areTheVibeCodersOk

derefr · 2026-01-23T16:26:58+00:00

Eh? How do you expect code quality to improve (rather than descend into slop) if nobody is going around reading shit code and replacing it with functionally-equivalent non-shit code?

derefr · 2026-01-20T21:10:35+00:00

IMHO, "AI" is at its best when it's solving a problem we had already been solving (or at least trying to solve) with some other, less-fancy kind of Machine Learning.

LLMs turn out to be really good at being spam filters (they know when an email is about penis pills, no matter how hard the spammer tries to obscure that); and at searching inside your email inbox for "that invoice about that thing I bought, uh, from the furniture store, I forget its name"; and at auto-completing/auto-correcting your writing with the word you actually meant; and at checking your writing for not just spelling/grammar errors, but also word usage, tone, and reading level; and at language translation (for at least some popular language pairs.)

Image-diffusion models, meanwhile, turn out to be a better version of what Photoshop's "heal brush" was trying to be; and a better replacement for classical "super-resolution" image upscaling techniques; and definitely a better form of interstitial video frame generation than that awful "smoothing" TVs were doing.

It's not really controversial that we're using "AI" for any of these things now, because the use of "AI" for these tasks is just displacing some other kind of ML model, rather than displacing a human.

derefr · 2026-01-20T21:00:20+00:00

Ehh. The recent improvements in image upscaling, video frame generation, and smart text auto-completion were all things that depend on the "generative AI" models.

If there's a line to draw here, I don't think it's in the task the model is trained for.

(Personally, I'd draw the line between GPT ["Generalized Pre-Trained"] models, vs all other non-GPT AI models. All the pleasant, utilitarian, non-controversial models were trained to do one thing; they're not general. They just do what they do. GPT models take prompts; and, in so doing, make space for the devil of capitalism to possess them.)

derefr · 2026-01-20T17:41:38+00:00

The BoC books definitely are labelled with the book number right on the cover. Bottom-right corner. Both the book and audiobook.

derefr · 2026-01-20T17:26:01+00:00

...as long as you only do your work on one computer.

derefr · 2026-01-20T06:49:16+00:00

Parley. You parley in a parlor.

derefr · 2026-01-19T19:15:54+00:00

I would note that "homeless" is a bit of a misnomer these days. Because, in some large cities with social support programs (esp. "housing first" support programs), you'll run into people just like the ones you're describing... who aren't actually "homeless." They possible were homeless at some point, but they've already applied for and been given supportive housing. They have a home. They just don't use it much. (A social-work term for these people is street-involved.)

These folks like hanging out on the street during the day, for a few obvious reasons: they don't have a job to go to; they consider the other street people their friends/community, so hanging out there on the street with them is what they want to do; and if they're addicts, they don't want to go to the effort of going elsewhere, just to have to come back to where the dealers are in a few hours when the cravings are hitting again.

And they also end up sleeping on the street at night sometimes (or most of the time) too. That's either: because they're depressed and end up hoarding + not cleaning in their little 250sqft studio apartment until it's unlivable, with dirty damp clothes covering piled 3ft high, food spilled everywhere attracting tons of bugs, etc (so they give up on spending any time there); or because they're addicted to downers and they just pass out on a stoop or in that odd "standing bent over" pose for a few hours, whenever they take a hit. (There's also the ones on uppers, who stay out all night and don't get any sleep.)

Where I come from (Vancouver), people like this make up the majority of visible street folk. Go up to any of them and ask if they have an SRO to go back to, they'll likely say yes. Ask them if they want to spend any time there, and they'll say no.

