> How many times do we hear things like "if the product is free, you are the product" - well, the consequence of that is development resources tend to be pulled into directions that benefit advertisers.
Maybe. Or maybe this is the final stop on the route to enshittification: bill both the advertisers and the users.
> At the end of your life, if all you've done are little half baked throwaway projects, you might look back and realize one day you never made anything of any particular significance, just thrashed around building stuff people had already done so many times before that some unthinking, unfeeling LLM can spit it out almost verbatim just so you can say "me too".
The big difference is, prior to LLMs, that you spent no money but gained something in the process of doing that little half-baked throwaway project.
Now, you spend some money, and get nothing in return.
> Where does this idea come from that good programmers were ever cool with that?
Copium from folk who were never developers before, but who now want the badge anyway. Too bad the same badge can be given out to a bright 12 year old who doesn't know the difference between a variable and a type.
I suppose I'd have to admit to not being a "developer" anymore, because developers in the age of AI won't know how to write code. Perhaps I can still hold on to the label "programmer" for a little while longer.
> With that Github and personal portfolio I wouldn't be making such sweeping statements.
Where's yours?
After all, my CV (online like everything else) shows almost 30 years in the field, 7 of which as a research scientist, 6 of which was spent writing software for munitions, many of which were spent as an EMV developer, a stint at a FAANG...
All you've done is state the things that very junior devs state, with just as much confidence.
> SO was just an example. If you try to tell me you've never copied/pasted code before I know you are lying.
I've never done that; many experienced devs I know have never done that. We barely used it, in fact! The few times I asked a question, the answer was not "Here's a piece of code".
Look, this comment of yours, coupled with a previous comment from you in this thread (demonstrating you don't know the difference between probabilistic and deterministic output) makes it painfully clear you don't do development; or at least you didn't until you were handed a magic "write me a program" tool...
> I'm sure they were blindly accepting the Assembly coming out of the compiler.
The fact that you consider deterministic output from a compiler the same as probabilistic output from a LLM makes me think you don't know how either of those things work, even at a very superficial level.
> "I wish I'd made more throw away apps I never use" ... said no one on their death bed, ever.
Yeah, it does make me wonder though - have these AI boosters never written their own tools before? I've written, for my own personal use, literally thousands of tiny little bash scripts, vim scripts, emacs scripts, Python programs, C programs, etc. I still daily use a music player (wish wrapper around mpg123) that I did in 2001[1]!
And yet, I'd be the first to admit that, for each 1000 things I wrote, probably 1 got permanent use for a significant length of time; the value, over time, to me was the lessons learned.
Now people are going through that cycle faster (i.e. instead of doing 5000 persona-use programs over 30 years, they're doing it in a single year), but the end result is still going to be the same - no one is ever gonna use it, including themselves!
It comes with an additional downside - you don't actually learn anything by having the AI generate your programs for you.
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[1] In case anyone is interested why I wanted a wrapper - it uses the locatedb so that I don't have to search for my mp3s:
You can also look at past posts by the same author (before LLM usage proliferated) if you’re curious.
The project is still very cool, but it’s a little less enjoyable to read when everything sounds the same. It would be just as annoying for people to manually write in a corporate/marketing style, because humanity is what makes the small web interesting.
What's interesting about the older post is that all the sentences are long, compared to the current datacenter GPU post which contains lots of short sentences.
But yeah, probably feels sucky to have your style analyzed for AI writing. FWIW, the datacenter GPU post was great! I went to look at the ebay postings.
GPTzero says 100% AI generated for specific paragraphs that I chose (such as `Multi-token prediction`). If you remove all the code listings, tables, etc and just paste the prose into these tools, it drops to 87% AI generated.
None of the 3x older blogs of yours that I tried went above 5% AI generated.
Maybe you're spending so much of time with the LLM that you are talking like it; in which case, take an old blog and a recent blog, give the prose from them both to you favourite LLM and ask them if the same author wrote both. I just did that on ChatGPT and on Gemini, and both found that it is extremely unlikely that the same author wrote both.
