Is he, really? Most of his blog posts are little more than opportunistic, buttressing commentary on someone else's blog post or article, often with a bit of AI apologia sprinkled in (for example, marginalizing people as paranoid for not taking AI companies at their word that they aren't aggressively scraping websites in violation of robots.txt, or exfiltrating user data in AI-enbaled apps).
EDIT: and why must he link to his blog so often in his comments? How is that not SEO/engagement farming? BTW dang, I wasn't insinuating the mods were in league with him or anything, just that, IMO, he's long past the point at which good faith should no longer be assumed.
> I think people would be less mad
People aren't mad about this. The vast majority of this community values simonw's contributions, which are well within the sweet spot for material on HN. That's why his material gets upvoted, as minimaxir (no friend of astroturfers) has pointed out elsewhere in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46451969.
The fact that an old-timer like yourself comes forward and says it means that the newer people aren't nutters thinking it.
"buttressing commentary on someone else's blog post"
That's how link blogs work. I wrote more about my approach to that here: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/
(And yes, there I go again linking to something I've written from a comment. It's entirely relevant to the point I am making here. That's why I have a blog - so I can put useful information in one place.)
I'll also note that I don't ever share links to my link blog posts on Hacker News myself - I don't think they're the right format for a HN post. I can't help if other people share them here: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=simonwillison.net
Are you really going to insult my and others' intelligence like this? Directly or indirectly, your motivation is money. You already offer monthly subscriptions to your blog, and you're clearly trying to build a monetizable brand for yourself as a leading authority on AI, especially as it pertains to software development.
Sponsorship from my monthly newsletter doesn't come close.
Seriously, do you have any idea how much money I'm leaving on the table right now NOT having a real job in this space?
Being a blogger is wildly financially irresponsible!
Do you really want to be an employee? Lets see what your reservation price is first.
Im pretty sure you'd need to be paid a lot to forgo having control over your time and so on. Lets keep it one-hunnid.
At some point I'm going to need to get back to earning more than I spend.
But given the volume of LLM slop, it was kind of obvious and known that even the moderators now have "favourites" over guidelines.
> Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity. [0]
The blog itself is clearly used as promotion all the time when the original source(s) are buried deep in the post and almost all of the links link back to his own posts.
This is now a first on HN and a new low for moderators and as admitted have regular promotional favourites on the top of HN.
Simon's posts are not engagement farming by any definition of the term. He posts good content frequently which is then upvoted by the Hacker News community, which should be the ideal for a Hacker News contributor.
He even reposted the same link (which is about AI) with one of his posts when the upvotes fell off and until the second one reached the top, with the intention of promoting his own blog.
Let me simply prove my point to you on how predictable this spam is.
He will do a blog post this month about this paper [0] with an expert analysis by either someone else (or even an LLM) with the primary intention of the blog being used for self promotion with at least one link back to his own blog.
> ...which is then upvoted by the Hacker News community
You don't know that. But what we do know is that even the moderators now have "favourites". Anyone else would be shot down for promotional spam.
Where did I do that?
> He will do a blog post this month about this paper [0]
That paper you linked to is a perfect example of where my approach can add value!
Did you read it? Do you understand what it saying? It is dense.
I would love to read an evaluation of that paper by someone who can rephrase the core ideas and conversations into a couple of paragraphs that help me understand it, and help me figure out if I should invest further effort in learning more.
I have a whole tag on my blog for that kind of content called paper-review: https://simonwillison.net/tags/paper-review/ - it's my version of the TikTok meme "I read X so you don't have to".
Honestly, your problem doesn't seem to be with me so much as it seems to be with the concept of blogging in general.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46409736
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46395646
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46209386
This is obviously an abuse of HN, regardless of who you're being aggressive towards. We ban accounts that keep doing this. If you keep doing it, we will ban you, so no more of this please.
If this post was by anyone other than me would you have any problems with its quality?
Add to this that all the hardware is already old and the amount of waste we’re producing right now is mind boggling, and for what, fun tools for the use of one?
I don’t live in the US, but the amount of tax money being siphoned to a few tech bros should have heads rolling and I really don’t want to see it happening in Europe.
But I guess we got a new version number on a few models and some blown up benchmarks so that’s good, oh and of course the svg images we will never use for anything.
I literally said:
"AI data centers continue to burn vast amounts of energy and the arms race to build them continues to accelerate in a way that feels unsustainable."
AND I linked to my coverage from last year, which is still true today (hence why I felt no need to update it): https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/31/llms-in-2024/#the-envi...
Or should we just keep chugging along as though there is no problem at all?
I also think we should use tax policy to provide financial incentives to reduce the environmental impact - tax breaks for renewables, tax hikes for fossil fuel powered data centers, that kind of thing.
2025: The Year in Open Source? Nothing, all resources were tied up to debunk a couple of Python web developers who pose as the ultimate experts in LLMs.
I made you a dashboard of my 2025 writing about open-source that didn't include AI: https://simonwillison.net/dashboard/posts-with-tags-in-a-yea...
Nvidia, Samsung, SK Hynix and some other voltures I forgot to mention are making serious bank right now.
Keep questions like this off of the propaganda thread.
I have a project to convert my multiplayer XNA game from C# to Javascript and to add networking to the game-play using LLMs.
They are far worse at it now than they were a year ago. They actually implemented the requirements (Though inaccurately) to the best of their ability a year ago. Especially Gemini.
Now they don't even come remotely close to implementing just the basic requirements.
The thing is, I'm giving them the entirety of the C# source code and spelling out what they should do.
How are you running them - regular chat interface or do you have them setup with Claude Code or Gemini CLI?
I am considering making a thread where I compel others to attempt to get what I'm trying to get out of it and show me their work.
The game is only around 25000-30000 LOC in C#.
This is the part they REALLY don't want you to say.
They can no longer train these models effectively and their performance is slipping. Late 2023 was the golden age.