it's taken three years, but (one of) the bots has finally accomplished a simple task for me, so chalk one up for AI.
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Dare Obasanjo @carnage4life.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
The fundamental challenge of software development is becoming how do you build reliable software using AI agents that are frequently wrong and often don’t follow instructions while your engineering team increasingly doesn’t understand the codebase because they didn’t write the code?
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Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 11/06/2026
LLMs from all the big AI cos keep telling tales about a lighthouse keeper "Elias Thorne." Great story from @404media.co @samleecole.bsky.social based on fascinating paper excavating the likely logic. Shared training data and methods lead to shared fixations. www.404media.co/elias-thorne...
404media.co
Chatbots Keep Telling Stories About Lighthouse Keeper 'Elias Thorne'. We Might Know Why
LLMs including ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude are obsessed with telling stories about lighthouse keepers and clockmakers, and one character named 'Elias Thorne' has made his way from chatbots to Amazon bo...
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Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 03/06/2026
This thread is a useful explainer on the difference between autocomplete and LLMs. Though I still think the analogy is helpful for dispelling the magical "it's thinking!" response. Read all the way through for an amazing demo of a heat-map tool showing LLM "attention" processes in action
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Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 27/05/2026
" Imagine an English teacher asking people to turn in their five-paragraph essays and everyone turns in a bad novel. That’s what product managers are dealing with in the era of vibe coding." From @ftrain.bsky.social, the whole newsletter is a great read aboard.com/the-ai-hango...
aboard.com
The AI hangover will be delightful
After the bubble pops, it will be like Times Square on January 1st.
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〽️ɪɢᴜᴇʟ 🔜 GodotFest @bitbra.in · 27/05/2026
Too many people still confuse Software Engineering with writing code. Code is the artifact. Software Engineering is understanding the problem, making tradeoffs, designing the system, reducing complexity, and deciding what shouldn't be built. No amount of 'vibe coding' can help you with this.
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Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 27/05/2026
Getting serious Saul Goodman vibes from Paxton in this pic
screenshot of NY Times photo showing Ken Paxton in a loud blue sport jacket with a downturned smile greeting a supporter
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Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 20/05/2026
Vibe-coding CEOs are inducing "the corporate equivalent of a bad acid trip" aboard.com/dear-vibe-co...
aboard.com
Dear Vibe-Coding CEO: Please Stop
Your interactive C-suite demo memo is not going to get you results.
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Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 19/05/2026
This is both funny and sad. You cannot do "AI-assisted research" AND "AI-assisted verification." If you MUST use the bot for research, you better do the verification yourself. And if you're writing a book about truth, you oughta know that?? www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/b...
nytimes.com
Book on Truth in the Age of A.I. Contains Quotes Made Up by A.I.
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Andrew Hickey @andrewhickey.500songs.com · 19/05/2026
All this. Basically, unless you have read at least four books specifically about Robert Johnson, at least two of them published within the last decade, literally every single thing you think you know about him is not just wrong, but *risibly, ludicrously* wrong.
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Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 17/05/2026
Just wanna say it took roughly 25 years before you could even imagine getting booed in public by mentioning the Web/internet. Generative AI has now speed-run this road in, what, under four? And the bubble hasn't even burst yet.
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Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 11/05/2026
Thanks @404media.co @jasonkoebler.bsky.social : "I have a finite time on this earth that I mostly want to spend interacting with other human beings. I don’t want to be the person arguing with a robot." www.404media.co/your-ai-use-...
404media.co
Your AI Use Is Breaking My Brain
AI writing is impossible to avoid, is making everything sound the same, and is driving us crazy.
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Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 07/05/2026
Remarkable essay — written with utter clarity and sobriety yet fully impassioned — on "refusal to work" as a response to our militarist/billionairist world.
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Mark Follman @markfollman.bsky.social · 05/05/2026
PART 2 of MY INVESTIGATION: Watch how ChatGPT gave me chilling advice—as I simulated planning a mass shooting. This 9-minute video and story contain shocking behavior from OpenAI’s chatbot. OpenAI keeps saying it improved safeguards, but that's not what I found. www.motherjones.com/media/2026/0... 🧵
motherjones.com
ChatGPT gave me chilling advice—as I simulated planning a mass shooting
I asked about imitating the Uvalde attacker, defending against police gunfire, and more—everything short of directly stating intent to kill.