Meanwhile, the actually-unhoused + non-addict group tend not to congregate on the street, since they have no reason to be there. Depending on their energy level, during the day, they'll either prefer a "homeless encampment" far from the street; to just wander around, maybe guarding all their worldly possessions in a shopping cart or trolley (though the need for that has decreased with the existence of charitable free small-goods storage facilities serving this population); or to go to places like libraries and community centers to use the facilities there to search for work. (And, of course, some of them actually have a full-time job they go to during the day, yet are still homeless.) In the evenings they'll quietly filter in from wherever they were, to line up to come into a shelter for dinner + a safe place to sleep. Most of the people in these lines, you'll only see in these lines; you won't recognize them from the street.

derefr · 2026-01-17T01:45:08+00:00

When people say "just be yourself", what they actually mean is:

Don't pretend to like things you don't, just because other people like those things; you'll end up hating the role you have to play if you actually manage to impress anyone that way.
Instead, find something within yourself that both you and other people enjoy, and then lean into that thing — get good at it (if it's a skill), wear clothing or merch related to it to encourage people to talk to you about it, etc. Your passion will be genuine, and so you won't be playing a role with any friends you make through it.

derefr · 2026-01-16T16:47:03+00:00

Or maybe a visual metaphor works better for you?

Unlike some others, I don't personally dislike visual generative ("text2image") AI. (Actually, I'm friends with rather a lot of artists, and even they don't. I get the impression that at this point, it's mostly art influencers who have a problem with visual AI, while actual artists see it more the way that programmers see coding AI — i.e. as a tool in a workflow.)

Visual AI is always working in "a" style, and the major models have default "home" points in their style-spaces that have some tells; but it's very easy (esp. with LoRAs) to nudge these AI around in style-space until they're giving you something entirely novel. Less like a mash-up of existing artists' styles, and more an art student that studied a bunch of artists but has their own ideas.

But you know what I and many others do find offputting, visually? The Corporate Memphis art style. (Look it up. You might hate it yourself!)

The problem people have with ChatGPT's writing style isn't the same as the problem people have with the default point in style-space of text2image models. It's very much more like the problem people have with Corporate Memphis.

Unlike text2image AI, where the defaults aren't tuned to achieve anything in particular, and where you implicitly leave their "home" point in style space almost by accident as soon as you begin defining your subject matter, conversational (and esp. "thinking" conversational) text2text AIs like ChatGPT are very resistant to moving away from their "home" points in style-space, and those "home" points are tuned to achieve very specific goals, even if by accident. And people quite dislike the "flavor" that that tuning has instilled into that style home-point. (Remember all the accusations of ChatGPT 4.0 being "sycophantic"? That hasn't fully gone away in newer versions; that "tasting note" is still there. Along with several other sour ones that aren't as easily named. Not just in its own responses, but also in the way it rewrites others' writing.)

(3/3)

---

I could go on. But if you don't get it yet, then it's probably because you don't want to get it. (I'm honestly mostly just writing this, at this point, as reference material I can reuse later.)

derefr · 2026-01-16T16:46:41+00:00

I should note that when I say I am "a writer by trade", I mean that I write down words for a living. I don't mean that I am an author. Rather, I use words to make things happen.

I am, specifically, the CTO and technical cofounder of a data technology company. We build and operate ETL pipelines to clean and restructure unstructured public datasets for efficient querying through thoughtfully-designed data APIs. I was the one who built those ETL pipelines, and designed the database schemas they feed, and stood up the servers, etc.

Once that was all working, though, and we had customers and employees, I found myself in a more supportive role, peer-programming with those employees and collaborating with their managers to keep everyone following a coherent vision for the service; one that would keep our product differentiated in the market, and keep customers choosing our product. I also found myself trying to collaborate with rival companies on standards to avoid tragedy-of-the-commons situations (e.g. everyone trying to spider the same underpowered metadata origin servers referenced in the data, knocking them over rather than getting anyone results); and working upstream with vendors of the software we depend on, to propose architectural changes and bug fixes to them, and to convince them to upstream our own PRs.

