51–60 of 268 posts
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I'm one person with a blog, and I have other things to do. Sometimes I feel that there's pressure for me to be a full blown newspaper covering everything that happens in a multi-billion dollar industry.
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Simon's writing is consistently either highly practical, or extremely high quality, or both. What's your reference frame to call it "bad" - your own comments?
FWIW I take his writings with a hefty pinch of salt these days. It seems incredibly concentrated on OpenAI to the detriment of anything else. This was only cemented when he ended up appearing on some OpenAI marketing video. This is fine. He is his own person and can write about whatever he wants and work with whoever he wants, but the days when I'd eagerly read his blog to get a finger of the pulse of all of the main…
https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=simonw
Or take a look at his website:
At least you admit it's your opinion. Maybe that's your bias showing?
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https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/6/research-goblin/#histor...
One who is passionate about it can totally donate to conservation efforts or raise the awareness about it.
As it's often said, "curiosity is the mother of invention".
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I don’t think this framing quite captures what’s going on. The AI space is full of BS and grift, which makes reputation and the resulting trust built on that reputation important. I think the popularity of certain authors has as much to do with trust as anything else. If I see one of Simon’s posts, I know there’s a good chance it’s more signal than noise, and I know how to contextualize what he’s saying based on his…
You're not negating anything they've said, but given some insight into why the case might be. However the cult of personality and brand still exists and as a result heavily distorts what could appear here. Saying that someone ought to write better consistently for them to "make its way here" leans completely into the cult of personality. I think following people would be better served though personal RSS feeds, and l…
> Saying that someone ought to write better
I did not say someone ought to write better. I described what I believed the dynamic is.
> I think following people would be better served though personal RSS feeds
My point was that this is exactly what people are doing, and that people tend to post content here from the people they follow.
> letting content rise based on its merit ought to be an HN goal
My point was that merit is earned, and people tend to attach weight to certain voices who have already earned it.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying there are no downsides, and I said as much in the original comment.
HN regularly upvotes obscure content from people who are certainly not the center of a cult of personality. I was attempting to explain why I think this is more prevalent with AI and why I think that’s understandable in a landscape filled with slop.
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I can accept that these questions are more intense than simpler prompts - running dozens of prompts in a chain to answer a single question.
Best estimates I've seen are that a single prompt is equivalent to running an oven for a few seconds.
I'm OK with my curiosity running an oven for a full minute!
Here are my collected notes on AI energy usage: https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-energy-usage/
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Your complaint sounds strange and petty to me. Trivial questions can lead to meaningful acts. Take this question: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/6/research-goblin/#histor... One who is passionate about it can totally donate to conservation efforts or raise the awareness about it. As it's often said, "curiosity is the mother of invention".
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I mean things like watching Netflix on a large screen TV in 4K, playing Battlefield 6, cooking a very fancy meal, doing recreational shopping, or simply driving to any location that's 30 minutes away.
I find it incredibly hard to imagine that a few minutes of GPT-5 inference are somehow the most "energy intensive" way to spend your idle time.
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I said the opposite of that: I haven't written about it yet because I didn't have anything interesting to say, and I try to write things that add value. I wrote about my approach to that here: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/#trying-to-a...
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I said the opposite of that: I haven't written about it yet because I didn't have anything interesting to say, and I try to write things that add value. I wrote about my approach to that here: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/#trying-to-a...
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