Comment by dang

On code-formatters, I don't think it's so clear-cut, but rather an "it depends".

For code that is meant to be an expression of programmers, meant to be art, then yes code formatters should be an optional tool in the artist's quiver.

For code that is meant to be functional, one of the business goals is uniformity such that the programmers working on the code can be replaced like cogs, such that there is no individuality or voice. In that regard, yes, code-formatters are good and voice is bad.

Similarly, an artist painting art should be free. An "artist" painting the "BUS" lines on a road should not take liberties, they should make it have the exact proportions and color of all the other "BUS" markings.

You can easily see this in the choices of languages. Haskell and lisp were made to express thought and beauty, and so they allow abstractions and give formatting freedom by default.

Go was made to try and make Googlers as cog-like and replaceable as possible, to minimize programmer voice and crush creativity and soul wherever possible, so formatting is deeply embedded in the language tooling and you're discouraged from building any truly beautiful abstractions.

The major reason auto-formatting became so dominant is source control. You haven't been through hell till you hit whitespace conflicts in a couple of hundred source files during a merge...

Code formatting is a bit different though, at least if you're working in a team - it's not your code, it's shared, which changes some parameters.

One factor is "churn", that is, a code change that includes pure style changes in addition to other changes; it's distracting and noisy.

The other is consistency, if you're reading 10 files with 10 different code styles it's more difficult to read it.

But by all means, for your own projects, use your own code style.

I worked on a project where having code formatting used was massively useful. The project had 10k source files, many of them having several thousand lines, everything was C++ and good chunks of code were written brilliantly and the rest was at least easy to understand.

I mean, not sure if this makes sense? The creativity you put into code is about what it does (+ documentation, comments), not about how it’s formatted. I could care less how a programmer formatted their website’s code unless it’s, like, an ioccc submission.

There is quite a difference between fixing grammar and the fuller rewording that is often used especially by LLM based writing tools. The distinction is much more of a grey area when you not talking about a language you are fluent in, because you don't know the difference between idiomatic equivalences and full-on rewording that will change your perceived tone⁰ - the tool being used could be doing more than you think and not in a good way.

And if you are using the tool, “AI” or not to translate it is even worse and you often only have to do on cycle of [your primary language] -> [something else] -> [your primary language] to see what a mess that can make.

I'm attempting to learn Spanish¹ and when I'm writing something, or practising something that I might say, I'll write it entirely away from tech (I have even a proper chunky paper dictionary and grammar guide to help with that!) other than the text editor I'm typing in, and then I'll sometimes give a tool it to look over. If that tool suggests what looks like more than just “that's the wrong tense, you should have an accent there, etc.” I'll research the change rather than accepting it as-is.

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[0] or even, potentially, perceived meaning

[1] I like the place and want to spend more time down there when I can, I even like the idea of living there fairly permanently when I no longer have certain responsibilities tying me to the UK², and I'd hate to be ThatGuy™ who rocks up and expects everyone else to speak his language.

[2] and the shithole it has the potential to become over the next decade - to the Reform supporters and their ilk who say, without any hint of irony, “if you don't like it why don't you go somewhere else” I reply “I'm working on that”.

I've written multiple books, the most recent in 2019. I used to love the em-dash, and considered it the superior form of ellipsis (over the parenthesis, comma or semicolon).

I'm not planning on writing new books now, but if I did, I would completely get rid of em-dashes, because of their second-order effect of making the copy AI-written (and therefore less valuable).

It's also interesting that using a Skill that discouraged the use of em-dashes, I noticed that Claude's "thinking" internal dialogue actually disagreed with the Skill spec itself ("no, actually, em-dashes are perfectly normal and not a sign of AI writing") and therefore kept the dashes, against the Skill instructions.

If that's true, it would be very sad indeed. Techical excellence is a very low bar to clear. It's so easy even AI can do that part.

When I was young, and learning my technical skills, then naturally I was focused on improving those skills. At that age I defined myself by what I did, and so my self worth was related to my skills. And while the skills are not hard to acquire, not many did, and they were well paid. All of which made me value them even more.

As I've grown older though I discovered my best parts had nothing to do with tech skills. My best parts (work wise) was in translating those skills into a viable business, hiring the right people, focusing my attention where it's needed (and getting out the way where it's not.) My best parts at work are my human relationships with colleagues, customers, prospects and so on.

Outside of work my technical skills mean nothing. My family and friends couldn't care less. They barely know I have drills at all, and no idea if I'm any good or not. In that space compassion, loyalty, reliability, kindness, generosity, helpfulness, positivity, contentment and so on are far (far) more important.

I hope at my funeral people remember those things. Whether I could set up email or drive an AI will (hopefully) not even be in the top 10.

This is quite an interesting question, because I believe there's two facets to the surface of the question.

Given you're interacting with a competent hacker (i.e. a person who is into tech not for money and for tinkering), you can't impress them. You can pique their interest, they may praise you, but if they are informed enough, anything looking like magic can be dissected easily. So technical excellence is meaningless.

Given you're interacting with a competent hacker again, everything technical will be subjective. Creating is deciding trade-offs all the way down and beyond. Their preferences will probably lay at a difference balance of trade-offs. Even though you catch "objective" perfection, even this perfection has nuances (see USB audio interfaces. They all have flat response curves, but they all sound different, for example), hence, technical excellence is not only meaningless, it's subjective.

