With that in mind, I bid you a very fond farewell, HN.

Exercise is magical, it gives you superpowers of focus and confidence that you can solve all problems. If everything is going wrong, it's the first place to check - are you exercising? If not, fix that. And maybe everything else goes away.

Diversity: because language models are in some sense capturing an average (even if that average can be from a subset of training data), its comments will not be very diverse. I suspect if you try sampling away from the center of the distribution, you’ll find the quality degrades to nonsense.

Volume: the biggest problem is that you’ll end up with complete overwhelm of plausible comments. Language models cannot reason, which means they are incapable of producing the best insights (they can probably provide insight through “monkeys at typewriters” effects).

So the smart human who has analysed the subject really well, who currently has to rise above a certain amount of background noise, will now get completely swamped by it.

I don’t think literally everything else matters less. I don’t think there’s a simple “matters” scale.

Most crucially, an important cause in itself does not justify any means whatsoever.

So don’t buy GM - or Twitter…

There are always ethical compromises engaging with the real world, and there are few hard and fast rules to follow.

If PG is reading, I’d love to hear the thinking behind going back.

(incidentally, not _all_ of the list is ridiculous, but most of it clearly is)

If you need to, build prototypes of the features to get a feel for how difficult they may be. Then you've got a set of features you _think_ you can get done by the deadline.

Write down the spec where folks can see it. The deadline should be say < 8 weeks away. No scope creep in that time. Stick to what you have.

Then get to work. One rule: you will ship at that deadline. You can actually ship individual features beforehand if you do CD etc. You can use feature flags to hide the features for most users if you want to have them feel like a "version" has been released. But that deadline is set in stone and you do not move it (you can allow say a week slack to be reasonable, but probably keep that to yourself if you're a manager and only use it if you absolutely have to e.g. a key dev gets sick in the final week etc.)

As the deadline approaches, things will go wrong. Keep the deadline. Cut the spec. Firstly, cut to simpler versions of the features. Second, start dropping features.

Ship. People will be annoyed you haven't shipped feature Y that got dropped. Gauge the response. Now for your next "release", Y or Z is top of the list.

After the deadline has passed, give folks a period to recover as you decide what's next, cut them some slack and then go again.

This is the only answer I have to estimation.

But overall yes agree a great achiever (never sure about that genius tag) who has lost the plot.

Part of that is that interesting voices like PG’s are not so drowned out by background noise, so losing folks like PG begins to undo that improvement.