To most of us that's worth a ton, whereas he's probably had enough front-page posts that there's less value to him, although still likely more than $12 worth.
>enough front-page posts that there's less value to him
On the countrary I'd say it's probably even more important - without (amongst doing other "thought leader" things) getting on the HN front-page regularly an influencer's value to the industry disappears (not criticising him here)
That's bad news for all of the other "AI influencers", off the top of my head I can't think of any with remotely my track record of hitting HN.
(That's because they're all busy attracting millions of views on TikTok and YouTube, which are much more impactful channels than my dedication to blogging like it's 2005.)
That's what I meant by other thought leadership things - that's all covering different niches. For what it's worth, I think you do useful work and are a respectible influencer.
I'd also say don't be down about your use of blogging - I'd say it makes you more valuable, there aren't that many decision-makers who are going to sit through a bunch of breathless YouTube videos...
P.S. I hope you don't object to me using the term influencer, assumed you were on-board with it since in your post announcing your sponsorship you referenced Freeman & Forrest, "influencers on tap" / "building turnkey influencer marketing programs as a service".
What strikes me about that is how much "dead air" there is without background music and how much of a long-format that was for broadcast.
You just wouldn't get away with that on TV now, the closest thing is some twitch or youtube streams, but even they'd have relentless background music ( and donation/subscription thank you sounds ) and other media at the same time.
But an actual non-live, edited programme? This whole 90 minute programme would be edited down to a 10 minute segment with endless repetition and audio stings, even on the BBC.
To me this shows how much we've lost from the TV format and the ambition it once had. Somewhere since it has fallen into a weird combination of lack of ambition but with a self-congratulation, where programmes often restate what they are doing as being ground-breaking.
> This whole 90 minute programme would be edited down to a 10 minute segment
Don't forget that this 90 minute program is itself an edited down version of the original series: "It features four of the original programs in a compiled and edited feature."
It comes up with a scenario where it could be a problem ( license removal ), and then it generates why a license might get removed ( "cost-saving" ).
It's not a person thinking, so there's no real thought to whether it is really a likely scenario, it's just something that sounds plausible.
I read too many blogs, I've come to spot these phrases that trip a feeling of, "Wait, do people really do that?".
You'll still have someone along in the comments to suggest that this article isn't AI slop, and that people really do remove individual one-drive licenses from active people in an organisation to cut costs, that this is just "edited" by AI, etc.
But it's slop from start to finish. Or in LLM speak, "The slop is real".
Related story: I recently watched a new video by a well-known YouTuber whom I was subscribed to for years. Something was off with the video: the script sounded like LLM slop. It sounded as if the author provided some bullet points on the main content of the script, and then let the LLM "expand" on it, with its typical, overly verbose, mode-collapsed LLM style. Then the YouTuber seems to have added some light edits to the script himself because it did sound real occasionally.
This was just after a few minutes of video and I didn't finish watching it. At a quick glance, I didn't see anybody else pointing this out in the comments. Disappointing.
How can I be so certain about LLM usage after just a few minutes? It's both the fact that it sounded like slop, and the fact that I intuitively know his real writing style from past years, and it simply sounded very different this time.
An article about OneDrive being substantially LLM written is sort of okay (who cares about OneDrive by some Office365 blog), but if people you thought you like resort to these methods I feel betrayed.
I had something similar happen where someone linked a blog article, I thought it sounded like slop, especially since they were posting 2-3 articles a day, but I wasn't sure so I checked their back catalogue.
I then saw they've always written like that, and always posted 2-3 articles a day, so I figured they're prolific and LLMs copied their style.
Then I read their first post again, and realised I should check the wayback machine.
Sure enough, they had gone through their entire post history, and had rewritten it with an LLM, to make it less obvious when they started using them.
Now, this was always a bit of a junk site, a knock-off Boing Boing, but it seems incredible to me that someone would replace their original posts with AI gen.
Surely it destroys any reputation you might have?
A site they've been running for nearly 20 years, overwritten by slop.
So he is rewriting the past without any visible indicator that he did so, and with the original publication date. That's deceptive and borders on unethical.
I get the feeling lots of blogs that are making advertising money are incentivized to do this: the most SEO buzzwords, the most "clinical" language, the most adjectives... I get that "this isn't right" feeling often now and I usually just close the browser and do something else.
Damn this is horrible. So the author chose to waste everyone's time by expanding with cow manure. I generally don't read much articles online anymore since they are all likely to contain slop unless authored by known non-slop users.
Yeah, lab leak is hard enough to contain with human viruses, but labs have well established protocols to prevent it happening.
Computing doesn't have good protocols except for air-gapping, we really just have lots of layers of best-effort detection, and billions of devices which mix data and instruction often in a careless fashion.
I used to not believe in the dangers of AI or the risk of internet-collapse from "rogue AI", but a genuine self-mutating virus could genuinely take down the internet and need an entirely new separate net. ( Or we'd discover if the current backbone actually has the power to break encryption to stop it. )
And this time, you can bet any new internet would be corporation captured. CompuServe and AOL failed because of the open internet, but we're a very different world now, governments would support the corporation led locked-down approaches for "safety".
I don't for a second believe the capability is actually there yet, but it's no longer unthinkable that such a thing could be created in a lab within a decade. Once out in the wild, there's a lot of idle compute out there to harness for self-improvement and spreading.
I hate it when companies use this kind of trick to get around legislation or privacy concerns.
"Employees are able to turn off tracking".
Sure, but there is a power imbalance, and employees will come to understand ( although never stated in any handbook ) that the rate at which they disable it will be taken into account in performance reviews.
Just like "unlimited PTO" is not a benefit, because employees self-regulate their use down to less than they'd get if they negotiated a fixed amount.