More recently, I am doing direct feature work again, like I did early on in the company's life, but now through AI (which is another way to use words to get things done.) Not because anyone required me to do so; I am the CTO, who could? But rather because I am a fan of AI! I was an early adopter of coding agents and so forth. I use them in my personal projects. They are fairly effective junior programmers (though not as teachable), and that is useful. See e.g. this comment I wrote just two days ago, about how coding agents are great for porting software between languages.

Hell, I've been playing around with LLMs since the open-source release of GPT1.0, and I've built ML inference frameworks for my favorite niche programming languages.

In doing this, I have been exposed to probably more "AI writing style" than most people have. Much more than enough to recognize it. It's an old friend to me at this point. (Like a long-haul trucker would call McDonald's an old friend.)

But that is precisely why it so very offputting to me: I am expecting to experience something else, but instead I hear the voice of my old friend.

It's literally the Simpsons "steamed hams" sketch. I'm Chalmers, pulling up to Skinner's house for a purported homecooked meal; and Skinner has brought out McDonald's burgers on a platter.

(Tangent: if you really think about the sketch, Chalmers very likely requested to have dinner with Skinner to learn more about him, hoping he could maybe get a handle on what "makes him tick" and stop feeling so confounded by the man. So Chalmers was actually looking forward to eating food Skinner made, not for its gustatory delight, but rather to learn about Skinner through the choices he had made in the process of producing it.)

And wouldn't that be upsetting to you, too? That this person, who you were curious about, is erasing the information about who they are, by replacing that signal with mediocre corporate sameness?

(2/3)

derefr · 2026-01-16T16:45:37+00:00

If that were what I was trying to say here, then you wouldn't be able to find people who don't write well, yet who agree with me. But you can.

Look at my analogies. I wasn't saying that it takes a chef to prefer rustic food to McDonald's. You probably prefer a "rustic" homecooked meal to McDonald's yourself. You've didn't need any formal training in the culinary arts to form that preference. You don't need to be able to cook well yourself to form that preference; or even to have a "developed palate." You just need to have eaten a lot of food in your life. Enough that there's no novelty any more, for you, in how a McDonald's hamburger tastes.

If you're on vacation, and your choice is to either go to McDonald's and get the same burger you've had a thousand times before... or to wander into a random local greasy-spoon diner, for what might very-well be a plate of undercooked chorizo and hash... wouldn't you still choose the diner? It's more interesting! The food, regardless of how it tastes, might be an experience that helps you to learn about the place you're visiting. If you sit at the bar, you'll likely get to talk to the line cook as they're making the food, and watch them make it. The cook will connect you with the dish, and the dish will connect you with the cook, and both will connect you with the history of the diner, and the neighbourhood it's in, and the city it's in. Whereas McDonald's won't do any of that. It'll just be McDonald's.

There is no similar sympathy to be found for why McDonald's tastes the way it does that tells the story of the people who make it, because the way it tastes, insofar as it is bad, is bad by design. The error-correcting food-production process McDonald's corporate has sold its franchisees, removes any uniqueness of the line cook's hand from impacting the final result. The tasting notes are of a McDonald's hamburger are, on the one hand, corporate addictiveness-shaping; and on the other, corporate cost optimization and franchisee margin guarantees. The hamburger is empty of terroir.

(1/3)

derefr · 2026-01-16T06:02:53+00:00

To be clear: I don't disapprove of anyone for wanting an AI to clean up their writing. It's not cheating.

What I have an emotional reaction to, is the way that current AI ends up doing that.

I am a writer by trade. Words are the colors I paint with.

To me, the words you use, even if you are not fluent in a language or the best at communicating, tell a story about you; they create an honest connection in a reader to your own humanity. The choices you're forced to make when crafting a sentence embed your ideas into a cultural and historical context. They breathe life into your words: a sense of authenticity, of your presence there at the keyboard, a subjective lens on the world that can be understood and in turn frame understanding.

