There's different levels to literacy, there was quite sobering research published recently about English college students who couldn't parse the opening paragraphs of Bleak House, even with assistance[1].
It's not been limited to the US but in the developed world broadly cognitive performance has been crashing for about a decade, i.e. the 'learning recession'. Talk to anyone who teaches these days and you usually get a fairly depressing story about kids being unable to decode basic information
What is the problem with that paragraph, other than the long sentence with many comma separated phrases?
The only 'non modern' bits are 'Michaelmas' (which I know is a Christianity related date), and 'undistinguishable' where I'd use 'indistinguishable'. So the note about the student being quizzed to translate to 'modern English' seems moot as it is modern English.
However, I'm English, so a number of the terms are immediately obvious.
I obvious know who the Lord Chancellor is (as the role still exists); as do the Inns of Court, being where Barristers receive their initial training. So I would suggest it is more a case of needing specific cultural knowledge, than needing enhanced language skills.
In P2, I had to look up "aits" (islands); otherwise they are all of no issue other than the length of the sentences, occasionally requiring me to reread a few phrases.
Basically Dickens is modern English, with a few archaic words being used.
> … As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.
A completely functional high earning English-speaking software developer might easily find the above sentence hard to parse.
I find old school sitcoms hard to enjoy, probably because I am missing a lot of subtle cultural context. It doesn’t imply my comprehension skills are poor.
If you're accustomed to reading, for instance, a modern English language novel such as Stephen King's "1963", it's going to be difficult and awkward to sit down and read the first few chapters of Moby Dick.
But that's kind of the point. Even a person who knows zero old timey nautical terminology or anything about New Bedford and its history will have to pick up what's going on by inferring it from the context.
If that sentence is hard to parse, it probably means you have room for improvement in your reading skills.
Reading skills aren't 1:1 connected to comprehension skills, and of course not to intelligence. And most people will never need the higher levels of reading skills, since they mostly are useful for reading text which isn't well written.
A person trying to parse this sentence as a non-native English speaker (and possibly not from a Christian cultural/religious background) might encounter two things. Here's what I infer from it:
> > … As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.
1. 'as if the waters had but newly retired' - this is clearly an allusion to the Christian biblical story of the Flood, Noah's ark, etc. The book was written in an era and for a target audience where the educated readers were almost all certainly regular dedicated Sunday church-goers.
2. It helps to understand the relatively recent 'discovery' of dinosaur fossils at the time the book was written, the beginnings of scientific understanding of them, and the history of Paleontology from approx. 1800 to 1900 to understand the reference to the Megalosaurus. It's my understanding that the book was written at a specific moment in history when the discovery of dinosaur fossils was a hot new scientific fad and would be reported on in the popular press.
Now if you're a person who is highly literate in English but you haven't specifically studied the history of how weird English people started going off to the far corners of the earth and digging up dinosaur bones and scientifically categorizing them (see section for 19th century here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_paleontology ), and you don't get the part about 'the waters' meaning a reference to an entire planet wide flood in a religious myth, the whole sentence is not going to mean the same thing.
It's not that a highly literate English reader from, let's say, Bangladesh won't understand the words in the sentence, but a great deal of the underlying meaning will be lost. Much as you or I might not understand the metaphors, allusions and allegories in poetry or literature written 150 years ago in a foreign language.
Reading the paragraph given to the students was very interesting. For context I'm much older, English is my second language, and it is very mediocre (but still much better than my generation average because of my work).
There were some words I didn't know either because of the cultural context (Michaelmas, lord chancellor, Lincoln's Inn Hall) or because of my limited English (the word mire for example). But in all cases I could infer enough meaning that I was able to read the paragraph without losing too much (except for Lincoln's Inn where I thought it was a literal inn but it's not very important for the understanding in the paragraph).
I would say I'm surprised that it was so hard for college students majoring in English but I also noticed that the young generation in my country has a big problem understanding figurative speech, worse than just a general lack of knowledge (it didn't help that it has been politically useful to pretend not to understand figure of speech for the last 15-20 years).
