I think the quality of Codex CLI (and Claude Code) is an honest reflection of the status quo of LLM-driven development. The future doesn’t look really promising.
To be fair we've gone from barely capable at writing code to what we have today in barely 3 years. I wouldn't put money on the counter bet that they won't get beyond this hump.
I wouldn’t assume that progress is linear. Maybe I’m wrong and it will be! But I’m reminded of early developments with self driving cars, it felt like manual driving would be a thing of the past within a decade. But progress has been much slower than that.
> But I’m reminded of early developments with self driving cars, it felt like manual driving would be a thing of the past within a decade. But progress has been much slower than that.
I think that's exactly the standpoint of Yann LeCun.
You committed your own fallacy of applying a sloppy heuristic to understanding the person you were responding to without bothering to check if it applies. Spectacular. The comical levels of arrogance that infect over-hyped tech marketing boondoggles (one area among many in which GenAI is clearly similar to self-driving cars) is one of the reasons nobody trusts the hype anymore.
The breathless astroturf articles, the brain-dead talking head conversations, the endless flood of obvious misinformation about industry uptake, the nauseating LinkedIn puff-pieces about PREPARING YOUR ENTERPRISE OR ELSE... it's a hostile information economy at best, and its being driven by the same people who brought you bullshit like self-driving, crypto and the Metaverse... for the exact same reasons (to get rich).
There's no epistemic credibility left in the tech industry in general. Maybe the Dario's or whoevers of the world believed what they were talking about at one point, but I don't believe a single word I read from Anthropic or OpenAI for the same reason I don't believe anything I read from Russian state media. I know it's being produced for reasons that have nothing to do with the truth.
As someone who interacts with the technology on a daily basis at a non-trivial level... I'm not seeing anything that would cure my skepticism about GenAI. The information economy surrounding it is broken. The fundamentals don't line up. The hype about "nearby capabilities" is identical to the hype of generations after generations of hype in the AI space (dating at least back to Turing). It smells like a bad bet.
It is hands down the most user hostile UX I put up with. The fact that I put up with it speaks volumes about the value proposition that the underlying models bring to the table.
I’m in the process of dumping codex for more open harnesses that don’t add problematic new features every week. Because Anthropic insists that I have to use their harness with the subscription, eventually I’m either going to wrap `claude -p` to get away from the crappy TUI or else I’ll just unsubscribe and use other models. Their bad UX has alienated me as a paying customer.
Try using the "rewind" feature to go back to a previous message.
Went too far? Oops, it's not accessible from the Claude Code UI anymore! You can get the agent to dredge up the info from the session logs, but you'd better hope they put the pieces together correctly.
Also, you can't rewind to a steering message. Want to make sure you can rewind to it? Wait for the agent to settle, or stop them, enter your message, and hope you don't throw them off their current train of thought.
To see a proper rewind UI, see how Pi does it: Every message is available, forked conversation history is preserved.
It has its own issues, but is miles ahead of Claude Code in this regard.
I'm not who you're asking but for me I am right now going through the insanity of providing plugin/mcp/tool access across environments. This is in codex which as I mentioned is intentionally trying to provide mass-market ergonomics. But with that comes incomprehensible configuration that's also a moving target. chat/work/codex/remote/cloud are all different things. And each client exposes different abilities and hides others. And looks like only the web-ui is the most up to date because other targets need releases. As a developer I understand why it's in its current state, but that in no way excuses it as acceptable ux.
Like of course codex is the most powerful and "just" run `npx blah blah` but no, I'm not running randomly piped code on my personal computer and even if I didn't care about privacy it means I can only run this locally with my laptop on. "leave your laptop on and access from your phone" is not a good idea. It only adds to the surface area of confusion. Ux no good.
this 1000x. a lot of details in context compaction, editing, reverting ux, etc are all really centered on keeping the load and cost of subscription users as small as possible. its no always that nor is it necessarily correct, but its a huge driver of how those subscriptions and first party apps are designed
I know this is an unpopular opinion, but it's actually good.
