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Taste Is All That's Left

notashelf.dev

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Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#541

Post by kyle-rb »

johnfn wrote: post #526
jefftk wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they're trolling us. Their post-mortem is a very AI-sounding (and Pangram-triggering) claim that they're not using AI: This post reads off as AI slop. You said it, I see it. I’m sincerely sorry for publishing something that has allowed you to feel this way. If my word means anything to you, I would like to assure you that this post was not authored by a LLM. Nor was it storyboarded, reviewed, checked, etc. by…

> the one-word lines The funny thing is that there are no "one-word lines". This more or less cements the fact that it must be AI in my mind.

> Taste.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#542

Post by MiscIdeaMaker99 »

tfrancisl wrote: post #419
cribbles wrote: post #411

For those keeping track, this is now (at least) the third wholly or partially AI-generated article on the theme of "taste" as enduring source of human comparative advantage to hit the HN front page. Previously: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47677241 You Had No Taste Before AI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45288551

This article is not AI generated. Everyone is asserting it is but the author is well known as a critic of these tools in his communities. Why would he lie and use it to write an article with his genuine views, edit it to assuage the feelings of HN commenters, and then double down? Speedrunning losing his credibility, or, his writing style got on some people's nerves?

Considering all the minor grammatical issues I'm seeing, I think it's very much written by a human.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#543

Post by soperj »

jefftk wrote: post #468
lolpython wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author has updated the bottom of the post to clarify that it was not AI-generated. https://notashelf.dev/posts/taste-is-all-thats-left#post-mor...

I think they're trolling us. Their post-mortem is a very AI-sounding (and Pangram-triggering) claim that they're not using AI: This post reads off as AI slop. You said it, I see it. I’m sincerely sorry for publishing something that has allowed you to feel this way. If my word means anything to you, I would like to assure you that this post was not authored by a LLM. Nor was it storyboarded, reviewed, checked, etc. by…

It's like their prompt included "use as many em dashes as is physically possible to troll the person I'm replying to"

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#544

Post by kyle-rb »

hellojomp wrote: post #8

On the topic of taste, I think of this quote in Susan Sontag's "Notes On 'Camp'" often: “For taste governs every free — as opposed to rote — human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion — and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. (One of the facts to be reckoned with is that taste tends to deve…

Wow a lot of emdashes, are we sure she didn't use Claude?

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#545

Post by dcow »

RussianBot9580 wrote: post #524
manlymuppet wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another thing to consider is that LLMs have become a premier source of reading for the public. If more of what you read is AI generated, how you write is going to be significantly influenced by that. One (slightly frightening) possibility is that many people write like LLMs even without assistance from LLMs. AI writing may have just become the norm for some. Maybe that's what's happening here.

LLM style is in many ways "The Atlantic from Temu". Nearly every article in The Atlantic sounds the same - I think we all know the cliches I am talking about. This doesn't mean that every author underwent a lobotomy (I hope). It just means there's a group of editors enforcing a common style. Joining these editors used to take years of training in order to write like they do. Now we have their wisdom available on the…

To put it another way: LLMs write in what was considered pretty good style before their proliferation. There are all these examples of people finding "llm cliches" in well-respected authors' works pre-llm (somewhat obviously, if you think about it).

What made pretty good "taste" pretty good was its novelty. Now that pretty good is common it's no longer stylish.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#546

Post by didibus »

frowaway4anoday wrote: post #439
didibus wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a quote I forgot that says: "There is a Quality to Quantity". I think it was from a Chinese person, as they took manufacturing of cheap things, low quality stuff, but managed to scale it to mass quantities. I agree with that, it may not be reliable, full featured, well designed, ergonomic, etc. But quantity enables things and thus is a quality in itself. It allows use-cases that benefit from accessible cheap…

Often attributed to Stalin in reference to the mass production focus of the Soviet war machine. https://quotees.co.uk/war/joseph-stalin-quantity-has-a-quali... When you treat scale as a design criteria, you get a different product

Ah interesting, it does say probably, so seems it's not fully confirmed. In any case, I guess my brain re-interpreted it in the context of manufacturing and making products and remembered it as that.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#547

Post by TaLiTr »

bijowo1676 wrote: post #89
hellojomp wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder, when you have a McDonald's McDouble, do you really care how it was made or do you just care that it's yummeroni and costs $2.99?

it is profitable to sell McDoubles, since they are popular and cheap, but McDonalds CEO doesnt eat its own burgers https://www.reddit.com/r/popculturechat/comments/1rhug58/mcd... so it is profitable to sell vibecoding tools, but its unlikely to be consumed by "serious organizations"

> so it is profitable to sell vibecoding tools, but its unlikely to be consumed by "serious organizations"

Isn't Anthropic currently using a "vibe coded" version of Bun they made using their own models?

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#548

Post by dexterlagan »

"I want to be careful here, because “taste” is doing a lot of work and it is easy to hear it as decoration."

Claude, is that you?

I haven't seen a human write like this, ever, and I've read a lot of books. The 'want to be careful here', the 'doing a lot of work'... common. If it had "I'd like to gently push back here" next to it, I wouldn't have been surprised.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#549

Post by Krei-se »

hexedpackets wrote: post #480
Krei-se wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name them. Just 2! Any example would be enough. Or well better than 0 and just a claim.

We can only guess what products you use, but I'll take a stab by naming some big ones: Spotify - https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/12/spotify-says-its-best-deve... Netflix - https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/22/netflix-all-in-on-leveraging... Stripe - https://stripe.dev/blog/minions-stripes-one-shot-end-to-end-... Discord - https://discord.com/blog/developing-rapidly-with-generative-...

These are grown and stable platforms now getting additions with the help of AI (which is not wrong) but they are not built by one.

Its like saying you live in a 3D printed home because you added a 3D printed decoration + the house is structurally stable == its a stable 3D printed house.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#550

Post by Krei-se »

jatora wrote: post #511
hexedpackets wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can only guess what products you use, but I'll take a stab by naming some big ones: Spotify - https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/12/spotify-says-its-best-deve... Netflix - https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/22/netflix-all-in-on-leveraging... Stripe - https://stripe.dev/blog/minions-stripes-one-shot-end-to-end-... Discord - https://discord.com/blog/developing-rapidly-with-generative-...

Beyond this i don't think it's wild to assume that somewhere between 70 and 90% of all software has heavy AI involvement. It would just be foolish not to

You can even assume 120% is.
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