The students in question just entered college, they were right after the high school.
That being said, I found the study to be one of those trying to find the conclusion they want. The students were asked to explain details of the book as they read it for the first time and translate as they go. I can totally see myself failing this test and I used to read a lot. The way they conducted the study is just not the way I read.
It came across as the students were blamed for thinking out loud after they were asked to explain details as they go. I would be unfamiliar with terms like "whiskers" too. I would not know "Michaelmas term" meaning either.
And frankly, the whole paragraph is an atmospheric paragraph that carry no literal importance. You are supposed to take the feelings out of it, the exact composition of the mud layers is not the plot point nor of the books philosophy.
Literally every time this is posted you see a few or more people jump out and say "no actually Bleak House is impossible to understand and it's written terribly and it's a dumb study!" Which I think means that while literacy levels are declining, people's perception of their own level is not. We have forgotten what high literacy is meant to look like. The original HN thread was depressing.
What they're getting at is that people aren't able to sit down and digest a moderately challenging book. This is due to attention span, the habit of 'scrolling' vs turning a page, etc... Those people can still 'read' and are literate in a sense.
I would say most of us have this situation already but it's much worse when you look more broadly around. People without an interest in books used to read tabloids which for all their faults were still more edifying then what the TikTok or YouTube shorts algorithms are presenting.
That is not what PISA is about. The test does not care about your ability to sit through "The Miserables". Long PISA exam text is still pretty short. The test is about your ability to figure out implied factual information from something somewhat convoluted.
This feels like a non sequitur? The point is that people either aren't able or willing to read books anymore; that's what the author of that Atlantic piece means by post-literate. By your own admission, PISA isn't relevant.
US is still near the top globally, though, and other countries like Germany had a bigger drop in reading performance that started earlier, so your point still stands.
I would be very curious to see stats on what percent of American adults will answer a poll claiming in the affirmative to have read any type of novel cover to cover in the past year.
The methods of the PISA study are quite controversial. It doesnt even properly control for immigration and background and the fact how its presented to pupils.
In Germany in the schools I know of, its stressed a lot how it does NOT affect anything at all, so its not actually a test on ability, but also on ability to motivate oneself to perform well in a meaningless test.
Yeah but I was thinking more along the lines of mutual mistake or scriviner's error or something. If both the parties agreed to a vesting schedule and then signed a document with a different schedule, that won't necessarily bind them to the written (erroneous) version.
I tend to agree with the post, but narrowly on the hook:
> Do you want to listen to music? Just open a Spotify playlist and let the algorithm figure out what you like. Please ignore the AI slop they will insert in between real songs to avoid paying royalties to real artists.
To be honest, my Spotify recommendation algorithm complaint is about the exact opposite, that it’s too conservative in what it suggests. Sometimes I feel stuck in a musical “echo chamber.”
I hear from this post that recommendation algorithms are too broad, but it seems from policymakers the bigger complaint is again the opposite (“echo chambers” and “rabbit holes.”) Not sure which is more compelling, but they are surely not entirely orthogonal features.
I'm not sure what the primary signatories want, exactly. "No mathematics" safeguards added to frontier models, like the "no cybersecurity or bio" ones that currently ship? That seems like a bleak future. Protectionism like tariffs.
I think implication being organizations with 40,000+ employees and even more consultants and contractors plus a lot of budget are also using LLMs to draft public facing content instead of paying for content writers or even just proof readers .
It points to friction rather than cost economics. Same reason we are always surprised why multi billion dollar product companies with millions of install base prefer electron instead of a native app.
This does not imply that the organization is not paying for content writers or proof readers. It does suggest that they are not getting the value of paying for content writers or proof readers.
According to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49417480, Anthropic hires writers who do not use LLMs, and reading their updates I also feel that they don't use LLMs for communication.
Pangram has an extremely low false positive rate. Even on adversarial examples.
