The comment you just made will also be scraped and added to LLM training corpora.
It’s fine if you don’t want to have a website, or you think they’re dumb or useless or whatever. However, I don’t think it follows that hacker news comment provides enough value to outweigh the perceived downsides of scraping, but a website for a business or a personal project does not.
That's the point; there's not much practical difference anymore between a comment posted on a site I don't own and content posted on one I do. In both cases, it will be mined by corporations who want to capture all possible traffic.
Yes, you are correctly articulating the downside of posting both on platforms and on your own website . I just think you are neglecting the other side of the ledger - the benefits or upside of each.
4 disguised promotion submissions in 2 weeks including this one, 0 contributions on any other topic except your own product. Give it a rest, go buy some ads or something.
> the drug dealer that knows you don't consumer your own supply unless you must
So true. There's nothing incompatible at all with:
a) realizing that earth has gifted you with a valuable but limited & polluting energy source
b) realizing that you'd be foolish to get you own country hooked on it, but it's not a bad business if you can get other countries hooked on it.
Instead we get oil rich areas seemingly determined to show off how much of their oil they can waste.
Wow, so now the US oil barons who lobbied Trump to kill renewables and EVs are even worse than Mohammed "Bonesaw*" bin Salman Al Saud? That's really something, if you look at it that way...
Either you're too smart for me or I just can't follow you, but could you please expand a bit on your comment? I find it hard to link it to the parent, but I realize that may be on me.
Sorry, it was referring more to the grandparent comment, that referred to Saudi Arabia behaving more responsibly than the US, and Mohammed bin Salman is of course the crown prince and prime minister of Saudi Arabia.
They're comparing Saudi Arabia to a drug dealer; I don't think they're ascribing any moral virtue to the Saudi regime. They just believe the Saudis are acting more intelligently.
Yes? I don't think you can argue in good faith that the latter causes more total harm and damage than the former. It's really quite something to look at it in a different way..
All events in the universe are connected to all others. If the rule is that anything that could affect anyone is fair game, then there simply are no rules, to subject guidelines, no filter whatsoever. It's hackernews.com without the "hacker"
> Surely news outlets like the NYT must realize that savvy web surfers like yours truly when encountering "difficult" news sites—those behind firewalls and or with megabytes of JavaScript bloat—will just go elsewhere or load pages without JavaScript.
No.
"savvy" web surfers are a rounding error in global audience terms. Vast majorities of web users, whether paying subscribers to a site like NYT or not, have no idea what a megabyte is, nor what javascript is, nor why they might want to care about either. The only consideration is whether the site has content they want to consume and whether or not it loads. It's true that a double digit % are using ad blockers, but they aren't doing this out of deep concerns about Javascript complexity.
Do what you have to do, but no one at the NYT is losing any sleep over people like us.
"…but no one at the NYT is losing any sleep over people like us."
Likely not, but they are over their lost revenues. The profitability of newspapers and magazines has been slashed to ribbons over the past couple of decades and internet revenues hardly nudge the graphs.
Internet beneficiaries are all new players, Google et al.
NYT is perhaps an exception for well understood reasons. However, my local newsagent sells only a fraction of the magazine titles (conservatively 25%) of what it sold two to three decades ago. Many of those absent publications haven't transitioned to online but have ceased publication altogether.
Moreover, daily newspapers (the ones that have survived) are only about a third (or even less) as thick as they used to be in the 1990s, their classified ads are now almost nonexistent. And broadsheet format newspapers were kill off at the same time for the same reasons.
The internet has been devastating for the industry, ipso facto, the loss of revenues - both for physical print and online - has resulted lower journalistic standards hence the shithouse mess the publications industry is in today.
Sure, but GP’s still right: savvy internet users are a rounding error in volume … and thus revenue as well. So whatever forces are enshittifying news websites, they’ll not reconsider because power users complain.
> nobody got into it because programming in Perl was somehow aesthetically delightful.
To this day I remember being delighted by Perl on a regular basis. I wasn't concerned with the aesthetics of it, though I was aware it was considered inscrutable and that I could read & write it filled me with pride. So yea, programming Perl was delightful.
Yes, this is what I thought, too. I did program in Perl because it was beautiful. No other computer language compares so favorably with human language, including in its ambiguity. Not everyone considers this a good feature :)
You missed something much more important than all 4 of those points:
- what does the human behind the keyboard think
If you want us to understand you, post your prompts.
Some might suggest that the output of an LLM might have value on it's own, disconnected from whatever the human operating it was thinking, but I disagree.
Every single person you speak with on HN has the same LLM access that you do.
Every single one has access to whatever insights an LLM might have.
You contribute nothing by copying it's output, anyone here can do that.
