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Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)
301–310 of 458 posts
Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can think of the following: (1) Translation from one language into another (2) Transcription from one medium (audio) into another (text) (3) Deception to obfuscate your thoughts (4) Posting things like "First!", "This.", "Just google it.", etc. (5) Textbook answers with no original thought.
> Translation from one language into another Bad example, because translation is deeply creative. You can't blindly mill one language into another, because words and phrases and concepts and cultural references in one language frequently don't map 1:1. You have to find a way to convey meaning as closely as you can and not necessarily the words.
Amusingly I absolutely abhor translations done by people who think the way you do. I want a translation that's as literal as possible and which provides the necessary commentary for me to understand any alien concepts, idioms, customs, etc. I absolutely never want "translated" cultural references. At that point the "translator" is nothing more than a shitty fan fiction author as far as I'm concerned.
Of course the above requires actual work on the part of the consumer. I realize many don't want that, particularly when it comes to entertainment. So I appreciate that the other sort of "translation" exists but I think it's important to realize what exactly those are.
Thankfully LLMs are more or less to the point of providing what I'm after in near real time.
Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)
#303These are all important points and I love the analogy. But there is an even bigger issue with having LLMs write for you: Writing is thinking. Thinking and deciding. There have been many times when I start out writing something substantial - could be an email, a blog post, a software design document, anything - when my own views substantially changed during the writing process. Writing forces you to serialize your tho…
This is perhaps even truer for writing code.
Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because _someone_ has vetted the output of GCC. It’s used in flight-critical stuff. The closest thing we have to vetting LLMs is “whoa look, it escaped this sandbox, that’s prolly not great but it’s so cool!”
Sure, I manually test the output of the LLM. Manual testing is actually the main role for humans doing software engineering these days. I wouldn't use it for flight control software yet, at least not without careful review, but most software isn't exactly critical. At the same time, I wouldn't trust flight control software that was only reviewed by humans, since AI is so much better at debugging. We'll probably need…
Can’t imagine a client allowing me to pass the buck like this.
Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can think of the following: (1) Translation from one language into another (2) Transcription from one medium (audio) into another (text) (3) Deception to obfuscate your thoughts (4) Posting things like "First!", "This.", "Just google it.", etc. (5) Textbook answers with no original thought.
> Translation from one language into another Bad example, because translation is deeply creative. You can't blindly mill one language into another, because words and phrases and concepts and cultural references in one language frequently don't map 1:1. You have to find a way to convey meaning as closely as you can and not necessarily the words.
Did you hear the one about Scots Wikipedia?
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-...
Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)
#306Wait, you're complaining about AI-generated content on LinkedIn? The place that was 99.9% organic human content slop even before there were LLMs? It was always all form, no substance.
Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
We don't have a reward function for "human understanding". We reward the appearance of understanding. We define goals that we cannot conceive of reaching without something like understanding happening. There is something happening, but it is alien and counter-intuitive - it makes bizarre mistakes that betray it - and we don't know what it is. I'm pretty sure it is not human understanding.
> we cannot conceive.. That is it. We cannot concieve it because we are new to it. Just like we would think of Stackoverflow as intelligent if we are fresh off the jungle and are not aware of how Internet works. Because without know that, we cannot conceive how Stackoverflow can produce answers without it "understanding"
Stack Overflow is made of humans with understanding...
Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)
#308These are all important points and I love the analogy. But there is an even bigger issue with having LLMs write for you: Writing is thinking. Thinking and deciding. There have been many times when I start out writing something substantial - could be an email, a blog post, a software design document, anything - when my own views substantially changed during the writing process. Writing forces you to serialize your tho…
I don’t think it’s a good analogy.
Having your fly open is a harmless mistake that has little impact on your peers. People may or may not mention it to you but it’s not something they’ll hold against you.
Posting LLM slop under your name is a deliberate act. You decide to damage your message by taking a shortcut.
The obvious analogy was speaking while chewing.
Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed, but a lot of code doesn't need to be understood. Knowing which is which is the art right now.
> a lot of code doesn't need to be understood Really? I am having difficulty thinking of any examples of code that doesn't need to be understood. If it isn't understood by someone, then how is it even working? If you mean like a library you are using, where you aren't even reading the internals or might not even have access to it, OK, but that code is stull understood by its authors, surely?
I have so many projects on my computer where it doesn't matter if I know how it works or not. Probably well over 100. I think closer to 200, depending on how you count.
They're relatively simple, they do the task they need to and then they wait until they're needed again (or not).
In the past I wrote them, then forgot how they worked, until I needed them again, relearned what I did and adapted it.
Now I just don't have to know how exactly they work, I just get an AI to read the documentation anytime I need to reuse the project and I'll query the AI to fill in the details and to make changes and I ask the AI to run the code and debug it.
Perfect use cases for today's AIs. Doesn't even require SOTA, I can run comfortably on a Sonnet 5 or a Qwen 3.8 and it'll do exactly what it needs to do without making too many mistakes.
Not all code is large corporate code bases.
Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 1. It's usually low value and not trustworth - I could have just asked the AI myself. You have no way of knowing what the input to the writing was. You're making the erroneous assumption that the person posting the article was a mouthbreathing spammer who used the prompt "write me an article on subject XYZ, make no mistakes!" and you could have supplied the same prompt.
Alternative uses for reading: 1. Facts and processes. I just want to know something. I do not care if some Nerds for Nginx article is AI written. 2. Opinions and experiences. I want to know a human is writing because emotionally engaging with an AI isn’t building a stronger society - it’s increasing isolation. 3. In another front, I feel like the value of an AI story cannot be greater than the value of the inputs. If…
If some Nerds for Nginx article is AI-written, it's probably subtly wrong. How does this influence your opinion of it?