Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Taste Is All That's Left

notashelf.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 573 posts

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#331

Post by kingkongjaffa »

notashelf wrote: post #146
boron1006 wrote: post #128

I don’t like the term taste, but the problem that I have is that LLMs don’t seem to work “good enough”. They seem to be able to solve the immediate problem, but stacking this on the scale of 3-4 devs over 6 months or so doesn’t seem to produce anything. One thing that I’m particularly frustrated with is the writing quality of LLMs. Like this is the thing that they should be able to do, but I would say almost everythi…

I'll risk sounding antagonistic and ask you this: if LLMs are not "good enough", why are they still around? Obviously "good enough" was a poor pick of words of words on my behalf---and I'll gladly own it---but they should be "good enough" for something if a significant amount of resources keep getting allocated to them. Yes on a very personal level you look at LLM-generated code and think to yourself "wow this is gar…

> if LLMs are not "good enough", why are they still around

They are not good enough yet, the people using these tools every day, and with a high bar for quality and design 'taste' notice the rough edges.

They are still around because LLMs are plenty good enough for casual consumers, but where 'taste' really starts to matter in design or in writing, the rough edges show up much more obviously and users who have been working with these tools feel it immediately.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#332

Post by kingkongjaffa »

brap wrote: post #42

Everybody thinks they have good taste don’t they. How convenient it is that we’re all so awesome according to the one metric that can’t be measured

I used to think the average HN reader probably did have good taste, at least above average. After all HN is a place for builders, making things. Most people never make anything. Making things means deciding what to make and how it should be, and also what not to make instead, so I think charitably HN probably does have higher average taste than random people or most other web forums.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#333

Post by jopsen »

cautiouscat wrote: post #102
jopsen wrote: post #101

Taste will always be there. But toil is not gone. We have still have code owners, lawyers, physical hardware, thousands of configurations that we can't test them all. And notably: we will still be asked to write software we can maintain in the future. Sure, there are short-lived non-critical software projects where LLMs will rule. But for many big complex projects, you can't land code without reviews. You can argue i…

> But for many big complex projects, you can't land code without reviews. Why do you think orgs are pushing less reviews? Token-maxxing increased PRs but stupid meat brains are a constraint. So of course, remove that constraint and you’ll have your features faster!

Software engineering is and has always involved engineering situations where you can let your co-workers/third-parties run wild with limited review oversight and limited blast radius.

Example: a plugin architecture with a solid API that makes degenerate behavior limited to usages of said plugin.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#334

Post by kingkongjaffa »

asdewqqwer wrote: post #162

But this is basically reinventing the term "Aesthetics" which is a field that had several centuries of philosophy research about it. Not all of them will agree AI cannot have it. Actually I think it is possible to reconcile Kant's third critique with the statement "LLM is possible to make aesthetic judgement" (with certain generous application of principle of charity, naturally).

AI does have something like Aesthetics and taste, but it's the average of all the inputs and so it's almost by definition the answer to 'what is the most average design possible based on all human prior data inputs?'

That's why AI prototypes of front end UIs tend to look the same without massaging them with your own design tokens, design language, and injecting your own taste.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#335

Post by [deleted] »

boron1006 wrote: post #128

I don’t like the term taste, but the problem that I have is that LLMs don’t seem to work “good enough”. They seem to be able to solve the immediate problem, but stacking this on the scale of 3-4 devs over 6 months or so doesn’t seem to produce anything. One thing that I’m particularly frustrated with is the writing quality of LLMs. Like this is the thing that they should be able to do, but I would say almost everythi…

[deleted]

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#336

Post by _luci_ »

chanux wrote: post #249
chanux wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Loren Brichter [1] Never thought of finding out who until you mentioned! What a small but fantastic contribution! Thanks Loren!! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pull-to-refresh

PS: Think about the next evolution of it, the auto refresh (from the great apps Instagram and LinkedIn). Did I use the word evolution right?

Id argue that auto refresh is more a successor than an evolution!

