Yay, another mostly AI authored piece with vibe-coded aesthetics.
Some will say that I should 'judge the idea, not the form'.
But if the author didn't find enough strength to write alone a short ~700 words summary about his work, it means he himself isn't that interested or enthusiastic about it. Why should others bother then? Particularly since low-effort like that signals possibility the whole work is superficial and derivative.
Say you have been working on a multi year project writing code and putting in a lot of effort.
If you then use AI to write a product page documentation and proof read it for correctness, would that constitute to signaling that the whole effort is superficial?
Some work may be left to AI while you focus on the more important aspects of the work.
Surprisingly people have got it completely backwards where they want AI to generate code and humans to write documentation.
> If you then use AI to write a product page documentation and proof read it for correctness, would that constitute to signaling that the whole effort is superficial?
It would constitute signalling possibility the whole effort is superficial.
Look around at the amount of slop that is thrown out there using low-effort methods.
I haven't order the work that is being presented here, I'm in no need to guarantee its correctness. I'm only bystander whose attention the OP is trying to grab by posting it on the HN. I don't know if his project is multi year or only multi prompt. The burden of proof lays on him to show he is not one of those another guys who hide emptiness behind AI generated text. Earlier the grammatically correct and carefully laid out blog post was in itself a proof that at least some effort was exerted. Now that important signal is worthless and when it's clearly written by AI it becomes an anti-signal.
At least according to me, because the front page of the last year shows surprisingly big number people love superficial slop.
I'll reiterate, I don't know if the work here is legit or not (and after seeing that ai documentation I have no desire to check that). Demanding from the reader to carefully look past the generated documentation and meticulously analyse the actual content is more time consuming than before and opens the gates for AI slop.
And that attitude also makes people who are not experts on the subject more defenceless against hoaxes and deceit. If both frauds and legit createor look superficially identical, because they use the same chatbot, then whom should the member of general public trust, eh?
> It would constitute signalling possibility the whole effort is superficial
Our company has been developing many core projects for years and one among them is our in-house database Dip. Hiring a writer or spending engineer's time on Dip's docs raises operational cost. Mentality like this gets a startup killed.
Dip's code is pure 100% human written and scrutinized by AI where appropriate. Docs are AI generated and we have it proof-read for correctness. Developers care about documentation being correct and vetted by the people who built the system.
Bitching about docs being AI slop is nothing but virtue signaling.
We are not working for a company here. The 'gzip as a language model' is not a company project. I agree what you say would be right about inner company workings or also when working with contractors and customers. AI can save significant time, and there are another multiple guardrails in place for guaranteeing code will work - and it doesn't even matter if it's generated or written by hand.
This experience doesn't translate to Internet news aggregator at all. We are an audience, not a paying customer. There are no guardrails. And the OP is trying to get our eyes to read his post. The only experience most of us will have with it is the text of the post - so it's basically a main thing. I'm fully in right to note the post is generated with low effort.
> I'm judging the ideas in your post, not its form.
and simultaneously you write that 'my form is lackluster' and that 'an LLM could have written your comment and improved its form without losing anything distinctive'. We are having ourselves a small contradiction, aren't we.
Be my guest, enjoy chatbot writing and drowning in slop. But don't encroach upon my freedom to protest it.
The blog post provides something akin to answer to this question:
You see, the main allure of LLMs is that they allow the developer to be more lazy. That’s kind of the whole point! You just prompt, sit back and relax. So it should not surprise you to hear that this attitude is then reflected in everything the vibe-coder touches
As I understand it, one of concerns is that with the lowered barriers there comes a flood of low quality software, vibe coded by very lazy and not very talented people.
This might be actually more of a human problem, but it's a problem nevertheless.
I had no visibility of developer attentiveness or lack thereof, not skill or code quality before AI was around, for any apps I downloaded to my phone.
I fail to see why worrying about AI code quality is any different to worrying about developer code quality when it comes to pre packaged apps.
With code I am writing, some AI generated, my work load has not really decreased, nor have I gotten lazy. My work has changed to a degree, and now involves reviewing and guiding and double checking AI code where I did not have to before, but I am certainly still working just as hard, and accomplishing more with AI's help in spite of the change in workload it brings.
delivering bad AI code because you got lazy is not the AI fault, it's the developers fault.
You can't call people lazy because they use LLMs, just like you can't call people lazy because they travel by train/plane/cars instead of their own feet.
> They see it as some great holy mission from god to go out into the hinterlands and convert the local people from their local existing belief system to their own particular form of Christianity.
Call me apologist, but I can see no real problem with that. They are willing to take risks and have enough motivation to spend resources. Whatever I think about their belief system in my opinion they are free to do that.
