I made such a thing ten years ago with an ESP8226 and a basic iOS app built using HTML and javascript. It still works perfectly.
The valves were 12v solenoids from ali express, and the plumbing was from the hardware store. I almost guarantee it was far, far cheaper than this project.
The more you write, the less this will be true. The more you write, the better you will become at it. Using an LLM to write is like sending a robot to the gym for you.
The more you use an LLM to write for you, the worse you will become at writing yourself. There is simply no other possible outcome. It's even true of spellcheck - the more you use a spellcheck the worse you become at spelling. I know this for a fact because I can no longer spell for shit. However, spelling is to writing as arithmetic is to mathematics. I also can't add up, but I have a degree in pure mathematics.
LLMs are a cancer on human thought and expression.
> LLMs are a cancer on human thought and expression.
LLMs help to express what many people dont have the energy or ability to express. It also has a broader scoped view of protocol...It does not have emotions, which often leads to less than optimal discourse.
In many ways, it help those who are challenged in discourse to better express themselves...rather than keeping silent or being misunderstood.
The guidelines are perfectly clear, no matter the outcome of your thought experiment. Hacker News wants intelligent conversation between human beings, and that's the beginning and the end of it.
If you want LLM-enhanced conversation then I'm sure you will find places to have that desire met, and then some. Hacker News is not that place, and I pray that it will never become that place. In short, and in answer to "Do we prefer text with the right "provenance" over higher quality text?".
Not the original commenter, but I noticed it too. I guess it's hard since AI is trained on human content, so presumably humans write like this too, but a few that stood out to me:
> Five entire countries vanished from GreyNoise telnet data: Zimbabwe, Ukraine, Canada, Poland, and Egypt. Not reduced — zero.
> An attacker sends -f root as the username value, and login(1) obediently skips authentication, handing over a root shell. No credentials required. No user interaction.
> The GreyNoise Global Observation Grid recorded a sudden, sustained collapse in global telnet traffic — not a gradual decline, not scanner attrition, not a data pipeline problem, but a step function. One hour, ~74,000 sessions. The next, ~22,000.
> That kind of step function — propagating within a single hour window — reads as a configuration change on routing infrastructure, not behavioral drift in scanning populations.
(and I'm not just pointing these out because of the em dashes)
GPTZero (which is just another AI model that can have similar flaws and is definitely not infallible, but is at least another data point) rates my excerpts as 78% chance AI written, 22% chance of AI-human mix.
To me at least, the article still seems to be majority human-written, though.
Also, one of the authors is "Orbie", which looks like an AI name, and if you go and read through some of the recent posts, all of the posts with that author feel very LLM-y and bland, and the posts without that author are much more normal.
The deep, profound, cruel irony of this post is that it was written by AI.
Maybe if you work in the world of web and apps, AI will come for you. If you don't , and you work in industrial automation and safety, the I believe it will not.
I was thinking the same thing, but I thought I was being too cynical given it was a post lamenting about all the cognitive abstractions we have created.
The linked article on medium was also written by AI, which immediately disqualifies it from being interesting or useful.
"And the worst part? Apple didn’t provide a switch to turn it off."
Now see, this is AI. A normal human being would write, "Apple didn't even provide any way to switch off this non-feature" - for example. AI always, for reasons that are likely neither interesting nor especially illuminating, writes like this. Unnecessary and stupid stylistic choices everywhere.
Look, if you cannot be bothered to write something, why on God's Good Earth would anyone bother to read it?
I sometimes write like that because I noticed for regular people, they tend to pay more attention if some things are written a specific way. It’s like an FAQ.
I’ll continue to use bolded titles and bullet points when writing for a regular audience.
If I see another AI-written trash article I am going to scream. Overlong, overwritten garbage. People used to write, and there was personality in that writing. Now people believe it's acceptable to generate reams of utter formless shite and post it on the internet.
If you cannot be bothered to write something, why on God's good earth would you expect anyone to be bothered to read it?
I'd normally agree, but this is a case I don't see often -- despite the form being terrible the content is good. I certainly would strongly prefer the same post with better writing, but if the entire 2019 internet were replaced with articles like this (on orthogonal topics/micro-topics) I think it'd be a better place.
I very strongly suspect that this preference is learned. I've never made anything from a mix, but I've baked brownies, cookies, sponge, tarts, biscuits and bread. They have all turned out perfectly delicious, without any need for the addition of whatever emulsifiers and what-not you'll find in the premixed packets.
This isn't to say that there's necessarily anything wrong with those ingredients. I'm sure that they're perfectly safe to eat, but they are simply not required. This seems to be a peculiarly American thing, permitting a large corporation to insert itself in the supply chain without there being any need whatsoever for them to be there.
In the rest of the world, where most of us live, there seems to be almost no examples of cake "recipes" containing anything other than basic ingredients. I've literally never even seen a recipe for anything that says "Add one box of brownie mix". I can hardly even imagine such a recipe existing. It boggles my mind.
I've never made anything from a mix, but I've baked brownies, cookies,
sponge, tarts, biscuits and bread. They have all turned out perfectly
delicious, without any need for the addition of whatever emulsifiers
and what-not you'll find in the premixed packets.
Without having tried the alternative that's a pretty weak claim.
> I've literally never even seen a recipe for anything that says "Add one box of brownie mix".
You don’t see that recipe because the only place most people see it is on the back of the box of brownie mix.
My family has predominantly made boxed mixes my whole life (though I think my grandma often made cakes from scratch). However, I haven’t seen people in my family use cake mixes in other recipes other than what is on the box.
The one exception might be a cookie recipe my grandma had that used jell-o mix, I think. But it also may have been generic gelatin, as they were chocolate chip cookies, there was no fruity jell-o flavor at all.
You’re right that people like what they’re used to. If you’ve only ever had cake from scratch, it’s going to be good, it’s still cake. The ones I’ve had, they are a little more dense and dry, while the boxed mixed have tended to be more moist and airy.
The valves were 12v solenoids from ali express, and the plumbing was from the hardware store. I almost guarantee it was far, far cheaper than this project.
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