simonw is a smart guy, definitely an HN darling for anything LLM related nowadays but at the same time he is constantly pushing for his personal brand, IMO. Maybe unconsciously and just because he is very prolific but still, I get that feeling.
He writes because he loves writing. People can tell, and thus like reading it. If that creates a "brand", there's not much he can do about it. He's an active, valuable, good-faith participant here, has a subject matter expertise in something HN obviously cares very deeply about, and isn't going anywhere.
I'm not denying that, in fact I think it's basically because he writes a lot and participates a lot. But yet, it can give the feeling that he is curating his own brand. But probably it's just an organic thing, not a fabricated one.
I don't think I have been rude at all, and also seniority does not give any special authority over opinions.
My point was that the "creating the personal brand" part - which can seem something intentional - is just a byproduct of posting, writing and contributing. And he contributes because he has knowledge, opinions and things to say.
It's like writing your own blog with good content and getting organic traffic from search engines vs writing SEO content to get traffic and get noted.
Maybe I initially expressed myself not the way I really wanted.
I'll be honest and blunt: I try to avoid his blog posts and comments as much as possible because I do find his contributions to be super spammy. It's about the frequency of his self-promotion (as a researcher in NLP it's tiresome to constantly see his self-promotion on nearly all posts on HN related to LLMs). Seems I'm not the only one.
If he posted on the ML subreddit while I was still a mod there (left after the API kerfuffle) I would have messaged him and asked him politely to tone it down.
I have no issue with simonw's work/comments; I've never gone near it because it's far afield from my non-tech world. He is, though, someone who breaks one HN guideline:
>Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.
His submissions here are usually to his own work. Admittedly, that HN guideline is like an obscure 19th-century law which is still on the books that few know of and is never enforced. Even so, he's clearly well-regarded based on the amount of conversation his blog posts elicit.