It's 100% AI-generated, including nonsense illustrations. And it's just so pointless too - there are many good, better-illustrated, and better-explained human articles about the same circuit.
I agree with "just so pointless too - there are many good, better-illustrated, and better-explained human articles about the same circuit."
However, to me, this reads more like human stupidity than AI slop. Certainly, my AIs would do a better job. Rather, the nonsequitors and errors are similar to what I've seen from lazy undergrads filling space.
I have had the misfortune of seeing many similar papers before the rise of AI.
I very much doubt that. We now have nearly-perfect AI image generation and it hasn't really changed the nature of human expression. I don't see my friends getting wildly creative. I mostly see it used for spammy blogs, spammy books, and cringeworthy corporate marketing - basically, a negative signal, rather than "ooh, AI image, I'm in for a treat". Is your experience different? If not, what changes with moving images?
Ultimately, most people don't have ideas for the kinds of personalized entertainment they want, and they don't want to be in charge of content production (even if you have an LLM do most of the work). I don't doubt that there are niches for it, especially stuff like porn, and I'm sure that pros (game studios, film studios) will leverage AI more and more, but I suspect that most of us will just want to sit on the couch, watch Spiderman XVIII, and then be able to talk about that shared Spiderman XVIII experience with all our friends.
All small business marketing material now looks exactly the same.
LLMs produce an extremely small range of artistic expression, and its kind of ironic, that while it certainly looks functionally good. It immediately becomes noise because everything looks identical.
So companies are going to have to hire creatives again, in order to stand out, and be "creative"
No, we don't. It's quite good, but it's nowhere near perfect. For example, you can see: https://genai-showdown.specr.net/ or others that highlight how far from perfection we still are.
> and it hasn't really changed the nature of human expression.
It sure has changed our discourse. Look at hackernews, where people just can't help themselves to engage in ragebait and flamewar comment threads about llm generated accusations. We've got half the people convinced that looking at ai content is like consuming food.
I'd venture a guess that it's too early to determine how this technology will change expression. A good analog would be photography, which caused a similar meltdown in the arts at the time.
I'm mostly seeing the impact of GenAI images in everydays life for example in the small posters small associations or individuals usually attach on streets to promote some small local event. We went from just text created with PowerPoint and maybe some stock image just a Google search away to now images depicting the topic closely. But yeah, it's not like a revolution.
And this personal media thing, yeah maybe for terminally online persons that are REALLY into a sub-genre but otherwise, it's too much effort, I agree. Until we get machines that can read our (subconscious) mind, that will not exist.
I don't want to say this is indicative, but my local library used AI-generated event poster/images for the past year. But recently they switched back to word/clipart event posters. When I was checking out, I query the librarian about it, and apparently they saw a 40-60% drop in attendance. On one hand, I found that hard to believe, but on the other hand, simple word/clipart event posters do have a certain inviting charm about them.
I think that word/clipart posters make it clearer the date and time, with GenAI material you end upo adding a big colorful image that takes most of the space and relegate the important bit to a second place. At least that's what I see around me.
Not even close. Current AIs have very poor spatial awareness, they can generate some kind of scene but they can't tell you where objects are in the scene, nor can they move objects into different places. They're very useful but it's difficult to be very creative with them because they can't update an image to make it more aligned with your vision for what should be in the image.
Ultimately, most people don't have ideas for the kinds of personalized entertainment they want
1:1 AI entertainment probably won't be a cold start experience.
Much like the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books of the 80's, consumers choose a baseline template, customize the characters, and interact at various points within the plot.
I know that we're discouraged from meta-comments, but what is going on in this thread? It's a nearly 800-page book about the art of programming. A huge amount of work on a topic that should be dear to our hearts. News for hackers, right?
But somehow, the discussion has three themes. It's 50+ comments of "I don't like the first sentence of the marketing copy", "I don't like the tool the author is using", and "what would happen if we train an LLM on this book?". Has anyone read the sample chapter? Did you like it? Anyone here owns volume 1 and has opinions about that?
I own volume 1 and when it first arrived I dropped it on my foot and had to go to the doctor. I have not got around to reading it again. His original x86 ASM book was good though.
I also read his Write Great Code series and generally found it to have some pretty good advice, but it was also full of things like recommendations to never trust compilers and to write lots of arcane unreadable magic code to unlock ultimate speedy hacker cred.
That being said, if you want to learn about ASM in TYOOL 2026 then you could do a lot worse than learning it from someone who doesn't trust compilers and does everything themselves.
Yeah, I'd second a recommendation of at least the first two volumes of Write Great Code. I've long suggested those to juniors who have come out of bootcamps, self-taught, or other backgrounds outside a typical CS degree and didn't have much exposure to lower level machine concepts. I was a bit let down by the third volume... not that it was bad per se, but I feel like the sw engineering process stuff it covered both strayed outside his core strengths and had been done better elsewhere already.
> if you want to learn about ASM in TYOOL 2026 then you could do a lot worse than learning it from someone who doesn't trust compilers and does everything themselves.
Not bad advice, but the Fasm forums used to be pretty good for asking questions, no clue if they are around and active still, but there were a lot of programs people had written and even a few simple OSs(including KolibriOS) which had a ton of code to read through that mostly was commented. Once you get the basics it is pretty easy to do stuff, and most of learning is doing stuff.
