> Where is it appropriate to post a subscriber link?
> Almost anywhere. Private mail, messages to project mailing lists, and blog entries are all appropriate. As long as people do not use subscriber links as a way to defeat our attempts to gain subscribers, we are happy to see them shared.
The occasional sharing of subscriber links in this way only does us good. If you enjoy the content, please subscribe and help ensure that there will be more of it!
Joining lwn makes you a gatekeeper for lwn (and allows you to browse and comment on lwn), it doesn't simply allow you to be a reader of lwn. I'm sure their traffic has almost no relationship to their number of subscribers. Subscribers are just the people actively marketing the journalism. It's like a two-level pyramid scheme - you're spreading their journalism and looking smart, and 1/500 of the people you send it to become new subscribers.
They're usually shared links (note the 'share a free link' button at the bottom, above comments) ime - I've never seen it styled like this before. Weird that it's a subscriber-only link that doesn't require login, but does for other subscriber-only actions like sharing a free link or replying to a comment.
> reserved for companies that are pushing the boundary of the industry
In a world where every company beleives (or wants to beleive) that they are doing some ground-breaking, bleeding edge work (see any tech company blog and you can only find hyped technologies in there), I do not think one can expect companies to do a fair assessment of if they really are doing such work.
> ask very precise questions explaining the background
IME, being forced to write about something or verbally explaining/enumerating things in detail _by itself_ leads to a lot of clarity in the writer's thoughts, irrespective of if there's an LLM answering back.
People have been doing rubber-duck-debugging since long. The metaphorical duck (LLMs in our context), if explained to well, has now started answering back with useful stuff!
One thing LLMs have been incredibly strong even since gpt-3.5 is being the most advanced non-human rubber duck, and while they can do plenty more, that alone provides (me at least) with tremendous utility.
This unfortunately has `docstring-to-markdown` as one of its dependencies, which is a pain to install behind corporate pip proxies because it's under GPL.