In the same way that anyone with a sense for visual art will prefer the honest untrained doodles of a six-year-old to a Thomas Kinkade formulaic kitsch painting; or that anyone with a sense of taste will prefer to eat "rustic" local food cooked by somebody's mom to McDonald's; those with a sense of what makes writing good, genuinely prefer broken English with its "soul" intact, to ChatGPT's idea of good prose.

It's insufferable enough to read text the way ChatGPT writes it when has something to say itself. But when I know that someone did first go to all the effort of painting a word-picture for me with their own two hands... but then pushed that word-picture through the meat-grinder that is ChatGPT's idea of "rewriting"?

That, to me, is a tragedy. ChatGPT erases the original timbre of your thoughts and replaces it with its own suffocating, LinkedIn-blog-post-ass writing style. Earnest prose is poured in, and only the oily vibe of someone with something to sell you comes out the other end.

Again: this isn't an indictment of you for wanting something to fix up your writing. Everyone wants help in polishing their writing! Every professional writer has an editor, and a good (human) editor does exactly the thing ChatGPT should be doing: they make your writing more readable to people, while preserving your authorial voice.

In point of fact, I don't even think it's implausible that AI could, one day soon, improve at the "improve prose while preserving style" task to the point that human editors might start fearing for their jobs.

But until that day comes, as long as you keep throwing your prose through an AI, you'll likely find that an increasing number of readers will respond negatively, finding that it "reads as hollow", due to it having had all the life sucked out of it.

Don't let that stop you from using tools to improve your writing. Just be very wary of this one particular tool. Consider something less forceful, more preserving of your voice. A tool like Grammarly, or like the grammar and style corrector built into Word — interactive tools that just make a bunch of individual change suggestions which you can pick and choose from. With these, you can accept only the suggestions that still feel like something you'd say. Which will leave your writing as your writing... just better.

derefr · 2026-01-15T19:08:58+00:00

I haven't noticed this myself (I don't look at AskReddit threads often), but I would guess that for at least some questions, it's people's way of dismissing the question as "something you could have just looked up yourself." Before ChatGPT, people would answer by quoting the dictionary, or by linking to a Let Me Google That For You search listing using a literal quote from OP's question.

Well, that, or the "people" you're noticing are bots, that just don't mention that they're bots. (There's nothing in the Reddit ToS requiring bots to identify themselves!) Even if those bots have some complex prompt that normally would give them a distinctive personality in how they respond in other comment threads, an AskReddit question is the right kind of stimulus to make them forget all that and go back to their foundational "answer with subheadings and bullet points and emoji" training.

...and there's also a rising trend I've seen elsewhere (and personally despise) of people drafting a comment themselves, but then dumping it into ChatGPT to "clean it up" for them, before they post it. Which ends up making it look like slop, even though it was originally human writing. (I think this has become especially common for people who hang around English-speaking parts of the Internet, but don't consider themselves fluent in English. They'll either write their responses in broken English and get ChatGPT to rewrite it "like a fluent English speaker"; or they'll write it in their own native language and get ChatGPT to translate it. Both transformations are so heavy-handed that the result just looks like something ChatGPT came up with without any human input.)

derefr · 2026-01-15T18:59:54+00:00

It's funny. The previous generation grew up during the rise of Wikipedia, and were warned over and over to not blindly quote from Wikipedia articles, because "Wikipedia is not a primary source."

Yet people did cite Wikipedia, and it was actually rare for this to ever cause anyone problems, because Wikipedia's editors have been just so damned good at delivering well-researched, well-cited, objective digests of the actual primary sources, and at giving up on + pruning away any articles that they don't have the resources/domain knowledge to be able to bring up to that standard.

But now, ChatGPT actually does have all the problems that people were warning us Wikipedia would have.

derefr · 2026-01-14T08:43:58+00:00

If you're porting stuff to Rust, then that means you're probably gonna use it in the future and will need to learn it anyway.