His earlier 32bit book was pretty decent, but super windows focused, I wish a similar work using a reasonable syntax existed for Linux, but the linux equivalent(some kind of foundations of programming or something similar assembly book) used gas syntax which is like nails on a chalkboard. Fasm is also so much nicer these days to use(masm is neglected by microsoft, but is the tool the author has used for everything).
Have you checked out paul carters assembly language book. it is free online. i'm not sure it has stuff for Linux.But you can check. also , it may be , for sixteen or thirty two bit. since I noticed it online long back. sorry voice typing.
Edit: i checked. it is for 32 bit. works on Linux. and uses Nasm.
That's weird, GNU as should default to AT&T syntax. Maybe the author switched to Intel syntax by adding the .intel_syntax directive at the beginning of the code?
Volume 1 is actually a really good book. Randall Hyde is a great author on this subject. HN has changed a lot from what it once was. It's just filled with a lot of this kind of snark and nonsense. What else would you expect when the most common take on AI on HN is this insane idea that "LLMs are just like a compiler was?" But, its not everyone. If you're interested in this topic then I think it will be worth working through.
I’ve been concerned seeing this in too many threads.
A Marketing and propaganda rule is that the very first thing people read/see sets the tone for the entire discussion. If you get everyone off track right from the jump it degrades the entire discussion and, ultimately, the usefulness of hacker news.
I read v1. It's good, but I prefer Ray Seyfarth's book. Not much interest in v2 - I haven't touched Windows in nearly 20 years and this seems much less OS-generic than the previous volume.
this is what almost every hn post is: lowbrow reflexive/reactionary responses. it's been like this for years. try to call it out and you'll be censured by dang or one of the other police officers for being "uncharitable" or something like that <shrug>
Really? I have quite the opposite impression. HN is one of the few places I can come to where intelligent conversations can be found. Sure, sometimes discussions run off the rails into the weeds, but snark is rare, and when conversations stay on track, they often add significantly to the post.
Counterpoint from someone who's been publishing on the internet for decades: no one will visit your website. It's as simple as that. You need a push mechanism to reach readers.
RSS could be it, but it's too niche. Social media is kinda it, but algorithmic feeds reward political clickbait and just because someone clicks "follow" or "subscribe" is not a guarantee that they will ever see your posts. Substack gives you a way to push content to your subscribers without an intermediary deciding what they get to read.
So no, there's no special value to having a website or syndicating across the web. There's a lot of value in backing up your Substack subscribers' emails so that you can move somewhere else down the line, and the nice thing about Substack is that they let you do that. If they stop, that's a trap.
Substack notes is non exportable; the newsletter now no longer have a link to read it on your site on substack and instead link to the substack app, and subscriptions started in the app pay Substack through Apple and Google and you can't export them.
Substack has become a roach motel but they pretend otherwise
Every single thing substack does reeks of growth hacking. I suspect that it will only get worse. For that reason alone I chose to avoid it for my newsletter.
If Substack stops supporting that feature you would end up losing all of your subscribers when you move to the alternative unless you happen to have an up to date export.
Of course, if they were given warning they would export their subscribers. I am talking about if it was cut off without warning. I do not think the majority would have a list within the last year.
Hackers always use this argument against everything because you can in fact know some things about what one person, yourself, will do in the future.
Thus they argue that you should not trust your things to other people but do it yourself, because, barring major illness, you can reasonably assume that you will try to do what is best for yourself in the future.
>because you can in fact know some things about what one person, yourself, will do in the future.
Nope. At best you merely know what your current self intends to do in the future. Whether you'll do them then, or whether you'll even still want to do them then, or be able to do them then, or have regretted ever wanting to do them, and many other such things, we don't know.
I'm not sure if you're arguing against self-determination and for serfdom. Or just making a narrow correction to one sentence in an argument that was perhaps slightly too definitive.
But obviously the key principle is about retaining control over your business, income stream, relationship with your readers, or whatever it is you value. Sure, I change my mind and make mistakes. But I don't think that's a good argument for handing over control to some other entity which is equally changeable and fallible, but not primarily incentivised by my well-being.
Nope. As per my second paragraph which you may not have gotten to:
>because, barring major illness, you can reasonably assume that you will try to do what is best for yourself in the future.
Furthermore the phrase "some things" does not actually mean all things.
So again, trying to put it another way to clarify anything that may have been unclear:
You can be reasonably certain at the time that you need to make a decision that you will try to do what you believe is the best for you. I will now not go on to make an exhaustive list showing every way that you in the future may not do what is right for you because it is normally understood that there are numerous ways in which the reasonable expectations of people can be countered but nonetheless, the reasonable expectations will still tend to hold more than any of the countering scenarios. This is why they are the reasonable expectations, while the countering scenarios are the notable exceptions that often show up in sensational news reports and fiction.
And finally I should note this comes down to the principle, which I would have thought was clear from my previous post but evidently not, that if you can reasonably expect that future you will try to do what future you thinks is best for them, you can just as reasonably expect that the future corporation you are buying a service from will try to what the future corporation thinks is best for them, without giving much consideration for what is best for you.
I do not know what you think is best, but I would normally trust future me over future corporation not owned by me but providing me a service, I guess I'm just funny that way.
on edit: Note in my first post I referred to major illness, because major illness, including mental illness, is one of the most common ways in which people end up not attempting to do what is best for themselves.
>because, barring major illness, you can reasonably assume that you will try to do what is best for yourself in the future.
