He's also got several nudges to enter your email and subscribe to his blog. And mentions getting 50+ emails a day that he has to respond to and mentions he uses AI to respond to them. He seems to like blasting people with AI content, and also as this blog post mentions, gets sent a lot of AI content himself. It's kinda weird, why is he doing this lol
Not sure where the “blasting people” take is coming from. I’m not for or against it, people should use whatever tools work for them. I do have a few real concerns, like its ability to convince us so quickly, which is why I wrote about safety and the need for regulation. That doesn’t mean I’m anti-AI. Like any new tech, there’s good and bad. I use it, I write about it, and I share my experiences; that’s all I’m really doing.
He's writing the kind of stuff that might get popular on HN, then posting it here so we go interact with his blog. He'll collect emails and gain a reader base and maybe start a substack or throw up ads on the side.
I could see this kind of AI astroturfing being a real problem communities face in the future, where you just scrape the top posts on a community and then generate blog content related to those, then post your content back at the community.
Rinse and repeat and you don't have to be a programmer anymore.
I think people don't object to making money as much as being underhanded about it (trying to bootstrap from zero to money while not making it clear you're currently at zero) and also using AI slop (or slop of any kind) to quickly generate content.
People would respect this more if it was content lovingly generated for years, and then the author went "hey, maybe I can promote this on HN?". But artificially promoting worthless, slop content, is going to generate this reaction.
I echo this sentiment. One of my favorite periods of my life was college, actually getting to learn about some advanced topics in CS. Then I graduated and got a job and now I struggle so hard to learn new things (despite lecture videos and textbooks and LLMs existing) without a professor grading assignments/giving exams/that you can talk to, or classmates.
I’m thinking about enrolling in an online college just for fun. Though the problem I have is that I think the Venn diagram of colleges that are online, aren’t expensive, have advanced CS/ML courses, have an experienced professor that you get to interact with is pretty much zero. If anyone has suggestions, do let me know.
Try not to beat yourself up too much about it, I certainly have and it hasn't been very useful to do so.
You have a finite amount of energy in a day and learning takes a lot of energy. It's why a kid's job is the learn.
You could try front running the learning, but it will impact your energy levels at work. It still takes a monumental amounts of discipline, but you may have the energy to make it work.
Georgia Tech has a great online MSc CS program (OMSCS) that's very affordable for what it is, though the amount of direct interaction with the professor varies from class to class.
A bit off topic, but does anyone know why there's only one Bluesky relay, or can direct me to an article? Even if the hardware requirements are high, I'd think someone would've made a second relay by now.
Incredibly cool. I enjoyed playing it for a bit but was not huge on some of the characters or art. It'd be cool if you added a level editor so we can add our own scenarios
