Semiapies

One writer recently wrote his own program for the job, but at least he eventually finished some books: https://hughhowey.com/neo/

Me, I just write in Emacs, set up a makefile, and export to PDF with Pandoc. But I admire the work to make a comfortable yet undistracting writing environment.

There's plenty of NSFW stuff on Bluesky. You just have to set your account as able to see it.

> Fundamentally, I know that HN has plenty of people who will react with "ha-ha, human authors should pack their bags"

And yet they still seem to object to LLM-generated blog posts and LLM-generated comments here, where literary expectations are much lower.

The quality of LLM prose may improve quite a bit, but I suspect LLMs writing fiction will asymptote towards the quality of a writer who has never interacted with other people, but only read other fiction. Even if you dismiss any value of the author being a sapient being to the process, a human author has a far larger training set...

Doubly so when you consider the history of every previous advance that was supposed to free people from the tyranny of needing a developer to make software, from COBOL forward. Some people indeed made their own applications, while everyone else rejected doing that and preferred to pay someone to do it for them.

Comparative advantage ("Is this the best use of my time?") is a real thing, and the human time to make and maintain non-trivial software will always itself be real.

Or just canceling scientific research because keywords like "diversity" showed up in the abstract.

> vibecoding is much fun as being IT manager

I think part of the popularity is that it appeals to people who want to be managers but lack people skills.

That only means these very specific things get removed.

And only mostly. For all people say "AI can do hands", I still see a lot of six-fingered hands in social media propaganda slop.

"A spymark is a hidden signal that makes your work traceable"

Not a single example provided of anything that could be honestly called "your work", just a bizarre attempt to stigmatize accurate detection of genAI output.

What was that PG bit about "submarining"?

It's called "writing skill". But you can just farm that all out to an LLM, if you like.

LLMs seem overpowered for the use the author suggests, finding and marking problems in prose. Actual human-written programs exist for that purpose, things you don't have to bludgeon into not praising you or semantically ablating your work. Start with langtool or the like and start adding others. Even art-bollocks mode for Emacs can be useful.

AI is the only product where prophesies of doom about it are part of the marketing strategy.

A question repeatedly asked by different people throughout these comments, but nobody answers.

Who in their right mind would feed any random LLM crawler their website's content?

"Heart disappointment" also shows up.

What, you don't like hearing about how someone used the new AI to AI an AI in order to bash something together that will never get updates?

I believe it's a response to something posted recently, but I don't know what.

Which was naturally used to train the models.

If you're routing like it's 1999, sure, 404.

On the other hand, if it's a CRUD app and you're filtering a list of entities by various field values? Returning that no items matched your selection (or an empty list, if an API) makes more sense than a 404, which would more appropriate for an attempt to pull up a nonexistent entity URI.

I'm maybe less pessimistic, but I expect in the next decade or two, I'm going to spend a lot of time fixing apps that people who were moderately technical vibe-coded years before. They seemed to work well enough until they didn't, and at some point, they became central to the business.

MS Access and so many more "you won't need a programmer again" dev tools over the decades blazed the trail.

> Sometimes when I log into Hacker News, more than half of the posts are about AI.

And I don't ever see it under a fifth, anymore. There is a Hell of a marketing push going on, and it's genuinely hard to tell the difference between the AI true believers and the marketing bots.

It's not a "reminder" for people who've never been to the site before. Especially not when the icon isn't even visible on some devices, like my phone in portrait.

It's at least a factor in why I value HN commentary so much less than I used to.

My having to prune my subscriptions says otherwise.

And they're always desperately insisting that won't go away and you can't escape it. It stinks a lot of Big Lie techniques.

Illusion. Mirage.

Of all the things people have trotted out this cliche for, this may be the dumbest.

Also, I want it to do everything that this really cool house I saw does. But, I only want to pay for a day or two of labor in order to accomplish every feature that massive contruction project had, plus this one key feature that that house didn't have.

What? You can't do that? My husband/ son/ nephew/ gardener knows how to draw with pencils, I can have them do it if you won't see reason!

On the one hand, I think everyone should try to put together a simple website with a few pages in raw HTML, just to get an idea of how it works. And actual, semantic HTML is not terrible in this day and age, much better than it used to be. You don't have to learn a static generator to put up a website, because you're the static generator.

On the other hand, I've written a lot of HTML since the 90s. And there's a dirty secret behind why so many static generators exist--the effort of slapping together something that builds a site how you want it is similar to learning an existing system. Often, that's a short build script rather than some expansive framework.

> But let’s substi­tute a different phrase: “learn to cook”. People don’t only learn to cook so they can become chefs. Some do! But many more people learn to cook so they can eat better, or more affordably. Because they want to carry on a tradition. Sometimes they learn because they’re bored! Or even because they enjoy spending time with the person who’s teaching them.

This is actually why I think more people should learn some coding (and why there should be more HyperCard-like environments for non-professionals). It makes the computer or phone a tool to do the things they want, not just what some programmer in SF wanted to write and try to market.

Looking forward to a brief rush of editorial cartoon-level works doing absolutely nothing not already covered by parody or fair use. Maybe a bad horror or porn movie.

Then nothing, just like happened with Winnie the Pooh.