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"The Best Essay" by Paul Graham
(paulgraham.com)
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this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2024
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SneerClub
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
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holy fuck this is meandering and written like shit. like, marvel at this early paragraph:
this quote looks like nonsense because Paully’s paragraph flow is absolutely fucked and his sentence structure isn’t much better. did he copy Marc Andreessen‘s absolute garbage writing style, or did he figure he no longer needs to pay an editor now that he’s tricked my industry into thinking he’s a great writer?
also, I don’t remember paully’s blog looking this ugly:
it actually took my eyes a while to see the header at all, and the weird janky “Read More”…. thing? he does on every page will lose your scroll position every time the tab reloads, plus it appears even on pages that don’t have any More to Read
is that a fucking shopping cart in the corner?
how reassuring. I legitimately can’t figure out what this is for; I don’t think you can buy any of paully boy’s books direct (and why would you?) and unless I’m missing something in the mess that is the sidebar there’s no swag he’s selling (but again, why would you buy that?)
so questions:
e: yep, I did a tiny amount of digging. if you send paully’s blog a mobile user-agent, it sends a version of his blog that’s (for some fucking reason) hosted on Yahoo Small Business/Yahoo Stores (now Turbify) which is a preconfigured e-commerce site. this lazy asshole fucked up building a mobile site so bad (and his desktop site isn’t much less ugly) that he decided he’d go off the fucking deep end and shove all his writing into a barely customized online storefront instead. this is seriously the type of shit that some of my less computer-savvy clients would demand I do back when I was working through college
you gotta admit, putting forth one thing while trying to convince you it's some other thing (and that there totally isn't a business side associated to it.... right....) is extremely on brand for him and basically everything he puts his money behind
so this is delightfully poignant
to be fair, his desktop site has wrapped around to being charmingly retro
The shopping cart is presumably because he did E Commerce when he did an actual job.
Paul Graham needs to take a lesson from Jenny Nicholson and organize his thoughts into a numbered list.