Regardless of major illness or not, people do stupid things, self destructive things, ill-thought things, impulsive things all the time. At best they'll do "what they think is best" not "what is best" for themselves. And frequently not even that, as people still do all kinds of things they know are bad for them but can't stop themselves anyway.
But even if it was correct, "you can reasonably assume that you will try to do what is best for yourself in the future" is not really strong as an argument against the grandparent's:
"You can never know anything about what anybody will do in the future? You can't. Why do hackers always use this argument against everything?"
The grantparent's argument is about not knowing what you'll be doing in concrete terms, not about merely knowing some abstract guiding principle like "you'll still want to do something you feel is best for you then".
>I do not know what you think is best, but I would normally trust future me over future corporation not owned by me but providing me a service, I guess I'm just funny that way.
Even so, that's worth acting only if the pain of future corporation pulling some shit later on is bigger than the convenience you still get before that, or easier than what you'll lack going without its services.
Also if the cost of just dumping their ass then when they DO turn, and moving to another player, is big.
> You can never know anything about what anybody will do in the future?
You absolutely can know something about what someone will do in the future. You gain those insights by looking at their past and present behavior and the behavior of others in similar circumstances. Hackers tend to be pretty good at pattern recognition and can often see where things are heading. Enshittification is a pretty smart bet.
So your ex girlfriend cheated on you and now you reject all contact with women because you know that "sooner or later" she's going to cheat on you? In my ears it sounds the same when hackers say you can never buy anything or use any service, because "sooner or later" it will go to crap.
It's probably easy being a cynic, because you can always wait for decades (as another commenter argued) until you are right. In the meanwhile you have missed out on life - for no personal benefit at all.
You can do whatever research you like, but when you attempt to apply it to predicting the future, you're still speculating. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
It is just risk assessment and mitigation. Some risks are acceptable for some people and they do not need the mitigation. But for others it is not acceptable and they would find solutions.
Allow me to translate: “It a near certainty that they will fuck you over eventually; the question is will it be next year, next decade, or will you win the lottery?”
> Counterpoint from someone who's been publishing on the internet for decades: no one will visit your website. It's as simple as that. You need a push mechanism to reach readers.
I think that one should at least have one's own domain instead of example.substack.com. Substack allows for exporting posts (which would be good to do regularly just for backups in case of (account) compromise):
This strategy for your legacy would not have been successful with stratoscope.geocities.com (RIP 2009), skyblog.com/stratoscobe (died in 2023 with no data export path offered), Posterous, MSN Spaces, Vine, and many others.
I am willing to bet that most of my domains will outlive "username.substack.com".
Excellent point! In fact I do have an automatic monthly donation to The Internet Archive.
Of course the URLs all change in archived pages, but at least the content is there for anyone motivated enough to find it.
A funny coincidence... I registered geary.com (my last name) in 1994, and just used it for email. A few years later I got a letter from a group of civic boosters in Geary, Oklahoma. They even enclosed a Geary Water Tower T-shirt which I still have. They saw that I didn't have a website up on this domain and asked me if they could have it.
I explained that this would be impractical since it was also my email address.
So they registered gearyok.com instead and put up a website built around Java applets. Oops.
But it got me thinking. I put up a static page (frequently edited by me) that I called Geary Central: A Guide to Gearys on the Net. This page is still up:
Naturally I gave Geary, Oklahoma top billing for inspiring this.
A few years after that I changed geary.com to a MoinMoin wiki devoted to the same topic, and moved the old static page to its current location.
Just a few days ago, someone emailed me about how they had stumbled onto my oldsite.html page and enjoyed this "blast from the past".
In 2011, my old ISP decommissioned the server I had the wiki on. I was planning to migrate it to something more modern like Drupal, but the time and effort weren't worth it to me at the time.
I did find the latest version of the "new" Geary Central on archive.org and shared it in my reply:
If you're in the US, average life expectancy is 79, so it will probably be fine for the next ~5 years.
If you're in Canada, or a G7/EU nation, it's in the 80s, so you may have 10+ years to go, so the chances of Substack being around in the same form for that time period is lower.
What if I want people to read me without needing a subscription or email disclosure?
What's the email for anyway? So that you can get sent notifications of new posts? ... People read those kinds of emails? I always curse myself for finding a way to get them sent to myself, and file them away somewhere until I can figure out how to turn them off.
My blog used to be RSS only, because I thought email subscriptions were a plot of "content creators" and not something readers actually wanted... until one of my readers told me he really recommended adding email as an option. I did, and a surprising number of people subscribed since then.
Yes, I have found out the hard way that an entire generation or two of internet users has lost the ability to visit a website to see what's there. They rely on having notifications or emails come in so that they can react to things rather than proactively go seek them out. I tend to eschew push the forms of communication, for the same reason my mobile isn't covered in a colorful grid of apps: I want to actively be choosing what I do rather than having a set of options put in front of me that I get to pick from.
But that's all just a rant. Your core point is completely correct. If you want readers, you have to cater to this 'push' mentality, I think.
Ok, so if you want to read https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/, which is now publishing less than once a month, you prefer to refresh the website once a week hoping there's an article to read?
That's unimaginable to me. Most of the writers I read publish infrequently. Email is great. I don't have to be on any social media. Articles come in and I can read them at my leisure.
I deployed my own RSS reader to handle sites that update infrequently. That's still ultimately a pull, I just have an agent doing the pulling, and then I visit the site for my reader.