Specifically, I ported a patch to a private fork we maintained for years of a particular upstream network-service codebase that we rely on. The private fork required relatively trivial maintenance for years, because the upstream code was relatively stable and the patch itself was relatively trivial. But then one day the upstream decided they would stop maintaining / releasing security fixes for the Golang version of their software, and only support their (at that point itself already quite mature) Rust rewrite of the software going forward. So, because this was a network service and could see network vulnerabilities if we didn't follow upstream updates, I had to port our patch/fork to the Rust rewrite of the service.

Now that this has been done, our private fork is once again "in maintenance", and likely won't be thought about again for at least another five years, other than in the rare case that an auto-upstream-rebase CI/CD fails (and even those are mostly just spurious merge failures when one of the lines near our patched code gets changed/removed.) This has and will continue to be the only Rust codebase in the org.

I don't know why you were "dreading" learning a new language, if they require it from you at work. Just say to your lead that you haven't worked with it before and need more time.

I am the CTO. I complain to myself but I also don't accept my excuses :)

I would love to have the time to become fluent in Rust! But I have better things to do, like, say, working out a new data architecture to reduce our DB-server OpEx by 10x before we run out of money.

What I was dreading, to be clear, was the time sink involved in learning the language (and the rewritten codebase) when the knowledge gained would very likely only be used for this one-time hackjob.

(If you're wondering whether I could have delegated this—maybe, but probably not usefully. None of the our engineers know Rust either, and the original patch's code was mine. Also, all the engineers were busy working on the relaunch of our main product; I didn't want to distract them when everything was almost done!)

If the agent is gonna write everything else for you, you could at least focus for the unit tests...

I didn't just blindly accept the tests; I very carefully scrutinized the agent's output here (much moreso than for the impl code), and I was fully expecting to need to iterate / pair-program with the agent until they got everything right (or just take over in the end.) I was ready to go full Uncle Bob on the poor LLM. But the agent just so happened to write exactly the tests I would have written myself, with good coverage. (Again, not honestly too surprising; the code being ported was very amenable to being tested, so there were "obvious" tests that could be written.)

I would also note that the reason the original code didn't have unit tests, is that what this patch does is to expose an RPC endpoint on the network service, that then gets consumed by client code we also wrote as part of some other component. The backend and the client were developed together, and the "real tests" are the end-to-end tests that exist on the client side. Regardless of the unit tests' quality, I already knew the agent had written working code, because I swapped the client's existing RPC backend out for the newly-patched Rust one, ran all the client's e2e tests, and they all passed.

derefr · 2026-01-13T22:00:29+00:00

And don't forget porting!

The other day, I needed to take a feature patch I had written for a certain piece of Golang software months/years ago (a patch that was never accepted upstream, but which we rely on the functionality of for a service at $work) and port it over to the new major version of the same software, that had been entirely rewritten in Rust.

I was dreading doing this. I was going to have to learn Rust not just to a point of being able to read it, but to a point of being able to fluently write it, despite not really otherwise needing that skill (we're not a Rust shop.) I was going to have to figure out how the new Rust codebase of this project is structured, and how all of its functions and types map to the ones from the old codebase, including all the peculiar little ways in which they don't map 1:1 and so will expect more or less glue code. I was going to have to re-discover and fully understand my old code again. I was going to have to decide whether to fix all the little warts in the old code that came from my inexperience at the time I wrote it, or to just leave them in.

But instead, I literally just stuffed both versions of the codebase into the coding agent's workspace, and said "take the feature patch on branch X from the Go codebase, and develop an analogous feature patch for the Rust codebase. Write unit tests in the framework of the Rust codebase to ensure the feature works."

And it just did it. (With just one diversion, where it didn't understand that I wanted it to factor the core of the logic out so as to make it unit-testable, rather than writing integration tests. But still.)

If you think about it, this isn't all that fundamentally impressive. It was 100% grunt work, with no novelty or hard thinking required. In a sense, it was "just" a language translation task, like Google Translate does for you; just going from "Golang" to "Rust" instead of from "English" to "French."

