Comment by estearum
7 hours ago
It's fascinating seeing people think that if you're snarky enough about something, the substance of that thing actually ceases to be substantive.
It's like staring down the barrel of a gun and taking the time to make quips about the type of paper the gun advertisement was printed on.
How do you know we haven't looked for substance, found none, and then decided to be snarky?
I can agree that snark probably isn't the type of comment that we generally value or encourage here on Hacker News, but neither is posting blatant advertisements and press releases, but here we are discussing one, so shrug ?
When writing is too heavily LLM-assisted, it does actually cease to be substantive, because it becomes impossible to know which parts of it represent actual claims which the author believes as stated and which are interpolations.
No no, it the LLM-assistance makes it hard to know what is substantive. That means it puts more work on the reader, which is a totally valid thing to complain about, but which is totally different from "the poor writing is actually the whole point"
But how can the reader do the work? They don't have access to Mythos and can't review Cloudflare's internal findings or harnesses. The only practical options are to accept the article at face value or not accept it if the expected density of LLM interpolations is too high.
All of them represent claims which the author believes as stated, otherwise the author wouldn't put their name on them.
Eh, I still read all of it, but it grates that everything everywhere all the time now is written by one person.
I agree with the complaint, I just disagree with this somehow obviating the need to engage with the underlying substance (where it exists)
And obviously it's a problem that it's so much cheaper to produce writing without underlying substance, but I think when one of the leading Internet security/infrastructure companies is writing about the leading cybersecurity model, it's excessively flippant to say the writing on top is "the real question"
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