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Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 05/05/2026
Great story. This is a perfect ourobouros -- AI-makers desperately need to hoard data for training but their own data centers' needs are crowding out the public resources that preserve the data.
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Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 24/04/2026
er this explains a lot
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Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 23/04/2026
@ftrain.bsky.social on the coming software glut: "It’s easy to build software in 2026, but it’s still hard to support, market, and maintain it." Will software just become an ambient tool like pencils and paper? It's just there and we put it to work? Not yet, but ... soon? aboard.com/claude-desig...
aboard.com
Claude Design Just Wants You to Stop Burning Tokens
Are you ready for Zoho-ification?
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Anil Dash @anildash.com · 21/04/2026
Substack's CEO now trying to scare people into *only* distributing their content through their proprietary app, not email. (The link he posted warns users away from email.) It's not enough that Substack's locking in publishers & readers with "notes" and comments, now they're escalating tactics.
Substack CEO Hamish McKenzie:
"Email is an important distribution channel. It should not be your only one." then he quotes Mills Baker on his team:
"I know l've said this a lot, but I cannot emphasize enough that email will continue to change, to become less deterministically reliable as a means for distributing your work; this is a huge part of why we got into the app and feed business, as you may know! You can blame a few things:"
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Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 18/04/2026
I guess next up SCOTUS will say nothing about the substance of what we're learning this weekend but immediately launch a mad crusade to find and punish the leaker(s).
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William Gibson @greatdismal.bsky.social · 16/04/2026
The Wetland Project has been my favorite alternate-reality radio experience since it began. Since it only happens once a year, you can’t become accustomed to it. Close your eyes and be washed over by the sonic reality of an isolated bog on Saturna Island!
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Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 14/04/2026
From what I'm hearing it sounds like Justin Bieber's avant garde production of "Krapp's Last Tape" was controversial?
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Andrew Hickey @andrewhickey.500songs.com · 10/04/2026
Tons of stuff in here -- as well as Neil Innes there's also Ray Davies, Tav Falco's Panther Burns, the Bangles, the Sugarcubes, TMBG, Jonathan Richman, the Replacements, Kirsty MacColl, Nick Cave, Continental Drifters, Mojo Nixon, Alex Chilton, Jad Fair, Roky Erickson, Robyn Hitchcock...
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Tim Maughan @timmaughan.bsky.social · 08/04/2026
no please NYT, tell me more of this ancient discovery your digital archeologists have unearthed (source: www.nytimes.com/2026/04/08/b...)
Satoshi was also very likely a member of the Cypherpunks, a group of anarchists formed in the early 1990s who wanted to use cryptography, the art of securing communications through code, to free individuals om government surveillance and censorship. The Cypherpunks interacted mostly through something called an internet mailing list. Ancestors of today's message boards, mailing lists were large group emails in old typewriter font that subscribers received in their inbox. To communicate, respondents replied-all.
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Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 02/04/2026
did we cross a line where we now say that a company with $ X revenue is "an $ X company"? Or that it's "worth $ X"? Sure, getting to $1.8B in revenue with two people is kinda nuts, but you haven't created $1.8B in value. NYT oughta know this, right? www.nytimes.com/2026/04/02/t...
nytimes.com
How A.I. Helped One Man (and His Brother) Build a $1.8 Billion Company
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Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 01/04/2026
It kills me that we now have 35+ years of experience designing online interaction and we still screw it up, so when someone like Derek who has been studying and writing about this for nearly that whole time weighs in, I pay close attention.