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#337

Post by don_esteban »

coldtea wrote: post #314
altmanaltman wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One thing I fear is going to happen when more and more people use LLM's for coding is that they will default to the "average taste" of the LLM, and we will stop getting new interesting ideas about how to build things. It is a possibility. But I also think we're underestimating the human need to create cool, unique things. Like yes most of the projects in this situation will have "average taste" but most of the proj…

> But I think it is a bit of an overblown fear that LLMs will just kill creativity and innovation in coding. Hackers will be hackin Hacking and a taste for hacking is a muscle you develop. LLMs will make most people not train it at all. Same way a huge number of people are obese and out of shape. For LLMs to be bad news in this regard, it doesn't matter if some people will still find a way to do something creative. A…

It is exactly like that.

Yes, there are exercise nuts who are exercising like crazy, but the average population is getting weak and obese.

The same with mental muscles.

How many people can do mental calculations in their head nowadays?

What about remembering several phones numbers?

What about simply navigating with map but without GPS? (Or, heaven forbid, just by common sense and observation?)

Properly thinking about hard problems is exhausting. Majority will be glad to offload the hard thinking to an AI 'assistant'. The same way we offloaded computing to calculators, and memory and navigation to phones.

What remains is the easily manipulated lizard brain...

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#338

Post by lelanthran »

esikich wrote: post #209
boron1006 wrote: post #128

I don’t like the term taste, but the problem that I have is that LLMs don’t seem to work “good enough”. They seem to be able to solve the immediate problem, but stacking this on the scale of 3-4 devs over 6 months or so doesn’t seem to produce anything. One thing that I’m particularly frustrated with is the writing quality of LLMs. Like this is the thing that they should be able to do, but I would say almost everythi…

This is just a problem of articulating what you want. Most people can't write for shit, I'm sorry. Because they maybe took one writing class in college. It's a skill in it's own. LLMs write better than anyone I've ever worked with and the reasons are obvious. If it rambles or is too "purple", that's on the person prompting it, because they can't write for shit to begin with.

> LLMs write better than anyone I've ever worked with

If you're talking about prose, this is obviously false. All the LLM prose I see is so mentally fatiguing to read that I usually just give up.

There are no lack of examples of poorly written LLM prose.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#339

Post by noosphr »

prodigycorp wrote: post #326
nazgu1 wrote: post #310

I have mixed feelings... I stumbled upon, read a post-mortem that looks even more AI-generated than the article. "That says something about my writing. It says nothing about who wrote it." - Two contradicting sentences, author's writing skills are part of the author as-a-whole "The short sentences, the reversals, the one-word lines" and then "I will write the next one plainer.". - even more? And... I wonder if this i…

Yeah, I am suprised this article ranks so high. It's either written by AI or it's poorly written. Very little to show on behalf of "taste". "Taste" is one of these words that have been bandied about recently, in addition to "moat". I've never seen a productive conversation stem from either of those mentiosn.

People read the title not the article.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#340

Post by hypfer »

scandox wrote: post #317
nazgu1 wrote: post #310

I have mixed feelings... I stumbled upon, read a post-mortem that looks even more AI-generated than the article. "That says something about my writing. It says nothing about who wrote it." - Two contradicting sentences, author's writing skills are part of the author as-a-whole "The short sentences, the reversals, the one-word lines" and then "I will write the next one plainer.". - even more? And... I wonder if this i…

> I'm sincerely sorry for publishing something that has allowed you to feel this way. What fresh hell is this? If this is human then I wish it was AI

> and this post will go down as my not-the-proudest, however, I take your criticism to heart—although not personally—and strive to improve.

I just do not understand why people - even when actively denying LLM usage - use the fucking em dash.

I don't care if it is the "right" thing to use there. The character has been associated with slop. Why do you keep using it without even just acknowledging that you did.

Just use any other character - like I am doing right now.

It must be AI indeed. Humans cannot be this dense.

___

Oh god I just saw the annotations on the side

> A fair pushback I got:

Dude. Why. Oh god. Why do you talk like claude. I want to believe you. I really do, but hell. Even claude could likely tell you that you sound like claude.

Oh my god.

Post reply on HN