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Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

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Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#361

Post by thaumasiotes »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #336
thaumasiotes wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you aren't disagreeing with your parent comment. You seem to have a strong opinion that you are; that opinion is incorrect. Words refer to a broad semantic region, a phenomenon technically known as "polysemy". The range of a word in one language is always different from the range of analogous words in another language. This is a classification problem. And a translator must think about how to solve it. Imagine a…

Of course nothing involving natural language and human culture is exact. A "literal" translation is obviously a slightly fuzzy concept that speaks to intent. However I think I provided enough context that this should be clear. I gave the example that I don't want "translated" cultural references or idioms but rather the (approximately) literal wording and some commentary from the translator providing the necessary co…

My point is that nothing in your comment was in any tension with the comment you responded to, and you still don't seem to realize that.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#362

Post by mpyne »

notahacker wrote: post #274
mpyne wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Root cause here is that writing is how humans communicate ideas. Writing is a way humans communicate ideas. It's not the only way humans communicate ideas. And now, it's not only humans who communicate ideas, we just saw with the OpenAI HuggingFace hack how AI agents were able to communicate amongst themselves by using various hacked websites to opportunistically write notes for later agents to use. All that "X is…

I think you're missing the context, which isn't musing on what it is to be human and can machines think, but the purpose of Joe Smith's LinkedIn account expressing that he has ideas about X is to convey the message that Joe Smith is interested enough in X to venture an opinion on it, and Joe Smith has actually just set up an automated process to generate content without thinking about X, that perverts the purpose of…

I get the context, but then the comment I'd replied to would have said that humans get better at communicating their ideas by writing their ideas on their own, rather than that writing is some kind of human-only mode of exposition. It's not.

And nor is an LLM generating text just "copy/pasting a Wikipedia article", you'd think people on HN would be smarter than that at least.

If all Joe Smith is going to do is cat $(which claude) to his LinkedIn, then he'll deserve the poor results he gets from it, but we shouldn't mistakenly say that this will be because LLMs simply cannot write. It would be just as dumb for Joe Smith to do with with a professional human ghostwriter.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#363

Post by MichaelNolan »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #341
27183 wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The most popular programming languages in 2030 will, in fact, be English and Mandarin. Deal with it and get over it. What are you willing to bet?

I'm game. Say $1000, donated to a charity of the winner's choice? How do you want to set the bet up, and how do you think it should be decided? To be precise: I will bet that high-level programming languages won't be any less popular as a whole, but the vast majority of code will be written by AI rather than humans, working from specs written in natural language or something very close to it. What we call "source cod…

Seems like a case for https://longbets.org/ You and the other poster just need to find some agreeable benchmark so you can decide who won.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#364

Post by snk »

ambicapter wrote: post #277
bcherny wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I work at Anthropic) I agree. I use an LLM to write my code, but I do all of my writing by hand, since it helps me think. It reminds me of the transition over the last year from AI-assisted coding to AI doing all the coding. At first the code output wasn't good enough, and humans read and iterated on the code all day, so the details of the source code mattered. Now, the code is largely high quality and it meets a la…

> I do all of my writing by hand, since it helps me think. Later > I wonder if long form writing will go the way of code. You and the AI agree on an outline or other high level representation, then the LLM expands it into a document. So in the future, it won't be necessary for you to think?

Kinda. Walking the dog with me this evening, Christa saw the license plate 8531 PRI and asked me if 8531 really was prime. The 2, 3, 5 checks are automatic, and 8531-8400 = 131, which obviously isn't divisible by 7, but I would've had to check the rest of the two-digit prime factors except 97 - 8531 is greater than 90 squared, less than 97 squared, though, I reckon. So I said I don't know. But Google would know, you know? If your LLM buddy is hanging out active on your phone all the time, it can - maybe not yet, but foreseeably - answer every question, no thought required, and carry out any expressed desire.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#365

Post by ingvay7 »

jcims wrote: post #187

We hired a new guy at work that's leading a specific platform initiative. In person he's very articulate, able to communicate abstract thoughts clearly, states clear goals and how he's learning about the business to develop a plan. But dear lord everything he writes in email and slack reads like it's copy paste from chatgpt. It's unnerving.

