Comment by notpushkin
5 hours ago
> The URL is the app
LLM-speak is a huge turn off to me (and a lot of other people here, from my interactions), so the fact that your submission title is AI-generated is... sorry, I have no words. I don’t even care that much about the code, but please write prose by hand, in your own voice, if you want us to read it.
Edit: rephrased the last sentence. Also, here’s my take on the title:
> Show HN: Bigwords.page – turn any screen into a sign, controlled by the URL params
Let me guess, you saw the `–` and thought "Clearly no human uses the em dash. It must all be AI".
I looked over the website and their github page and saw no indication of AI usage. I'm not saying it wasn't used, but unless you have actual evidence, then please point it out.
That’s an en-dash – and I use those myself. (I’ve experimented with em-dashes—brefly—but it doesn’t look good to my eye in English.)
It’s all by the vibes, I don’t have any concrete proof. FWIW, the comment seems at least hand-edited, so maybe it’s just this “the [A] is the [B]” trope that has triggered me. If the rest of it is readable, then I apologize, but still: that’s a bad title, please don’t use this – unless you’re writing a LinkedIn post.
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Edit: here’s another LLMism example from another HN user: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49996255
> (I’ve experimented with em-dashes—brefly—but it doesn’t look good to my eye in English.)
I saw what you did there.
I always get en and em confused. They are all just dashes to me :-).
The "Nothing else: no lists, tables, links, quotes, images or rules" is from the docs indicating that these things are not supported.
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For me (not the OP) I see the patterns 'The X is the Y', 'Every X is a Y' (both of which are there) and llm-sense tingles. Add in Not A, B, C or Z and I'm increasingly convinced it's LLM generated text.
OP didn't quote the part with the em dash, they quoted the part with the "The X is the Y", which is a common LLMism.
not that
Wait how is "The URL is the app" LLM-speak? Genuine question, sounded fine to me when I read it, not sure what a better way to phrase it would be
It's LLM speak because it's wrong, but pithy. The app is the app, and it lives on the server. The URL just contains the content of the sign.
it's marketing speech, following the rules of how to make memorable slogans that have been around for decades and in many different formats. Elevator pitches, explain it to me like I'm five, keep it simple, stupid, and so forth. It sounds like an LLM because LLMs learned from the digested wisdom of a million marketers. It may be an LLM produced it or it may just as well be someone who has cracked a marketing textbook some time in their life or hell, has watched the full run of Mad Men and thought, now what is a pithy way to express the selling point of this thing?
on edit: That said, I would probably have said "Turn Any Screen Into A Sign with Just A URL!"
It's LLM speak because it's wrong, but pithy.
That's all marketing.
I thought they meant the outputted javascript is embedded in the url, like a bookmarklet. But looking closer, it clearly isn't.
I’ve read it as “the URL is the UI”... sorry; I mean, you can change URL params (remotely) to control the app. It is a good idea perhaps (if you have the means to open a URL remotely), but evidently the title does not get the idea across. (Maybe I’m also wrong, I haven’t read the docs yet :)
“The [A] is the [B]” (and variations with “the” replaced with “your”) is screaming LLM to me. It’s been used by real people too, but it sounds very corporate, and is not something I’ve seen used to describe a personal project before LLMs.
It must have been used by humans before LLMs, because where do you think they learned it?
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LLM apophenia is so widespread in HN that it's becoming quite sickening.
Donald Knuth once said "Jon Bentley probably hit the nail on the head when he once was asked why literate programming hasn’t taken the whole world by storm. He observed that a small percentage of the world’s population is good at programming, and a small percentage is good at writing; apparently I am asking everybody to be in both subsets."
Get off your high horse. Not everybody studied to write prose, not everybody was born American to begin with. If LLMs helps programmers get heard - good. That's probably the best usage for them anyway.
> If LLMs helps programmers get heard - good
It does not, it does the opposite. It gets the programmer ignored.
Comments like "don't say this, this is LLM-ism" are the things that help the programmer get heard, whether she isn't good at English or she was just lazy and used LLM to generate text.
I haven’t studied to write prose either. I have studied English since when I was a kid, but I still make mistakes sometimes, and that’s okay.
LLMs turn your own voice into uniform corpo-speak. It is usually not an improvement, and it certainly doesn’t help you get heard – you’ll blend in with hundreds of other projects with the same-looking landing page, same tone of voice, same kilometres of docs that nobody read before putting up, and you’re basically playing a game of chance here. It’s like TikTok for programmers.
Ten times out of ten, I’ll prefer broken English over Claudish. Speak in your own voice. Don’t be afraid.
Indeed. I would much prefer to read someone's poor English over their fluent LLM.
it doesn't help programmers be heard, it helps LLMs be heard. Just publish the thing with your own words, what matters is if they are genuine, not that they sound exactly like everybody else.
Yeah, the issue here is that the URL is not the app.
This is basically a differently-shaped https://github.com/antonmedv/textarea
Cool idea, but agree that fixing actual mistakes in the title is a worthwhile use of time.