- pasting lots of content became [35 lines] and they added a tiny notification to show it as-is if you paste again
- interactive questions layout
- paste images
- the recap
- auto-updating session titles
And so many more. I tried codex and it was lacking in many UX aspects. Remember we got from a text-paragraph-only terminal to this at breakneck speed.
Half of what you're listing as features people should be impressed are stuff that causes as much frustration as it solves. The image pasting behavior is a super-annoying footgun, because sometimes I just want to tell the LLM the path to the image file without it trying to burn a ton of tokens on computer vision—and dragging and dropping a file into the terminal pastes the path in any normal context. The auto-updating session titles, recap, and notifications are token-burning distractions that are glitchy; I had to disable them when I found that having the agent launch an app would mean I'd get a random beep about a minute later when the agent had been waiting for further input in the background.
And they can't seem to go two whole months without scrolling breaking in some new way.
Claude Code is better than Codex UX. But as per the sibling response it's more a developer tool made by developers for developers. It does have a lot of niceties. Codex/openai on the other hand is more clearly trying to reach mass-market and it's a UX shit show because of it. Consumer UX is its own thing. So the original point is that raw ability of the tool doesn't magically solve ergonomics.
Won't disagree with you because I haven't used codex/OAI a lot - but Claude's non CLI UX is great too.
Eg - I asked for a recipe and it says leave x for y time - there's actually deeplinks that link to your clock timer with the time preset! And to change quantities, there's input boxes in the response that update all quantities accordingly.
agreed. the thing i reach for most is its ability to coordinate my agent graph, e.g. seeing what sub-agents are doing, messaging agents, adding new capacity. claude code really is a delight to use here
The current approach of the big companies is to keep increasing the number of parameters (there was a report that recent Claude models are on the 4T parameter scale). Even recent SOTA open weight models are in the 1T-2T range.
This is partly due to the multiplicative scaling factor -- the number of tokens; the number of transformer layers; the number of features; etc.
I suspect that for models to have a step upgrade either/both of 1) a new/improved architecture model; and 2) better training of smaller parameter models are needed. I say the latter as I think that with the larger weights there is a lot of unused/redundant parameters.
> The capital costs have also ballooned to the point where the rate has to level out
That's a pretty bold use of "has to". None of the financing behind AI seems sane, yet it continues to defy rational expectations. Reminds me of the comment "the market can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent". It's not the exact meaning but has the same feeling. The circular financing going on does not help anything either
I dont think the quality has gotten that much better. Take claude 4.5, the probability of getting usable outputs was less likely than with opus 5.5, and the usuable outputs weren't great.
I think newer models are more likely to produce the usuable output, almost always, but its still not great. The frequency in which you get usable results leads one to believe that quality is improving.. No usability is improving but the result is still meh.
Also put an llm in an environment without an lsp or compiler to check against and let me know how capable you think they are on their own. The "loop" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
in the last 2 weeks or so:
- scrolling stopped working
- subagents no longer work (main agent doesn't get notified when they finish)
- subagents don't work (a subagent can't make its own agent even if instructed to do so)
It has pretty rapidly reached the point where I do not think any acceptable LLM-harness is widely available. Every single one I've tried has broken in bizarre ways on even minor updates.
I used codex the first time yesterday and quickly decided I need to sandbox it and came up with a pretty easy and straightforward solution (I think).
I use nixos and use a little wrapper that wraps Codex CLI in Docker. Run codex-box /path/to/project and it starts or reuses a container with only that project bind-mounted, keeping login and history in a separate volume. It uses tmux for detaching and reattaching
I was delaying it but one day Codex+GLM went ahead and did things in my ~/.dotfiles folder which I had granted only READ access for. I asked and I was given a reason which I didn't understand and didn't really want to. Right then I used sandbox-exec/safehouse (macOS) and tightened every harness installed (and the one not even installed, lest I install it later and forget to add/track them in the sb zsh init script).
But I am not satisfied. I am trying to find a really lightweight container/VM for macOS that eats very less RAM on its own and expands as needed. Because I really don't want to run an agent outside a container on my mac.
