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

Do your own writing

alexhwoods.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 265 posts

Re: Do your own writing

#241

Post by packetlost »

prodigycorp wrote: post #145
ninjin wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm reminded of that scene in "Ghost in the Shell" where some guy ask the Major why he is on the team (full of cyborgs) and she responds something along the line of "Because you are basically un-enhanced (maybe without a ghost?) and are likely to respond differently then the rest of us; Overspecialization is death." The scene you mentioned (amazing movie and holds up to this day) with the Major and Togusa: https://…

Bitterpilled. Wow, the audio mixing on that clip is great. I miss art like this. I'm afraid that nothing will recapture the way I felt watching GOTS the first time.

There are some many pieces of media that I wish I could fully scrub my memory of to experience for a second time.

Re: Do your own writing

#242

Post by balderdash »

I do my own writing, but i can go so much faster really just writing all of my thoughts down and organizing them a bit and using llms to really just clean up and better organize my thinking.

Re: Do your own writing

#243

Post by Willish42 »

The trust component is so critical here. When I get halfway through reading a design doc and hit a part that's obviously slop, it really hurts my confidence in the project and in any faith in the developer having done their due diligence.

Certain communications, especially technical writing, are "expensive" both in terms of the effort of the author(s), and in terms of the person-hours of people reading them to gain understanding. Like mission-critical code, they should be written and reviewed with care, and at the very least heavily edited from an automated LLM output to be unrecognizable as such.

I personally don't use LLMs at all in my designs and I remain skeptical of the value proposition for those who do.

Re: Do your own writing

#244

Post by [deleted] »

samusiam wrote: post #90
nerevarthelame wrote: post #12

I agree with most of this, but my one qualm is the notion that LLMs "are particularly good at generating ideas." It's fair enough that you can discard any bad ideas they generate. But by design, the recommendations will be average, bland, mainstream, and mostly devoid of nuance. I wouldn't encourage anyone to use LLMs to generate ideas if you're trying to create interesting or novel ideas.

"by design, the recommendations will be average" This couldn't be more wrong. The simplest refutation is just to point out that there are temperature and top-k settings, which by design, generate tokens (and by extension, ideas) that are less probable given the inputs.

[deleted]

Re: Do your own writing

#245

Post by zahlman »

roadside_picnic wrote: post #9

I've long considered writing to be the "last step in thinking". I can't tell you how many times an idea, that was crystal clear in my mind, fell apart the moment I started writing and I realize there were major contradictions I needed to resolve. Likewise I also have numerous times where writing about something loosely and casually revealed to me something that fundamentally changed how I viewed a topic and really co…

> I've long considered writing to be the "last step in thinking". I can't tell you how many times an idea, that was crystal clear in my mind, fell apart the moment I started writing and I realize there were major contradictions I needed to resolve. Likewise I also have numerous times where writing about something loosely and casually revealed to me something that fundamentally changed how I viewed a topic and really consolidated my thinking.

I've found that I instinctively try to work around this by thinking in an explicit inner voice; i.e. I imagine that I can hear my thoughts put into words and spoken to myself. (Actually speaking aloud is somehow too embarrassing, even if nobody is around to hear.)

It still doesn't quite seem to work as well as actually writing.

Re: Do your own writing

#246

Post by darth_aardvark »

satvikpendem wrote: post #229
darth_aardvark wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest, non-confrontational, non-passive aggressive question: Have you used any of the latest models in the last 6 months to do coding? Or frankly, in the last year?

They note in another comment they don't even use search engines so I don't think they're the right person to ask regarding frontier models.

I'd ask them what tools they do use, but I doubt they'll see my comment; I'll see if I can mail it to them.

Re: Do your own writing

#247

Post by bandrami »

imtringued wrote: post #201
bandrami wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm just not familiar enough with the solution space Neither is the LLM

If there is something LLMs are good at it's knowing some obscure fact that only 10 other people on this planet know.

They're also very good at almost knowing an obscure fact that only 10 people know but getting a detail catastrophically wrong about it

Re: Do your own writing

#248

Post by BoredomIsFun »

dgxyz wrote: post #19
nerevarthelame wrote: post #12

I agree with most of this, but my one qualm is the notion that LLMs "are particularly good at generating ideas." It's fair enough that you can discard any bad ideas they generate. But by design, the recommendations will be average, bland, mainstream, and mostly devoid of nuance. I wouldn't encourage anyone to use LLMs to generate ideas if you're trying to create interesting or novel ideas.

All LLM output is always dry as fuck quite frankly. At all levels from ideas and concepts through to the actual copy. And that’s dotted with pure excrement. I think the only reason it’s seen as good anywhere is there are a lot of tasteless and talentless people who can pretend they created whatever was curled out. This goes for code as well. If I offend anyone I will not be apologising for it.

> If I offend anyone I will not be apologising for it.

What you said is simply counterfactual, so no reason to be offended.

Re: Do your own writing

#250

Post by bandrami »

darth_aardvark wrote: post #246
satvikpendem wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They note in another comment they don't even use search engines so I don't think they're the right person to ask regarding frontier models.

I'd ask them what tools they do use, but I doubt they'll see my comment; I'll see if I can mail it to them.

(Why wouldn't I see your comment?)

I just don't use the web much anymore because the experience has degraded so much over the past several years and it has become decreasingly useful at work as well. I do sometimes need to search for a document and find Kagi pretty good for that, but the old way of using a search engine to kind of explore and discover stuff just isn't viable anymore, unfortunately.

I administer software for a living so I read a lot of documentation of that software but it comes with the software so I don't ever really need to search for it; I also read and participate in some forums and us the relevant IRC channels.

Post reply on HN