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AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

rickmanelius.com

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Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#601

Post by account42 »

ModernMech wrote: post #86
gortok wrote: post #36

The part that astonishes me is that in the year of our common era two thousand twenty-six that it's not universally offensive and reviling to post an AI-generated response to another person. If I'm reading something on the internet, I'm either reading it to learn, or I'm reading it to be persuaded. If I wanted the LLM to teach me (thank you, no), I would ask an LLM. I'm reading your website/newsletter/email because I…

I went to a farm opening this weekend. A guy was there with fliers with about the barn renovation he completed, products they used, how the process went. 100% LLM output. How would you talk to your LLM about something like that? If he gave you that flier, would you scoff and trash it talking about how you can't be bothered to read it if he didn't write it? Or would you look it over?

I would leave at the earliest convenience and avoid interacting with that person as much as possible.

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#602

Post by account42 »

blitzar wrote: post #249
edaemon wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Volume is the problem. There's so much more of it now. Many platforms I used to enjoy are just overwhelmed with valueless content.

On platforms where you can not curate what you are fed, the healthiest option is to leave.

The problem is unless it becomes socially unacceptable might run out of platforms. It's not just influencers doing this, it goes as far as "normal" posters in old-school forums.

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#603

Post by b112 »

BeetleB wrote: post #407
preg_match wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will use LLMs to find spelling and grammar mistakes, as well as voice inconsistencies. I then carefully review the diff. Yes there are deterministic tools for this, but grammar is actually kind of complicated and the tools either miss mistakes, or suggest obviously worse edits. Looking at you, Microsoft Word. All the writing is my own and I read all of it. Naturally there’s no LLM-isms because I wrote 99.9% of the…

Many do as you, and I completely endorse this usage. Unfortunately, too many of us here make the giant leap of "If it went through the LLM, the original person was too lazy."

Of course, the start of the thread really had nothing to do with the concept you're espousing here. At all. It was more about "Some guy writes instructions into an LLM, and gets a blog entry", which is entirely on a different scale. And yes, that's the scope and scale we've been discussing.

Personally, in this new, different context you've stated, I don't think many have an issue with that. If you write 6 pages of text, and then ask an LLM to look for errors, that's not remotely the same, and it is more like a spell checker, or a second set of eyes.

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#604

Post by account42 »

xdennis wrote: post #313
gortok wrote: post #36

The part that astonishes me is that in the year of our common era two thousand twenty-six that it's not universally offensive and reviling to post an AI-generated response to another person. If I'm reading something on the internet, I'm either reading it to learn, or I'm reading it to be persuaded. If I wanted the LLM to teach me (thank you, no), I would ask an LLM. I'm reading your website/newsletter/email because I…

> The part that astonishes me is that in the year of our common era two thousand twenty-six It astonishes me that in 2026 AD, people still like to pretend that our calendar is not based on Christ's supposed birth. Christians have no problem calling days after pagan gods (Wednesday = Woden's day, Thursday = Thor's day, etc), but for some reason we have to pretend like the calendar isn't based on the Christian god.

> we have to pretend like the calendar isn't based on the Christian god

I like how this could be offensive to both Christians (Jesus isn't god) and anti-Christians.

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#605

Post by jeremyjh »

hypertexthero wrote: post #594

> If, however, prose is LLM-generated, this social contract becomes ripped up: a reader cannot assume that the writer understands their ideas because they might not so much have read the product of the LLM that they tasked to write it. If one is lucky, these are LLM hallucinations: obviously wrong and quickly discarded. If one is unlucky, however, it will be a kind of LLM-induced cognitive dissonance: a puzzle in whi…

Thank you for pointing to this. Instead of trying to constantly explain it to people, I'm going to link to that.

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#606

Post by teo_zero »

account42 wrote: post #587
teo_zero wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> using AI as an editor vs letting it write a whole essay for you. AI;DR is about the latter I'm sure that's the intention, but the alarming trend, at least here on HN, is crying wolf at the first em-dash.

Why is that alarming? Your immune system will also do some small amount of collateral damage to your own cells when its in a heightened state.

While you went this road of the medical metaphor, taking antibiotics at the first suspect of sickness without checking what's really going on, is a sure way to help develop antibiotic-resistant viruses.

Please note the key item is without checking. I'm not denying that many AI-generated documents are likely to be garbage. But refusing to read them just because of it will result in a lot of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#607

Post by meerita »

dominicq wrote: post #582
meerita wrote: post #558

I am writing excellent documentation with AI. The key success is to have rules to write documentation, PRs, commits, etc. I use ASD-STE100 and some constraints on what to write, how, and what it matters to my projects.

doubt

Try it. If you don't like the output, adapt the rules until you get the consistency you're looking for.

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#608

Post by account42 »

coderatlarge wrote: post #197
gortok wrote: post #36

The part that astonishes me is that in the year of our common era two thousand twenty-six that it's not universally offensive and reviling to post an AI-generated response to another person. If I'm reading something on the internet, I'm either reading it to learn, or I'm reading it to be persuaded. If I wanted the LLM to teach me (thank you, no), I would ask an LLM. I'm reading your website/newsletter/email because I…

i wonder if you’re equally offended by a public figure hiring young people to ghost write for their social media accounts or their books etc

Are you implying that one should not be offended by that? It's commonly mocked when it becomes apparent.

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#609

Post by jappgar »

Lerc wrote: post #337

For me the bar is still quality. Sure it bothers me if I search for something and find a crappy AI written tutorial that answers none of my questions, but if I found a high quality well written, insightful, and informative tutorial, I would not care if it were AI written. I guess the same thing goes for articles written by humans. I don't really read the articles that are "Shower thoughts that I think are profound" o…

I agree, but a lot of people don't.

I have coworkers who say they will stop reading something if they believe it is AI.

For them, it's not about quality, it's laziness disguised as righteousness.

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#610

Post by moffkalast »

joshmoody24 wrote: post #233
LPisGood wrote: post #56

My coworkers continue to dump hundreds of lines of AI documentation in every PR and every other line of code has between one and ten lines of AI generated comments, talking about the real unlock and how things are byte for byte identical on the load bearing path or how the acceptance ladder is misleading. Features are coming out and metrics are improving, but we’re basically in a post readability code base, with the…

My team uses a Claude Code hook that blocks any comment more than 2 lines long, and when tripped it encourages the agent to rewrite the comment more concisely and focus only on the "why" not the "what" of the code. I've found this extremely useful for code reviews.

I was using that approach with Fable to great effect, but with Opus it's useless. It just writes unreadable horseshit anyway, so banning comments entirely results in far more readable code.

Still I always find it funny when I give it code to review that it itself wrote and it immediately says how good the comments are, it's like that obama giving medal to obama meme.

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