Earlier quoted context omitted.
If someone had written it. It's well curated slop, but it's still slop. Consider this bit: > A profession does not need to be eliminated to be mourned. It is enough for its center to fall out, leaving the people who built careers in that center with credentials that no longer map to a stable role. When AI threatens the work, it threatens the self, which is why the response looks less like ordinary job-loss fear and m…
Moaning about downvotes and Things These Days is tedious and your post would be improved by the absence of it.
However, to your point directly: Simon has a pretty valid argument. There’s a lot of slop posted on jere these days.
Personally I’m reading far less stuff from HN than I used to. That’s a shame because up unto the past six months or so I’ve found it a great place to expand my reading.
Now I increasingly click something open, realise it’s more AI slop and close it.
What I don’t understand is why these people do not realise how utterly, unmistakably, glaringly obvious their awful AI crap is.
I recently said elsewhere on here: I partly work with words. I find AI-“authored” content absolutely and unmistakably obvious.
The fact that people publish crap like this shows that they don’t know what good writing is, or what good expression of ideas is. Because if they did they would proof what their AI had written and realise how awful it is.
And that by extension means that the content is almost certainly worthless, because whoever prompted it read it and said “this is fine! I’m happy to publish it under my own byline!”
And in reality it just makes them look idiotic. No discrimination. No original thought.
So I don’t think my comment, - or Simon’s comment - was moaning about “Things These Days”.
It was a point about the erosion of the community this creates.
And if nothing else that erosion is silly arguments about the value - or otherwise - of AI slop.