The reason that's especially interesting is that I was using an AI to write something that needed that functionality, and it spewed out that same Python code, which I recognized immediately. It was slightly modified with respect to naming and comments because, I assume, it was stored slightly imperfectly in the model's weights.
So many people here are talking about not coding anymore. At the same time, when a project is coded by AI, it's mocked here as being vibe-coded, and many people say they won't use it.
There seems to be an inconsistency between those facts that would be worth discussing. I'd be interested to hear anyone's thoughts.
How do you resolve it? Do you think people are creating software they wouldn't use, perhaps because they are forced to create what they would judge as crappy AI software on their jobs?
Ah... maybe I misstated my question. There are people who are stopping working on FOSS projects because that's no longer fun. But what I meant to focus on is people who say they are still creating software, using AI, and therefore miss coding. And the fact that there are people who say they wouldn't use a vibe-coded project.
If those are overlapping groups, there would seem to be an inconsistency, but maybe it's resolved as I mentioned in the first paragraph of this comment.
Some people are producing vibe coded garbage with LLMs and some people are protesting and getting out of the business. It doesn't have to be the same people.
But yeah, people who are doing both could be forced to use LLMs at work and unable to leave. And when those LLMs inevitably fail because the codebase is too complex they have to refactor with LLMs because what they originally crapped out is incomprehensible and no one bothered to read and understand it while it was being developed. I expect a lot of people don't like that we are becoming dependent on funnelling money to a third party to maintain the crappy software they enable to begin with.
I think the entire industry is about to have another recognition about the importance of quality in software development. Just like they did with lines of code as a metric, and outsourcing with minimal communication.
" - When a neutrino, rarely, collides with an atom, it produces charged particles. In ice - not vacuum! - certain particles can travel faster than light."
That confused me for a moment so it seems worth clarifying: in ice, certain particles can travel faster than light does in ice.
This is also the source of the classic blue glow in water cooled nuclear reactors. Electrons move through the water faster than light and leave behind a kind of 'sonic boom' of photons in its wake.
Light slows down in dielectric materials because as an em wave it interacts with the polarization of molecules. Neutrino has very little interaction with matter, OTOH.
I don't immediately see a way to put an outline based on heading levels in the sidebar. For me, that's an absolute requirement, so I'll be sticking with Typora, at least for now...
A blockchain that uses neither hashing nor stake for security. (And not authority.) I will post here when done. Although, I will do so with some trepidation, because I know how much antipathy there is here for blockchains.
I wrote a short story based on a similar scenario. (Caveat, I did it with AI help, but my ideas and many iterations and me doing final editing to get it the way I want).
Without wishing to be unkind, this reads a lot more as 'one-shot with AI' than 'many iterations'; if you truly did that much editing, you didn't put it where it showed.
You've got all the AI favourite names and rhythms at once in the second paragraph, for example.
Yeah, I think the AI probably shows. But in fact it is the result of many iterations.
But what I was trying to get across are the ideas, not the language. I think it you were to read the whole thing, you'd probably find it interesting. But if not, feel free to let me know.
But my hypothesis is that there are people with skills for ideas that have the potential to be interesting stories, but not necessarily great prose skills; I don't think those necessarily line up in the same person. Up until now, to write a worthwhile short story you had to be among the best at both.
Maybe AI can help change that, and maybe (I hypothesize), that would be for the better. I understand that such a hypothesis would be controversial, but to me, it feels worth exploring.
The reason I did it the way I did is that I believe that Fable writes better prose than I do. I could write it so that people would be less likely to think it's written by AI, but I wouldn't think it's as good.
So, I'm happy with it as-is; I think the ideas are good and deserve to be out there. I think it just needs a context where people will be more forgiving about AI prose because they are interested enough in the ideas that are conveyed.
But of course, the challenge with creating such a context is that one person with an AI could spew out 1,000 crap stories a day and submit them all...
It involves one life, drawn at random, from human history. I can't imagine how you could miss that if you read it.
But I am realizing that AI writing is so offensive to many people that if they get that vibe, they just won't read it, and therefore won't have any idea what is being attempted. Maybe there could be a context where that wouldn't be the case, but HN is probably not it.
I read it all, and the central theme seemed to be more about collecting random thoughts/memories rather than "lives", with a final twist about the apocalypse or something like that.
You really need to stretch quite a bit to find similarities between this post and this short story.
And since you incorrectly assumed that I didn't read it, I'll give you more unsolicited feedback. Yes the writing is horrendous, but the idea itself is not novel or thought provoking. The general idea has been done many times in the classics like Dick, Asimov, Chiang and others. And the twist at the end ("Oh my god! They couldn't see things in the future because there is no future!!!!!") is immediately predictable when they can't get samples in the future.
That being said, keep writing and enjoying yourself but 1) try to dial down on the AI assist, it really makes for a poor experience for the reader, 2) don't get on your high horse when someone points it out.
Not bad!
Did you ever read Stephen King’s short autobiographical story on how he sold his first few stories? He had to be persistent as could be, just years of writing and submitting to publishers and getting rejected. It is a good read.
The reason that's especially interesting is that I was using an AI to write something that needed that functionality, and it spewed out that same Python code, which I recognized immediately. It was slightly modified with respect to naming and comments because, I assume, it was stored slightly imperfectly in the model's weights.
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