One trade-off is even some obviously LLM text won't get detected by them, but they work really hard to ensure false positives are rare since a false accusation is much worse for society than someone getting away with LLM meatpuppetry.
I think you can't trust Pangram in a high stakes situation, but it is absolutely better than random noise at detecting AI-generated text. Which isn't surprising. If the distribution of probabilities can yield blatant Claudisms, it's not surprising it would also have more subtle deviations.
(Addendum: As I recall, LLM-generated outputs roughly follow Zipf's law, but the distribution still tends to have some subtle distinctions vs human text; pretty interesting, but I don't know where I heard this, so nothing to cite. Sorry.)
To be honest with you, I don't think I would be able to identify with high certainty that the bottom text is AI generated, so it definitely goes a long way to obscure the AI-generated nature of it, but I also think it still feels unnatural somehow. I realize my framing naturally calls into question whether I'm being honest, but I am being honest. Given my experience with similar "skills" (it's just chunks of prompt, nothing magical after all) I expected even less.
But still, this is all very strange because it wasn't that many generations of AI models ago that AI writing was a lot better - I'm talking GPT 4.1, Claude 4.5, that sort of era.
Anthropic newsroom posts on the other hand are carefully constructed and well-written in a way that I have not seen demonstrated by LLMs yet, past or present. I expect that they have well-paid staff who are careful with every detail of their public communications. When you put it that way, it almost feels unfathomable that they wouldn't, doesn't it?
I don't feel like either one of you really has a strong claim. "Doesn't appear to" is subjective, and of course it's impossible to prove one way or another.
You're simplifying the exchange a little too much. I said:
> Anthropic doesn't appear to use Claude for blog posts
My claim is literally the lack of evidence, which, yes, can't prove anything. This claim can be contested easily by showing evidence that they in fact, do appear to be using Claude to write prose in blog posts.
They said:
> Anthropic _absolutely_ does
Sounds pretty certain Anthropic is in fact, using Claude to write blog posts. Enough to emphasize "absolutely". That doesn't read like "I'm going off of vibes", that reads like "I can prove it". So, fine. Prove it. I don't believe it, and I want to hear the proof.
I'm skeptical, but it wouldn't be my first time being wrong. But flatly, if you make claims with this kind of certainty, yes I want to hear your proof.
My point in saying "Even Anthropic doesn't appear to be using Claude for blog posts" was not meant to be some striking revelation, I literally was considering it a prior to make another point. This on the other hand sure does sound like a striking revelation to me, that a lot of people across the Internet would be curious to hear. Like I'm sure these people would be interested:
I will admit that I am unnecessarily aggressive sometimes, but I wouldn't have changed my response much in any case. If you're going to make a strong claim like this, I want your evidence, not your vibes. Otherwise, the claim should be a lot weaker.
I also realize that this sort of brashness upsets HN a bit, but it is what it is. I pandered comments for votes in my 20s a bit, time to grow up, sometimes people won't like you. Sometimes I feel something deserves a brash response.
I don't really have any opinion on your tone; I just still don't agree with your framing. A lack of evidence would be neutral like "there's no evidence to indicate either possibility is more likely", but your phrasing conveyed that one possibility was more likely than the other. I pushed back against your follow-up because it seemed like you were arguing for a higher threshold of evidence than you provided.
Well, to be fair, you're correct. I am asking for a higher threshold of evidence. It's a stronger claim. I feel a stronger claim deserves stronger evidence.
I guess that's where we disagree. I feel like either claim is equally hard to falsify from the outside (partially because I've never had much confidence in my ability to spot whether text is from an LLM outside of the most glaringly obvious cases, and likewise don't have any clue whether people who have high confidence are accurate or deluding themselves).
McDonald's food is not even that unhealthy. I just tried a Burger King burger the other day and it's terrible. I think it's like 2000 calories in a single burger or something.
2k cal would be around 250ml of oil. or 350grams of peanuts. So doing with bread, meat, and other stuff alike requires over 600g of food, an excellent value to energy.
