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Comment by khalic

10 hours ago

I strongly recommend the authors rewrite the readme by hand. It’s kind of a snif test for how much care someone put into this project.

I have the same complaint about oh-my-pi's readme. The tone is obnoxious. It's somehow jaded and matter-of-fact at the same time. Like it was written by that one guy at work who never misses a chance to brag about how clever he is.

  • There is a band called The Protomen who do rock operas about the Mega Man storyline. They have a very earnest, gritty sound. Every time I read a project README written by AI, I hear the voice over from the first track of the first album, Act 1: Hope Rides Alone (https://youtu.be/VZ8jyGVioxg?is=gsXlgwa4Ubx6LmKE).

    "Twelve years Light worked and on a cold night in the year 200X, Protoman was born. A perfect man, an unbeatable machine, hell-bent on destroying every evil standing between man and freedom, built for one purpose, to destroy Wily's army of evil robots. Ready. Willing. Prepared to fight."

    For the Protomen it makes sense. But for a project README it's so absurdly melodramatic.

> Avoid generic tangents.

> Please don't post shallow dismissals

> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage.

See: Hacker News Guidelines

  • 1. Not a tangent, it’s related to the very first content visible on that link. 2. Not a dismissal, an advise from an expert 3. Not complaining, as stated, giving an advise about the optics of using clear LLM prose on the first paragraph

Really? I mean, yeah, it's probably written by an LLM, but it's hardly the worst that I've seen. Looks way more straight forward than the modern README featuring a ton of badges, emojis, confusing out-of-context screenshots, "trust me bro" installation instructions, vague elevator pitches, "used by netflix, nasa, disney, good morning america, alex jones, the church of scientology", and other verbiage to create the illusion that the author won't immediately get bored and abandon their glorified dissertation piece. They all scream "give me your github stars" whereas this one doesn't. But I still get what you mean when it comes to the particular 'isms.