For a decade or~so I subscribe to newsletters and had skip inbox rules that archived them in a folder about the subject. Eventually I never really looked at the folders but it never bothered me as I don't really see them. Not sure if that means it works or not.
> Eventually I never really looked at the folders but it never bothered me as I don't really see them
Most people don't read most newsletters. Some people read some.
This Saturday I sent an email. It has since been opened by 26% of my subscribers, that's 4,600 people. 780 people clicked on a link.
I tweeted the same email as a link and got pretty good engagement! 20 likes, 2 retweets – that's decent for me these days. It was seen 1400 times. 78 people clicked on a link.
I have roughly the same number of followers as I do email subscribers.
> It has since been opened by 26% of my subscribers, that's 4,600 people
Sadly, open rates are no longer a useful metric in the absolute, at all. Some email providers will block all tracking pixels (so those people look like they never open anything, unless they click the link) and others will proxy all images, so they fire all tracking pixels systematically (so these people look to you as if they open every single email).
The only use you can make of open rates today is relative: "was the open rate higher or lower this month than last month?"
But it's extremely unlikely that your actual open rate (and list of who actually opened) is anywhere close to what the stats show. The only thing that still makes sense is click rates.
Hahaha it could well be that people are merely hoarding newsletter emails. I hope readers derive _some_ value from the emails, but since I'm not doing it to drive up "engagement metrics" I don't really mind.
There was a time when google toolbar had a search gmail button. I would use it to open gmail using whatever query was inthere. It happened quite often that it found newsletters matching the query. It takes quite a bit of hoarding to accomplish.
Perhaps it is even a better solution than website that vanish eventually. I might one day make a newsletter with links like:
example.com?re=you@yourwebsite.com&article=1234
Then mail you the requested article. With RE: and the same title they will even be threaded.
> What if I want people to read me without needing a subscription or email disclosure?
Medium is where you can post and get a bit of what substack offers while giving you the ability to make your post freely available via the web.
> What's the email for anyway? So that you can get sent notifications of new posts?
On substack, you get the whole newsletter in the email. you dont need to go to a website. I use https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ to put them in my rss though.
Sure, but my comment was being given directly to a user who asked for a platform that allowed X, Y and Z. I was providing them with an answer that met their stated criteria. I don’t see how other people’s configuration is of any concern.
...I use email notifications. I follow very few people (fewer than 10), so I'm always happy when an email pops up letting me know they've written something.
I don't pay attention to my RSS reader, and barely use social media. For whatever reason, email works for me.
It's not really a counterpoint when it's addressed in the article.
"The biggest pushback I hear from writers is: “But my website doesn’t have an audience! Substack does.”
But you don’t have to completely abandon social media or platforms like Substack to protect your autonomy (personally, I prefer the word sovereignty but it does sound a tad dramatic)."
I think you're conflating two things. You can absolutely have your own website, and still use Substack. Then if you do have to move off Substack, you aren't "moving" in the sense that your URLs remain the same.
Getting a list of your existing subscribers' emails from Substack in order to migrate notifications to your new platform (hosted behind the same domain name you own) is of course an important part of moving, though.
The argument from the article is that you should be hosting your writing on blog.mywebsite.com, not mywebsite.substack.com, even if those two pages are identical and are both hosted by Substack. That's the entire point it's trying to make.
Whether or not your readers visit your website or consume your content entirely through email notifications isn't relevant to the point the author was trying to make. Because despite your absolutist "no one", some people will visit your website, and having a stable location that you control yourself is important. (Also please consider that while you may have been publishing on the internet for decades, your experience may not be universal.)
It is absolutely crazy to me that anyone with a serious web presence doesn't have their own domain name, even if that website is backed by someone else's hosted platform.
The lift to make your own website is so low now, and the benefits of future-proofing are so great that it's just the right decision to make. You don’t even have to drive all your readers there, you’ll just have it available for everyone if the audience ever decides to gradually move on from substack (which seems to happen pretty much every social media platform).
I'm outside the loop so please forgive me, but what is different between substack and a self managed mailing list?
I've been subscribed to a few website/blogs newsletters for years and they appear to work fine, and I think the owners are not particularly technical, there's WordPress plugins.
Substack is trying to turn itself into a social network, so comments on substack posts by other substack bloggers let people find other blogs. This is why half the comments on popular substacks are from other bloggers casually mentioning the articles they wrote.
It also means that if you comment on a substack, other people can find all the comments you made on every substack, by default.
oh I can tell you that lately, hundreds of bots are very much visiting my website every day in volumes that I have never seen in the past... Unsure that's a good news though
The same thing is happening on one of my Blogger instances, the one where I publish about a very niche interest (old floor-mill buildings from the Romanian countryside). Most of the hits are coming from countries like Vietnam and Singapore, most of them associated with Android use, so I think it's a new-ish thing that Google Analytics' anti-bot/anti-spam algorithm just can't (won't?) catch.
I use self-hosted Listmonk. Works great in combination with my blog. But yeah its slow growth. But that's actually what I prefer, because if you grow fast on Substack, these are gone as fast IMO as people don't really read substack emails anymore after getting 10 of them every day (as subscribing is so easy on Substack). So having a slow, but honest subscribers and then sharing it on socials or reddit in places where it genuinely helps people, there will always be some who will subscribe and read.
I agree, if you don't publish anywhere and just write on your website, and you're not yet known, it's hard for people to discover initially. But in the beginning, the writint is also more for you, than for others. I haven't read from anyone that writes super good on day one. That will come with the reps, and by then, people will read you, have discovered you.
