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An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

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Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#231

Post by fennecbutt »

armchairhacker wrote: post #216
sho_hn wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also ironic: When the same professionals advocating "don't look at the code anymore" and "it's just the next level of abstraction" respond with outrage to a journalist giving them an unchecked article. Read through the comments here and mentally replace "journalist" with "developer" and wonder about the standards and expectations in play. Food for thought on whether the users who rely on our software might feel simil…

- There’s a difference. Users don’t see code, only its output. Writing is “the output”. - A rough equivalent here would be Windows shipping an update that bricks your PC or one of its basic features, which draws plenty of outrage. In both cases, the vendor shipped a critical flaw to production: factual correctness is crucial in journalism, and a quote is one of the worst things to get factually incorrect because it’s…

Tbf I'm fine with it only one way around; if a journalist has tonnes of notes and data on a subject and wants help to condense those down into an article, assistance with prioritising which bits of information to present to the reader then totally fine.

If a journalist has little information and uses an llm to make "something from nothing" that's when I take issue because like, what's the point?

Same thing as when I see managers dumping giant "Let's go team!!! 11" messages splattered with AI emoji diarrhea like sprinkles on brown frosting. I ain't reading that shit; could've been a one liner.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#233

Post by shantara »

bombcar wrote: post #190
usefulposter wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like in the original thread that was wiped ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47012384 ), Ars Subscriptors continue to display lack of reading comprehension and jump to defending Condé Nast. All threads have since been locked: https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/journalistic-standards... https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/is-there-going-to-be-a... https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/um-what-happened-t…

Ars Technika has fallen substantially from the heady era of Siracusa macOS reviews.

Eric Berger space coverage still remains Ars’ strong suit.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#236

Post by anthonj »

I have very strong, probably controversial, feeling on arstechnica, but I believe the acquisition from Condé Nast has been a tragedy.

Ars writers used to be actual experts, sometimes even phd level, on technical fields. And they used to write fantastical and very informative articles. Who is left now?

There are still a couple of good writers from the old guard and the occasional good new one, but the website is flooded with "tech journalist", claiming to be "android or Apple product experts" or stuff like that, publishing articles that are 90% press material from some company and most of the times seems to have very little technical knowledge.

They also started writing product reviews that I would not be surprised to find out being sponsored, given their content.

Also what's the business with those weirdly formatted articles from wired?

Still a very good website but the quality is diving.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#237

Post by ffsm8 »

Pay08 wrote: post #185
ffsm8 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I don't subscribe to the idea that you shouldn't look at the code - it's a lot more plausible for devs because you do actually have ways to validate the code without looking at it. E.g you technically don't need to look at the code if it's frontend code and part of the product is a e2e test which produces a video of the correct/full behavior via playwright or similar. Same with backend implementations which hav…

If you tried this shit in a real engineering principle, you'd end up either homeless or in prison in very short order.

You might notice that these real engineering jobs also don't have a way to verify the product via tests like that though, which was my point.

And that's ignoring that your statement technically isn't even true, because the engineers actually working in such fields are very few (i.e. designing bridges, airplanes etc).

The majority of them design products where safety isn't nearly as high stakes as that... And they frequently do overspec (wasting money) or underspec (increasing wastage) to boot.

This point has been severely overstated on HN, honestly.

Sorry, but had to get that off my chest.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#239

Post by idiotsecant »

anthonj wrote: post #236

I have very strong, probably controversial, feeling on arstechnica, but I believe the acquisition from Condé Nast has been a tragedy. Ars writers used to be actual experts, sometimes even phd level, on technical fields. And they used to write fantastical and very informative articles. Who is left now? There are still a couple of good writers from the old guard and the occasional good new one, but the website is flood…

[flagged]

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#240

Post by christkv »

Kwpolska wrote: post #235

The story is credited to Benj Edwards and Kyle Orland. I've filtered out Edwards from my RSS reader a long time ago, his writing is terrible and extremely AI-enthusiastic. No surprise he's behind an AI-generated story.

Is he even a real person I wonder
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