Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bcantrill.dtrace.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 436 posts

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

#421

Post by fortzi »

arjie wrote: post #257
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…

One could imagine a universe where the agent fills in citations and supportive points and so on, or makes a more conclusive argument but it seems you’d get better results leaving that to read time if it’s a one-shot. Steering prompts etc. with tool use to bring in other sources etc of course change this entirely. And regardless, I doubt we will read content like that directly ever again. Agents will act as per-person…

> In some sense, all programming is boilerplate expansion because computers have (until now) been unable to be programmed with anything approaching natural language.

Maybe sometimes, but not always. When you need to actually render the thing you have all kinds of micro decisions, like where to put the square, what color, how fast it spins, etc.

You might not care about the details, but maybe you do. If it spins at 10000 rpm, will you care then?

Natural language, and human communication in general, is ambiguous, and coding is in great part about disambiguation.

Sure, you can use English to disambiguate as much as needed, but wouldn’t you then end up with some yaml-like spec that wasn’t much easier to create in the first place?

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

#422

Post by gps372 »

Another AI-as-amplifier vs AI-as-substitute article.

Wondering what happens when tomorrow AI accepts and learns from the feedback and gets trained on all the failed initiative as well. It wouldn't be so hard if failed (something which wasn't right at all or hasn't got the traction) projects and ideas are all listed somewhere for an LLM to scan through. LLM may finally figure out how to add personal scars, hard decisions and personal insights which can be personalized further.

Also I don't think it might be so undesirable for an org, if there is a system which observes and present hard facts based on last quarter or year JIRA (pi planning and sprint planning) and commit histories.

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

#424

Post by darksim905 »

habinero wrote: post #292
OroPla wrote: post #276

Earlier 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.

I think you meant that translation is, case in point, based on inference. The person doing the translating is inferring, based on context, intent and meaning and imparting that on what their output is. That's generally not desired from a taxonomy perspective.

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

#425

Post by fc417fc802 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #378
fc417fc802 wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Here's what I understand: - You've got a pet peeve. - You're going to rant about it, because you want to, whether or not it's relevant to an existing conversation. - You didn't bother to think about my comments. - You didn't bother to think about habinero's comment either. Here is the same passage of the Analects (part of the chapter Gongye Chang) in different translations: --- Annping Chin --- Zilu said, "We would l…

I really think you aren't talking about the same thing that I am. I'm not sure why you're assuming bad faith on my part rather than engage in discussion to clarify.

I think it should be quite clear by now that I am not talking about isolated words that broadly lack an equivalent concept in the target language. I even quoted the bit from the original comment that I took issue with and proceeded to give examples so I'm really not sure where the misunderstanding between us could lie at this point. Perhaps you are the one who should stop and more carefully think about what I wrote?

As to your example. I certainly do not accept that this is a case where we should throw our hands up and accept that different translators will go about things differently. Those two sentences in english have (as you note) rather different meanings. So either one or both translators must be wrong.

You have indicated that the original work in the native language is ambiguous. In such a case I do not think it is remotely acceptable for a translator to arbitrarily pick one of several possible meanings and just run with it. If the original meaning of the text is ambiguous then removing that ambiguity changes the meaning thus it is a bad translation. The translator instead needs to faithfully communicate that ambiguity, possibly resorting to a note if it isn't possible to easily express such a thing in the target language.

I realize that many people aren't going to want such a marked up copy. But without all the gory detail the reader will be consuming some sort of bizarre partial fan fiction. Your example illustrates that perfectly.

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

#426

Post by harrouet »

So there are people who actually spend time on the LinkedIn social feed?

Man, it has been purely made of fake content, even since before LLM were a thing.

And the notifications are so senseless that everyone disable them -- and people don't even answer the private messages.

There is nothing social about LI.

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

#427

Post by altmanaltman »

max__dev wrote: post #186
altmanaltman wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been thinking over this comment for a while now. I think yes, you are correct that thought is involved in writing but I don't think it is possible to claim "all writing is thinking when done by a human". Like what type of thinking are you claiming here? Because one can copy a text and write it down and that involves thinking in the sense that anything we do involves thinking fundamentally. But that thinking is…

You wrote "apt apt apt apt apt apt" to prove a very specific point no? Absolutely requires reasoning and understanding the problem to go there. And good luck getting an LLM to do that.

Yes, I wrote it to prove that writing doesn't mean I understand the world. It responds to "writing helps you understand the world." My point was that, yes, of course you can find categories within it that apply, which is why the answer is not fundamentally incorrect. Claiming "writing = thinking" in a general sense is very broad, and that's my point.

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

#428

Post by altmanaltman »

lelanthran wrote: post #215
altmanaltman wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been thinking over this comment for a while now. I think yes, you are correct that thought is involved in writing but I don't think it is possible to claim "all writing is thinking when done by a human". Like what type of thinking are you claiming here? Because one can copy a text and write it down and that involves thinking in the sense that anything we do involves thinking fundamentally. But that thinking is…

> Why does me writing "apt apt apt apt apt apt apt" help me think about the world? Poor example. You wrote it to make a point, after all.

Yes, but not to understand or think about the world. In this case, writing was to express something, not to understand something. The overall point is that claiming that "human writing = human thinking" is too broad a general statement to make seriously.

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

#429

Post by rrr_oh_man »

card_zero wrote: post #156
fwlr wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strange! I would quite specifically highlight “having to do the reader’s thinking for them”, as well as more generally developing the skill to “communicate non-interactively with an unknown audience”, as extremely valuable upgrades to my thinking.

It's a kind of shared fiction of an imaginary person's thinking, really. The author writes "now, I know what you must be thinking", and hopes the reader will agree "OK, close enough".

> It's a kind of shared fiction of an imaginary person's thinking, really

That is the best way I’ve seen anyone put into words what I feel about those types of theses

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

#430

Post by IanCal »

strix_varius wrote: post #334
IanCal wrote: 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.

Not necessarily. Poorly worded, ambiguous, confusingly ordered writing can be massively improved without changing the core content. Better setups and explanations can be longer without changing the message or meaning.

Look at it the other way, could you take a good longer message you’ve written and make it shorter and less readable for your audience while still making sense to you and containing the key points?

Post reply on HN