Push as in a newsletter alone isn't doing anything. It's the "show ocassional posts of you on an already captive audience of millions and especially readers with similar interests" (the whole Substack base) that does it.
you said: "...from someone who's been publishing on the internet for decades: no one will visit your website"
This is false.
It's more accurate to say that "no one will visit your website if you do not properly setup a distribution ecosystem".
It's hard work. But it works. All of my companies have been built by writing online --> distribution --> people finding my/our stuff.
Your experience of 'doing it for decades' reveals that publishing, in of itself, does nothing. And if all people do is publish (without the distribution engine), then, I agree it's a waste of time.
I write 1 hour per day. I spend about 2 hours working on distribution. Sometimes, I spend 4 hours on distribution.
I publish links to my new articles on Reddit , sometimes on Twitter. That’s enough for my posts to get to lots of people, sometimes. And when it happens, Google indexes it and it becomes one of the first links about the topics I covered. And people repost it later in other media like Mastodon, HN etc.
I don’t get how someone can have used the internet for decades and not know how this all works!
I write 1-2 hours a day but I dont spend anywhere near that much time on distribution so this is a learning opportunity... would be great if you could help me understand the activities/tasks you undertake? What do you do to spend the 2 - 4 hours on distribution? Is this daily? Or per task/article??
sure, well there are two categories of activity: (1) no-money distribution and (2) with money distribution
* No Money *
You have to invest time. On all new projects I start here, even if I have a budget. That is because you can learn a lot more by "being on the ground" so to speak.
Here are some activities you can do:
- post on news aggregator sites like hacker news (there are lots of different ones that are niche specific)
- post on social media. This will require you to build up your social media in the first place. This takes a lot of time if you are starting.
- guest content for other peoples platform
- finding similar, non competing people in your niche and create for them, link back to you.
- Spend time writing and re-writing really helpful stuff. This helps with word of mouth.
- hardest one - actually making friends. I have made many online friends over the years by taking an interest in them. Some of them are now massive. They sometimes distribute the things they like of mine
- CRITICAL: a lot of people will read the above and think "okay, but he has a network...that is why it works", and they would be correct. But, and this is key, building a network is a skill. Learn it.
When I said I spend 2-4 hours per day sometimes, these are the things I'm doing above.
* With Money *
- SEO - seo is very expensive. backlinks, promoted content, optimization
- paid traffic to content - can start the budget low but need to be skilled in paid ads to make this work.
- Paid media buys - for example paying for your content to be featured in someone else's newsletter. If they have a list of 50,000, as an example, you might pay $1,000 for that placement. If that same list was in the finance space, you might pay $30,000. It's contextual.
Even though these paid strategies are paid, they still take time.
If you write news, posts that needs discussion, information that relatively quickly becomes obsolete, then probably yes, you won't want a website because few people will search for it deliberately.
But if you're writing for yourself, articles with multimedia, or want to use advanced features, no platform provides anything close to what you can do on your website.
No one is writing purely for themselves. It's something we like to say, and there's some value in writing down your thoughts - but deep down inside, every blogger is dreaming of having a positive impact on other people's lives. That requires reaching these people in the first place.
I promise you that Bartosz would be bummed out if he had an audience of one. And while relying on HN to accidentally discover you can work, it's not a sustainable model for anything.
Every time I see posts like this one and go into comments, everyone in the comments treat writing as a hobby which they would like to turn into work and earn money from, more or less. And I suppose the words "writing" and "blogging" associate with the community around themselves in their minds, not with the text information per se.
I'm writing technical articles (blog posts) my whole life most of the time as a result of me learning something new, to structure the information on some topic for myself and others.
If it's a research, I make a post with all the information and final result of it in public, primarily for myself and sometimes for others, because 95% of the time it's not secret and there's no point to store it privately.
If it's a helpful information (software: unofficial bugfix, hacky workaround, poorly documented feature somewhere, etc), I want it to be searchable/indexed, only that.
I don't care about attribution, about who reads my writing (be it me, my friends, people I don't know, or AI), I have no incentive to push (as in post here or on social networks) or promote these articles in any way. I don't want people to get back to my site, to subscribe to it, or to build a community around it.
If the user types "How do I solve issue X" and by a mere coincidence I solved and documented it, I don't care if the user gets the solution from my website, from the scrape & repost websites, or from AI agent which scraped the site. If this helps the user to fix the issue or to learn something new, every way is fine for me!
According to hacker news users you have to monetize every single thing you do in your spare time, otherwise it's a waste of time, be it blogging, pet projects that you need to convert to SAAS etc. And if you claim that you have "fun" and "hobbies" you are a liar (or at least you are lying to yourself that you don't want to make money out of those things).
I actively skip stuff that’s on substack just like I do medium and blogger. Maybe there’s good stuff on there but it’s usually a by-word for slop. I figure if anyone has anything that interesting to say they’d make the effort and put it up on something more serious looking.
> Substack sent a push alert encouraging users to subscribe to a Nazi newsletter that claimed Jewish people are a sickness and that we must eradicate minorities to build a “White homeland.” […] The newsletter's logo is a swastika and it has pushed Holocaust denialism along with news and opinion content for the 'White Nationalist Community.' […] Substack is primarily funded by Andreessen Horowitz, a firm whose founders have pushed extreme far right rhetoric.
