natbennett

Luckily I don’t think these people are particularly representative of people who buy fiction.

It is probably why sales of things like self-help books are collapsing.

And there are people who exclusively read AI generated fiction. These people mostly weren’t reading a lot before. AI in a lot of cases isn’t replacing existing fiction, it’s offering a different product.

Genres where ghost writing is a already a big part of it and where authors routinely publish multiple books a year might end up incorporating AI more but right now you’d have to lie to readers to do it.

A deep question.

The component that I believe AI researchers miss is the parasocial relationship.

I was also a very early user of Neovim.

The way I personally remember it being positioned was “Vim, but with breaking changes.”

What I find interesting about this is the evidence that OpenAI believes that GPT-5 can replace genre writers (e.g. G.R.R. Martin and that this is why genre authors are mad at them.

The fact that they believed this is legally useful because of the definition of fair use, so I see why the Author’s Guild is emphasizing it, but the authors I know don’t talk about it. They’re very angry about their work having been used without compensation to create the model, but not because they think it can replace them.

Whenever I’ve seen AI researchers talk about the possibility of AI writing fiction they always sound very confused about why people read novels.

It’s not unfalsifiable. Non-commenting Hacker News readers are observable by looking at the traffic that HN drives to other websites.

> Delegating your decision-making, ranking, assessment, strategising, analysis, or any other form of reasoning to a chatbot becomes the functional equivalent to phoning a psychic for advice.

Lots of comments talking about how recent accomplishments disprove the article but I think this bit holds up pretty well.

LLMs are very good at tricking people into thinking they have capabilities that they don’t.

Just delete stuff you’re not going to do.

> The vast vast majority of shops are not going to adopt Extreme Programming

True!

> and cut their velocity in half

That’s not how pair programming works.

“It doesn’t scale” and “it’s unreasonably difficult for many people” aren’t the same thing.

It scales fine to 400+ engineers. You do have to be willing to hire specifically for pairing tolerance.

“Only an extreme blood-and-soil nationalist would prefer indigenous anarchy or tyranny to imperial democracy, prosperity, and rule of law.”

This sentence is extremely funny in the context of actual ethnographic research on “indigenous anarchy.”

After a bunch of experiences like this I will now basically only use test runners that automatically run the tests in randomized order.

Gotta catch that stuff early.

I do make the assumption that the reader is trying to look competent to their boss/clients yes. If that's not the reader's goal then I have very little to offer.

Author here. Do you generally find that people who are not software developers understand what you mean when you say "technical debt?"

In the case of a newly committed file you can add just the file with

git add . -N

And then review the text itself as part of the git add -p workflow

The issue here isn’t that this guy shared something about his personal life it’s the particular personal details. It’s possible to share information about your personal life without talking about your drug use or your therapy or your drug use at therapy.

It is irritating that people expect you to understand what reasonable personal sharing is without explaining explicitly and goodness knows I screwed this up when I was younger but “don’t talk about your personal life at all” is bad advice.

If you haven’t interacted much with people raised by conservative Christians in the United States, they often have strong feelings about how they were raised.

Firefox is an interesting choice as a company that wasn’t affected by identity politics given how Brendan Eich left the company

They are not a “pure middle man.”

You should talk to someone who works at Patreon. Or a larger creator on their platform.

They provide a lot of services and support to their bigger creators.

Last I heard they also do their own payment processing, which is a substantial technical problem.

Patreon just does this every few years. At least Jack Conte didn’t post a video of himself crying about it this time.

I do this a lot but I use “TK:” with the colon to make it unambiguously grep-able (stands out better visually too)

Headlines and articles are typically written by different people with different goals.

I’ve got a test that checks to see if “Logger” has been imported anywhere in my Elixir project, and if it finds one it prints out an explanation of why this project shouldn’t use Logger and what it should do instead. (Which is— emit OpenTelemetry events.)

The phenomenon this describes is the most important effect of LLM coding tools, and this is my favorite description of it.

This was posted in March 2026.

Oh yeah that’s how you’re supposed to do it. But it’s entirely possible to set up a system that uses RFID key fobs that uh, doesn’t.

In the case where it was most useful to make copies they did eventually replace the system with one where the keys weren’t copy able. Which was better!

Nope! Only occasionally. But it’s handy on those occasions.

Flipper Zero is one of the handiest little pieces of tech I’ve ever owned. Being able to copy RFID keys is occasionally fantastically useful.