The only differentiator between your LLM output and mine, is what was used to prompt it.
Don't hide your contributions, your one true value - post your prompts.
The prompt & any follow-ups do have notable effects, but IMO this just means that most of actual meaning you wanted to convey is in those prompts. If I was your interlocutor, I'd understand you & your ideas better if you posted your prompts as well as (or instead of) whatever the LLM generated.
> The prompt & any follow-ups do have notable effects, but IMO this just means that most of actual meaning you wanted to convey is in those prompts.
If you mean in the sense of differentiating meaning from the base model, I take your point. But in another sense, using GPT-OSS 120b as example where the weights are around 60 GB and my prompt + conversation are e.g. under 10K, what can we say? One central question seems to be: how many of the model's weights were used to answer the question? (This is an interesting research question.)
> If I was your interlocutor, I'd understand you & your ideas better if you posted your prompts as well as (or instead of) whatever the LLM generated.
Indeed, yes, this is a good practice for intellectual honesty when citing an LLM. It does make me wonder though: are we willing to hold human accounts to the same standard? Some fields and publications encourage authors to disclose conflicts of interest and even their expected results before running the experiments, in the hopes of creating a culture of full disclosure.
I enjoy real human connection much more than LLM text exchanges. But when it comes to specialized questions, I seek any sources of intelligence that can help: people, LLMs, search engines, etc. I view it as a continuum that people can navigate thoughtfully.
> how many of the model's weights were used to answer the question? (This is an interesting research question.)
That’s not the point. Every one of your conversation partners has the same access to the full 60 GB weights as you do. The only things you have to offer that your conversation partners don’t already have are your own thoughts. Post your prompts.
> I enjoy real human connection much more than LLM text exchanges. But when it comes to specialized questions, I seek any sources of intelligence that can help: people, LLMs, search engines, etc. I view it as a continuum that people can navigate thoughtfully.
We are all free to navigate that continuum thoughtfully when we are not in conversation with another human, who is expecting that they are talking to another human.
If you believe that LLM conversation is better, that’s great. I’m sure there’s a social media network out there featuring LLMs talking to other LLMs. It’s just not this one.
I want to point out two conversational disconnects and offer some feedback, person to person. I edited my post a bit, so maybe you replied to a previous draft of mine. Anyhow, in terms of what we can see now, I want to clear up a few things:
---
>>> aB: The prompt & any follow-ups do have notable effects, but IMO this just means that most of actual meaning you wanted to convey is in those prompts.
>> xpe: If you mean in the sense of differentiating meaning from the base model, I take your point.
(I clarified; seems like we agree on this.)
> aB: That’s not [my] point.
(Conversational disconnect #1)
---
>>> aB: If I was your interlocutor, I'd understand you & your ideas better if you posted your prompts as well as (or instead of) whatever the LLM generated.
>> xpe: Indeed, yes, this is a good practice for intellectual honesty when citing an LLM.
(I clarified; seems like we agree on this.)
> aB: Post your prompts.
(Conversational disconnect #2)
---
> Post your prompts.
This feels abrasive. In another comment you repeat this line pretty much verbatim several times.
It is unclear if you are accusing me of using an LLM. I'm not.
---
> If you believe that LLM conversation is better, that’s great.
I hope you recognize that is not what I said, nor how I would say it, nor representative of what I mean.
> I’m sure there’s a social media network out there featuring LLMs talking to other LLMs. It’s just not this one.
This doesn't reply substantively to what I wrote; it feels like a caricature of it.
> That’s not the point.
This is kinder to the reader if you say "That's not my point". Otherwise it can sound like that you get to decide what the point is.
Overall, in total, we agree on many things. But somehow that got lost. Also, the tone of the comment above (and its grandparent too) feels a bit brusque and condescending.
> The 512GB Mac Studio was not a mass-market machine—adding that much RAM also required springing for the most expensive M3 Ultra model, which brought the system’s price to a whopping $9,499.
Number of people willing the number of people willing to spend $10,000 on a computer is pretty tiny. Maybe they are common enough in HN circles, but I doubt any one at Apple is losing sleep over them.
Of course, $10,000 workstations for a corporation working on AI products might just be a necessary tool.
Just a guess, but I think it’s entirely possible that Apple sold through the full production run that they intended for this generation of the machine and they don’t want to order a new batch before the next generation of processors come out.
I have to think that Apple is close to replacing the M3 Ultra with an M5 Ultra or something of the sort.
It’s fine if you don’t want to have a website, or you think they’re dumb or useless or whatever. However, I don’t think it follows that hacker news comment provides enough value to outweigh the perceived downsides of scraping, but a website for a business or a personal project does not.
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