On a deeper level, a genuine person who knows its cookies well, even though with gaps is a much more interesting and nicer person to interact with. They'll be genuinely interested in talking with you, and learn something from you, or show what they know gently, so both parties can grow together. They might not be knowledgeable in most intricate details, but they are genuinely human and open to improvement and into the conversation itself, not to prove themselves and win a meaningless battle to stroke their own ego.

An LLM generated response is similar. It's lazy, it's impersonated, it's like low quality canned food. A new user recently has written an LLM generated rebuttal to one of my comments. It's white-labeled gibberish, insincere word-skirmish. It's so off-putting that I don't see the point to reply them. They'll just paste it to a non-descript box and will add "write a rebuttal reply, press this point". This is not a discussion, this is a meaningless fight for internet points.

I prefer genuine opinions, imperfect replies, vulnerable humans at the other end of the wire. Not a box of numbers spitting out grammatically correct yet empty sentences.

Have you tried that line in a bar?

More to the point, Hacker News is much more interesting for encouraging idiosyncratic (i.e. original, diverse, nuanced views of specific) human viewpoints, not just being raw technical information.

Model rewrites remove much of specific human dimension.

There is value in technical excellence, but it’s not substituable for having and using a voice that isn’t the crowd-averaged AI normal. Better an unpracticed voice than a dull one, etc. (Also, AI is nullifying a great deal of excellence in favor of barely sufficient, just like Java did! so betting on the continued value of technical prowess requires some particular specializations that are not so easily replaced as the high quantity of devopseng cogs turn out to be.)

No, that would be my roguish good looks.

Only if you’re a very boring person.

One example of voice is of retreading old ground over and over, taking a long time to give evidence or get to the point. Content expressed with this voice is hard to extract from the text.

Another voice might add citations to every little detail to the point that it is hard to read, but makes a great reference and/or starting point for additional research.

Voice is not really separate from content, in part it is the choices of what content to include.

Coming from a social scene in which I'm involved in modding and deconstructing video games, this behavior was immediately apparent to me. It's the same contrived story that cheaters use to explain why they really really need a feature that gives them an advantage over other players in online games.

The story itself being true or not doesn't really matter - they're weaponizing an appeal to emotion by using a disabled person as a prop to violate everyone else's standards of interaction.

Count me as a weapon, too, then.

This is not weaponizing to a single disabled person. I am not disabled, but I have always had difficulty expressing myself effectively, and that difficulty has increased as I've aged. I use AI to help organize my thoughts, to help give voice to that little tidbit of an idea that is trying to escape, and it has been a genuine help. Asking me to not use that assistance is similar to asking a user to not use accessibility features. It's an asinine policy and is an overcorrection.

>it does allow people for whom typing and dictation are painful, difficult, or impossible

Putting aside the example proposed above where typing or dictation may be difficult, "impossible" seems, well, impossible. I am curious how you suppose that someone who cannot type or dictate at all would prompt an LLM.

Is it a long tail? Let's take me, because I know the subject well.

I have poor working memory. Very poor, insomuch as I have to type six digit codes in blocks of three.

I can write, of course, and sometimes well. But technical writing requires maintaining both detail and thread and I cannot do both in a sustained way. For a short comment, I'm usually okay. For anything longer, not so much.

Is the long tail the whole beast? I think yes.

So I write shorthand and use tools to help me, and yes the results aren't always perfect -- but they are my thoughts embodied.

When it comes to factual information, and not opinion - telling someone that they are wrong is not a criticism.

It is fact.

Of course - people have egos and emotions, so when they hear someone tell them they are wrong, they will typically take that as criticism about themselves - and not the fact that you are disputing.

It's completely clear what is intended, the only thing you're disagreeing about, is the cultural difference of who is expected to make this translation.

I think that would've been pretty clear from the post too, if you weren't so keen on giving a non-native speaker an English lesson ...

Speaking of, I have been using an LLM to help me sound less accusatory when trying to talk about my feelings.

Trying to keep things on topic, BTW, I found that LLMs are pretty good at picking up the kinds of context that makes this very obvious what is really being meant.

So you could use an LLM, privately, to soften people's opinions.

I just tried it for you, I won't copy it here cause the thread is about not using LLMs, but if you get too upset from somebody being simply direct and clear in their manner of speaking, the LLM is trained on enough American cultural baggage that it is very capable of softening that blow with the extra words you so dearly need to see past that red mist.

Someone might even be able to vibe code a browser plugin for it.

They are semantically identical: "you're wrong" is shorthand for "what you said is wrong" ... it is definitely not ad hominem.

If the speaker says something incorrect, they can't be right, therefore they're wrong. I don't see the difference.

In my previous comment, for example, I stated my personal experience and it's now sitting at 0.

Yikes, fixed above now. Thanks to both of you!

That works!

Definitely agree. If you look at comments posted in places like Slashdot - is is basically ruined forever (and at one time it was quite excellent for real comments, from real experts and experienced people)

There's a gradient here for sure, but it's getting clear that people using LLMs "only" for grammar and spelling fixes are underestimating how much else the LLMs are doing.

Slop ambience just sure sounds to me like HN is banning a prose style. I guess I just think that if this is how the rule will be enforced, that is how it should be written.