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

Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

holovaty.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 451 posts

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#171

Post by dylan604 »

plemer wrote: post #97
normie3000 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with passive?

Passive voice often adds length, impedes flow, and subtracts the useful info of who is doing something. Examples: * Active - concise, complete info: The manager approved the proposal. * Passive - wordy, awkward: The proposal was approved by the manager. * Passive - missing info: The proposal was approved. [by who?] Most experienced writers will use active unless they have a specific reason not to, e.g., to emphasize…

> Passive - wordy, awkward: The proposal was approved by the manager.

Oh the horror. There are 2 additional words "was" and "by". The weight of those two tiny little words is so so cumbersome I can't believe anyone would ever use those words. WTF??? wordy? awkward?

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#172

Post by Dylan16807 »

b112 wrote: post #134
kragen wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. So far it seems to be a lot better at creative idea generation than at writing correct code, though apparently these "agentic" modes can often get close enough after enough iteration. (I haven't tried things like Cursor yet.) I agree that it's also not currently capable of judging those creative ideas, so I have to do that.

This sort of discourse really grinds my gears. The framing of it, the conceptualization. It's not creative at all, any more than taking the sum of text on a topic, and throwing a dart at it. It's a mild, short step beyond a weighted random, and certainly not capable of any real creativity. Myriads of HN enthusiasts often chime in here "Are humans any more creative" and other blather. Well, that's a whataboutism, and…

Point taken but if slushing up half of human knowledge and picking something to fit into the current context isn't creative then humans are rarely creative either.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#173

Post by dylan604 »

IggleSniggle wrote: post #139
exe34 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favourite: "a decision was made to...". It means "I decided to do this, but I don't have the balls to admit it."

That's funny, I always thought that meant, "my superior told me I had to do this obviously stupid thing but I'm not going to say my superior was the one who decided this obviously stupid thing." Only occasionally, that is said in a tongue-and-cheek way to refer directly to the speaker as the "superior in charge of the decision."

That reads like several comments I've left in code when I've been told to do something very obviously dumb, but did not want to get tagged with the "why was it done this way?" by the next person reading the code

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#174

Post by kragen »

PlunderBunny wrote: post #165
bityard wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition to the points already made, passive voice is painfully boring to read. And it's literally everywhere in technical documentation, unfortunately.

It has its place. We were told to use passive voice when writing scientific document (lab reports, papers etc).

To be fair, current scientific papers are full of utterly terrible writing. If you read scientific papers from a century and a half ago, a century ago, half a century ago, and today, you'll see a continuous and disastrous decline in readability, and I think some of that is driven by pressure to strictly follow genre writing conventions. One of those conventions is using the passive voice even when the active voice would be better.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#175

Post by [deleted] »

brookst wrote: post #124
kragen wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes the missing info is obvious, irrelevant, or intentionally not disclosed, so "The proposal was approved" can be better. Informally we often say, "They approved the proposal," in such cases, or "You approve the proposal" when we're talking about a future or otherwise temporally indefinite possibility, but that's not acceptable in formal registers. Unfortunately, the resulting correlation between the passive v…

Yep, just like tritones in music, there is a place for passive voice in writing. But also like tritones, the best general advice is that they should be avoided.

[deleted]

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#176

Post by groestl »

kragen wrote: post #30

I've found this to be one of the most useful ways to use (at least) GPT-4 for programming. Instead of telling it how an API works, I make it guess, maybe starting with some example code to which a feature needs to be added. Sometimes it comes up with a better approach than I had thought of. Then I change the API so that its code works. Conversely, I sometimes present it with some existing code and ask it what it does…

> and being unintuitive is the only one that this will fix

That's also how I'm approaching it. If all the condensed common wisdom poured into the model's parameters says that this is how my API is supposed to work to be intuitive, how on earth do I think it should work differently? There needs to be a good reason (like composability, for example). I break expectations otherwise.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#177

Post by jcranmer »

brookst wrote: post #126
School-Cotton wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You used passive voice in the very first sentence of your comment. Rewriting “the points already made” to “the points people have already made” would not have improved it.

Thats not passive voice. Passive voice is painfully boring to read is active. The preamble can be read like “however”, and is unnecessary; what a former editor of mine called “throat-clearing words”.

"the points already made" is what is known as the "bare passive", and yes, it is the passive voice. You can see e.g. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922 for a more thorough description of the passive voice.

As I said elsewhere, one of the problems with the passive voice is that people are so bad at spotting it that they can at best only recognize it in its worst form, and assume that the forms that are less horrible somehow can't be the passive voice.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#178

Post by Xorakios »

arscan wrote: post #120
normie3000 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with passive?

There was a time when Microsoft Word would treat the passive voice in your writing with the same level of severity as spelling errors or major grammatical mistakes. Drove me absolutely nuts in high school.

had to giggle because Microsoft hadn't yet been founded when I was in high school!

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#179

Post by badlibrarian »

dylan604 wrote: post #171
plemer wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Passive voice often adds length, impedes flow, and subtracts the useful info of who is doing something. Examples: * Active - concise, complete info: The manager approved the proposal. * Passive - wordy, awkward: The proposal was approved by the manager. * Passive - missing info: The proposal was approved. [by who?] Most experienced writers will use active unless they have a specific reason not to, e.g., to emphasize…

> Passive - wordy, awkward: The proposal was approved by the manager. Oh the horror. There are 2 additional words "was" and "by". The weight of those two tiny little words is so so cumbersome I can't believe anyone would ever use those words. WTF??? wordy? awkward?

29% overhead (two of seven words) adds up.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#180

Post by kragen »

jcranmer wrote: post #177
brookst wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats not passive voice. Passive voice is painfully boring to read is active. The preamble can be read like “however”, and is unnecessary; what a former editor of mine called “throat-clearing words”.

"the points already made" is what is known as the "bare passive", and yes, it is the passive voice. You can see e.g. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922 for a more thorough description of the passive voice. As I said elsewhere, one of the problems with the passive voice is that people are so bad at spotting it that they can at best only recognize it in its worst form, and assume that the forms that are less…

I'm not sure this is a "bare passive" like the beginning of "The day's work [being] done, they made their way back to the farmhouse," one of the bare-passive examples at your link. An analogous construction would be, "The points already [being] made, I ceased harassing the ignorant". But in "In addition to the points already made" this case "the point already made" is not a clause; it's a noun phrase, the object of the preposition "to". Its head is "points", and I believe that "made" is modifying that head.

Can you insert an elided copula into it without changing the meaning and grammatical structure? I'm not sure. I don't think so. I think "In addition to the points already being made" means something different: the object of the preposition "to" is now "being", and we are going to discuss things in addition to that state of affairs, perhaps other things that have happened to the points (being sharpened, perhaps, or being discarded), not things in addition to the points.

Post reply on HN