Look, if all the SOTA LLMs agree that your recent blogs sounds generated, you can't blame the reader, can you?
It thinks this is AI:
“I bought a datacenter GPU that doesn’t even have a normal PCIe connector, stuck it in my gaming PC with an adapter, and now I have 32GB of VRAM across two GPUs running a 27 billion parameter model at 32 tokens per second.”
There’s nothing AI about that. Not all SOTA LLMs agree, hell, none of them do. The same exact example I sent here gives me 0% in some, 10% in others, 100% in GPTzero.
This, setting aside the llm issue, it is dealing with hardware in ways that -- one would think - would be celebrated on HN of all places. But we focus on presentation.
Because their custom training data contains an emphasis on such verbiage. It doesn't come from the God-knows-how-many TB of web content the model is pre-trained on. There, such phrasing is only a drop in the sea. But the "yes, you're right" phrases, the em dash, etc., come from the later stage, for which content is created according to some (probably overprecise) guidelines.
Right. The overuse of "genuinely" most of all. Seems like they put Claude through a few good rounds of training to always answer questions about its consciousness, thoughts, etc., with something about how it's "genuinely unsure," and as a result, the model learned to use "genuinely" as an intensifier in all sorts of inappropriate contexts.
It's a very specific style of condescending journalism that US media has been nurturing and recycling for decades now. I was going to write this this whole comment as a parody of it, starting with some literary hook like 'Call it Ouroboros syndrome:' but I can't bring myself to add to the pile.
I have not done the textual and statistical analysis to verify this, but I feel like it's something you could trace back to east coast journalism schools and publishers mediated via television, which long predates mass adoption of AI. Think how many news articles you've read with titles like 'Anatomy of a murder' os 'Inside the meeting that changed everything.' The hooky, slightly pompous tone is something you can find back as far as the 1960s or 1970s; browsing through old issues of Readers Digest and you'll find tons of it. When I say it's mediated through television, I'm talking about both the dramatic and heavily conclusory style of fictional prosecutors and narrators, and the extremely shallow style of TV news reports (often transcribed to the web) which are only one or two sentences per paragraph. And this is before we consider the stylistic impact of ad copywriting on communication in general.
And there's something else.
The one sentence paragraph interjection, designed to refocus your attention in a surprising new direction after two paragraphs of stuff you already know. 'I never thought I'd end upere,' said Sally Nocontext, hooking you in for another paragraph or two where you try to figure out who this woman is, where she ended up, and what it has to do with the article you are already halfway through reading. After all, I've come this far, the reader through. I might as well see it through to the end.
And that's just what publishers wanted.
One sentence can also validate a truism that the reader already suspects, flattering their beliefs in their own analytical powers....
...well you get the idea. When I'm using LLMs for any sort of extended session, I find myself reaching for the same few prompts to break it of such clicheed expression; I'm especially averse to the habit of adding zippy-sounding nicknames to complex or potentially dull concepts. I don't have a favorite starting prompt, but I generally find that asking for 'a concise, academic tone' does wonders to de-fluff its output. Remember, it defaults toward being as widely accessible as possible, and much journalism is aimed at consumers with only a high school education and maybe middle-school reading comprehension, math ability, and appetite for depth over sensation.
This particular case seems to be an LLM trying to blindly apply the saccharine therapeutic pattern "your frustration is real" to a context where it doesn't make sense. No one is debating or questioning the fact that the card has 16 gigs of vram.
The point of "X is real" in a therapeutic context is to make the person feel seen and acknowledged, that his struggles are real to him and really do weigh on his mind, even if it is technically "all in his head".
> Where do you think llms learned to write that way?
Not from individual human content, that's for sure - maybe MLM marketing copy? Sleazy 4AM ads?
I mean, every time this response comes up, I keep asking the person to point at something written prior to 2022 that gets 80%+ on the LLM detectors, and yet no one can find anything.
Maybe you, postalrat, can find something written in this style that was published prior to 2022.
I have written the blog post. I know empirically that I have used 0% AI while writing it.
