Live data from Hacker News

AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

rickmanelius.com

261–270 of 729 posts

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#261
post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many different people in this HN submission have given you similar feedback: given that, you should consider that your priors are not correct.

It could also be that this site has created its own hive-mind environment. Which is especially and bizzarely intolerant of AI at the moment. I don't want the prompt - I may not have access to an LLM to evaluate it. The entire argument here is misguided, and deeply angry about AI. It's equivalent to answering a question with "google it". Which is often times just plain rude.

People having preferences different from you is not a hive mind.

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#262
post #36

The part that astonishes me is that in the year of our common era two thousand twenty-six that it's not universally offensive and reviling to post an AI-generated response to another person. If I'm reading something on the internet, I'm either reading it to learn, or I'm reading it to be persuaded. If I wanted the LLM to teach me (thank you, no), I would ask an LLM. I'm reading your website/newsletter/email because I…

It takes energy to generate the LLM response. If you read the already generated response instead of generating your own, we burn less coal.

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#263

My coworkers continue to dump hundreds of lines of AI documentation in every PR and every other line of code has between one and ten lines of AI generated comments, talking about the real unlock and how things are byte for byte identical on the load bearing path or how the acceptance ladder is misleading. Features are coming out and metrics are improving, but we’re basically in a post readability code base, with the…

My "favorite" Claudism is when I critique its work and ask it to remove some unnecessary part of the design -- and then the diff has more green than red because it added comments about why the code is no longer there -- the code that was never in the mainline and never asked for!

It's not just claude, all AI is unable to produce something concise. On the surface everything looks 'good' whether code or prose, but then if you dig a bit, try and understand the whole text you quickly realise that 80% of it is unecessary and the whole thing could have been re-worded/re-coded into something a fraction of its size and complexity.

I asked Sol to reduce the length of some documentation we had by making it more concise. It came back after 20 minutes of work, did a line count and was aghast that the line count had somehow increased...

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#264
post #36

The part that astonishes me is that in the year of our common era two thousand twenty-six that it's not universally offensive and reviling to post an AI-generated response to another person. If I'm reading something on the internet, I'm either reading it to learn, or I'm reading it to be persuaded. If I wanted the LLM to teach me (thank you, no), I would ask an LLM. I'm reading your website/newsletter/email because I…

I think there are some, who couldn't be a part of the public conversation, precisely because of they inability to add anything to said conversation. LLMs enables them to post (or, rather, paste) something, in an attempt to trick others into believing they do have something to say. They think they sound smart now, because LLMs are "very much the “stupid person’s idea of an intelligent person”"[1] So now we are flooded…

I believe you've just described 95% of things posted to LinkedIn...

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#265

I really like the point I read somewhere the other day; instead of sending me the AI output, just send me the prompt you used to generate it. That is the only part that contains only the information you are trying to convey. The rest is just guesses flowery language added, and it confuses the actual message being sent.

How is this? https://claude.ai/share/99bfee0f-bab9-4593-aabb-377e71f1151d

I think you intentionally sandbagged your prompt by dragging on and being repetitive and it’s still a better read than the LLM output.

There’s also a difference between “please edit my writing” and “please generate a blog post from these bullet points.”

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What drives people to cheat at competitive games? I imagine it’s the same genes.

Using tools to fix your writing style or grammar is not exactly cheating.

This implies that writing styles are simply "correct" or "incorrect". I'd prefer to read someone's natural writing style, even if they do not consider themselves a good writer, because it comes from them genuinely. Much better than enduring text that has been fed into an LLM and homogenized.

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#267
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The HN guidelines prohibit a lot of behaviors that remain unmoderated, you can see it in any thread that goes over 80 comments.

If those behaviors bothers you enough you can always mail hn@ycombinator.com because dang is not omniscient even if sometimes it looks like he is...

How many active moderators are there? This site has a lot of comments, far too many for one person to read.

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we get it. Laziness has always abounded in human endeavors. Despite the common social norms against it, there is a clear reason. Obviously, if you can get the same reward with less work it is a greater ROI. The incentive is pretty straightforward. In a mechanized world the incentives are even more aligned towards a kind of laziness given the capacity for automation to scale. None of this is new. People who act l…

TL;DR: I want more effort posts/better SNR, so I guess I have to tolerate the human non-effort posts complaining about AI non-effort posts with the hope that it helps retard the rate of non-effort posts vs effort posts. While I'm hoping the AI bubble pops sooner than later, as I still hold out hope that knowledge work will continue to require knowledgeable humans at the helm, I wanted to add on that I think you make…

It's a good point, I just don't agree with the conclusion. I think if you examine the incentives/mechanics behind the phenomena, you would realize that a world in which there are more "meat proxies" for more tasks would be a more enlightened one. The precedents to me are obvious - go back and examine the most famous times of human flourishing. It was always connected to power and patronage - ie, commerce. Most people could not read for most of human history. Universities used to be institutions for a small number of elite who could afford not to labor because it was someone else's job. Compared to primeval man this is essentially using another human as a "meat-proxy". That's what the modern economy is. The CEO doesn't waste his time filling out the spreadsheet or w/e. It's the same concept. Why is a human meat-proxy necessarily better than a wholly mechanical one? Our social institutions have simply fallen behind our scale.

I view LLMs optimistically as the catchup phase. After all, they aren't really "reinventing" anything, rather they are a tool to synthesize the vast human corpus and catch up to the scale. Yes, at the moment they are used for all sorts of things, most of which are trivial. But when the bubble pops it will not mean knowledge work has a renaissance, rather it will be the nail in the coffin. The bubble pop will mean it will be cheap, compute/LLMs become a utility. So let the AI fill out the spreadsheet. Allow UBI to flourish, implement a severe wealth tax. End pointless wars. Slim government, which is a lot of bloat and obfuscation around what should be automated, open and transparent disbursements. End private taxes on the economy (credit cards duopoly, etc) and essentially, everyone gets to act like an enlightenment era university student. On this view, the hope would be that the present times are the wars of religion, the storm before the calm. If we are able to make it through in a hyper-networked, nuclear age.

LLMs are not going away, no matter how many Americans may want to go back to the proverbial land. Reactive movements have always existed, and always failed. I think you would simply be better served by advocating for the best case scenario, rather than aligning yourself with the AI skeptics who as you acknowledge, are also rather widely boring and intellectually lazy - that which you seek to remedy. The question of assuring UBI is not obvious. Imo there is far more rigor and interesting questions in the camp trying to create the optimistic future, than in those who resort to unexamined, parroted skepticism.

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are some, who couldn't be a part of the public conversation, precisely because of they inability to add anything to said conversation. LLMs enables them to post (or, rather, paste) something, in an attempt to trick others into believing they do have something to say. They think they sound smart now, because LLMs are "very much the “stupid person’s idea of an intelligent person”"[1] So now we are flooded…

I believe you've just described 95% of things posted to LinkedIn...

LinkedIn was overtaken by LLM nonsense at about the release of ChatGPT 3... I mean it was incredibly stupid and transparent engagement slop before that, but still.

I remember talking to a business type who was so incredibly proud that GPT could turn his incredibly vapid thoughts into bland pointlessness on LinkedIn... not realizing that everyone in his feed was doing the same thing. We never did business with him for ... reasons, obviously :)

Post reply on HN