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

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411–420 of 455 posts

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

#411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Miss me with this. I write way more now than a year ago. Mainly because I have to explain myself to the LLM. I'm fairly certain I write 50x more than before simply because before my weekend was spent gaming and watching anime. Now I'm having fun building things.

Idk man I get a ton out of gaming and other media. If I say “I’m a cinephile” no one bats an eye, it’s seen as elevated and intellectually stimulating. Your examples reflect more on the gate keeping we do with what’s considered “worthy of our time” and “art” than the value of LLM’s.

I'm not drawing a moral equilancy here. You're right that people get all gate keepy. But the premise was that I do less writing. The truth could not possibly be further from reality. My actual words typed is thru the roof.

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

#412
post #389

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…

If you never used any particular tool, you probably wouldn't find it useful, right? I asked Gemini about my unicycling this morning, and it coached me on weighting the seat; e.g., looking ahead instead of down helps unweight the pedals.

That's true. I've also never used a wheelchair, or a variety of other tools for people who can't walk, because I can walk without them. The same holds true for communication.

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

#414
post #293

I don’t want to read content written by AI. A feature I would like on LinkedIn would be a 100% verified human content flag for users. LinkedIn can then do the scans and flip that to false for any users it catches posting AI assisted content. Let me filter that out of the feed. If we don’t do something to maintain some standard of discourse, we lose intellectually and as a piece of our humanity. LinkedIn is the only s…

How do you think they will verify this?

With AI?

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

#415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't, generally, think in words, Don't worry, no one does. That's why it is so common for people to forget a specific word they want to use ("it's on the tip of my tongue"). If we thought in words that will never happen.

…you don’t think in words? Or do you not consider an inner monologue to be thinking?

>>> I don't, generally, think in words,

>> Don't worry, no one does.

> …you don’t think in words?

"I don't, generally, think in words" is not the same as "I don't think in words".

Like I already said, if thought was exclusively in words for humans, humans wouldn't have the "It's on the tip of my tongue" problem. It's blindingly obvious that thought does not occur exclusively with words.

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

#416
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…

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

#417
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…

[deleted]

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

#418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Miss me with this. I write way more now than a year ago. Mainly because I have to explain myself to the LLM. I'm fairly certain I write 50x more than before simply because before my weekend was spent gaming and watching anime. Now I'm having fun building things.

LLM prompts definitely don’t feel like “writing” to me in the way that writing a blog post (or even an HN comment) does or writing code used to. There is nothing to work out, you don’t really need to think. You’re _typing_ sure, but I don’t think it counts as writing maybe because the text that you write is thrown away.

I'm way more articulated now than I've ever been, because in the past I didn't have to -- I never write a blog post -- but I've learned that well thought-out writing, with clear description, will produce better code.

The bottom line is, prompting is definitely writing.

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

#419
post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What use is that? I'm not being facetious, I'd really rather like to know. People are terrible at writing. Near universally bad. Even good writers have drafts and editors. There is a constant refrain here that somehow short messages are more valuable than longer ones. But that assumes it's understandable. Lots of short content is, frankly, awful because the writer cannot put themselves in the position of the reader…

To turn bad short writing into good long writing you must necessarily change the content of the writing, not just the shape.

wasn't it thoreau who said "Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short"

personally, I think there's a time and place for short versus long, just like there's a time and place for a 45mins TV episode versus a 2 hour marathon movie.

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

#420
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone needs to disclose the tools they used to write something. Nobody ever disclosed Word's grammar suggestions or spelling corrections, or the fact that they used some autocomplete tool to produce code, so we should they now need to start disclosing this tool. Besides, in it's current state, it discloses itself to anyone paying attention. I do think people own the output they produce regardless of th…

I don't really care about the tool per se, but if I'm reading some LLM output you give me its utility is awfully limited if you don't also supply the prompt. That's what I'd like to see normalized: Do not give me LLM output unless you also give me the full prompt text. Without the prompt I cannot discern what you were trying to do, because the LLM output is basically devoid of any coherent voice. Whether it's code, p…

>Do not give me LLM output unless you also give me the full prompt text.

Umm the point is you won't know to ask this question in the first place, and even if you did, you wouldn't have any leverage to demand this because you're a peasant.

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