Some of us actually enjoy writing code, and wish to preserve the skill, so we have no motivation to offload the task to an LLM. Do LLM coding evangelists also badger illustrators, asking why they don't just embrace machine learning image generation? Do they tell people they shouldn't have human friends because chatbots exist? Do they insist that musicians slough off their creativity like a molting snake, and just let a computer generate their songs?

There is also a big, uncomfortable truth regarding "AI" coding tools: They are trained on open-source code, yet they ignore the licenses attached to that code. If it's unethical for me to copy-and-paste MIT licensed code without including the license text, then it's unethical to let an LLM do it on my behalf.

LLMs are paving the way to a dystopia where there's no motivation for humans to create, and that world sounds miserable.

"People say that you should not micro-optimize. But if what you love is micro-optimization... that's what you should do." -Linus

My long-running website damninteresting.com and its affiliated projects (e.g., omiword.com) earn me a combined ~$700/month profit on average. Donations have been declining, however, so I don't know if I'll be piping up in next year's thread.

If you’ve recently dipped below, definitely still post.

I personally would still want to see your comment.

I love your website. I stumble upon it again every other year and I'm always amazed by the quality of the content and writing. I was reading your articles on my Windows Mobile phone, ages ago!

Have you also had a decline in traffic in the last 18 months? It seems like the entire independent web is getting strangled out.

Thanks! We had our 20th birthday earlier this year, so we've certainly been around for some vintage devices. Over the years our primary audience moved from desktop web browsers to mostly mobile readers, and now our largest audience is podcast listeners.

Site traffic is indeed down in recent years. The largest decline was when Facebook introduced "boosting," and stopped showing our posts to 90%+ of our Facebook followers overnight. I despise advertising, so I was unwilling to cave to their demand to "boost" our posts into ads. I'd have been happy to pay a reasonable monthly fee to reach our audience there, but that option was never available.

That big dip in traffic came with a big dip in donations, and as a consequence I eventually had to move from a part-time day job to full-time. The sharp reduction in free my time led to a sharp reduction in original content on Damn Interesting, which further shrunk the pool of people willing to donate.

This is a spiral that some would classify as "death," if I were willing to let it die. But it settled into an equilibrium where it pays for itself, makes a modest profit, and remains rewarding. Frankly I'd probably still do it even if donations dried up entirely, the research and writing give me a sense of purpose that would be difficult to replace.

I used to hope that a wealthy benefactor would discover us, and decide to fully fund our project for a few years, giving us space to realize more of the project's potential. But such offers come with strings attached, and I don't have the stomach for most of those. Perhaps I am broken.

I love this site - have you considered monetizing with like e-books or other offline offerings, if you don't already?

Also, your traffic might not be counting those of us like myself who use an RSS feed (a la Feedly) - those links don't go to your site, they just go to, well, the link. =)

Thanks! We do indeed have a sort of e-book monetization; donating above certain thresholds gives one access to download an e-book version of our entire catalog.

And true enough that RSS traffic is largely uncounted, but there are many other indications of reduced visitor count--server-side logs, comment count on original content, number of email subscribers, and that sort of thing.

This is how I fear my own website will be if the trend continues. Platforms gave, and now they're taking away.

At least what you have built will endure. Even if your invested just enough to keep the lights on, you would still have a trove of fascinating content. It's something to be proud of.

> Dumb question: who’s Firefox target user?

These days, it seems to be people who:

* Don't want to be using a browser owned by an ethically dubious corporation

* Want a fully functional ad blocker

* Prefer vertical tabs

> Want a fully functional ad blocker

My main reason but also

* want to ensure competition because I'm sure that once it's chromium all the way, we're gonna have a bad time.

The problem is the list keeps shrinking since now Mozilla Corp is an ethically dubious corporation.

Mind you, you can get all that and more in a browser like vivaldi. And that market is.. small. Vivaldi doesn't have to develop a browser engine

> Want a fully functional ad blocker

Is this even the case? UBO has ~10 million users going by the extension store, Firefox has over 150 million users.

So less than 10% of Firefox installs also have UBO.

* But don't really care about privacy that much

Brave already has an adblocker built into the browser itself and supports vertical tabs.

This was the main thread about Snowden on the day his identity was revealed:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5850590

> You need to have been convicted to receive a pardon, the petition should be not to prosecute.

Hahaha / I’ve made myself sad

The critics weren't ever the brightest lights in the sky, but this was horribly naive even for that time. It is as if you took the whole lot of human literature, took a dump on it and honestly believe you would know better.

Oh! That's a cool site I didn't know about. Bookmarked.

The iPhone keyboard is a living he'll.

A couple of years ago I deleted reddit and other social media and news apps from my phone. The only remaining distractions it offers are email and books. It's been wonderful, I've been reading about 2 novels per month. Highly recommended.

I remember buying The Sims when it came out originally. I started a gaming session that evening, and after a little while I noticed the sun coming in the window. I'd played all night without noticing. Since then, I've given that kind of open-ended game a wide berth. It's a bit disconcerting for a gaming session to achieve flow state.

This is also how my partner stopped complaining about my late night gaming, the first time I woke up and they were still playing - hadn't stopped all night.

"...I get it now" and no complaints from gaming since =)

That's too bad, Atlas Obscura is (was?) one of the good ones. It must be heartbreaking to watch capitalism eat your baby.

They exist precisely because of the market. Their aim was to make some money and they advertised.

From what it sounds like, this is just a classic takeover and consolidation of a power clique. I was at the inaugural meeting of a charity a year or two back. There were people already putting measures in place to try and exclude ordinary members from voting on certain matters... And the use of deliberately obscure language to exclude. Nowadays it barely resembles what it was set up to be, and is not run by the people who founded it. Atlas Obscura sounds the same but is in a slightly different arena. Also as I say above, I don't know what their long term strategy is... a subscription channel or tours etc?

The author does mention:

> The reason for all this, of course, is AI datacenter buildouts.

This bubble can't pop fast enough. I'm curious to see which actually useful AIs remain after the burst, and how expensive they are once the cash-burning subsides.