Very much this... The utility of Claude has grown exponentially with the amount of work I've put into memory/context management, tooling, skills development and CLAUDE.md (and friends). I freely admit I may just be fortunate, but I've yet to hit a bug in a new release that rose above the level of minor annoyance.
The thing that really validated this point was when I recently tried Codex again. Out of the box it was OK, but not great. I swung over the memory apparatus and had it import directives from my existing Claude install and it was almost immediately quite useful in its own right and, especially, as a counterpoint to Claude when dealing with some fairly complex operational issues.
Pi went searching across my entire home directory unprompted... Idk to do that without some kind of sandboxing builtin is rough and chews through tokens on things I don't really want polluting my context.
A coworker of mine has a pretty neat script that uses bubblewrap to wrap any application. I'm using that one too for pi and it's pretty great since you don't have to trust the harness and can quite easily customize the sandbox to your needs, e.g. disallow reading to certain directories etc.
I believe it's all related. They keep adding new, badly thought out features because it's much easier than improving existing features built on low quality code.
The latter requires modifying existing, badly architectured and tightly coupled code that will almost definitely break something somewhere else if touched, so what do you do? Just keep adding new code on top and hope for the best.
This is not a new phenomenon by any means, but AI amplifies it by 100x.
I've used the CLIs for Codex, Gemini and Claude and they all give off the feeling of being on an very rickety, very fast runaway train.
You install an update. Oops, they added a sandbox that doesn't work inside a docker container, it's stopped working.
You install an update. Oops, you can't log in inside a docker container any more, it's stopped working.
You install an update. Oops, they started catching the copy+paste shortcut and replaced it with one that doesn't work.
You revert a broken update. Oops, the update changed the format of your login details, the old version can't read them, gotta log in again.
You install an update. Oops, can't scroll with the mouse wheel any more.
Not showstopping bugs (if you're used to persuading broken oauth logins to work) but it certainly makes updating an "ugh, what have they broken this time?" experience.
You got further than I did. I checked them out and went back to manual prompting. Just don't have a need for codegen that much, and when I do I'd prefer to be in control.
It does some neat things that, ultimately, are super obnoxious. Background animations and "sparkle" effects that make my terminal indicate activity at all times. Just subtly broken behavior.
So is OpenCode. More so. I use Claude Code and OpenCode almost equally and Codex slightly less and Pi the least of them (not that it's worse, but because I use it for "non coding" purposes). They are all bad. Even this newer breed of "agent orchrestrating" tools.
One goes to Github and one notices, the dev is done by LLMs, issue triage is done by bots, and the commenting is done by the bots. (btw, the triage mostly means closing them or playing the "this is dupe of that" game while noone gives a flying fuck about any of the issues). Another good one is "not planned". You report a breaking/critical change and "not planned". What demorlised me is attitude of OpenCode devs/maintainers. I think the Open in it more of the "Open" in OpenAI than in FOSS. That's when I started reducing my dependency on this harness whihc was slowly becoming my pretty much full time harness.
OpenCode is barely usable with local LLMs. Plan mode to build mode switch and lose all your prefix. Compaction throws away your prefix (just fixed in v2... I guess v1 gets to stuff it). Pi throws away your prefix during compaction too. I think all these tools' devs and users use it with hosted models. Pi doesn't come with basic permission capabilities--YOLO, write your own or hope the extension you find in the Pi extension store isn't an absolute dumpster fire.
Claude Code turned on the remote-control server by default with an update (no explanation or notification). BUT Claude Code didn't break the expectation that the hooks and the commands you run inherit your environment. So it was hard to notice.
Whereas when Codex App server became enabled by default, and as per OpenAI, it was never contractual that hooks run in the client's environment. Sure, let's break long-standing expectations of where code runs when you run a CLI--it was never contractual, you see. Now you have to figure out how to turn this crap off, just to UNBREAK your workflow!
This is why it's apples and oranges here, with Claude Code and Codex.
