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Taste Is All That's Left

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Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#361

Post by pmg101 »

owebmaster wrote: post #327
innocentoldguy wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a writer with what may be an unpopular opinion. I have a college degree in creative writing; I do technical writing and programming for a living, and I used to publish technical articles on Linux, Python, Elixir, and other topics—complete with em dashes—long before AI was a thing. When confronting AI as a writer and deciding how I feel about it, I've landed on the conclusion that I've never accused mathematicians…

People that don't communicate well can't fix that with AI. Turning one line of confusing thoughts into a 30 lines text make it worse, not better.

Somebody at $formerwork wrote a "skill" that takes a poorly/briefly specified Jira ticket, and "fleshes it out", purportedly so that when an agent picks up the ticket it has more context.

Really at that point, with head in hands, rather than try to explain the foolishness, I decided I was better out.

"Zoom and enhance" used to be a joke/meme, apparently it's now "engineering".

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#362

Post by criley2 »

vsl wrote: post #354
hypfer wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> I just do not understand why people - even when actively denying LLM usage - use the fucking em dash. Because they are literate? Unlike the "em-dash means AI" illiterate crowd? I'm not going to change my writing because some idiots who never read a novel or heard about typography think only AI does that.

[dead]

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#364

Post by drngdds »

innocentoldguy wrote: post #324
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 a writer with what may be an unpopular opinion. I have a college degree in creative writing; I do technical writing and programming for a living, and I used to publish technical articles on Linux, Python, Elixir, and other topics—complete with em dashes—long before AI was a thing. When confronting AI as a writer and deciding how I feel about it, I've landed on the conclusion that I've never accused mathematicians…

My points of disagreement are

- At least to me, AI writing (especially from Claude) is actively painful to read. It's worse than the average person who has flawed English (or just sucks at writing) because of how verbose and stylistically repetitive it is.

- AI writing is a strong probabilistic signal that what I'm reading is going to be crap in terms of the actual ideas and content too, even if it isn't the case 100% of the time. I just don't want to waste my time on that kind of thing.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#365

Post by lelanthran »

SoftTalker wrote: post #181
swat535 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For majority of people, including business executives it's the latter. No one cares about artisan code. Software is just a means to an end for them and not an art form. People treat their computers like any other appliance. They don't care if it's riddled with bugs, they'll gladly restart their computer or refresh the page at infinitum to get it to work. I think it's also why marketing and designers get more of a say…

> they'll gladly restart their computer or refresh the page at infinitum They won't gladly do it. They'll do it begrudgingly because there is nothing better, or they have no choice, and they need to get their work done. Just because people use your AI-vomited garbage programs doesn't mean they like it.

I'm quite sad that I have to disagree with you and agree with GP: if quality siftware mattered to people, Microsoft would have gone out of business a long time ago.

If quality software mattered, javascript wouldn't be the most popular way to write desktop software.

If users cared at all about quality software, we wouldn't have 800MB chat apps.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#366

Post by scotty79 »

grey-area wrote: post #269
scotty79 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only because you'd rather believe that you are being lied to than mistaken.

No, because the writing is objectively bad in ways that LLMs excel in producing. Either they used an LLM or they have no taste and have used LLMs far too much elsewhere.

> No, because the writing is objectively bad in ways that LLMs excel in producing.

Author does not dispute that. Yet they claim to not use AI. So your preferred belief is that they are lying, rather than a thing that looks AI written might have been actually written by a human and you are wrong thinking that it can't be true in this case.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#367

Post by ferfumarma »

owebmaster wrote: post #327
innocentoldguy wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a writer with what may be an unpopular opinion. I have a college degree in creative writing; I do technical writing and programming for a living, and I used to publish technical articles on Linux, Python, Elixir, and other topics—complete with em dashes—long before AI was a thing. When confronting AI as a writer and deciding how I feel about it, I've landed on the conclusion that I've never accused mathematicians…

People that don't communicate well can't fix that with AI. Turning one line of confusing thoughts into a 30 lines text make it worse, not better.

And mathematicians who don't understand mathematical theory can't use calculators to write proofs.

Focus on the content and the idea; not how it was written.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#368

Post by the_wolo »

I really don't get why people here are so obsessed with "taste". I also find the premise of the article to be completely wrong. Taste, not only in software, is only the only thing that's left for humans, if you ignore the complex social environments in which our technological systems are embedded. AI puts the emphasis in the socio-technological system on the social. If you were never social to begin with, or if you deliberately ignore the social embeddedness of our systems b/c you are terminally valley pilled, you might come under the impression though that indeed, taste is the only thing that's left.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#369

Post by tripzilch »

hypfer wrote: post #340
scandox wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'm being serious here: Looking for em-dashes is a terrible way to "scan" for slop. You need to look deeper than that and if you did, there's clearly a voice there. If you let yourself develop an "em-dash allergy" and think this helps you avoid LLM-slop, you're scanning for the wrong things and it's going to do the opposite for you. Actually stay on your toes and don't become this complacent.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#370

Post by tripzilch »

hypfer wrote: post #357
vsl wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just do not understand why people - even when actively denying LLM usage - use the fucking em dash. Because they are literate? Unlike the "em-dash means AI" illiterate crowd? I'm not going to change my writing because some idiots who never read a novel or heard about typography think only AI does that.

I just do not comprehend how that can be the hill people choose to die on. Like.. I get it. It's wrong. It feels wrong to give the AI nonsense just an inch and all. But in the grand scheme of things, it's just highly ineffective dogmatism that makes people unheard, miserable and just further increases struggle. Which people are free to do, in the same way that I am free to purposefully drop a massive hammer on my foo…

Avoiding em-dashes is not going to save you from being blind-sided by slop.
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