It's not 1800s, if the given population doesn't like missionaries, as far as I'm aware it's equally free not to listen to them. Or to throw them out.
Cargo culting is still a thing, the power imbalance is still real here. Kicking people out is generally much trickier than letting them in, these aren't simple things. Remote populations aren't global idea consumers at the internet-accessible global ideas mart.
These missionaries don't come in with an army. Its more often small families or a couple of individual vs entire villages of natives and the "conversion" is done via talking, persistence and kindness rather than by force.
> Remote populations aren't global idea consumers at the internet-accessible global ideas mart.
Shouldn't that be a good thing according to your logic? Its not like the global ideas mart is less different from their own society than what the missionaries bring and it would be quite presumptuous to say that your beliefs or those that you consider "global ideas" are better for as yet untouched tribes than those of christian missionaries.
At the risk of taking the bait, what percentage of PNG highland villagers living in grass thatched huts do you think have 24x7 electricity and broadband Internet and intermediate to advanced level literacy in one of the Internet's major languages?
It’s not bait. I don’t think the OP that I responded to was speaking about the mechanics of introducing these populations to the Internet (they’re welcome to correct me) but that they shouldn’t be introduced to such things or that the introduction would be tantamount to exploitation of some sort.
I read it more as that a remote highlands PNG villager is not "innoculated" against the concept of, and is not aware of the methodologies that will be used by odd foreigners who have a well thought out plan to convert people to their specific ideology.
Like, if you're out shopping and some person starts up a weirdly friendly conversation with you that leads to a MLM sales pitch, you already know that's a thing which exists and why you're almost certainly not interested in participating even before the pitch arrives.
It's also immoral to expose isolated populations to all manner of the modern world's vices, optimized to be maximally addictive and maximally extractive, for which they have zero defense or even knowledge of their dangers.
But they're not equipped to decide whether they want it or not. It's like offering drugs to children saying they can choose if they want it. Children simply aren't equipped to make that decision, neither are people in these populations. I don't think we should keep them isolated, but contact should be limited initially. The technology we introduce them should be limited, enough to increase their quality of life and eliminate disease and so on without being utterly disruptive. Over time more technology and information can be introduced.
No population should be kept living a life we would consider extreme poverty out of some noble ideal. But we also shouldn't completely disrupt their way of life out of a different noble ideal. Wealth as we understand it isn't the only thing of value. Human connection, meaning anchored in community and deep roots, a sense of belonging and so on, are what really matter. Introducing modernity to such populations will sweep all of that away in one motion. These people would be left adrift in an alien world devoid of personal meaning, their only solace whatever addiction appeals to them most.
> But they're not equipped to decide whether they want it or not.
Why can't you say that about, idk, folks on welfare in the United States? How are they in a position to decide whether buying pop on food stamps is what they want or not? Maybe a woman doesn't really have the tools she needs to decide whether she wants to keep a pregnancy until she's had some counseling and time to cool off?
Obviously I'm not comparing these situations directly, and frankly I'm not sure you're wrong, but the point of view you are expressing here leads us to all of those scenarios and I think we should reconcile that.
I agree the application of the logic doesn't end with isolated populations. The relevant difference is that those brought up in the modern world have/had the potential to engage with knowledge of addiction and other vices, and decide for themselves how to steer their lives in an informed way. We draw a somewhat arbitrary line for being responsible for oneself as the best way to structure society given the tradeoffs. There's just no sense in which these isolated populations as a whole can be sufficiently informed about the modern world to suitably navigate its complexities to lead to their prospering in it.
But on the other hand you are assuming the modern world is bad and so therefore exposure to it is a dangerous and negative thing. I'm here to tell you that having access to medicine and playing sports and whatever is pretty great too. It's not all bad. I think you're taking a little bit of this Star Trek version of "leave them alone to develop on their own" but if the shoe were reversed and there was an alien species out there that could come down and talk to us and share knowledge and potentially harmful things as well, I'd like to make that choice for myself.
It's certainly a complicated subject, but I'd just challenge you to think of the positive version as well, not just the negative (addiction/vices/&c). It seems you have a default negative view of the world, some of us have a default positive view of the world. Modern life is pretty awesome!
My concern isn't mainly about addiction and vices, its more about a loss of meaning and being adrift in an alien world. The addiction/vices are just what one falls into when your life becomes devoid of meaning. I think the mental health crisis that most of the western world seems to be engulfed by, despite living in an age of endless wonders, goes to show that there is something deeply wrong with our modern way of living. My caution is against introducing this "sickness" (for lack of a better term) into populations even less able to defend and preserve personal meaning against an onslaught of technology and ideas that would evaporate their personal sources of meaning in an instant. That is no gift to anyone.
