Comment by TacticalCoder
5 hours ago
TFA's title is: "Taste Is All That's Left" but when I read the following:
> But the ratio was never the danger. It held steady for centuries. What held the flood back was that producing the crap cost something. Bad novels still took a year to write. Bad software still took a month to build.
I want to rename the title to "Blogs writing in LLMish are all that's left".
Seriously, take this one: "But the ratio was never the danger.".
Who the FUCK speaks like that?
Hemingway wrote the same way. Here's a famous example from the Old Man and the Sea:
Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.
The reason is simple: Short sentences are punchy. They hit hard, carry emotional weight.
P.S. As evident, clearly I'm having some fun with this, but the point stands.
Short sentences were never the danger, or what the GP is referring to.
But understanding the GP was never the danger. Incomprehensible posts on HN have held steady for decades. What held the flood back was that producing crap was all the users could muster. Bad comments took seconds to write. The ten percent was throttled by lack of use of tools like LLMs to help refine the words into something that could be understood.
Correction:
> The reason is simple. Short sentences are punchy. They hit hard. But they carry emotional weight.
More importantly, why are there always 30 people who insist that you can’t know it’s claudeslop? Or, “so what if it is,” or something like this? It boggles the mind.
What boggles your mind is not that people are falling for the genetic fallacy, but that others are calling them out for falling for it?
Does this stem from you believing that there is value in making logical errors, or is your angle more towards believing that nobody should waste their time interacting with someone who makes logical errors?
Yep, it is slop. I got 2-3 paragraphs in and closed the tab, as too many LLMisms raised their ugly heads.
> Who the FUCK speaks like that?
If we assume that it is LLM generated, as suggested, apparently a lot of people, as the LLMs were trained to mimic how people speak (write).
You might find it to be unusual because you probably have never read anything written by most people. Only peculiar characters tend to get noticed.
> the LLMs were trained to mimic how people speak (write)
It's a foundational model (fresh from autoregressive pretraining) that approximates the probability distribution of human texts. And, no, it's not the statistical average of how people speak. It approximates how a person who could have written a text in its context would have written the next words.
Fine-tuning, RLHF, reinforcement learning change this probability distribution. I guess, it's mostly RLHF that shapes the way LLMs write. The similarity of style is due to common providers of RLHF data.
But no _individual_ speaks like this. It is not common that a guy representative of the Average Of All People Plus Some RL writes a blog post.
That reminds me of story where the US Air Force attempted to design a cheaper cockpit and chair that would fit the "average pilot".. but in practice it fit nobody well. They went back to the drawing-board and put in all sorts of adjustable components instead.
This is likely because the individual measures being averaged like "femur length" were not independent from one-another, even where they had the benefit of being normally distributed.
The specific quote that we are talking about reads like something I wouldn't find unusual in the works of an individual. Maybe not from someone who stands out as someone who writes things that you'd actually want to read, but from an average Joe? It is likely. I, being no wordsmith myself, have written things just like that. It looks quite typical of how people write to me.
In fact, I find no meaningful difference between "But no _individual_ speaks like this." and "But the ratio was never the danger.", aside from them being about different topics. They are syntactically very similar.
> Who the FUCK speaks like that?
Do you mean starting sentences with "But"? I do, but then again I'm not a native speaker and my writing may be nonstandard. Or do you mean short and direct sentences? In which case, Hemingway.
I'm not saying the article isn't AI slop, but I think it's not obvious from the specific sample you chose, since plenty of people online write like that, before AI.
> Who the FUCK speaks like that?
Walter Hartwell White, I suppose.
> Who the FUCK speaks like that?
It's a blog post. It was written. The written word is different from the spoken.
People don't speak like: The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
People don't speak like: In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
In fact, I can throw this question at you:
"TFA's title is"
Who the FUCK speaks like that? Who the FUCK uses TFA's IRL OMG WTF?
Silly, isn't it?
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
> It's a blog post. It was written.
The person you're replying to is saying that it wasn't written. If you are the author, I will believe you that it was. If you are not the author, I have no idea why you think you know more than anyone else does.
Yes, your pedantry shows how you're very clever. Please be very clever somewhere else.
Even if they didn't make a fair point (and I think they do), I would prefer their pedantry to your palpable contempt by a large margin. I mean "palpable" literally. My body is tenser and my heart more sad having experienced the voice you just used on that person.
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