I get the impression that Nvidia employees don't care too much - I started seeing fully AI-written "documentation" on some of their smaller projects more than a year ago (i.e., before it was even slightly a good idea).
Yeah lol it’s basically the only reliable way to know how things work. Pre-AI, I read documentation for libraries that I used almost every day.
And now with AI I’m using it to fact check Claude. And still reading it for myself to understand why other peoples code is written a certain way. It’s basically the most important thing to reference when coding.
Sure today Claude can just read the library code and tell you what a function does or how to do something. But it still won’t tell you why something is a certain way or won’t figure out specifically-designed usage patterns as reliably as the author telling you “this is an example of doing x”
I really appreciated a friend reaching out to me with some PHP questions today. It was, to me, fairly basic but he was having a hard time grokking the documentation vs reading what his coworker wrote (some code using output buffering).
I brushed up on the docs since I haven't touched it in a couple years, explained my understanding of the ob_* functions, and gave him a very brief demo on a PHP playground.
He could have asked any LLM to tell him what that chunk of code did, and to explain the three functions, and instead he reached out to me. That felt _good_. Talking shop has always been a good way for me to form connections, because the pressure to socialize becomes task-oriented and you start to learn about how people think and feel, and that opens up easier paths for actual connection. It was nice.
Just like the Old Internet still exists - niche websites, mailing lists, probably a BBS or two (likely more right?), the pre-LLM world will trudge on, for a time. I hope LLMs actually lead to good things for people in the long run, and for now I personally will remain sparse in my usage of them.
The good news is your attention to actually reading and understanding documentation will differentiate you more and more as others (short-sighted, IMO) outsource understanding to an LLM.
when you start to internalize that these kinds of statements are an indication of how the average developer of the last 10-15 years operated the adoption rate of AI makes a lot more sense
Do you have the stomach to walk into a high school in the USA these days? Teachers use AI to generate assignments. Students feed the assignments to AI and submit the responses. Teachers feed the student submissions to an AI for grading.
As a high schooler going to a school with stricter rules on AI than most in my area, I can say that it's been going downhill ever since GPT 4. Teachers constantly use AI to create assignments(my French Teacher regularly handed us work with GPT 5.1 prose and emojis). Students are also rampantly using AI and bypassing school restrictions(We have a google account, making it easy to use Gemini if we just sign out), causing an inflation in GPAs and test scores. There's no easy solution to the problem, banning AI-tools only help somewhat as even typing into Google has AI web results, and students are quickly overcoming ways to restrict them. I have a friend that vibe coded an application that allowed his Mac Mini's desktop to be mirrored on his school chromebook, bypassing every restriction with sub 1-second latency. Of course, that opens the can of worms to whether schools should allow students to use AI...
> Of course, that opens the can of worms to whether schools should allow students to use AI...
We are starting to see results indicating cognitive decline due to AI in education, so no, we should do everything possible to ban it except for very limited fields.
LLMs aren't calculators or even computers, their generated output is too flexible, generic and basically starts replacing thinking.
Most likely they should only be allowed during late highschool years or just at university level, when people at least have a chance to learn how to research on their own.
I know many teachers who actually have respect for the profession, themselves, and the students. Thankfully that means they don't do this.
Whether this is a widespread macro trend is another issue, and would be terryfying.
If true, however, it would reflect on the values of the organization: we have spent decades underpaying teachers, and doing a poor job of pretecting schools from frivoluos lawsuits. Add into that, districts have thrown money into new buildings, have been suckered by Big Tech to adopt their policies (common core was pushed by Big Tech and has been a distaster as well as computers in classrooms). As a nation (the USA) we can't get our act together for a rigorous national exam, etc etc.
About half of the states in the USA require the ACT or SAT for high school graduation.
Alabama is one state that requires the ACT. The mean score in Alabama is below 18/36. Wisconsin is another. Its students score on average about 1 point higher than the national average of 19.4/36.
