jonbodner

There is no rebuilding society because of energy. All of the oil and coal that could be extracted by a civilization that only has wood for fuel has been used. If we go back to the Stone Age, we aren’t returning to the present. If we’re lucky, we will get to the Middle Ages.

It’s not potential, it’s actual. There are court cases and settlements and everything. I’ll be getting a little money from Anthropic.

As for how I feel, I think that LLM companies are incredibly short sighted. If I was them, I’d be funding newspapers, non fiction writers, fiction writers, and artists in general in exchange for the exclusive rights to index. They get content to improve their models and the world gets new knowledge and art. But considering the public good is passé and LLMs have done pretty well by stealing everything. This might be why I’m not a billionaire.

For Go it had to be a Gopher (as it is the mascot for the language). My editor showed me the artwork and I approved it.

Yeah. I don’t think people are aware of how few books are purchased. At this moment, Learning Go is 45,855 on Amazon US across all physical books. This is in the top few percent of book sales. The number tends to bounce between the 50,000s and the 30,000s, but sometimes slips higher or lower. One or two sales in a week moves a book quite a bit.

I'm the author of O'Reilly's "Learning Go". Here are the last 13 months of paperback book sales:

- Mar 2026: 124

- Feb 2026: 140

- Jan 2026: 157

- Dec 2025: 306

- Nov 2025: 484

- Oct 2025: 218

- Sep 2025: 176

- Aug 2025: 136

- Jul 2025: 317

- Jun 2025: 230

- May 2025: 237

- Apr 2025: 165

- Mar 2025: 367

Sales are certainly down, but it has gone up and down in the past.

Since the 1st edition came out in 2021, it has sold roughly 20,000 copies (about 10,500 English paperback copies, 3,800 ebooks, and 6,700 translated copies). The 2nd edition came out in 2024 and has sold roughly 13,000 copies (about 8,300 English paperback copies, about 3,000 ebooks, and about 1,600 translated copies).

Most of the money comes from O'Reilly's online platform, not from book sales. That has been declining lately, partially because the latest edition is now over 2 years old, but also I suspect that people are cancelling O'Reilly subscriptions and just relying on LLMs (which have indexed all of the books and used pirated copies to do so).

And gold is a non reactive physical object. Storing gold is cheap compared to the infrastructure required to keep Bitcoin ledger information.

I’m the author of Learning Go from O’Reilly, so I might be a bit biased.

What I’ve found is that different publishers put different amount of effort into producing good content. O’Reilly is almost always excellent. Others are less so.

It’s hard to find a dev who is willing to invest a year of their life to write a book that is likely to make almost no money. It’s doubly hard to find devs who write well.

Given these filters, two or three good programming books a year sounds pretty great.

Oh, you sweet summer child.

Who do you think "private supporters" are in Saudi Arabia?

And no, I don't think anyone with anything resembling power or wealth in Saudi Arabia supports human rights.

HRW execs admit via email to the editor in chief of a nationally respected magazine that they raise money by bragging how tough they are on Israel. And then they are tough on Israel, and you think it's a principled stance. Maybe they just have profitable principles, I dunno.