> techfolk who write fiction set up their writing pipelines

And perhaps infinitely procrastinating on the actual writing itself...

One writer recently wrote his own program for the job, but at least he eventually finished some books: https://hughhowey.com/neo/

Me, I just write in Emacs, set up a makefile, and export to PDF with Pandoc. But I admire the work to make a comfortable yet undistracting writing environment.

He just vibe coded it.

Well, that's kind of a good use of vibe coding. Let the clanker make the app and you focus on the art itself, the writing.

Indeed. One irresistible temptation for coders who go into writing is to bikeshed their pipeline. I know I have spent many hours tweaking my writing pipeline when I should have been writing. I mean, why just write when you can create a Containerfile to build a hermetically sealed image that houses your typesetting system and a dozen carefully chosen fonts, and then you can write scripts managed by a Makefile to launch containers from the image and inject into them your source text and extract from them the typeset PDFs? I mean, surely all of that is essential work on the critical path to getting your writing done. Right?

I remember a quote by Pandoc creator slash professor of philosophy John MacFarlane: "I would like to think that the time I’ve spent developing tools to make writing more efficient has been repaid by the time I’ve saved using these tools, but I’m pretty sure it hasn’t."

Reference: https://usesthis.com/interviews/john.macfarlane/

Not always:

https://t3x.org has two novels and tons of comp sci books probably made with very little...

We're now building some of the same superiority complex into commercial AIs to effectively refuse any wrongspeak.

Jev is still extremely useful for its intended purpose, not the mildly interesting hype on social media.

> a person who does not use it

He still runs a company with several services written in Rails with no obvious migration plans. AI psychosis and Linux side quests haven't, so far, changd that.

Rails is dhh's taste in programming materialised. If he's no longer using it by definition it is on its way out (i.e. no new features, no enhancements) whether he still manages people depending on it or not.

Another way to look at it is that ddh's taste has now completely shifted from doing things the Rails way to not looking at code at all.

Is it? I thought I read somewhere that it was one of the most token-efficient ones. Also, Rails + LLMs is magic and speed (of development).

Ruby is token efficient because it is terse, and has little special-characters. That why it sometimes "reads like english".

But also it has a bolted on type system.

I dont mind burning tokens on code that is well typed.

Just like I dont mind burning tokens on TDD.

This industry is actively working on making people walk away regardless of joy status.

> Can someone explain to me how you "acquire" an open-source project?

You corrupt the hearts of core maintainers with truckloads of cash, then get them to stop working on it (and instead on something else) and to effectively kill the brand.

Of course the code is free for anyone to pick up & work on, but setting up new infra & finding new people is costly in both time and money.

> There used to be a time sites got punished if they treated searchbots differently..

Google is itself deep in the darkpatternmaxxing game now as well.

> There are entirely factual ways to describe January 6th, 2021.

That's the thing. People can't even agree on facts, even if they're obvious to an outside observer.

Don’t confuse lies with disagreements.

The Republicans understand the facts of Jan 6. It’s just not in their interest to be truthful about those facts. Which is another problem entirely.

You cannot disagree about facts