I also know LLM detectors are total BS and they don't really work. I have tried a couple on this exact blog post, and QuillBot, for example, gave me 0% AI detected on it.
I have then used a blog post of mine from 2021. QuillBot gave me 8%...
The King James version of the Bible came out at almost 100% AI generated a while ago. It was the HN front page.
Stop thinking that if someone writes in a way that is fun or looks like what you would think an AI writes, then it is AI generated. Loads of the time it is, but sometimes it's not, and it really hurts those like me.
> I have tried a couple on this exact blog post, and QuillBot, for example, gave me 0% AI detected on it.
Don't use Quillbot; not sure why, but their model is reluctant to classify anything as AI generated. I ran into this when proof-reading a students Phd - ChatGPT, Gemini, CLaude (and others) all agreed it was AI generated, but Quillbot said it wasn't.
It's a function of the LLM "thought process"! It's not really modeled after human speech. It is in short segments but not long form, same reason you see the same rather odd nuances in LLM generated code.
If they way you thought was to run a bunch of if statements, generate content, then feed that content back to get a "score" of what seems the most plausible, run the if statements again, and adjust / merge responses, then you would write similarly. The recognizable cadence of LLM generated content is pretty clearly the result of a lot of if statements being fused together.
I'm not sure what point you are replying to; my reading of GP's (somewhat incoherent) post is that Iran has more in common with Nazi Germany than it does with (most) of western civilisation.
If we're working on a scale of 1-10 for "how close is a ruling government to Nazi Germany", Iran is maybe a 7 or 8.
The US, despite Trump's best efforts, is still only at a relatively benign 3 or 4.
> my reading of GP's (somewhat incoherent) post is that Iran has more in common with Nazi Germany than it does with (most) of western civilisation.
I not sure what I am supposed to take away from this comparison. I never claimed Iran, UAE or Saudi are western civilizations. And conversely, Nazi Germany was a product of western civilization and still have active western fans. Notably, in the form of German AfD and guess who was giving them money and supporting them lately. And also notably in the form of Stephen Miller and sigh heiling American business leaders and politicians.
> If we're working on a scale of 1-10 for "how close is a ruling government to Nazi Germany", Iran is maybe a 7 or 8.
The relevant difference being that Nazi Germany started the war of conquest. In this case, USA started this war for no good reason and celebrates conquest. Nazi Germany committed genocide. Israel committed genocide and USA punished people from saying it out loud. Iran, UAE and Saudi all mistreat their minorities, Iran probably the most. And still, Iranian minorities specifically refused to join the war, because they knew they will be betrayed again if they do.
Iran is oppressive dictatorship - but original war plan was to keep it as oppressive dictatorship and negotiate with new head for oil. Like what happened in Venezuela. Iran is what happens when Islam goes bad.
And on top of it all, USA seems to despise other western democratic countries, is attacking them as much as it can and is trying to make them weaker. And supports those far right movements.
> still only at a relatively benign 3 or 4
USA is better country then Iran internally. Absolutely. It is also massively more powerful and is causing more issues then Iran can cause. Greenland thing was not benign. Financial help to AFD is not benign. AFD are literally people who want nazi germany happen again. Support to Russia is not benign. Starting the war against Iran and causing worldwide economic issues worldwide is not benign. Murdering those boatsmen is not benign.
> In practice, GPL is pro-user, BSD/MIT is pro-business.
Yet every time a GPL licensed product competes against a BSD licensed product in an open market, even when inferior the GPL product wins in the long run.
That's because the GPL ecosystem leapfrogs the BSD one every time one of those pro-business businesses sells proprietary add-ons while the former stands on one another's shoulders.
It's almost like free markets composed of multi vendor ecosystems are business friendly?
(Sarcasm aside, the weasel word here is "business". Customers and vendors are both businesses. Monopolies are very business-friendly for the vendor, just not for anyone else.)
It's a rule that's mostly only true for self-contained products though, it hasn't been true for things like codecs and SSL stacks, and components used by proprietary and free products alike.
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