I'm still around.. I'm just not writing here

Commenters reacted to Rachel's announcement that she’s stopped blogging publicly by debating whether withholding hard-won knowledge is justified. Gavinray and armchairhacker argue that not posting hurts the community because others benefit when problems and solutions are shared; ulimn said they were saddened to lose a rare blog the followed. lapcat and some others insist they’ll keep writing for human readers and reject ceding public information to corporations, while ChrisMarshallNY says he writes less because he prefers shipping projects and happily uses LLMs to produce some output. spongebobstoes defends the author’s choice and rejects misanthropy, and simianwords and JohnFen push back against the idea that helping broadly is obviously the best course.

A large thread of concern centers on AI training and monetization: deburo and selfsimilar worry that cloud providers harvest public text regardless of “don’t train on my data” settings and that feeding “AI farms” incentivizes exploitation. Loquebantur suggests a middle path of publishing non‑monetizable, practical help; others propose invite‑only or private spaces. Opinions diverge over whether public writing is the “best gift” to humanity (simianwords) or a legitimate reason to pause sharing (those protecting their work), and dang urges charitable interpretation of motives. Overall the split is between those who prioritize open contribution and those who prioritize protecting authors from corporate appropriation.