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natbennett

464 karma · joined September 16, 2023

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natbennett··on Unsealed Briefs in Authors’ Case v. Microsoft/OpenAI
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.

natbennett··on Unsealed Briefs in Authors’ Case v. Microsoft/OpenAI
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.

natbennett··on Unsealed Briefs in Authors’ Case v. Microsoft/OpenAI
A deep question.

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

natbennett··on On caring for user data: NeoVim caused Vim undo files to be deleted
I was also a very early user of Neovim.

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

natbennett··on Unsealed Briefs in Authors’ Case v. Microsoft/OpenAI
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.

natbennett··on Unsealed Briefs in Authors’ Case v. Microsoft/OpenAI
It’s not unfalsifiable. Non-commenting Hacker News readers are observable by looking at the traffic that HN drives to other websites.
natbennett··on The LLMentalist Effect (2023)
> 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.

natbennett··on Product Backlog Problems: Why Your Hierarchy Is Broken
Just delete stuff you’re not going to do.
natbennett··on Maybe we shouldn't be reviewing all this code
> 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.

natbennett··on Maybe we shouldn't be reviewing all this code
“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.

natbennett··on Should We Have Kept the American Empire?
“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.”

natbennett··on Composable Tests
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.

natbennett··on Let's not call it "tech debt," it's just "mess"
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.
natbennett··on Let's not call it "tech debt," it's just "mess"
Author here. Do you generally find that people who are not software developers understand what you mean when you say "technical debt?"
natbennett··on Staging patches with git add (2024)
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

natbennett··on Netflix employee fired for sharing personal details in retreat trust exercise
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.

natbennett··on Don't Take the Black Pill [video]
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.
natbennett··on I regret migrating to Codeberg
Firefox is an interesting choice as a company that wasn’t affected by identity politics given how Brendan Eich left the company
natbennett··on Patreon laying off 20% of staff
They are not a “pure middle man.”

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

natbennett··on Patreon laying off 20% of staff
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.

natbennett··on Patreon laying off 20% of staff
Patreon just does this every few years. At least Jack Conte didn’t post a video of himself crying about it this time.
natbennett··on TK, or the secret to effortless writing (2024)
I do this a lot but I use “TK:” with the colon to make it unambiguously grep-able (stands out better visually too)
natbennett··on Why it's so difficult to produce American-made medical gloves
Headlines and articles are typically written by different people with different goals.
natbennett··on Automating AI Away
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.)
natbennett··on Software Bonkers
The phenomenon this describes is the most important effect of LLM coding tools, and this is my favorite description of it.
natbennett··on Software Bonkers
This was posted in March 2026.
natbennett··on The future of Flipper Zero development
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!

natbennett··on The future of Flipper Zero development
Nope! Only occasionally. But it’s handy on those occasions.
natbennett··on The future of Flipper Zero development
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.
natbennett··on Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected
This article is at least the sixth restatement of a single Reuters article that has been posted here.
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