Your source is Taylor Lorenz, on her own Substack (with a custom domain). She apparently wasn't bothered enough to disassociate with the service. This is someone who makes claims like "Substack is primarily funded by Andreessen Horowitz, a firm whose founders have pushed extreme far right rhetoric." (Something which Wikipedia editors would be tripping over each other to evidence if it were true, but their article says nothing about it.)
There is nothing to demonstrate the claim that Substack "continues, proudly" to host such content, nor that they were ever "proud" of it. A cursory inspection shows that while the "facing" page for the group in question still loads, the underlying profile and content are all gone.
It is a known tactic of agitators to post objectionable (or even highly illegal) content on distribution networks (or in communities) they dislike and then try to get media attention attributing it to the network/community rather than themselves.
One of the first newsy types to report this particular issue, but certainly not the only one. See https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/substacks-nazi-p..., which quotes a press release from Substack. Arguably, my source is therefore Substack themselves, via Ars Technica.
> Something which Wikipedia editors would be tripping over each other to evidence if it were true, but their article says nothing about it.
Actually, this information is on Wikipedia. There's one NYT link on the Andreessen Horowitz article, and several paragraphs on Marc Andreessen's. I don't know enough about US politics to know whether all this adds up to "extreme far right rhetoric" (and I'd rather not debate that here), but there's definitely extreme, and right-wing, political advocacy described in Marc Andreessen's article. I have not confirmed whether the claims in the Wikipedia article are correct; if you dispute them, then please let me know as a courtesy (I like having accurate knowledge), then take it up with the Wikipedia editors.
> There is nothing to demonstrate the claim that Substack "continues, proudly" to host such content,
But they do continue to host it. This has been a problem for years (see e.g. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/substack-e..., https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/feb/07/revealed-how-s...). Do you need an article from last month? Or do I need to link you to a Nazi blog directly? They are not very hard to find: just type "site:substack.com" followed by some keywords. It took me 20 seconds to find one called "White Free Press", with such wonderful articles as "David Lane and the Foundations of His Racial Ideology", "The Contemporary Conceptual Framework of the White Ethnostate", and "The Immutable Animosity: blacts [sic] hate White People, and Nothing Can Change It".
> It is a known tactic of agitators […]
Quoting the Ars Technica article:
> Of those accounts created in February, only the Substack account is still online, which Fisher-Birch suggested likely sends a message to Nazi groups that their Substack content is “less likely to be removed than other platforms.” At least one Terrorgram-adjacent white supremacist account that Fisher-Birch found in March 2024 confirmed that Substack was viewed as a back-up to Telegram because it was that much more reliable to post content there.
> “Groups that want to recruit members or build a neo-fascist counter-culture see Substack as a way to get their message out,” Fisher-Birch told Ars.
I don't think "this is all some kind of contrived false flag operation" is a particularly likely explanation.
> There's one NYT link on the Andreessen Horowitz article
I see no mention of the far right in the article; the only NYT source with "right" in the title that I can find is "The Tech Right Gets Its Own Phyllis Schlafly", but this is only being used to cite Boyle investing in some aerospace/miltech companies.
As for Marc, we're at multiple layers of guilt by association now, but even so I don't see what's extreme about anything attributed to him in his own article. In fact, it all looks to me like stuff that I'd expect a very large percentage of Americans to find agreeable.
> But they do continue to host it.
FWIW, I consider that the actual literal Nazis were a step beyond typical contemporary American white supremacists. Regardless, this is still a goalpost shift. Note that the headline of your own source explicitly describes Substack as having offered an apology, which is the opposite of how you respond when you're proud of what you're accused of.
> I see no mention of the far right in the article
I see no mention of the far right in Taylor Lorenz's article. I do see mentions of Donald Trump, DOGE, and the Republican party in the NYT article cited in the "Politics" section. As I understand, these entities are considered "right-wing" in US terms, and many of their actions would certainly be considered "extreme". ("Extreme" is somewhat subjective, so for the sake of foreshortening this argument, I'll set it at the objective threshold of ten thousand dead children.)
> "The Tech Right […]", but this is only being used to cite Boyle
So, you found a source describing Katherine Boyle, in her capacity as manager of Andreessen Horowitz's American Dynamism fund, as right-wing. This seems to support Taylor Lorenz's claim.
> but even so I don't see what's extreme about anything attributed to [Marc Andreessen] in his own article.
Aside from working for DOGE, and strongly supporting cryptocurrency and AI, I would agree with your expectation that a large percentage of Americans would find his views agreeable: I would expect slightly under half the US population. These views are not so popular internationally.
As a reminder: I would rather not debate this here. TFA is an article about Substack, not Andreessen Horowitz's political leanings: we should be discussing Substack, not its investor.
> FWIW, I consider that the actual literal Nazis were a step beyond typical contemporary American white supremacists.
To start with, the Nazis were much, much tamer. For example, the Nazis neither owned, whipped, nor branded people in 1924, whereas the second KKK had only just started to fracture at that point. It was only once the Nazis got control of the state apparatus that they got really bad: the Night of Broken Glass, Aktion T4, the invasion of Poland, the Holocaust…. Adolf Hitler (claimed to have) modelled parts of the Nazi regime on American white supremacist practices.
The Nazi party started with the recruitment of Nazis. By the time they were an organised fascist paramilitary capable of attempting a coup (1922–1923), it was almost too late to stop them.