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Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 31/03/2026
When something as utterly weird as skibidi toilet becomes just another hunk of "Valuable IP" aftermath.site/skibidi-toil...
aftermath.site
Skibidi Toilet Community Goodwill Circling The Drain After Hollywood Studio Takes Over
Since Invisible Narratives bought the rights to Skibidi Toilet in 2023, fan creators have faced copyright strikes and clashed with the Creator Alliance trying to "professionalize" their fandom
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Rest of World @restofworld.org · 31/03/2026
Rest of World is seeking our next ambitious Editor-in-Chief to reimagine our publication for this new era of tech volatility. We’re looking for a visionary leader to take the reins of our world-class newsroom. Join us: restofworld.org/about/hiring/editor…
restofworld.org
We’re hiring an Editor-in-Chief
We are seeking our next ambitious and visionary Editor-in-Chief to lead our strategic pivot, as we reimagine the publication for this more urgent mandate.
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Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 31/03/2026
Very cool use of internet time. 💯
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Anil Dash @anildash.com · 27/03/2026
You must picture Sam Altman holding a knife to Tim Berner-Lee's throat. We are in a truly existential level of danger when it comes to the survival of the open web, across every front. This year is when it all comes to a head. www.anildash.com/2026/03/27/e...
anildash.com
Endgame for the Open Web - Anil Dash
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
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Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 27/03/2026
"Just trying to keep the lights on." New album "The Former Site Of" from the New Pornographers and @acnewman.bsky.social out today... can't wait to hear it all. www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-U0...
youtube.com
The New Pornographers - Votive (Official Music Video)
YouTube video by The New Pornographers
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Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 26/03/2026
This is a phenomenally great podcast that I highly recommend (and I am not even interested in sports!) and very sad that it is so relevant again
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Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 26/03/2026
RIP Tracy Kidder, a great writer who knew how to tell human stories. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/25/b... "Soul" was totally my inspiration for "Dreaming in Code." I thought "OK, he did an incredible job with hardware, what about software?"
nytimes.com
Tracy Kidder, Author of ‘The Soul of a New Machine,’ Dies at 80
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Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 24/03/2026
The NYT is writing about Bojangles fried chicken landing in NYC www.nytimes.com/2026/03/24/d... but we've been here before, my old friend @billmckibben.bsky.social was covering this exact same story back in 1982! www.newyorker.com/magazine/198...
nytimes.com
Every Southern Fast-Food Chain Wants a Five-Piece of New York City
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Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 20/03/2026
Exactly right from @slhamlet.bsky.social: This is so much the heart of it -- willful ignorance about history, previous experience, prior art. It's always year zero in the Valley. Too often, a giant cycle of ignorance. From www.nytimes.com/2026/03/19/t...
“They glommed onto the term ‘metaverse’ without really understanding the concept,” Wagner James Au, author of “Making a Metaverse That Matters,” said in an interview. “Their efforts on their metaverse strategy seemed completely indifferent to what previous platforms had learned.”
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Toby Buckle @polphilpod.bsky.social · 19/03/2026
mill's dedication: this is a jointly authored work a century & a half of male editors: mill exaggerated out of a sentimental fondness for his wife mill's letters: no, really, most of "my" work was partly by her, i really could not be clearer on this
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Asa Dotzler @asadotzler.com · 13/03/2026
Seen on the web: "Every time I complain that vibe coding produces slop, people tell me I can get better results by writing more specific instructions. Good idea! But I think we need a catchier name for the concept of writing specific instructions for a machine to follow."
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Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 10/03/2026
The Grammarly "famous editor bots" fiasco that @caseynewton.bsky.social wrote about is hilarious, but the thing that gets me is that they filched the names/reps of all these high-profile writers & journalists when most of them would agree that the best editors are largely unknown and work in shadow
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Derek Powazek @fraying.bsky.social · 06/03/2026
Jack liked the bsky idea because he thought by turning Twitter into a protocol he would be excused from having to do the messy community work that’s the actual hard part of social media - an ethos that almost destroyed bsky in the beginning and still lies at the root of all their bad decisions.
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Scott Rosenberg @wordyard.com · 18/02/2026
Big fan here of DeLong's substitution for "artificial superintelligence" of "Anthology superintelligence"--"humanity’s collective mind present and past stored in and as our information technology capital stock." LLMs? A new interface to All That. With real opportunities and big pitfalls.
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