The benefit of a blogging platform like Substack and the like, is that it can sometimes make it easier for people to find your writing.

How do you “solve” the discoverability problem? Asking you because I know your blog has become very popular!

Yeah that's definitely a useful feature of Substack.

I'm the wrong person to ask about discoverability because I've been blogging for 22 years and I've accumulated 100,000+ followers on Twitter, 39,000 on Bluesky etc.

It's worth offering an email subscribe mechanism. I didn't do that for the first ~20 years - I offered just an RSS feed - but when I added the Substack newsletter option it become clear I should have been gathering email addresses from a lot earlier on!

Despite having a substantial audience visiting my site now I still think the best way to get traffic to an article is to tell people about it elsewhere. I follow the POSSE principle: publish on own site, syndicate elsewhere: https://indieweb.org/POSSE

Honestly though quality is much more important than quantity. Join communities of like-minded individuals and make sure that a small number of engaged people get to see your stuff. Opportunities from that are likely to be more valuable than if you have a much larger audience who aren't as closely aligned with what you're publishing.

I used to do the same, copying and pasting from the web app and convinced I didn’t need anything else.

But Claude Code is honestly so so much better, the way it can make surgical edits in-place.

Just avoid using the -dangerously-skip-permissions flag, which would have been OP’s downfall!

A friend of mine and I (we are both Aussies) had been staying at my Grandma's house in a rural village in UK and were trying to make our way back to London on Boxing Day. The fact that it was Boxing Day meant that no buses were running, so we started sticking our thumbs out to try and hitch a lift to the nearest town's train station. As you would expect, picking up two 19 year old blokes in the middle of nowhere was not an attractive proposition to your average passerby.

Eventually a guy comes along and picks us up. Tells us he hitched all the way across Europe back in the day so he empathized with us. Says he's on the way to pick up his son (our age) from work, a department store that happened to be on the way to the station.

His son gets into the car, understandably pretty bemused as to why his dad has brought two random stragglers with him!

We get to the station only to find that it's closed, because, yes, it's Boxing Day and trains weren't running either (we hadn't really thought this through). Guy says:

"Don't worry lads, all the family are around ours for Christmas dinner. My brother lives in West London so he can give you a ride there at the end of the night."

So we found ourselves, two foreign students, invited to a complete stranger's Christmas dinner party. We all had so much fun and drank so much that we completely abandoned the London idea and went back to my Grandma's at the end of the night.

And the kid who was our age that got picked up from work? He ended up being my Best Man when I got married 15 years later. True story!

This kind of reminds me of my brother's first trip to Taiwan.

This was in the 1980s. (Before cellphones.) The guy who was supposed to pick him up didn't show up because his motorcycle broke down. And couldn't get it fixed because it was Chinese New Year.

My brother arrived, not speaking any Chinese, surrounded by people who didn't speak any English. Who were having the biggest party that my brother had ever seen, and kept giving him food and inviting him places! He had absolutely NO idea what was going on!

After a few days of this, the person who was supposed to meet him finally managed to arrive, and my brother was hooked. Spent most of the next two decades in Taiwan.

Wonderful story!

As a Brit, I feel Xmas meal is the one time when you might see new faces around the table as we make an effort to ensure nobody is eating alone.

Growing up it was not unusual for members of the local community to join us if they faced Xmas alone.

Wild how life sometimes compresses decades into a single afternoon

does couchsurfing count? in poland trains are running on christmas, but i missed a connection and i was stuck in warsaw on chistmas eve. looked up hosts on couchsurfing which take guests without prior notice and found myself enjoying christmas dinner with a polish family.

After a concert in London, I missed the last train back to Lancaster. So I made a sign saying that I was on CouchSurfing, and some strangers invited me over!

After CouchSurfing started charging a monthly fee, I’ve defected to BeWelcome.org which is a European, open-source alternative to CS.

That's absolutely amazing.

Of all the soul-sucking jobs out there, software dev is one of the better ones I would say. You're getting paid to think, to tell machines what to do. There's a huge portion of the workforce that are paid to become machine-like themselves.

I beg to differ on the getting paid to think part. I once had a software job at a financial institution that shall remain nameless, where thinking was actively discouraged by managers. You get paid to do what the customer wants.

TLDR of this article would be something like: "Nietzche's ideas were relevant at the time of the industrial revolution - AI poses similar risks to people's feelings of displacement and redundancy, so they are relevant here too". Would have loved to have heard a take on HOW they are relevant.