Recent submissions

Comment · 1 month ago
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.

Comment · 1 month ago
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.

Comment · 1 month ago
A deep question.

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

Comment · 1 month ago
I was also a very early user of Neovim.

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

Comment · 1 month ago
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.

Comment · 1 month ago
It’s not unfalsifiable. Non-commenting Hacker News readers are observable by looking at the traffic that HN drives to other websites.
Comment · 1 month ago
> 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.

Comment · 2 months ago
Just delete stuff you’re not going to do.
Comment · 2 months ago
> 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.

Comment · 2 months ago
“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.

Comment · 2 months ago
“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.”

Comment · 2 months ago
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.

Comment · 2 months ago
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.
Comment · 2 months ago
Author here. Do you generally find that people who are not software developers understand what you mean when you say "technical debt?"
Comment · 3 months ago
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

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