I'm still around.. I'm just not writing here

ulimn

Oh, one of the few blogs I was following. Sad to see this news.

armchairhacker

So you no longer want to help good people because you would also be helping bad people? You don't have any obligation to post, but I don't think it's a good idea, lest you no longer find the help you need because others did the same. Remember: you are almost certainly unexceptional except in a small niche, and big companies can hire other talented people. So if talented people don't contribute to the public, most of it only the small individuals lose out.

selfsimilar

I get this sentiment, but I think there's probably a LOT of people who are doing good things, cool things, helpful things, who are helped by Al Gore's free and open Internet. But most of them don't bother to upvote, or post a "thank you" or anything because the medium makes everything so frictionless. It's only the OSS zealots and the people who have issues who you'll hear from. The vocal minority. It's kinda shitty, but learning to ignore the haters and bad actors is table stakes. But feeding AI farms is the new threat, and that' definitely something unsolved. Going dark is certainly a solution. Small enclaves of invite-only blogs and tweets, I guess...

deburo

It's unfortunate to think that some people may want to restrain themselves from sharing as much in the form of blog posts, but on the other hand, if you're still using AI in your day to day work from cloud providers, perhaps we'll still benefit from that data in one way or another. I mean, OpenAI couldn't guarantee that someone's data was not used for training, even though he had the "don't train on my data" setting turned on. I still don't understand what that means. And Anthropic probably does a similar thing, right? Did they share details how they derive from our data for training purposes?

geuis

Direct link in case it's needed. https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2026/10/08/idle/ For some reason the first time I tapped the link it didn't go directly to the article, which confused me. Subsequent times it goes straight through.

ChrisMarshallNY

> The web is broken. You can keep it. I do have to agree, but I have a different reason for writing less. I just enjoy doing stuff that ships . That tends to take up a lot of my bandwidth. I couldn't care any less about whether or not someone (or some thing ) uses my code (that's why it's MIT-licensed). I'm also not particularly interested in being credited for stuff (as long as I am not the target of a lawyerpult). I've enjoyed using an LLM, and plan to do a lot more of it. I even let it write a bunch of stuff. It's maybe not stuff that has my "imprimatur," but that's fine. People seem to understand it better.

spongebobstoes

if they don't want to write anymore, that's okay, they don't owe it to anybody but I will disagree with the rationale I want enable and empower everyone, even though it includes bad actors, because I know it includes good actors I believe that on balance, humans, the world, the future, are all good I reject misanthropy and pessimism

gavinray

> I run into problems, figure out solutions that don't seem to be documented anywhere else, and then I don't post about them. I don't understand this. Presumably you've only been able to build software your entire career because, when you hit a wall, usually someone online had too and shared the solution. This feels like throwing a sandwich in the trash rather than let a hungry person eat it.

simianwords

> Put it this way: I've been pretty pissed off at "helping bad people" with my freely given information since roughly the summer of 2022. I think this is slightly selfish. If you write and your stuff goes into LLM's, that's the best gift you can give to humanity.

beej71

I'm going to keep publishing my handmade material online for free because, for realsies, fuck those guys. I'm going to be a human light in the slop darkness, even though I know the content will be consumed and repeatedly vomited out as AI garbage. I will never, ever stop striving to be better than AI, and sharing what I can with the world. The sloplords will never reach 100% while I live! [Raised sword emoji] :)