Had a similar experience when my talented lead engineer, who usually grunts in monosyllables and writes terse responses to my apparently intellectually frivolous questions, started adding flowery emojis to his email.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#366

Post by bentcorner »

CityOfThrowaway wrote: post #246
lelanthran wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> wonder if long form writing will go the way of code. You and the AI agree on an outline or other high level representation, then the LLM expands it into a document. What use is that? I'm not being facetious, I'd really rather like to know. Who or what is the audience for that sort of long form writing? If it's a human, why would they read it? They'd just give it to an LLM and get the salient points back. If the aud…

You can imagine: 1. I have a bunch of data or research that I've gathered with a unique hypothesis 2. Having gotten my arms around that pile of information, I believe I have a compelling thesis to put forth 3. I design the narrative arc and of the thesis. The important parts, the necessary but not sufficient scaffolding. 4. An AI helps fill in the story from there. Fact checks each claim, connects the dots, makes it…

> An AI helps fill in the story from there. Fact checks each claim, connects the dots, makes it comprehensible.

I think this certainly has some value but this claim in and of itself is stated like your hand-wavy step 3. How do they fact check claims and connect the dots?

Maybe LLMs get there but currently they write in an extremely verbose manner, and things that have gotten into the context window that are no longer relevant continue to stick around (just try having it write some code, then work some of it back to simplify the problem - it will insist on writing comments about code that no longer exists).

Right now using an LLM to write documents is like taking a superhighway to travel 100 meters. Yeah you're doing a lot but is all that really necessary?

I won't deny that LLMs will never have a place in writing. But I personally don't think the current form is "the one that actually lands" (!).

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#367

Post by fc417fc802 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #361
fc417fc802 wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course nothing involving natural language and human culture is exact. A "literal" translation is obviously a slightly fuzzy concept that speaks to intent. However I think I provided enough context that this should be clear. I gave the example that I don't want "translated" cultural references or idioms but rather the (approximately) literal wording and some commentary from the translator providing the necessary co…

My point is that nothing in your comment was in any tension with the comment you responded to, and you still don't seem to realize that.

I think you've misunderstood something. The comment I replied to specifies "words and phrases and concepts and cultural references". You only seem to be talking about words (and perhaps exceedingly simple turns of phrase). I was quite direct that I disagree when it comes to (among other things) the more complex idioms and certainly when it comes to any and all cultural references.

Imagine a localization attempting to replace a reference to an actor, political scandal, or other concrete cultural reference from one country with the "equivalent" from another. I've encountered that sort of thing before and while there are certainly those who appreciate it I am emphatically not one of them. As far as I'm concerned that's shitty fan fiction.

There are also a lot of examples in most (all?) languages that rely on repetitive sounds, easily mistaken words, or other strictly auditory features of the native language. You literally cannot translate those things. I do not want shitty fan fiction, I want an explanatory note.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#369

Post by StanislavPetrov »

Personally I never use an LLM or "AI" for any reason. Don't find them useful and, like others, don't find their writing compelling or interesting. I can understand using it as a coding tool, but can't fathom anyone wanting or needing to filter their own thoughts and ideas through it. Is it really that difficult for anyone to send a letter or an email without machine assistance?! If someone sent me a machine generated email I would view it as being no different than any other spam message. In my opinion doing so shows a lack of respect for the recipient whose time is being wasted with machine generated trash.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#370

Post by mlinhares »

jeremyjh wrote: post #62

These 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…

Same. I do not use LLMs for writing and I recommend everyone i work with to do the same. Even for code, I come to the code with the idea of what I want and provide that to the agent, then we iterate on what needs iteration or decisions.

Just did this for some caching, started with the structure of what I wanted the cache to look like, asked the agent to start the work, didn't like how the architecture came about, scratched it and rewrote the whole thing, so it fit the model I now wanted.

Was also just having this discussion with friends, that I can only think seriously about a subject if i can put it to paper (even virtual paper). Writing lets me organize my thoughts, clearly define my assumptions and see if any of it make any sense. I can't imagine what it would be like if i couldn't write, my brain just doesn't work without it.

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