nickagliano

I can’t believe there’s a Pope from Chicago quoting Gandalf in an encyclical about AI.

There’s some nuance to this surrounding the “creative commons” licensing of these ACM publications.

Open access does not mean Creative Commons license (CC-BY, or CC-BY-NC-ND).

Jan 1 2026, all ACM publications will be open access, but not all will be creative commons.

Per an email I received on April 11th, 2025 from Scott Delman:

“Thank you for your email. All ACM published papers in the ACM DL will be made freely available. All articles published after January 1, 2026 will be governed by a Creative Commons license (either CC-BY or CC-BY-NC-ND), but ACM will not be retroactively assigning CC licenses to the entire archive of ~800K ACM published papers.”

This is unfortunate, in my opinion, because a lot of the foundational computer science papers fall into that category.

#FreeAlanTuring

Fantastic comment

Interesting to see astral come out with this right around facebook’s release of “Pyrefly, a faster Python type checker written in Rust”.

Not making any sort of ethical statement, just interesting that rust keeps eating the python and JS tooling worlds.

As a card carrying Substack hater, I’m not suprised.

"How could Substack improve this situation for technical writers?"

They don’t care about (technical) writers. All they care about is building a TikTok clone to “drive discoverability” and make the attention-metrics go up. Chris Best is memeing about it on his own platform. Very gross.

After much deliberation, I've started writing on Substack. One of my main points of contention is that, well, since it's not my own blog, I can't just implement feature (i.e., syntax highlighting). Syntax highlighting is pretty important IMO when people are reading code, especially when it's interpolated with text. So I published this formal, open letter as a feature request.

I saw this comment on the marimo post too. Is there a source of Fernando saying this?

Most fun game on HN since Infinite Craft.

Worked well on iOS Safari. Installed as PWA and everything. Managed to keep my attention for 5 levels. Nice work.

Yes! Thank you Simon. Takes like this will make this conversation a lot more well-rounded.

Of course writing is important. Writing free-hand on paper is beautiful. But so are the ideas, and the organization of the writing, and the style, and the plot and the characters.

Of course playing instruments is important, but I'm reminded of the Rick Rubin interview where he talks about how he's not a musician, and he doesn't know how to do any real technical music production.

No, I agree with you! I'm not trying to simplify things by saying it's a tool. As you use the tool, it changes you as well. I think the chatbots are particular technology that will have a lot of that effect.

One of my favorite ramblings on this is Wendell Berry's essay on "Why I Am not Going To Buy A Computer".

I'm just saying that there's an obviously bad way to let this tool have an impact on you, and there's a way to use it that won't ruin you.

It's important to be vigilant, and not to abuse GPT-4 and, i.e., replace all of your own writing with AI.

It's more complicated than, "using AI more and more will cause us to forget how to write."

It's just a tool.

I like comparing it to something like quizlet (online flash cards), which can be a great study tool, but which people will also misuse and abuse. Instead of studying and taking the online quizzes, people will often just find the right quizlet which has all of the answers to the online quiz. People who are honest will actually learn the material, and the cheaters suffer.

I think people who misuse ChatGPT will become lazier, worse writers. But using the tool in an honest way will improve even an already talented writers work.

Just my 2 cents.

I posted something else a day ago more focused on the fivehundredwordsaday website, but I'm more interested in the topic of this post.

Hey HN. I submitted something about this website 6 months ago and got some traction, and I've had a fun time playing with this tool I developed for habitual writing ever since. Hopefully this is an interesting update and maybe could be an interesting conversation on generative writing.

To be transparent, there is database backups on this site, but letting people download their own backups feels like a nice to have. So everyone can have their bytes.

That sucks, I’m sorry you lost your writings. That sentiment is part of the reason I built the site myself. But that does make me think that when I build an exporting feature there needs to be a “download a backup” option.

I made a change which should hopefully fix any calendar date staying blue problems you were having. Let me know if that's not the case :)

Also text exporting is the next thing I'm working on :)

Here you go!

Monthly support: https://buy.stripe.com/5kA5kn2jd8XV39m144

One time support: https://buy.stripe.com/00gaEH3nhdebfW83cd

What browser are you using?

It depends! If I have energy and time I try to write fantasy stuff. If I don't have time or energy I just stream of consciousness journal, which sometimes turns into something cool, sometimes it's nonsense.

I write it usually in the afternoon or evening, so it's fun for me to think of things throughout the day or jot them down as a prompt and crank out the 500 words later in the day.

I like this idea. I have a friend who writes news and journalistic pieces, and I recently asked if he ever writes for fun. He said that creative writing is like pulling teeth. So he could easily write 1000+ words, but writing 500 creative words would be a good exercise. I’ll send him the Minisagas idea.

Sure! The writings, tags, and prompts are encrypted at the application level (using Rail 7’s ActiveRecord encryption, which is pretty cool).

I think that this is about as secure as it could be beyond letting users generate and store their own encryption keys.

Did anyone else look into his Stanford biography page? Pretty insane stuff.

https://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/

http://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/bucket/

In a section headed by an anime girl, he claims to have, "figured out when and how a bunch of other fantasies got into our DNA and will shortly post an article on this web site that will explain how that happened, why it is causing modern humans to make billions of bad decisions each day, and how we and our descendants are likely to be wiped out soon unless we begin dealing with this problem in a rational way."

Then there's a weird picture of his face, which is how he thinks he'll look in 2043, when "he plans to croak at age 112".

On his bucket list page,

"My choice as a troublemaker will be to get shot in the back while running away from an jealous husband in May 2043".

Very weird stuff.