> Note that the headline of your own source explicitly describes Substack as having offered an apology,
A qualified apology, of the form: "We're sorry if our policies lead to the systematic platforming of white supremacist hatemongers, and of course the active promotion of this neo-Nazi organisation by our computer systems was a one-off mistake, but we won't change our policies: if we don't give Nazis a voice, then they'll say even worse things!" That's not really an apology: it's a "we're sorry for the bad press we're experiencing".
By "contemporary" I meant contemporary to today, since those are the people who would potentially be doing these Substacks. I guess that was the wrong word.
It is, because the people currently defamed as Nazis have had ample opportunity to bring such a thing about, and they are clearly not doing so. Every aspect of the ideological comparison is a stretch.
> The Immutable Animosity: blacts [sic] hate White People, and Nothing Can Change It
Not in any aspect comparable to a Nazi. Gotcha. Hey, out of interest, have you read Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler? Here's a bit of Ludwig Lore's translation, Chapter 2:
> The great mass of people could be saved, even if only by the utmost sacrifice of time and patience. But no Jew could ever be freed from his opinion.
(I'm not sure whether you're seriously arguing that bloggers have the capacity to construct offshore death camps to which they deport "undesirables", or the power to unilaterally and militarily invade Poland, and the fact they haven't done so reflects well upon their characters; so I'll not attempt to refute that point until it is clarified.)
I feel like the transition from substack to website + newsletter wouldn't be terrible, although I'm sure your traffic would decrease after making the switch.
One of my first jobs after graduate, I used to share a lot of posts with my coworkers until a certain point where one of them said "I don't know how you read so much content", worthless to say him was a Master's student, so I'm expecting him to be able to consume more content than myself, although different more towards academic stuff.
Yeah so I guess the hundreds of billions of page views from organic search every single month is just a total myth?
As somebody who has made a lot of money publishing on the internet you absolutely can get people to read your website organically but it takes specific strategies and you can't just write about whatever you want however you want and expect traffic.
I have a blog, I don't really promote it, and no one reads it.
Now, there is an argument that there's nothing on my blog worth reading, and yeah there might be truth to that, but regardless my traffic is on the order like 100 unique views per month, and I don't know what percentage of that is just scraping bots.
I'm fine with this, I had no delusions of becoming a famous writer or making any money from it or anything, my blog is basically just a dumping ground for thoughts that I think are interesting, but if I actually did care about people visiting my blog I would probably use Substack or something similar.
You mention RSS, but Substack is about paid subscribers, is it not? What do you think converts a Substack user to a subscriber; is it just a numbers game?
Yep, let's suppose an average HN user reads 30-100 articles a month on independent websites (personal domains) posted on HN. Out of 100, he probably subscribes to 0-2 at best (via RSS/e-mail). Now, imagine how many times you need to appear on HN to get your own audience. There is too much friction for a user to subscribe.
Substack is similar to a social platform. People open it to read new articles in a similar way to HN, and they can subscribe to anyone by pressing a single button. There is a recommendation feed as well.
Since Google search for tech content is dead, getting views on independent blogs is extremely hard.
Why not do all automatically? My concern with substack is that it's a single point of truth. If they decide to blanket paywall everything after they sell to private equity for example. Or start to force all users to pay to be visible at all including old content. You're at the mercy of whatever they decide.
Most writers just want to write and don't want to start maintaining servers and databases to handle the collection and storing of emails. This is why they outsource that functionality to a service like Substack.
It would be nice if services like Substack supported exportability, so when a writer eventually becomes successful enough to migrate away, or the platform itself is no longer a good fit, then there aren't any losses.
Convenience is good, but I don't want writers & readers to have to make a faustian pact every day.
For sure. I had a huge following on my wordpress blog 15 years ago and email was how everyone got notified of new content. I'm sure there's a way to at least do sms now if people want that level of notification.
Yes, I think people who move away from Substack already need to have a brand and a number of followers to drive people to their personal websites, even if they use Ghost. And I do get the concerns that Substack has some super bizarre and awful content in the mix. Their feed shows me stuff every once in a while, from uber-conservative right wing Christians to conspiracy theory nonsense. But my dumb soccer blog/podcast putters along and grows slowly, in some cases, not even from social media posts. It's an interesting platform.
this tide will turn, and the day of reckoning is coming for AI slop and large domains owning the search results. small publishers are going to have their time very soon.
Substack also comes with a brand, and having a substack is a social cue that you are a higher status person, it goes with the beefed up LinkedIn profile, playing tennis and conspicuous consumption.
Having a substack shows that you are time rich, yet at the same time, it does not come with overtones of vanity. Serious discourse allegedly goes on with substack, if you are writing there, then you are rolling it with the pros.
Yet every platform goes through phases, ending with the inevitable 'enshittification'. Soon the reader will see substack as a byword for best avoided, much like having to download a PDF or open an inevitably paywalled mainstream media news article, not worth the click.
With one's own website you are outside of the loop, and the theory still holds that, if you have anything worth seeing, they will come. However, most people will stay on platforms until there is something to actually buy.
Recently I was doom scrolling until I came across this vacuum cleaner for cats, that enables you to harvest the fur. I want this as a joke present for a cat I know, so I was prepared to escape the platform to buy the product. If it was a lengthy essay on how to make felt clothing from cat fur on substack, then I probably would not have clicked. Yes I am that shallow!
Hence, if you have something to sell, then an independent website is what you want, and a sales funnel to get people there. This does mean social media, the newsletter, SEO, the substack and even paid advertising.
