Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by seanhunter 14 days ago
Aside: The author of this article wrote a fantastic novel that not a lot of people know about called “The Debt to Pleasure”. One of the best instances of the “unreliable narrator” I’ve ever read.
3 comments

Good to know, thanks! This article was such a breath of fresh air compared to the usual "LLM-assisted" writing you get.

Just sentences like this:

> This isn’t just a problem for far-off countries of which we know little, like the EU and the US and China. Here in the UK [...]

So good! I feel like I'm becoming an old cynic but if it's the tenth time on the day that I read an overdramatized "It's not X, it is Y" in an article, actually good writing just hits different.

This is the London Review Of Books. They will be one of the last bastions of non-AI writing, because they actually care.
It’s depressing how hard it is to find anything worth reading on HN lately. Everything is either an advert or slop essay.

The article here is outstanding.

Not a fan of AI writing but I find sentences like that to be fluff and would prefer a more concise article overall. That would also have been my critique prior to AI and is the reason I only made it about half way through.
Phenomenal author indeed. "Capital", a novel about the financial crisis and bankers on the hedonic treadmill, is wonderful too. Too bad either Lanchester or his publisher has beef with Amazon, most of his work is not available as an ebook.
I enjoyed it too, a long time ago, and some sentences have stuck with me. This is the first time I’ve seen someone mention it. Felt inspired by Pale Fire.
…another fantastic book.