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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.)

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"The Best Essay" by Paul Graham (paulgraham.com)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

22 comments fedilink hide all child comments

In which a man disappearing up his own asshole somehow fails to be interesting.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (2 children)

holy fuck this is meandering and written like shit. like, marvel at this early paragraph:

There is, and on the face of it, it seems almost identical to the one I started with. Instead of asking what would the best essay be? I should have asked how do you write essays well? Though these seem only phrasing apart, their answers diverge. The answer to the first question, as we've seen, isn't really about essay writing. The second question forces it to be.

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?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (3 children)

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:

is my industry finally done pretending hacker news is ugly and broken as fuck on purpose?
is Paul fucking Graham’s blog hosted on Shopify? I’m not near a computer to check what javascript’s being loaded but this shit is seriously making me flash back to the last time I had to do a godawful Shopify theme for a client

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

to be fair, his desktop site has wrapped around to being charmingly retro

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

The shopping cart is presumably because he did E Commerce when he did an actual job.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

Paul Graham needs to take a lesson from Jenny Nicholson and organize his thoughts into a numbered list.