> hope the extension you find in the Pi extension store isn't an absolute dumpster fire
That's why I didn't mind it when Pi added native MCP capabilities. What dismayed me was they didn't other tools like subagents, and other stuff. I mean why do I have to scour the Interwebs to find something that doesn't possibly screw everything up for me.
I have a feeling harness usage will finally move to lots of harnesses with usage clusters - as in not X million harness for X million devs/users but a lot and people will use what suits them, and if not a more inclined coder will fork/make one just for them. In all their faults LLMs have made this a possibility.
I think the (lack of) quality of these tools shows that software engineering is maturing as an engineering discipline.
We were overbuilding trivial parts of the software like the Romans overbuilt small bridges.
Modern engineering is about making the thing that barely works. If you disagree, learn a little bit about bit narrow the tolerances of modern cars and bridges are.
> learn a little bit about bit narrow the tolerances of modern cars and bridges are
Buildings typically use a safety factor of 1.5 to 2.0, and cars typically use a safety factor of 2.0 to 3.0. These things are being built twice as strong as they need to be. I wouldn't call that narrow.
And with software, we're at a point where it can't even properly do what it needs to. If we were overbuilding it, damn software wouldn't crash so much.
I think all engineering has safety factors of 2 or more. Maybe with the exception of aerospace (mostly space) where materials might be at the limits of what's possible right now so the safety factors are much reduced.
> I think all engineering has safety factors of 2 or more.
Not even close.
For example, a BMW X5 weighs about 2200 Kgs without passengers, and it's GVWR is 2800 Kgs.
If you have five people and heavy bags, you can comfortably exceed the GVWR. You can absolutely break control arms and suspension components in that scenario if you go over a speed bump or hit a pothole (which are real things that exist in the real world, like people doing something unintended and crashing software).
If this needed a 2x safety factor, there would have been no way to build this car.
Even the toughest cars like land cruisers are limited in this way.
I think there's a difference between something that's engineered and precise vs something that's rickety. Just because you built something that might fall apart at any moment doesn't mean it's been engineered with narrow tolerances.
A 100 percent of modern bridges are rickety. There has been dozens of high profile incidents because of this.
> Just because you built something that might fall apart at any moment doesn't mean it's been engineered with narrow tolerances.
Here the software they are building falls apart in ..say.. two days of use, but can be updated in 5 seconds at close to zero marginal cost. The software is useful enough that people keep updating and using it. This iteration gives them a competitive advantage over the safer choice of rigorously testing every new thing for several weeks.
I don't disagree but it's clearly a problem that already existed for decades in software and is just being 10x'ed. how many different frontend frameworks or AWS regurgitated and enshittified cloud services did we have to endure over the years.
There is actually even worse code quality written by humans, is that small sample also a reflection of human-driven development? And therefore, the future doesn't look promising that way either?
The difference is the source of the sample. This is a flagship product by a frontier lab. It should be reflective of the best that is possible. It should be biased in the most favorable possible way. It was designed by people without the normal limitations and quotas of outsiders in building it, as well as in learning experiences in driving it. This is not a random cherry-pick of bad code.
Again, the same parallel can be drawn by frontier tech companies. Case in point: Even before AI (and even till date), iOS has always been buggy, crappy. Apple was a trillion dollar company when they had some of the worst bugs in iOS launched to public.
The same story for Google's products - their products were always buggy even before AI. And so is the case for Microsoft.
I think the reasonable argument is that AI or not, software problems are hard problems to solve. And software is constantly evolving. AI isn't a magic wand. It also depends a lot on the humans using it, including prompting and context supplied to it.
Drawing a massive conclusion from a tiny, unrepresentative sample is just hasty generalization.
Seems like its just a bunch of young engineers making bad architecture decisions. Not sure I would blame the culture of vibe coding everything. It might just be bad taste.
The restraint, rigour and responsibility you showed prior to LLMs relates directly to how much of that you apply now that they’re here.
Given how rare it was previously, and how little it was cultivated by shortsighted management, I’m not surprised with all the slop we see today.