ACM has been leaning heavily into AI-generated content for their journals in the past year, and this article is no exception: it appears to be 100% AI generated and full of LLM verbiage.
There's something hilarious about that, but also, snake eating its own tail.
> Ya, there are already three pure ad hominem comments here with no examples.
You should probably understand Thomas' comment in part as a reaction to Zitron attacking Thomas in a pretty low-brow fashion, essentially for saying "hey folks, AI coding works and you should be using it":
The bottom line is that Ed Zitron, like Gary Marcus, built their entire brand on being AI contrarians; they can't say anything positive about it without qualifying it with a more damning negative. There's nothing wrong about having voices like that, but it makes them unreliable narrators. I am apprehensive about AI and its externalities, but I don't want to be caught citing either of them for that reason.
I swear to Christ before this comment I had completely forgotten that Zitron had ever written anything about me. Zitron isn't an engineer and doesn't code, so I'm not all that het up by his attempt to rebut me.
> You should probably understand Thomas' comment in part as a reaction to Zitron attacking Thomas
Sure, but an ad hominem is still an ad hominem regardless of one's personal feelings (it took me a good minute to figure out who "Thomas" is).
Otherwise, I agree, and I try not to cite extremists or bullies on either side. I don't even really care that much about defending Zitron, but I do put him on in the background because he does so many podcasts as I find it soothing to listen to someone rant and rave against the tech bro overlords, even if some of the shit he says annoys me. But he does show his work sometimes and wanted to point that out.
> I do think the valuations are quite and they would need to meet the reality, but don’t think there’s gonna be a crash or we’d ever go back to pre-AI era. It would more or less would be a correction to valuations.
Something to consider: would your description also apply to the dot-com boom of the late 1990s? The internet was real, the ideas for internet business were real, and we were not going to the previous reality. But the valuations weren't quite right and a "correction" happened at some point.
When people talk about AI crash, that's what they mean. Not that AI is a hoax, but that the correction could be quite violent and have effects on the broader economy.
But there’s a difference between fearing mongering with a crash and a long term correction. The correction would make all the startups/companies that created a wrapper around frontier models go away, but the ones that truly solved a problem would remain.
Also I remember reading that Anthropic is on its way to be profitable in 2028
With respect, the way you talk about corrections makes me suspect you weren't working in tech in the US at the turn of the century.
A "correction" in this model isn't a reasoned and gradual re-evaluation of the market cap of every company. It's a broad pullback where people panic and no one wants to be left holding the bag. Money shifts into other assets for years and tech employment, incomes, and the availability of funding takes a big hit.
As to your comment about profitability... every unprofitable company is on a path to be profitable. Some even get there.
Plus, look at it this way: Kellogg's is a profitable company and a part of almost every person's life. Does this make them worth trillions of dollars? No, they just provide boring, commodity products, their valuation is basically a low multiple of the assets they hold and the revenues they bring. There's a future where OpenAI or Anthropic are more powerful than all the world's governments combined, but also a future where they're Kellog's.
It's not just emotions, it's also a matter of time and uncertainty.
I was in a buying situation where my old lease was expiring soon, I had a second kid on the way, and the last thing I'd have wanted is to buy a place where I'd have contractors milling around for weeks or months to make various repairs. I was willing to pay a hefty premium for a place that's in a move-in condition.
I don't think this extends to "you'll get $10k less if you don't vacuum", but it's a common courtesy on a million-dollar transaction to maybe not leave a mess.
The page is entirely AI-generated and each piece is written with the same silly thesis (things used to be better and then they ruined everything). I see why this works, but it's frankly disappointing to see so many smart people fall for it over and over again. There's no human on the other end of these essays that believes these things. They're not true and not meant to be true. Yes, they're what we want to hear, but that shouldn't be enough.
As to why it exists: when generation of content costs next to nothing, I think that question is harder to pin. The basic answer is "clicks".
Could be a copy/paste error, or could be an LLM trying to cite its own work by just looking at a list of sources used and guessing which one the claim came from.
But how far behind? Is he writing the article or the prompt?
What struck most of all is the deep disconnect between author and authority. The tools one (tools are better than they've even been) stood out as a great example of this. People like to say things got worse, but it read like somebody asked a LLM to show how they got worse, ignoring all the ways in which they got better. A human who'd ever used tools would recognise the omission.
The site may be slop and poorly made, but that doesn't invalidate that consumer products of a given quality tier are lower quality than they used to be. People like to see it confirmed because it matches their lived experience.
That's like saying "politicians are crooked, so every bad thing you can think of about politicians must be true". It doesn't and we shouldn't fall for it.
In fact, the one industry where enshittification is widely embraced is our own, so I guess maybe it's projection?... Most other goods and services are not deliberately designed to get worse over time. We're the masters of giving people something cool for free and then progressively worsening their experience until they're forced to pay.
Things like appliances don't get worse on purpose. They sometimes get worse as a combination of market pressures and regulations. Take fridges: you can buy a full-sized kitchen fridge for less than $600, that's kinda crazy? And yes, it probably won't last a lifetime, and they won't make it serviceable because it's not worth servicing given today's labor costs - if your bonded-and-certified repairman quotes you $500, you're going to toss it out either way.
Indoor GPS reception is spotty, especially in urban / high-rise environments, so I don't think that's a realistically marketable product. Not unless you some have some window- or balcony-mounted probe, which would then require battery changes (although I suppose you could make it solar-powered).