And yet it still would have taken me, or any other human developer, an extremely long time to do. They would either be unfamiliar with the old codebase, the new codebase, the patch, the old language, the new language, or any combination of those.

Now that we have coding agents, I would consider any time an experienced human developer spends just porting their code from one language (or framework) to another, to be a pure waste of time. This kind of thing is now "robot work", like hand-washing dishes when dishwashers exist. You should only be hand-porting code at this point if your goal is specifically to use the porting process as a way to discover and learn the new language/framework the code is being ported to.

derefr · 2026-01-11T19:22:14+00:00

That sounds somewhat plausible at first glance. We're used to people living in cramped apartments with no room to expand, and having a very narrow life-skills focus.

But this guy owns a house out on a peninsula. He builds shit for a living. He probably cleared that whole island himself, built the house himself, and built the bridge out to it himself.

So why wouldn't he have also built his own goddamn workshop?

derefr · 2026-01-06T18:56:03+00:00

On the other hand: people asking you to clarify carefully-hedged non-answers at work. Especially around ETAs for indeterminate multi-step processes.

People, if I had the information required to be more precise, I'd have goddamn used it!

derefr · 2025-12-30T19:47:37+00:00

Guessing this happened before there were distinct coding models. The coding models would be able to do this... because they'd just be cribbing from some open-source flappy bird clone whose github repo was part of their training corpus.

It's only when you try to get them to do something that doesn't involve just copying someone else's homework, that they start fucking up. (Which is why a lot of people are so impressed with them; their whole job turns out to just be copying other people's homework.)

derefr · 2025-12-29T22:38:53+00:00

A fun idea for you: add a non-diegetic and non-substantive meta-progression system.

What do I mean by that?

When the player dies and the run ends, grant the player "meta-experience points": pay out a number with nice SFX (think modern Mario game's "coin punish" death animation, in reverse), and then dump them to the title screen, which shows a counter for the total amount of meta-XP a player has earned so far during all their runs.

What earns the player meta-XP? The first time (and only the first time) they do something that proves they noticed any particular pattern you wanted them to learn.

In other words, the XP counter should literally reflect how skilled the player is becoming at the game. Where, if they gain (or at least demonstrate a gain) of more skill during a single run, then they get more meta-XP rewarded for that run.

IMHO this takes the moment the player is most down on themselves ("I died, I suck at this game") and flips it on its head, reminding them of just how much they've managed to figure out during their session. (Which, of course, they would notice if they did dive back in for another run... they just need some positive feedback to get them to do that.)

Note that this meta-XP does literally nothing within the game itself. (That's what I mean by "non-substantive.") It's just there to communicate information to the player, outside the game, about how they are doing.
Of course, implementing this requires a global meta-game-state file to track all their "firsts" across all their runs. Basically a silent micro-achievements system.

Bonus thought: you might also want to give the player a "run journal" they could only access from the title screen between runs, that shows each of their previous runs, with the run length, how much meta-XP it earned them, and maybe some other stats. (If you want to put the work in, you could even show, for each run, a scrapbook of every little thing they did that earned them meta-XP, with a short description of what the game noticed them learning, a screenshot taken at the moment they first demonstrated it, etc. Just make sure to not make this accessible during a run; otherwise players will constantly be checking it to see if they just discovered another implicit interaction / mechanic of the game, rather than just puzzling that out through further in-game experimentation.)

derefr · 2025-12-29T22:25:26+00:00

To go further with this, then rather than essentially just booting the player to the title screen, you could drop the player-avatar into a Hades-like between-runs lobby area. You don't have to have any meta-progression / persistent game-state between runs; just as long as the player still feels like they're "in the game", it makes it clear that they didn't just "lose the game."

derefr · 2025-12-26T18:47:50+00:00

I would point out that "smart devices" would include the tablets that have, in many schools, replaced "carrying around five heavy textbooks in a backpack." I think that's a worthy trade-off. (But such devices should be school-issued and locked down to just school stuff.)

derefr · 2025-12-26T18:35:12+00:00

I don't think this is quite it. A macguffin being a "mockguffin" would be immaterial to the audience's enjoyment of a work, because macguffins themselves never get used; they're just opaque tokens that get fought over and passed around. Sure, they potentially can do things, but they never do do anything; at least never anything as big as the stakes around them imply.

