I did hit a nerve. I don't like being accused of posting comments here for "low effort personal brand promotion" or nefarious financial motives.

▲

hypfer 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Well, yeah. No one does.

But, also, as said, you're an industry (and foss!) veteran, so I find it impossible to believe that you haven't had your fair share of baseless bullshit being thrown at you, and with that, you gaining a persona that will not be hit by that, because it clearly knows that it is in fact bullshit.

Unless of course it doesn't really know that with certainty.

As said, I would _love_ to give you the benefit of the doubt, because you might just have a stressful day or whatever, but content marketing is literally your whole thing by now. It is impossible for me to do that with a clean conscience.

Your blog front page currently opens with

> Earlier this month I hosted a fireside chat session at the AI Engineer World’s Fair with Cat Wu and Thariq Shihipar from Anthropic’s Claude Code team.

That is not what "some rando foss maintainer we are morally obligated to be soft with" does.

But I repeat myself.

▲

simonw 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm a professional blogger now. I still also work on open source software. I'm even fine being called an "influencer" (shudder), but I take offense to accusations of unethical behavior.

I think very hard about the ethics of what I'm doing and how I can best use my "platform" (shudder again) in as constructive a way as possible.

▲

hypfer 4 hours ago | parent [-]

[flagged]

	▲	TulliusCicero 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Come on man, can you please just stop, take the L and let the subthread die. I'd rather you do this than him. Chill out, please. The pelican pic is fine.

▲

underdeserver 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What do you want from him, seriously? Anyone who follows the scene knows that blogging about AI (and participating in conferences etc.) is what Simon does nowadays.

There's nothing shady here. The disclosure is front and center on his About page on his website.

He's not spamming you. It's one short link, sometimes a link to a first-impressions post. It's interesting and useful for me and the other commenters who keep upvoting his comments. Why are you so antagonistic?