The truth is there’s nothing stopping someone from using these tools to remove dead code, simplify project structure, remove dependencies, etc. but I don’t see it happening very often. I have done it a bunch myself though so it’s absolutely possible, it’s all a matter of investment and prioritization.
i'm personally quite perplexed how sloppy the harnesses are from the leading AI labs, you'd think these are their primary products and would have some human attention devoted to them
it's embarrassing when every claude code release has obvious bugs in it like telling you to upgrade when you're on the latest version or codex opening visible powershell windows for every command that pop up on your screen
like 5 minutes of human testing would catch this obvious shit but obviously they don't bother because vibes are the future and stuff? idk
Solar power has become a real transformative technology and instead of trying to recreate a better world we tariffed them and the execs of this country spent all our coins on power hungry data-centers that write mid code.
It's no secret that people get blinded by their own belief and faith. They forget how to see, how to smell, how to taste, and how to hear. They get trapped in a virtual world inside their own minds -- a gigantic Matrix, but without sophisticated machinery.
Look at the current physical state of the city, the raw sight of it -- no amount of fair punishment can justify this scale of pure, one-sided destruction of lives, daily-lives, and futures. This is directed violence, clearly beyond practical necessity -- unless practicality is defined in terms of ethnic cleansing.
Any logic that jumps through the hoops of background material (history, religion, beliefs, politics, and so on) is mere mind tricks, designed to draw your eyes away from reality -- the horrific nature of the Israeli genocide.
I don't think its just religious faith and belief, but also like how much people want to believe that the society they are part of, and that provides for their every day life, is a moral, just, and necessary one. And how much that puts on the blinders to questioning things. Israel is simply labeled a "like minded country".. at this point sounds a lot like "we have certain things in common, Jeffery" to me..
Pin-pointing Hamas and Oct 7 is pretty much a logical trap, because Netanyahu and Hamas had been symbiotic -- which put them in the very same ballpark. Both enjoyed their own external threats, and, through that, established strong political influence.
The one difference is that Israel always had been able to control the situation for decades to its liking, while Hamas had been passively reaping the hatred that Israel had sown -- only until October 7.
So, Israelis fearing Hamas? That's a horror they created through their democracy, purely by abusing powerless people. Total hypocrisy.
Netanyahu literally created them because their alternative was getting too peaceful and if Gaza was peaceful they wouldn't have a justification to keep destroying it. This is well-known info.
What's the actual, concrete, material, actual reality that actually exists?
Is Hamas killing every Jewish person or is the Likud party of Israel actually killing the residents of Palestine?
Let's look at the actual material reality.
For instance, Israel intentionally destroyed all the farms and ruined the fields to grow crops. They have a naval blockade that stops them from fishing so you can't get food there either. They've cut off all external water supplies, blocked food aid from coming in and have openly said they are trying to starve the population to death. Actual, concrete, material reality, available on any news website, with interviews, videos, satellite photos, extremely well documented.
Amnesty International, Doctors without borders, Human Rights Watch, the IPC, the UN, all have been unequivocal in their condemnation of this. Even Haaretz and other Israeli newspapers have been critical of it.
There's two possibilities here: Either every international organization, news source, academic journal, independent third party, satellite, photographer,and videographer is controlled by a powerful invisible puppetmaster or reality is reality.
I know stuff like this is unwelcome but someone's gotta stand up for reality.
(1) OpenAI is merely abusing math problems for their PR stunt. That is, once the PR value dries up, they'll leave.
(2) OpenAI, and any AI companies, can incur serious harms to the social dynamics in the field of mathematics by taking away big prizes away from mathematicians.
(3) The current gen AI is too inefficient -- requires a lot of money to operate -- so it's near impossible for academia to replicate what OpenAI invested in Navier-Stokes.
(4) Also, human experts are still economically much more efficient in searching critical directions, as we saw in the case of Navier-Stokes. The best working model is human-AI collaboration, with AI taking over the grinding part. This is what OpenAI failed to recognize.
Thus, the aggressive campaign from OpenAI is socially harmful -- disrupting a working social system without offering any alternate working sustainable system.
1, 3, and 4 are likely to be resolved IMO. Others will get access to these models, they will get dramatically more efficient quickly, and the AIs will likely pass a point where they don't really need that much human collaboration to solve these problems.
2 is the concern. Even in a world where AIs become all-powerful oracles for math, we still need human mathematicians to ensure we as humans can understand the results, and direct progress toward areas that benefit humans. But this is a new role, very different from the current role of mathematicians. Current academics don't want this role and the upcoming generation of students probably don't either.
Despite its bizarre look, the sentence is evocative and eloquent. It does make me get a clear mental image from the very first word. It leaves little room for roaming and guessing, as it firmly nails elements one by one, and, by the time I reach the end of the sentence, I get the full meaning almost immediately.
This sentence is not randomly written; this is crafted with intention. TBH, it would take me hours, if not days, to write a sentence this much condensed and easy to understand. I seriously like it.
Perhaps, this is more about context -- which style to use in which situation. I'm only guessing here, but, since Orwell is offering an interpretation, he probably chose to be more clinical. He probably had a point to make and didn't want to risk vagueness up-front.
To be gentle, that some here are impressed by Orwell's intentionally bad sentence indicates that they need to improve their reading and writing skills. Using complex words where they don't introduce additional precision or meaning to fake intellectualism is something basic that writing classes warn against.
Orwell's bad sentence uses harder words than it needs to, but it reworks the bible verse into direct claims.
Needing better reading skills to understand the bible verse just shows that it's not a good way to communicate. If an HNer wrote like the bible verse, you'd find them insufferably ostentatious. Just like you wouldn't want Claude to use literary flair when you're asking why your production database stopped working.
If you dumb down Orwell's sentence back to simpler terms, it's a point much better communicated than the bible verse.
Frankly the bickering in this thread is due to the original HN comment choosing a bad comparison because both sentences are poorly communicated for different reasons in this context: you wouldn't want Claude to write either.
I'll point out that the bible verse was a translation for the common folk of their central religious document in an age where Christianity was dominant. Being able to read it smoothly is a very low bar to clear for the educated.
When I read the Orwell's version, I immediately had the same feeling I had when reading mathematical proofs. I hate so much to hunt the preceding text for anaphora resolution... It's just such a bad and pretentious way of writing. It's hostile to the reader with the side of flaunting author's superiority.
It's like having to sit through a party with acclaimed academics: every single one is so full of themselves, they will constantly one-up each other by belittling everyone in their workplace s.a. to make you feel how great of an intellect they possess and how much more they would accomplish, had they not been surrounded by all these bumbling idiots.
I agree that it's not great style for just conveying information clearly and plainly (e.g I'd hate to read documentation written like this) but I'd argue that here, the medium is part of the message.
It's supposed to sound dry and depressing and somewhat sterile.
> It's hostile to the reader with the side of flaunting author's superiority.
I think if someone deliberately obfuscates meaning to sound fancier when the point is to communicate information directly, sure, I'd agree. But writing is often art, and I think demanding effort from the reader is fair in that case. I wouldn't make a blanket generalization like that.
I agree in that I don't know in what context Orwell wrote the quote above. Maybe it made more sense the way it fitted in that context.
Whenever this kind of discussion happens, I recall Andrey Platonov (a Russian writer, who was so weird in his rejection of the "decadent" parts of speech and sentence clauses that he'd never use passive voice or adverbs, would never put two adjectives side by side etc. that even Soviet censorship decided to ban him.) His works were added to the mandatory high-school reading list back around the collapse of the Soviet Union. I studied book publishing in college right around that time and had taken an elective in editing (the process of preparing a manuscript for publication, especially for the more technical fields, like encyclopedias or handbooks). My professor was a huge fan of Platonov, and, probably, forever spoiled for me whatever people enjoy when they read flamboyant or contorted prose like the one quoted above.
One thing that would send my professor into a fit of rage about that quote is that the real subject is people: it's talking about how people incorrectly rationalize the connection between effort and outcome. But, it's written in a way that, formally, the subject is... "the consideration", making it necessary for the reader to work back from the formal towards intended before they can figure out what the author was really trying to say.
I disagree. There is plenty of writing that operates at the same level of abstraction (philosophy, mathematics) without being needlessly convoluted.
Orwell is a master precisely because he understood language deeply enough to be able to produce a monstrosity on both the level of content (undue abstraction) and structure (winding, breathless syntax).
Ah, I just read through it. That’s was a fun read.
> This is a parody, but not a very gross one. …
So, Orwell wrote the second sentence as a parody of the first sentence, using the modern English that he was criticizing in the essay.
> … in the middle the concrete illustrations – race, battle, bread – dissolve into the vague phrase ‘success or failure in competitive activities’. …
> … The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness. …
> … The second contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its 90 syllables it gives only a shortened version of the meaning contained in the first.
He tried to argue that the second one is worse, but, unfortunately, he successfully simulated one possible interpretation of the original. Sure, the parody has narrower meaning, but it is a valid subset of the original meaning, which is still very significant tbh. This justifies the reduction of “race, battle, bread” into “success or failure”, invalidating one of his points.
Also, the parody is not necessarily less concrete. It replaced poetic expressions in the original with words that are bloated, for sure, yet more concrete. It does have awkward expressions, but every word plays a role in the sentence. This basically conflicts with one of his criticisms in the essay — meaningless words.
Funnily enough, his another example — “some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism” — also fails to capture the nature of the modern English. He points out the “euphemism” towards the violence as an issue of style, but, no, that’s the whole purpose of it, and his example really just excel at it. Style-wise, again, the writing is very solid.
All in all, Orwell simply failed to properly simulate what he was trying to criticize. Good examples of “modern English” can be found in the earlier part of the essay, basically written by other people. Those examples do fit into Orwell’s criticisms.
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 yourself.
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 rule in major scale, and keep your work sound nice, you eventually get a minor scale piece that keeps every rule that you tried to break through.
Same here. He probably wrote a disgusting piece in his standards, but kept the writing sane, and eventually it became a proper prose — simply with disgusting intention in his standard.
> we are all way worse at reading compared to the average mid-20th centry reader?
I would say English has changed. Modern English speakers, especially those in academia and technology, prefers explicit styles over poetic and nuanced ones. There are a lot of factors at play (e.g. i18n, the internet, education, literature) but I’m too lazy to cover them here.
> you - and no one else in the hundred years since - found his fatal mistake?
First, the essay is from 1946 — 80 years ago. Second, why not? Often-times, a different perspective is all that takes to discovers something new in the old.
I think you’re trying to make an appeal to authority here — a logical fallacy. You’re basically saying I cannot criticize his essay because Orwell is a great writer.
Also, my point is neither fatal nor about mistake. Orwell’s examples still demonstrate his claims in a relative sense, all within the context of the essay. However, when you pull them out of the context and put them out in the wild, it’s going to be very difficult to say those are bad writings right away, because, compared to other bad writings, those examples are very solid and straightforward.
> This is not even a sentence.
It is informal, sure, but I intentionally made it colloquial with something called bare quotation, a style commonly used in informal conversation. I wanted to avoid being “an overeducated dolt” and send a friendly gesture too, oh, but you chose to put that on a pitchfork. Bravo, clap clap.
> Also, my point is neither fatal nor about mistake[sic]. Orwell’s examples still demonstrate his claims in a relative sense, all within the context of the essay. However, when you pull them out of the context and put them out in the wild, it’s going to be very difficult to say those are bad writings[sic] right away, because, compared to other bad writings[sic], those examples are very solid and straightforward.
You should take this as an opportunity to improve your English and widen your reading, rather than trying to win a silly argument on a forum with 'logical fallacies' and other such humdrum wikiphilosophy. I'm not even sure what you meant to say in this paragraph, it's not at all clear I'm afraid.
Your perspective on this is entirely wrong, starting with a mistake about the intentions of Orwell and the quality of the text (which is deliberately obtuse and plain awful in so many ways). If you can't easily interpret the biblical text, that's fine, it is quite old, but there is really no excuse for saying that Orwell is a bad writer or .
But Orwell's example here is an example of bad writing, not good, and was produced deliberately as an anti-pattern. It has no redeeming features, and deliberately so. If you read 1984, you'll see further what he was getting at and rebelling against - a tendency to use words to obscure and twist meaning rather than transmit it.
> widen your reading, rather than trying to win a silly argument on a forum with 'logical fallacies' and other such humdrum wikiphilosophy.
Yeah, sure, the paragraph there is pretty bad, I admit. I was having an technical issue w/ my phone. But, look, did you really read my comment, the whole set of it? It's not even about philosophy. I'm just talking about a little /finding/ that Orwell's examples of bad-English is much better than what you usually find in your daily lives.
I'm not even arguing here, because you people avoid engaging w/ my point itself. It's more like I'm only repeating myself again and again and again. I'm not raising anything new.
> Your perspective on this is entirely wrong, starting with a mistake about the intentions of Orwell and the quality of the text (which is deliberately obtuse and plain awful in so many ways). If you can't easily interpret the biblical text, that's fine, it is quite old, but there is really no excuse for saying that Orwell is a bad writer
First, if you were talking about my first comment, I did mention that "I'm only guessing". I did clarify that I didn't read at that point. Someone replied with a link to the essay, so I read it, and only then I said "I [had] read it".
Second, I never said the original is bad. I only said the parody is pretty good, perhaps because of its brutal explicitness, which the first one lacks comparably.
Also, I've been saying that Orwell is a bad /bad-English/ writer, not a bad writer. His proficiency in English doesn't imply any proficiency in reproducing the bad-English he was criticizing. This part is childish, sure, but it was supposed to be /fun/.
> But Orwell's example here is an example of bad writing, not good, and was produced deliberately as an anti-pattern.
I totally agree here, but ...
> It has no redeeming features
... this is the part I disagree with.
Sure, on the surface, they are chokingly bad. I definitely agree that he removed certain qualities from those examples, and, for demonstration purposes, they serve the purpose.
However, if you offer those examples completely out-of-context, it's going to be difficult to dismiss them simply as bad writings. Their logical flow is very natural, and his word choices are very precise. It is much better /formulated/ than a lot of real-world bad English writings. I definitely sense /professional touches/ from those examples. That's why I said that it would take me hours, if not days, to write such sentences by myself.
Both versions are great: the former is poetic and grand and would fit right in in a fantasy text; the latter is dry and informative and requires much less mental effort to translate and extract meaning from (though still more than "normal" text.
I could imagine a third version that's clearer than the second and still nearly as poetic as the first.
Well, I can tell what sort of angle you most enjoy. Anyways -- I think there is GOOD writing and BAD writing, but only subjectively. So if you enjoy it, power to you. It's certainly not random, but it is the sort of verbosity that turns off 99 percent of the people that would read it given a comparison. I find the former rather eloquent.
Yeah, even Pangram is a bit problematic here. It has been notoriously fragile. Minor edits can flip scores from 100%-human to 100%-AI, because Pangram is crazy sensitive to local and surfacial features of text. Simple consulting with LLMs for word choices can result in 100%-AI score. Insane.
Obviously, NVIDIA is trying to own the AI development chain.
Owning HF -- the discovery and distribution channel -- is one thing, but I think the biggest threat vector is the privileged access to HF platform data, that includes HW survey info and model download pattern. This can be a borderline anti-trust case.
There's a small chance this could be signalling a pivot, or at least posturing for a possible future pivot. If they see the mega-datacenter market drying up or slowing down, they may opt for a future in hardware targeted to the individual or smaller teams. In other words, as soon as the VC money for centralized AI dries up, they start selling hardware that doesn't require VC-levels of money to buy.
Also they bought the company which develops the open source slurm scheduler which is the primary and defacto standard HPC scheduler on the market. Bit of a concern to say the least
This brings back memories of the CVS/Aetna merger for me, which ended up going through of course. Hopefully the anti-trust enforcers have some experts in the ML/AI pipeline, but I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't bat an eye at this one. Hope I'm proved wrong though.
reply