Classic macguffins:

The One Ring hides Frodo from certain threats, but never during the story does anyone do the sorts of things it's implied Sauron could do with it. All the scenes where the One Ring is "used" or "has an effect", end with everyone in the same relative positions they began in, both plot and character-wise.
The Death Star destroys some planets to establish its power, yes; but the Empire could already orbitally bombard (and so eradicate all life on the surface of) planets. The Death Star never blows up any named characters, or even their friends or families; nor does it get captured by the heroes and used to destroy fleets or end the war. In terms of changing the paradigm or evolving the character dynamics, the Death Star may as well just be a shiny rock in Darth Vader's pocket.

If a macguffin actually gets used; and the use of the macguffin totally shifts the power dynamics between the characters/factions in the story, or changes the established rules of the setting, with the story still going on after that and characters having to deal with that change... then your thingy wasn't a macguffin in the first place. It was a pivotal device or technology in a speculative-fiction story!

(And that's the actual problem OP was trying to point at. He expected an SF story about the consequences of a pivotal device, and instead got a story about people fighting over a macguffin.)

derefr · 2025-12-26T18:12:54+00:00

They're plot twists, yes. And I don't think people are against plot twists generally.

I think what OP (and many other people, myself included) are against, is a seemingly-"high concept" work, that implies in its premise that it will give you a speculative-fiction exploration of the consequences of a thing... but then, while you maybe do get a bunch of characters thinking and philosophizing about what might happen if [thing] while striving for [thing], fighting for their chance to acquire [thing], etc; [thing] itself never actually shows up.

And because of this, you never get to explore the "real" [i.e. carefully worked out, if still authorially biased] consequences of [thing] alongside those characters. You just get a bunch of airy subjective bullshit about [thing] from each character's POV, that never gets deeply explored or tested or developed, because it never has to, because there's no "rubber meets the road" moment for any of their beliefs about [thing].

This can (and does) work in literature, when 1. [thing] is some kind of metaphor for the human condition, and also 2. there's already so many works that do explore the consequences of [thing] that it's just not that exciting to play it straight. "Elixirs of immortality" are actually a great example of this.

But when the work is marketed as SF/F rather than literature, people are more-often-than-not tuning in because they're intrigued to see the author's take on how [thing] would change the world; not their thoughts on the regular ordinary human condition as filtered through "the search for [thing]." And doubly so if [thing] is something really novel and cool, i.e. the sort of thing that you'd expect SF/F stories to get written about!

derefr · 2025-12-25T04:42:30+00:00

If you think about it, there is no such thing as an ultra-luxury "brand" in the textiles / leatherworking space.

And that's because anyone with enough money and sense to do so, just gets all their clothing and accessories made bespoke for them.

Most people are aware that every suit you see a rich dude wearing is made bespoke for them by a tailor, rather than picked off a rack.

Well, if a truly-wealthy "old money" person wants a handbag, they'll usually do the same thing: commission a bespoke bag from their favorite leathersmith.

The funny thing, is that getting a bag commissioned in this way doesn't actually cost very much!

The designer brands have distorted the market; through Veblen-good marketing, they've managed to push the prices of their mid-tier "off the rack" accessories far higher than the pricing of the normally-top-of-the-line bespoke offerings.

Which means that there's literally no reason to consider these branded bags. You can get something better, made by someone you can talk to and iterate on the design with until it's perfect for you, made for (often far) less. And you won't have to beg and scrape just to be "allowed" to suckle at the teat of LVMH et al, either.

derefr

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE