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The revolt of the reader

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Re: The revolt of the reader

#251

Post by gosub100 »

ahepp wrote: post #151
bananaflag wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why dont they train LLMs not to speak like that? Is it some tragedy of the commons here?

A bigger question I'm interested in is why do LLMs speak like that in the first place? Is that really what you get if you took the average of the English language? It would be difficult for me to believe that. Is there something about tuning for desirable qualities that forces LLMs to have this voice?

It wouldn't surprise me if it takes more effort to be succinct. There's some famous quote from I think Mark Twain "this letter would have been shorter but I ran out of time". Just my guess

Re: The revolt of the reader

#252

Post by daveguy »

carlosjobim wrote: post #205
daveguy wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right that Nazi doesn't mean Nazi anymore. It means neonazi / white supremacist / white nationalist, which is a much broader group of people that, for some baffling reason, are under the impression that people don't care about their fascism and racism anymore.

"You guys are fucking nazis" - said the drunk young guy to the police when he was arrested for fighting outside a bar.

Nice strawman. I doubt the white supremacists / nationalists / nazis even want you to come to their defense if you're going to be weak about it.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#253

Post by Frieren »

masswerk wrote: post #98
kierangill wrote: post #65

My revolt is against the cognitive stress of reading generated text. A trope typically indicates I’m in for an uphill read. I recently read this William Zinsser quote that inspired a nickname for this: Clotted Claude [1]. > Nobody has made the point better than George Orwell in his translation into modern bureaucratic fuzz of this famous verse from Ecclesiastes: > > I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is…

In contemporary YouTube-script wording: > The Ecclasiast looked under the sun, but there was something he didn't understand. Something that wasn't right. Something that was not as it was supposed to be. And here is what the Ecclesiast didn't understand. Here is what nobody understood. Not then. Not in the years that followed. Not now. It was not the swift who won the race. Not the strong who won the battle. Not the w…

> two years, we will be all writing and talking like this

I have seen kids talking like youtubers: the top 10 things I like, or what I need to do before I die (the kids is 9 years old), ... not great (like repeating ad tunes or slogans) but not as bad as AI bullshit-talk.

My only hope is that AI bullshit-talk is so boring and predictable that it has low impact in our speech. And looking at what other commenters say boring and insufferable seems to be the case.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#254

Post by carlosjobim »

nwhnwh wrote: post #245
carlosjobim wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You guys are fucking nazis" - said the drunk young guy to the police when he was arrested for fighting outside a bar.

"You guys are fucking dogs" - someone said that the other day, and, of course, it means that the word "dog" lost its meaning.

Good example, since bitch certainly has lost a lot of its original meaning.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#255

Post by jimmaswell »

rmunn wrote: post #199
jimmaswell wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This could be shortened to "success does not belong to the skillful, for time and chance befalls all" with no meaning lost. It's self-indulgent fluff. Meanwhile, Orwell's actually adds more to the statement - much better signal to noise.

You're running into a cultural difference. The book of Ecclesiastes was written in Hebrew, in a poetical style even though large chunks of it are prose. But if you read other parts of the Bible, such as the book of Psalms (which is entirely poetry, specifically songs, though in many cases we do not know the tune that they were set to), you'll see that Hebrew poetry relied on repetition. For example, here's the King J…

Repetition can make a good impact, but it's beyond excessive in this instance. Contrast with this poem:

    Non est salvatori salvator,
    neque defensori dominus,
    nec pater nec mater,
    nihil supernum.
Translated:

    No rescuer hath the rescuer.
    No Lord hath the champion,
    no mother and no father,
    only nothingness above.
- Eliezer Yudkowsky

I find this one profound, and it's given me a lot to think about over the years - in situations ranging from asking what our place in the universe is, to doing the "right thing" (and deciding what "the right thing" even means to yourself), or standing at the helm of some team or project, knowing that judgement call is yours alone and there's no authority or higher power coming to swoop in and give you the answer or authoritatively judge your decision can be simultaneously liberating and terrifying. The use of repetition works incredibly well in my opinion and it still gives me chills to read it.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#256

Post by Rapzid »

I was looking into some AI code agent regressions Copilot and Claude silently slipped in behind remote FFs with shifting cohorts(just to drive us insane, cause fuck us right):

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/80015

It's tsunami of AI vomit drowning out a few human posters. I can 100% empathize with OSS maintainers banning AI submissions.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#257

Post by nialv7 »

i think long form podcasts with experts in certain fields is going to replace (non-fiction) reading for me. at least when you can see the human being talking, what comes out of their mouths cannot be AI generated.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#258

Post by [deleted] »

esjeon wrote: post #232
mpalmer wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He tried to argue that the second one is worse, but, unfortunately, he successfully simulated one possible interpretation of the original All in all, Orwell simply failed to properly simulate what he was trying to criticize If I was going to read "Orwell was wrong about English" anywhere, I guess it was always going to be HN. The sheer pomposity of your remarks here is the biggest clue that you are not writing them y…

No, my view is more like that he was too good at English to write bad English that he was criticizing. The examples he wrote are simply too sharp to fit well into his own criticisms. They are formulated so well that you can just “welp, my intention was different”. EDIT: This kinda reminds me of the musical theory of harmony. There are strict rules to follow in music composition, but when you go against every single r…

[deleted]

Re: The revolt of the reader

#259

Post by ryandrake »

vogelke wrote: post #138
masswerk wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In contemporary YouTube-script wording: > The Ecclasiast looked under the sun, but there was something he didn't understand. Something that wasn't right. Something that was not as it was supposed to be. And here is what the Ecclesiast didn't understand. Here is what nobody understood. Not then. Not in the years that followed. Not now. It was not the swift who won the race. Not the strong who won the battle. Not the w…

> in, say, two years, we will be all writing and talking like this Shoot me now.

> Shoot me now.

I'm sorry, I can't generate that because the request violates our content policies.

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