161–170 of 312 posts
So the year is 2026 and we cannot point a LLM at, say, this HN thread, and give it the instructions: "I don't want to look like a dumbass, so don't make these obvious mistakes / don't use these obvious tells" !?
Kind of works.
What I find amazing is how HARD it is to make the LLM produce a piece of text that does not sound like slop. I have had dozens of sessions where I tried to make it write like a human would, and yet it still uses those tired writing phrases. I don't understand why neither openai, nor anthropic are able to do anything to make it better, and in some cases it feels like we are actually going backwards.
Alan Turing poisoned the context in ways we can't comprehend and all LLMs are bound by his dead hand.
- “(The) honest caveat:” (or “genuine caveat:”, both with the colon) - “(The) honest answer:” (again, with colon) - “The thing to internalize:” - “The smoking gun:” (really, sentences that start with “The :” are a strong tell, but those four are the most prolific) - “load bearing” (when not talking about architecture) - “blast radius” (when not talking about actual explosives, but rather the effect of an event/action…
Also, here’s a link to well-documented patterns by Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
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Heard smoke test IRL & was confused to see it used indeed in place of “sanity check”. Weird.
Can't remember when I first heard it, but I searched my email and got a pile of results from 2012 and 2009. It's possible there's earlier in there somewhere but 2009 was a busy year so I got bored of clicking the "more results" button...
The LLM writing sameness is bad. Use LLMs to help your writing! But don't include a word they generate, even just a vocabulary adjustment, in your own output. Have them critique structure and flow, spot overused words and passive constructions and dumb picks for topic sentences. It's great for that, and those are all objective improvements in your writing that won't mess up your style. The LLM sameness in web design…
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If you're doing art, do art. Nobody's stopping you. If you're trying to solve a problem for other people, be legible. Legibility and individual expression are goals in tension.
I'm not saying replace the entire thing with a flash animation or something drastically "artsy", just yours.
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You're contradicting yourself. First you say that they're judged on the end product, then you mention things that are very clearly not end products but thoughts and visions behind them that only lead to end products. Frankly, I have no real idea of how good Carmack, Torvalds or Blow are as programmers, I have never worked with them so I don't really have a way to tell (even though I do contribute to Linux and I've se…
> You're contradicting yourself How? > you mention things that are very clearly not end products but thoughts and visions behind them that only lead to end products Thoughts and visions are much more closely intertwined with end products (in fact, likely supercede them) than some random code review is, so I'm not seeing where the contradiction lies. > that's the main thing he was being judged on for decades now Linus…
> Code review is (...) mostly about communication between people, convincing them to your ways of doing things (or getting convinced by others) and communicating needs. It's what keeps projects running and what makes people improve their skills.
The way he does that is exactly what most news stories about Torvalds have been focusing on for many years now. In practice, unless you run a project alone, code review is where thoughts and visions surface up the most. Or, well, should be - not everyone is good at it.
(that said, even though my point is that's he's obviously not being judged on his code, you can easily find code that he wrote as late as this month, so your statement is clearly wrong even if that doesn't really influence the discussion here - code review is still the vast majority of his job, just like he stated there under your link)
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There's a third camp between these extremes who is like "goddamn it just type this shit out for me so I don't have to do it myself".
Definitely the space I'm in, where I know exactly what I need, exactly how to implement it, just saves time typing 100s of lines.