July 19, 2026
Hot blogs, no bots
Ask HN: What are your favorite blogs not about AI?
Tired of AI everywhere? The internet just dropped its secret comfort-read list
TLDR: A Hacker News thread asking for favorite non-AI blogs became a love letter to the old internet, packed with niche recommendations and nostalgia. The big reaction was clear: people are hungry for human voices again, with commenters celebrating personal writing, mourning dead blogs, and sneaking in a few cheeky self-promos.
A simple question — what blogs do people still love that aren’t about artificial intelligence — turned into a surprisingly emotional group chat about the lost art of reading the internet for fun. Instead of robot hype, commenters served up a chaotic, charming pile of favorites: The Old New Thing, Ciechanow, John D. Cook, Dan Luu, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, and more. One user flat-out declared that acoup.blog is the only blog they check manually — a dramatic vote of confidence in a world where most people let feeds and apps do the digging.
The biggest vibe in the comments was equal parts nostalgia and low-key rebellion. One person sighed, “I miss the 2009 era of blogging about personal projects,” which basically set the mood for everyone mourning the quieter, weirder internet. Another admitted they “love feeding my RSS reader,” a sentence so gloriously old-school it practically came with a fedora for your bookmarks. There wasn’t much fighting, but there was delicious gate-crashing: someone recommended a podcast in a thread about blogs, another plugged a clean-comedy newsletter “No AI produced writing,” and a few people slipped in their own sites with a humble-brag energy that was honestly kind of adorable.
And then the thread took a softer turn. A tribute to late writer Shamus Young brought real heart, with one commenter saying, “Rest in Peace Shamus. You made a huge impact on a younger me.” So yes, this was a recommendation thread — but it also became a mini-drama about taste, memory, and people desperately trying to prove the human internet is still alive.
Key Points
- •The Hacker News post asks readers to share favorite blogs that are not primarily about AI.
- •Responses include a wide range of blog recommendations spanning software, graphics, mathematics, economics, photography, history, and personal project writing.
- •Raymond Chen’s 'The Old New Thing' on Microsoft’s developer blog is specifically highlighted, along with a linked favorite post.
- •Several recommendations note niche subject matter, including Darktable, Nintendo corporate history, procedural generation, and graphics engineering.
- •The thread includes both independent blogs and adjacent formats such as Substack newsletters and a Foreign Policy podcast.