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ai;dr

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Re: ai;dr

#121

Post by CivBase »

philipp-gayret wrote: post #56
acedTrex wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compiled code is meant for the machine, Written code is for other humans.

Compiled natural language is meant for the machine, Written natural language is for other humans.

If AI is the key to compiling natural language into machine code like so many claim, then the AI should output machine code directly.

But of course it doesn't do that becaude we can't trust it the way we do a traditional compiler. Someone has to validate its output, meaning it most certainly IS meant for humans. Maybe that will change someday, but we're not there yet.

Re: ai;dr

#122

Post by dfxm12 »

raincole wrote: post #10

> AI-generated code feels like progress and efficiency, while AI-generated articles and posts feel low-effort I've noticed that attitude a lot. Everyone thinks their use of AI is perfectly justified while the others are generating slops. In gamedev it's especially prominent - artists think generating code is perfectly ok but get acute stress response when someone suggests generating art assets.

The author is a blogger (creator and consumer) and coder though. They are speaking from experience in both cases, so it's not apt to your metaphor.

It's worth pointing out that AI is not a monolith. It might be better at writing code than making art assets. I don't work with gaming, but I've worked with Veo 3, and I can tell you, AI is not replacing Vince Gilligan and Rhea Seehorn. That statement has nothing to do with Claude though...

Re: ai;dr

#123

Post by comboy »

miniatureape wrote: post #113
comboy wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> https://seeitwritten.com Fun, I'd make playback speed something like 5x or whatever feels appropriate, I think nobody truly wants to watch those at 1x.

I had a take on this same thing a number of years ago. Much simpler, but the idea was just to see it at a glance. https://miniatureape.github.io/sprezzatura/

yeah the idea is not new at all:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=557191

I can't believe etherpad lost this item...

edit: oh, I found the one I was looking for: https://byronm.com/13sentences.html

Re: ai;dr

#124

Post by ef2k »

I really liked this post. It's concise and gets straight to the point. When it comes to presenting ideas, I think this is the best way to counter AI slop.

Re: ai;dr

#125

Post by 98codes »

parsimo2010 wrote: post #75
archagon wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To quote Office Space, “Why should I change? He’s the one who sucks.”

Mostly because when I see an em dash now, I assume that it was written by AI, not that the author is one of the people who puts enough effort into their product that they intentionally use specific sized dashes. AI might suck, but if the author doesn't change, they get categorized as a lazy AI user, unless the rest of their writing is so spectacular that it's obvious an AI didn't write it. My personal situation is fi…

> assume

There's your trouble. The real problem is that most internet users are setting their baseline for "standard issue human writing" at exactly the level they themselves write. The problem is that more and more people do not draw a line between casual/professional writing, and as such balk at very normal professional writing as potentially AI-driven.

Blame OS developers for making it easy—SO easy!—to add all manner of special characters while typing if you wish, but the use of those characters, once they were within easy reach, grew well before AI writing became a widespread thing. If it hadn't, would AI be using it so much now?

Re: ai;dr

#126

Post by alontorres »

fwip wrote: post #9
alontorres wrote: post #2

I think that this requires some nuance. Was the post generated with a simple short prompt that contributed little? Sure, it's probably slop. But if the post was generated through a long process of back-and-forth with the model, where significant modifications/additions were made by a human? I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

One problem is that it's exceedingly difficult to tell, as a reader, which scenario you have encountered.

This is the strongest argument against it, I think. Sometimes you can't easily tell from the output whether someone thought deeply and used AI to polish, or just prompted and published. That adds another layer of cognitive burden for parsing text which is frustrating.

But AI-generated content is here to stay, and it's only going to get harder to distinguish the two over time. At some point we probably just have to judge text on its own merits regardless of how it was produced.

Re: ai;dr

#127

Post by threetonesun »

gordonhart wrote: post #65
acedTrex wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compiled code is meant for the machine, Written code is for other humans.

For better or worse, a lot of people seem to disagree with this, and believe that humans reading code is only necessary at the margins, similarly to debugging compiler outputs. Personally I don't believe we're there yet (and may not get there for some time) but this is where comments like GP's come from: human legibility is a secondary or tertiary concern and it's fine to give it up if the code meets its requirements…

I rarely see LLMs generate code that is less readable than the rest of the codebase it's been created for. I've seen humans who are short on time or economic incentive produce some truly unreadable code.

Of more concern to me is that when it's unleashed on the ephemera of coding (Jira tickets, bug reports, update logs) it generates so much noise you need another AI to summarize it for you.

Re: ai;dr

#128

Post by kjkjadksj »

comboy wrote: post #105
dontwannahearit wrote: post #25

It's pretty much over for the human-internet. Search was gamed, its usefulness has plummeted, so humans will increasingly ask their LLM of choice and that LLM will have been trained on the content of the internet. So when someone wants to know something about the topic that my website is focused on, chances are it will not be the material from the website they see directly, but a summary of what the LLM learned from…

There there, remember when all images were hand painted? (me neither) And I know it's different, but I'm surprised the overall sentiment is so pessimistic on HN. So maybe we will communicate through yet another black box on top of hundreds of existing ones already. But probably mostly when seeking specific information and wanting to get it efficiently. Yes this one is different, it makes human contact over text much…

There is a mountain of difference between photography and Ai

Re: ai;dr

#129

Post by pohl »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #30
cgriswald wrote: post #18

> For me, writing is the most direct window into how someone thinks, perceives, and groks the world. Once you outsource that to an LLM, I'm not sure what we're even doing here. Why should I bother to read something someone else couldn't be bothered to write? Because writing is a dirty, scratched window with liquid between the frames and an LLM can be the microfiber cloth and degreaser that makes it just a bit clearer…

> Outsourcing thinking is bad. I keep seeing this and I don't think I agree. We outsource thinking everyday. Companies do this everyday. I don't study weather myself, I check an app and bring an umbrella if it says it's gonna rain. My team trusts each other do do some thinking in their area, and present bits sideways / upwards. We delegate lots of things. We collaborate on lots of things. What needs to be clear is wh…

Managers and business owners outsource thinking to their employees and they deserve huge paychecks for it. Entrepreneurs do it and we celebrate them. But an invention that allows the peon to delegate to an automaton? That’s where I draw the line.

Re: ai;dr

#130

Post by hinkley »

weinzierl wrote: post #92

"Growing up, typos and grammatical errors were a negative signal. Funnily enough, that’s completely flipped for me." For me too and for writing it has the upside that it's sooo relaxing to just type away and not worry about the small errors much anymore.

Autocorrect is going to make me sound like a dumbass anyway.
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