It's a twisted legal trick to get out of an obligation.
Often this kind of thing is put in as a relief valve to stop people demanding legislation. They can push back by pointing to this kind of measure, despite knowing in practice that employees aren't really free to use it.
A fun experiment, and cute if not for the lag. A full 14 seconds between the pen stopping writing and the result,
What I'd find interesting is the trace of that 14 seconds. How much is the Remarkable processing, how much is the claude transcription, how much is the let-go start-up / processing, etc.
I haven't used the latest reMarkable devices, but the first/older ones takes multiple seconds to save notes to disk. I remember having similar issues for my own file syncing daemon I tried to make for my reMarkable, where it took many seconds before the filesystem event actually was fired away, it might still be the same issue today I suppose.
This is my experience too, I've worked on code bases which made heavy use of attributes, and they work really well to provide static per-type information, but if you see them as a universal problem solver and try to go too fancy, you'll find yourself in trouble.
Fluent builders are nicer to work with than attributes, although it sometimes feels weird if the defaults are nearly fine but not quite, and you wish you could just reach for a single attribute rather than having to traverse down 3 layers of builders to change a single property.
It frustrates me too, it really feels like the next breakthrough will be when someone gets agents working "natively" with LSP on large code-bases.
Anthropic added LSP support to claude-code, but the current implementation is worse than useless, because any changes aren't reflected fast enough, so it's constantly working on outdated views / compilation caches, and it gets in a right muddle between its "internal" state / understanding in context, the real-world file, and the LSP.
If it could just leverage LSP to apply refactorings it would be amazing, but it feels like the LSP can't keep up, and I don't know if that's an LSP problem or a claude problem.
So we binned the LSP plugin and we're back to watching a machine find/replace, because while waiting on that is slower than LSP, it's a "Action => Wait" which the tooling understands, while LSP is "Possibly Wait for LSP to catch up => Action" which it doesn't understand nearly as well.
I suspect the LSP plugins also need better skills that pair with them so it reaches for them more often.
It hurts my soul to see it reach for find/replace to rename a class, complete with mistakes made in complex solutions where you might have name clashes in different namespaces. Something the LSP handles without problem, but can trip up an LLM.
I wonder, is the problem here that LSP is updating too slow all the time? Or just that there’s a chance it will update very slow, and you never really know if you’ll hit that chance, so your model always has to do the “long time wait” just in case? It seems like it ought to be possible for LSP to report that it is still processing, in the latter case, somehow…
I'm not an expert, but my reading of the spec is that LSP can handle generic $notifications, but there isn't a specific standard for readiness reporting beyond "Initialize / Initialized", which isn't suitable for monitoring on-going staleness or readiness post-file-detected change, the spec has that as a single first-time initialization.
There are notifications (i.e. `textDocument/didChange` ) that you can send to the LSP to help it along, but again you might end up racing the notification from the client making the change and any file-watchers you might have running.
I suspect the answer will come in the form of some kind of more powerful LSP implementations with generous memory caches so that disk changes are just another buffered input that can be disregarded if already stale, no longer seen as the source of truth, and the LSP becomes the real source of truth, so everything can coordinate through it, operating mostly out of memory.
Another avenue for better success will be more research into faster compilation and better incremental compilation for languages with slower compilation.
Maybe one day we'll even get AI agents directly manipulating syntax trees, and the code to get there being written back as merely a side-effect, but that seems like sci-fi compared to the current state of play. LSP is still very document based, and of course LLMs are also trained on oodles of source.
LSPs only really pro-actively send diagnostics (error/warning/info/suggest[/code action]).
Everything else is responsive; the client asks for symbols in this document, or completion on this line, etc. And if the client is aware of document changes (which are versioned), it should notify of those before requesting new symbols/etc, but that's not difficult.
I don't know that it's mandatory, but I definitely implemented servers so that they would complete processing changed documents before responding to any later requests.
And if it's just the client re-using cached symbols without asking for an update (which should be very fast if nothing has changed); well, that's foolish.
That logic has a glaring flaw, that while tulips might be in short supply, the price is driven by everyone else doing that too, so there'll be a glut of new blubs in the future, so the future price shouldn't be assumed to be the current price.
Anything self-replicating can't hold to "current price best predicts future price".
what happened with the silver rule 7 is different from the tulip craze.
Hunt brothers buy a bunch of silver, lots on margin (bank borrowed), government saw what was happening and literally changed the rules of the market to force them to mass liquidate when they couldn't meet a margin call (all of the sudden). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Thursday
Having perhaps only a thin understanding of the Hunt births legacy, I was remembering that as silver was bought up, suddenly formerly unprofitable silver mines were reopened, people who had silver began to sell, etc. Suddenly we came to find there was a lot more silver than the Hunt brothers had cornered and the price crashed.
(But I'll (re)read the history in the Wikipedia link, thank. ;-))
While that was true, that was a negligible effect. Silver mining production stopped because ore purity became (and remains) low. Consider the now times of refiners no longer accepting less that pure silver, sterling, constitutional, 80%, 40% isn't getting refined currently due to a massive backlog (read: demand for silver). Reopening mines (and purifying ore to pure silver) remains unlikely in the near future because of this backlog. The core demand for all this silver currently is AI datacenters. There is also a weird acid shortage that's preventing refining from operating at full capacity too.
Lots of weird things happen with silver right now. Even weirder things when you go digging behind the curtain. Even a simple question about 'how much silver exists' is weirdly obscured (we've consumed {rendered into a state where it would be uneconomical to refine it back to pure silver} a substantial portion of the above ground supply). And with backroom whispers of silver confiscation (to fuel AI-datacenters)... lots of 'boating accidents' are being reported.
The history of silver, and pricing on the market gets muddy and grimy, with a lot of perverse incentives.
