i love writing. i never let agents write for me. whether it's docs, or tweets, or shitposts, or even prompts (okay maybe that one's harder as agents manage other agents) there's a simple reason for that: i still strongly believe that writing is thinking. it's a skill i hope to never give up. it's also important to me that whatever i say is always authentic, mistakes and all. my favorite posts are the ones that i just full send without any editing i suspect it also helps with prompting. being able to clearly express what i want, and knowing the vocabulary i need to be able to direct my agents does seem to make for more effective usage of agents. in the same way that engineers have an advantage when we prompt agents to write code, because we are intimately familiar with the words that make up the discipline knowing the right word incantations to get an agent to produce a desired goal almost feels like spellcasting. as models get more capable, and that input box looks more and more like a magic box that can output anything, words become the interface between you and the genie there may come a time when we give up the keyboard in exchange for brain-computer interfaces. but until then, i'm writing every word.

I’ve pointed out that AI is killing cold outreach. Let’s check in on how that’s going. We’re months away from the Fall *2027* PhD admissions cycle and I’ve gotten about 75 inquiries. I expect this to increase exponentially until December. And this is just one of 10-15 categories of unsolicited email I get. Sadly I’m long past the point of being able to open all mail. On top of that, there is a new wave of spam / attempted extortion from a company called iLands that lets people run unmonitored agents. tedium.co/2026/09/11/ilands-… One response to my previous post — what’s wrong with needing introductions for outreach? Why am I sad about the death of cold emails? It doesn’t affect me much, because I’m well established in my career. But once upon a time I was the one writing cold emails. Growing up in India, I didn’t have many connections to rely on for reaching out to prominent researchers. Without cold emails, I wouldn’t have ended up where I am today. Of course this is far from a catastrophe, but there was something magical about the egalitarian potential of the internet, and we lose something when we go back to clubby hierarchies.

TMLR has faced a deluge of submissions, necessitating stricter desk rejection policies due to limited reviewer capacity Co-EiC Nihar Shah reached out to authors of 10 papers slated for desk reject. Could they answer questions about their *own* submission? medium.com/@TmlrOrg/asking-a…

I've written 70+ recommendation letters for students applying graduate programs in my career. This is the saddest one I have to redo. // A former undergrad student got denial of entrance with a 5-year ban, when flying to the US for PhD study. As usual, no reason was given. I can't imagine what he have gone through.

I don't write a lot of papers these days, but the ones I do write, 90% of them are AI generated + light editing

I've been unsettled lately. Reading messages or papers feels like dissociating. Everything seems a bit alien, even if it's completely human. I've had a realization: When our simulations finally exited the Uncanny Valley, they brought the Uncanny with them. nsaphra.net/post/uncanny/

TMLR has refocused its acceptance criteria to place more emphasis on clear writing. Read more in this blog post: medium.com/@TmlrOrg/increasi…