Nathaniel Mott

90 Followers
89 Following
2.6K Posts
- doing normal computer things
- writing and editing for pay since 2011
- fuck "AI" and "crypto" and Elon Musk and CloudFlare
- accusations of LLM usage will be met with violence
- opinions are mine and Mordenkainen's
- friendlier than any of this makes me seem
Websitehttps://nathanielmott.com

I don’t know if regret is the right word. There’s certain things I’d question now and reevaluate…I guess in some sense, I regret that there were so many negative reactions where people did seem genuinely upset. It’s almost like people were really quite disoriented and terrified by it. […] And to some extent I get it and I’m trying to empathize with how they’re feeling.
But on the other hand, it’s like, look…you can keep your head buried in the sand and I think people do want to keep their heads buried in sand.

where’s the sign that says “apologizing for someone else’s feelings rather than for whatever you did to provoke those feelings isn’t really apologizing” because i gotta tap it

“sorry you cried when i punched you” is not an apology

“sorry i punched you” is an apology, barely

“But now with an agent, you can just say, “Hey, can you create a Wikipedia article on this?” And it reads the docs and just does it. Now, it might not be perfect, and it might have errors, which is something to look out for. But it lowers the friction by a lot. And so when I was kind of talking on the Wikipedia [page]…I was trying to say that this should empower the editors and people who want to contribute to Wikipedia. It’s a tool that makes editing Wikipedia much simpler. But I think a lot of the editors didn’t like that idea.”

you don’t have to “think” they didn’t like it, dude, they said they didn’t like it. this is the same kind of conversation I have with my kids except we’re talking about a grown-ass man who’s too attached to a plausibility demon to care.

“And I was surprised how upset some people got by it and I feel bad that…they called it like a horrifying experience, actually, and a traumatic experience. I feel really bad for them, but you know, this is the reality now. People are gonna have to deal with this.” https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/03/i-was-surprised-how-upset-some-people-got-a-conversation-with-the-creator-of-tomwikiassist-the-bot-that-edited-wikipedia/

brother the “deal with this” is going to look like things that get people banned from mastodon servers

“I was surprised how upset some people got”: A conversation with the creator of TomWikiAssist, the bot that edited Wikipedia

"It's almost like people were really quite disoriented and terrified by it. And to some extent I get it and I'm trying to empathize with how they're feeling."

Nieman Lab
nvm it's working now and i don't know why
ah, it silently conflicts with an existing keybind, so neither command gets run but nothing is echoed to the minibuffer
Next up: figuring out how to add custom keybinds because my ”<space> c” = { run = “toggle-comment” } can go fuck itself I guess
dunno who this will help but to auto-load a colorscheme in ad your “colorscheme = /path/to/colorscheme.toml” needs to be above any other bracketed section in the config. can’t be in its own “[colorscheme]” bracketed section, because that fucks with TOML, but if you try to just uncomment the example line it gets caught in the “[tree-sitter]” section and isn’t evaluated

*Company makes my life worse through their product*

I will boycott this product

*Company continues making my life worse, now through externalities*

How do I boycott an externality

I think acme is pretty cool, too, but I have a nagging suspicion much of its charm could be replicated in emacs? so if we had emacs + evil mode / meow + $ACME_PACKAGE we'd be, what, the arbiter of the end of the editor wars?