I have a friend that is lucky enough to have retired at 40. A year ago he was adamant he'd never work again, having been burnt out from his time at big tech. Back then he was also an absolute AI hater and wouldn't listen to anyone who claimed LLMs were useful for programming.

He finally tried LLMs when Claude Opus 4.6 released and immediately changed his mind in the face of the overwhelming evidence that LLMs can in fact program pretty well. And now with the release of Fable 5 he's giddily creating all sorts of things that would have taken far too long to make prior to AI-accelerated software development. He actually plans to try and found his own business now. He's a very smart guy, so I hope he can make something interesting that people want.

There are a lot of AI doomers and haters. In person I mostly see people doing the same thing they've always done, but now saving time on various tasks. But this is the first time I've seen someone go from grumpy and checked out to giddy and optimistic thanks to LLMs.

I'm using the phrase 'internet discussion site' pretty informally, so I hope my meaning will become clearer as you continue reading.

I got rid of Snapchat around 4 years ago now. At some point in 2023 I noticed a sharp downtick in discussion quality on Twitter, and got rid of it as well. About two years ago, frustrated with the lack of human interaction and the vying for attention, I deleted Instagram. Near the end of 2025, I stopped using Discord. The final nail in the coffin has now arrived, since I'm unfortunately coming to the conclusion that Reddit is no longer worth visiting, leaving me almost entirely cordoned off from internet communication at a time when more humans are using it than ever before.
I won't bother repeating my personal reasons for this exodus since I feel confident that most people on this website have feelings on the matter that at least approximate my own.
Realistically this is a sign that it's time to prioritize interaction in the real world, and that's certainly a worthwhile thing to pursue. But bluntly society has restructured around the internet in a pretty substantial way, and I don't think it's an unreasonable ask to find various forms of forums on which more meaningful discussions can take place.
Here is my personal survey of the current landscape:

• tildes.net: Basically good. I really enjoy this website and I think in a lot of ways the 'bar/pub/cafe' model for a forum, where you can peer through the window but require permission to gain admission, is the only viable model for future online discussion places as the internet becomes ever more saturated with bots and bad actors.
• lobste.rs: Also basically good, for the same reasons as tildes. In some aspects, limited by the fact that it has a particular focus. In other ways, that's a really good thing. Maybe in a perfect world there would be a lobste.rs equivalent for every hobby, and we would return to an early internet forum world.
• Hacker News: Also basically good but perhaps a bit less so than the above two. I think most of the things posted on there are interesting, but a lot of the discussion has lately felt less insightful than it used to. I think a different tildes post noted this as well, but it's very caught up in the AI news cycle, often to an unfortunate degree.
• Rateyourmusic: The core site is enjoyable, and the forums are usually fun to check in on every now and then. Certainly a worthwhile place to visit if you enjoy music.
• Stackexchange networks: This is cheating since this is obviously many sites. I'm a mathematics student and I've found MSE and MathOverflow to be really wonderful places to learn and converse, albeit with some very arcane and strict rules for posting. The philosophy SE seems also generally of a high quality, and there are many other SE sites that I occasionally stumble into and am pleasantly surprised by. Unfortunately I expect its time is finite, since the UX has slowly but surely been degrading and the site traffic dropping.
• Fediverse networks: These sites clearly have potential, but for whatever reason it's still just not there. I drop into lemmy and Mastodon occasionally, but the posts are rarely of high quality. In many ways they just feel like "Reddit/Twitter but with a different name".

Surely these can't be all, right? It's a little soul-crushing to think how many people are online at any given time and how hard it is to find a place not drowning in noise. Maybe this is just my lament.

My daughter (11) is doing a week long Python class, which is not using LLMs.

It got me thinking about how I learned to program in the pre-internet days (laboriously, from books), and then what a marvel it was when you could just search for information, especially for troubleshooting. But for her, the first answer in the Google search is going to be the AI summary, and most of her search tools are going to be AI tools.

I wonder if it would be possible to make an LLM that has a didactic/socratic mode. So if you said, "help me write a program to do madlibs" maybe it would give you a skeleton of a function, then prompt you to come to with a plan, then critique that plan. Or if you said, "I'm getting this error", it wouldn't just fix it, it would explain what the error means and nudge you towards the answer.

Thinking in a larger sense, it could have a rubric of important concepts, even tiers of understanding. It could be using the interactions to track the user's understanding, which could let it then tune how it answers future questions, or even be used to customize assignments.

I recognize that this is potentially replacing a teacher with a machine, which wouldn't be my goal. Good teachers are more holistic in their teaching than a machine is ever likely to be. But for people who don't have access to good teachers, or need more directed support than is available from a teacher, or just want to self study, it seems like it could be a valuable addition.

Until they solve the obsequiousness problem, it would be vulnerable to prompt hacking, so really more of a tool for someone who recognizes the value of learning over just being given the answer.

What do folks think about using such a tool? What would you want it to do, or not do?

Aside: I forgot until I reached the end of this post, but this is also (somewhat) the plot of The Diamond Age, or A Young Lady's Illustrates Primer by Neal Stephenson.

Now that we know everyone's favorites, I'd love to hear about games that are further down the list -- the ones that don't necessarily rise to the high heights of definitive favoritedom.

So, share your eleventh favorite game this time. You know, the one that doesn't quite make it into your top 10.

Feel free to share your top 10 if you like as well, but lead with your 11th, as those are the ones I'm interested in seeing highlighted.

Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

In a moment of distraction, I fell for a phishing phone call and compromised my Google account. It took me 13 minutes to realize how catastrophically stupid I am and begin frantically changing passwords. I've run the official Google "secure your account" process probably 10 times (though 9 of those times there was nothing to do). I've checked all my financial info, changed passwords on all sorts of things. As far as I can tell, other than gaining access to my Gmail, I don't think anything else was compromised.

How boned am I? I've got 2FA on basically anything remotely important, and I've had decent password hygiene (although I do use the Google password manager, so that's probably comprimised). Is there something else I should do or be on the lookout for?

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?