I just think you are super focused on the negatives. My life is great, I don't have a mental health crisis, most of my friends are doing well and having kids and enjoying their lives, and more.
There might be something deeply wrong with the modern world (which by the way includes other countries ranging from, idk, Iran, to Vietnam, to Korea) but there are a lot of things deeply right about it: opportunity, human rights, women's rights, independence, opportunities to build rocket ships or sail the world. That seems like one hell of a gift that I wouldn't want to deny anyone. If anything, providing opportunities and giving human minds the chance to flourish and be creative seems less of a sickness and more of a cure.
The danger when making decisions on behalf of other people is in imagining yourself in their position, rather than imagining them in their position. So you have a happy fulfilled life, you have the kinds of human relationships that provide deep meaning to you, you have the right kind of curiosity and wonder to be fulfilled by witnessing burgeoning technological progress, etc etc. Yes, being deprived of all that would be very bad for you.
Now imagine someone psychologically very average whose source of meaning is in the familiar environment where they have an acceptable amount of status, broad community support and much social engagement. They have a peculiar culture and social practices which gives them deep personal meaning. Now imagine all of that is swept away; no social status, no familiar environment, cultural practices gone, extended family scattered to the wind. What value does the wonders of the modern world have to someone who has lost everything they value?
Consumerism, technological marvels, and endless entertainment are the modern world's answers to the waning sources of personal meaning in modern life. Turns out that it's all a very poor replacement.
One of the problems is the power dynamic westernized/developed societies have. The article talks about just that: Australians brought shells in and basically one-shotted a rich culture for their own gain via hyper inflation.
If a missionaries message was basically "Believe in God and you'll have limitless shells", and backed it up with a crate of shells, they would all be converts.
> It's not 1800s, if the given population doesn't like missionaries, as far as I'm aware it's equally free not to listen to them. Or to throw them out.
That argument would necessitate treating them like children rather than adults who can think and choose for themselves. I don't think this is a healthy approach that would work out well at all.
> I don't agree. Good writing and good ideas are entirely different things. Just read all the beautifully written, inaccurate stuff by the NYT or the Guardian.
I'd be very curious of some examples when great ideas are being presented in bad writing (or bad speaking for that matter).
> Also, non-native English speakers have to use LLMs to share their views so that they are not judged on their writing.
weird statement. If they use LLMs they will be then judged for both their inability to write in English and for their usage of AI. Not good.
One example that comes to mind is math textbooks – the early textbooks in a field are usually much worse than later ones that come along. To pick on one, I think most people who've read both would agree that the commutative algebra section of Lang's Algebra is much worse than Atiyah & McDonald's Commutative Algebra book, despite covering basically the same ideas, theorems, etc.
> I dont get the investment in humanoids beyond trying to create some kind of stock market bubble again.
Our entire world is heavily adjusted towards bipedal humanoid creatures. Having a moving humanoid tool who could replace some of our physical tasks without the need to build additional infrastructure in proximity around it is BIG. Noting your reservation about fragility, even the possibility of cheap construction and agriculture work is VERY BIG.
Bipedal is the easiest one: very few environments require 2 feet in particular. Sure, ability to cross uneven terrain is needed, but this can be done with 3, 4 or 8 feet. But in a lot of places, including most of the retail and a lot of factories, all one needs is an ability to move on flat surface and cross door thresholds (thanks to ADA, no stair climbing required). And than can work just fine with large wheels, or tracks. On the other hand with something like construction, you probably want many appendages with some sort of climbing attachments?
The "top" part of humanoid is more integrated into the world: our human infrastructure is really built for beings just under 2m high, and a many of actions need at least 2 human-like hands, with at least the same reach as humans (~3/8 body height long, attached at ~7/8 body height). But this is just a minimum - a lot of things would work better with 3 hands, or maybe with dissimilar hands - one "strong", one "fine manipulation" and one "misc"? I certainly wished to have a 3rd hand when building something...
Ok, tell me then how exactly can I "not read it" when it's NOT disclosed?
The subject interests me so I'm beginning to read, only to waste minutes of my precious life on realising this is another long-winded slop. How should I avoid that?
Read the first few sentences. If you don't like it, stop reading. Stop being concerned about the provenance. In a year, you won't be able to tell that AI wrote it.
Some will say that I should 'judge the idea, not the form'.
But if the author didn't find enough strength to write alone a short ~700 words summary about his work, it means he himself isn't that interested or enthusiastic about it. Why should others bother then? Particularly since low-effort like that signals possibility the whole work is superficial and derivative.