If you prefer states that require the SAT, the mean SAT score of students from Delaware is less than 980/1600, about 50 points below the national average.
I'll leave it to others to argue about whether these exams are rigorous.
I have two kids in engineering programs at a state University. They are allowed to use AI for homework assignments, but the homework is no longer worth any credit. They have a lot more papers, quizzes, and tests in class that count for their entire grade.
FYI, the world is a lot more decentralized than we think and even during the Dark Ages, guess what, that was happening in Europe and many places in the world were booming scientifically, technologically, etc.
Meh. It's not like we forgot how to make copper wires for landlines. We'll be fine. We'll live more or less like in 1880 or 1920, it's not a horrible life. I do hope we get to keep antibiotics, though.
It's true of most work in many and soon most white collar jobs, too. Claude writes some dense useless thing, everyone else uses Claude to summarize and write a reply to the thing. The Claude-submitted PRs get automatically reviewed and commented on by a GitHub Claude review bot. The programmer asks Claude to check out Claude's review comments to Claude. Claude pushes a commit to the branch and writes a comment. The Claude review bot reviews the commit and leaves a comment. The human [...].
My hot take is that it's not really that terrible in the long run for work since I think LLMs will probably be nearly or actually AGI and better white collar workers than most humans within 5 years of today. But it is very funny and surreal in the meantime.
It is definitely bad for school, though. Kids IMO should actually be encouraged to use LLMs but not in or for class work outside of an AI best practices class. Probably stop giving them homework (90% will always try to find a way to make AI do it) and have them solve problems in class hours with no electronics so that they're forced to not defer learning. This will become even more important once we have AGI.
Dude I am in slop fucking hell right now. There is still room for a human touch, without which the agents will lever us harder and faster into a world of incomprehensible garbage.
I totally concur. I'm almost lost for words at this stage. I need me some land to grow vegetables on and that's about it. Maybe some chickens. Every single day brings more despair (and not the prosperity we were promised).
It is the number 1 thing I cannot stand with Claude slop. It's a sort of anthropomorphization of language. Every "thing" does, produces, feels, wants, asks, answers, etc....
- "Launch is checked"
- "Question is asked"
- "The implementation answers"
- "The model wants"
- "The results name"
- "The connection surfaces"
- "The prompt wires"
- "The feature rides the mechanism"
Every single fucking thing is alive, wants things, and does things.
It's terrible. Infuriating. I want to rip my eyeballs out reading this filth. All. The. Time. "The anger is real".
Create any page with a file uploader. They all look the same now. It's like the Twitter Bootstrap days of responsive design. You'll get an icon which looks like ones on (on the drop space) those sites which are like "you must wait 60 seconds for this file to download".
It's so horrible. The human element has been completely removed and replaced by..... mediocre.
The human element has been completely removed and replaced by..... mediocre.
No it hasn't. The human element is still there, prompting the LLM. The change is that the human is happily accepting the first thing they get rather than critically looking at it and seeing a problem.
I don't think it's that because I see a lot of this in businesses where the human isn't paying the bill, or is even aware of what the bill is.
Humans are seeing either a shortcut to go faster (accepting low quality to move on immediately; reasonable if they're short on time) or a shortcut to lowering effort (accepting low quality because they don't care; not so reasonable but probably has a deeper root cause).
I hadn't read the article and read this comment as though NVIDIA themselves were implying that this library was checked but not trusted by them since it was fully LLM generated.
It gets fun when someone uses an uncensored model to bypass a refusal, but they accidentally pick one that was trained for erotic writing and brings its particular talent to the documentation task.
Yeah. I think if the text is written for other machines, then by all means have an LLM generate it, but if it is intended for a human audience, have a human being write it.
We are still much better at writing in a way that doesn't waste other people's time.
Was almost going to praise this article for not overtly sounding like Claude, but then I read this:
> and the incentive structures we have built are the experimental apparatus.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_St...
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