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I told people I'm a convicted felon after 20 years of hiding it
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Overview
Buford Taylor, who writes science fiction as Leonard Buford, is building three companies while writing a new novel and an autobiography. He says he has started or joined 17 early-stage companies since 2007, most of which shut down. His current businesses include Casting Call Club, a casting marketplace for voice actors, producers and directors with 2 million users; Closing Credits, an education and community platform for creators; and SHO, a testimonial-collection and embedding service started in October 2024. Taylor was engineer number three at Eventbrite, where he says revenue grew from $4 million to $700 million during his four years there. He later joined Reforge as founding engineer; the company raised $20 million from Andreessen Horowitz. He says Closing Credits reached about $50,000 in monthly recurring revenue in January 2022. Taylor is writing Sol Truckers, about a missing Earth and interplanetary war, and Buford versus Oklahoma, an autobiography covering prison, homelessness, addiction and entrepreneurship. His Nouscraft LitRPG trilogy has sold more than 10,000 copies and averages 4.5 stars on Amazon and Goodreads. Taylor says he uses no AI in his prose but uses AI for most coding, while reviewing all AI-generated code. He argues that writing manually remains necessary for sustained, deep thinking.
Summary from buford.bg.
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Hacker News · buford.bg
Reported comments: 48 · 15 saved in sample
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Based on 15 sampled comments from this thread. Analyzed 2026-10-22.
The discussion contains almost no substantive AI or machine-learning reaction. One reader noticed that the personal site appeared to use the same visual or technical approach associated with an OpenAI promotional site, and another responded that its presentation looked AI-generated. Neither comment developed that observation into a claim about model quality, AI-assisted authorship, safety, training data, or the value of an AI product. Instead, the thread overwhelmingly focused on the author’s undisclosed conviction, the apparent severity of the offense, whether the memoir conveyed remorse, and how criminal records constrain employment and housing after release. Some readers argued that a justice system should make rehabilitation practical rather than trap people in desperation; others stressed public protection and questioned whether the author’s framing earned sympathy. Those are social and criminal-justice arguments, not AI/ML ones. Comments about intrusive website sounds, bandwidth behavior, and clickbait likewise concern ordinary web design rather than AI functionality. As a result, there is no meaningful community consensus, dispute, praise, or criticism about AI to extract from this material.