> We don't have to use doordash or claude code or aws or amazon or anything else.
I know you think you're dunking here, but unfortunately you're just proving that either:
- You genuinely don't understand how the real works for vast amounts of people, in which case it would behoove you to educate yourself (maybe start by looking into topics like food deserts or Walmart's business practices in small towns)
- You're consciously making a strawman argument, in which case please don't insult us with that BS
I've been in and around hobbyist computer topics for decades, and I'm still not 100% sure if this comment is straight serious or a really well executed humorous trolling. They'd read essentially the same, so IDK...
I grasp what you’re expressing, I really do. I’ve probably pondered this very thing too often in my life and can think of very specific examples where purchasing a non-brand name version of a particular product really froze up the decision making process.
However I think as I’ve gotten older, certain realities have occurred to me:
1. there is a fairly significant amount of people that would still pay more for the shirt the “right” logo and who would absolutely not pay less if it had the “wrong” (I.e., vs no logo). In fact, they wouldn’t wear the wrong logo even if the shirt was free. I include myself in this under certain circumstances and would conclude that some times the recognizable name actually helps put my mind at ease about the purchase, while being fully able to acknowledge that it was entirely a psychological thing.
2. Unfortunately there’s just simply no way of knowing this information (brand name product vs essentially same product without brand name) most of the time so letting that weigh too heavily on an otherwise thoughtfully considered purchase achieves effectively nothing.
3. The thing was probably entirely discretionary for my existence, so don’t buy it (otherwise, see #2…)
I too was strongly inspired by the ideas that CSS Zen Garden was promoting, even if little to none of the real world work looked or worked like that.
Always weird to see what posts really bring out the negativity on HN, but pay that no mind. Some people can't stand others being happy (and some are just having a bad day...)
Be proud of what you accomplished and it must feel great to have contributed to something like Firefox!
Thanks for your kind words. Luckily, I thrive on criticism of my work, and don't take negativity personally. Working with the team at Mozilla on this truly felt really great!
I get the sentiment, but what if it was the difference between not getting the thoughts out there and being able to celebrate the fruits of their labor?
It's okay to exercise nuanced views (as well as choosing to say nothing.)
what if it was the difference between not getting the thoughts out there and being able to celebrate the fruits of their labor?
I'm sure I don't know what implausible hypothetical scenario to which this could refer.
The "difference" is that of spending five entire minutes proofreading the output. But this blog post, like the other 98%, is once more the tasteless fruit of very, very little labor. Whether you value it or not, whether you are even able to recognize it anymore, writing for an audience is a skill.
I (and probably GP) feel legitimate dismay when I read the output of someone who had an obvious opportunity to exercise good taste for the benefit of the people who actually take the time to read it.
The continued inconvenience to you of reading opinions like this is obviously extremely unfortunate.
Mostly, I have other, more important stuff going in my life. I did write a lot of this post myself, but used AI to flesh out some of the details because otherwise between my perfectionism and tendency to overthink blog posts, I would have never gotten around to publishing this.
If you think other things are more important than writing, why would you expect anyone to take the time to read it ?
It’s just not a very efficient strategy, it might work for some readers, but as the comments show it’s a big turn off for many. Where it says “There’s one honest footnote”, that’s really grating, like the other commenter I also stopped reading there.
That’s not necessary rational, it’s just that we are social creatures that are really sensitive to those kind of surface level cues in communication, to gauge credibility. I’m sure many authors today use LLM in brainstorming, research, ask it to steelman an argument etc and no readers complain because it doesn’t impact the authorial voice.
The problem then is with letting LLM ‘fleshing out the details’: you end up having the LLM’s style and words all over your text. You can’t really do that without your authorial voice loosing credibility. I think next time, you have to go over it and edit it and make it sound like you.
If you don’t want to that, the good news is that I think people will start to get less critical of sloppy writing, as long as it sounds human. So you could sound convincing while leaving some details raw and not have the LLM have a go at it.
My approach is more "ship fast, iterate later". Your criticism of AI slop is valid and I share it. I've manually re-written the post today, no more AI slop. Of course, that came with the opportunity cost of not spending time on 100 other projects competing for my attention. AI has enabled me to do a lot more with my limited resource of attention.
Did you read it or, if English isn’t your first language, have someone who writes English well read it? I’ve had a lot of useful feedback on stuff I’ve written that way.
Surely, SOMEone at these companies realized training LLMs on the content of the internet (namely the vast amount of comment sections) would result in such outcomes. Or at least that they should weight heavily against that content for purposes of writing voice.
Editing to add my own salient tl;dr: shifting the "easy" tasks onto AI agents leaves the human ones to shoulder the cognitively demanding loads, resulting in burnout.
There are nuances, of course, but if you imagine that while once a human might have been responsible to move 500lbs a day, broken up into primarily small loads, now a robot is moving anything under, say, 20lbs and the human is left to only carry the heavier loads across the same time period so is now hefting 50 or 100lbs at a time and required to do across the same day, so now they're moving 1,500lbs a day.
I know you think you're dunking here, but unfortunately you're just proving that either: - You genuinely don't understand how the real works for vast amounts of people, in which case it would behoove you to educate yourself (maybe start by looking into topics like food deserts or Walmart's business practices in small towns) - You're consciously making a strawman argument, in which case please don't insult us with that BS
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