Regarding your cross-computer situation: I track my memory files in source control. This helps to keep them in sync across different machines. But the main benefit is making those files more transparent and easy for me to modify directly. So no funny business regarding memories or context I'm not aware about.
15 years ago we'd all be drooling breathlessly, wondering what sort of magical, earth-shattering new product Apple has been cooking up behind the scenes, and will we get to learn any details about it from the court case.
Today... Who cares? Lol. I'm not convinced there's anything going on at Apple, secret or otherwise, that we would find particularly interesting.
it's unfunny but I'm not sure it's incorrect in an abstract sense. The corporation treats your life as a bargaining chip. If it was profitable to kill you, it would.
Man, these AI-generated UIs are so bad. They always look pretty at first glance... punchy headline, nice colors, lots of "widgets" and doo-hickeys. But it's just a nice paint job. Trying to actually read them is a recipe for suffering.
This one has at least 20 distinct text styles. They are seemingly deployed in random ways, following no discernible hierarchy. the smallest text is "9.6px" which is not only small, but also fuzzy due to the 0.6 pixels (?? why) making it impossible to read.
Likewise for the size, placement, and emphasis of various widgets on the page. Altogether it's just a big pile of information. It's hard to know where to begin, or how one's eye should move around the page
(In their defense: this particular UI is attempting to convey a very complicated sequence of interrelated events from multiple data sources. Doing that well isn't easy.)
I've become convinced that AI models have no concept of 'white space' or cognitive load which is something technically minded folks have already seemed to underappreciate so it is amplified in situations like this.
To call it out again...
(1) almost no white space - every square inch is communicating information
(2) no clear hierarchy - almost in search of minimizing white space and presenting maximum rather tham maximally useful information.
(3) no consistency of any taxonomy for presenting information across the page
(4) no guidelines or legend for interpreting what any of the visual cues (color, size, etc.) mean.
There is a huge push in engineering at least to try and introduce better communications skills into curricula. It is hard in part because students are very much of the mindset that information and meaning is inherently shared and structuring a narrative or story is to whit unnecessary. This is in part because so much of their education is focused on the bulk transfer of facts and an assumption they will stitch information together into knowledge.
"this particular UI is attempting to convey a very complicated sequence of interrelated events from multiple data sources. Doing that well isn't easy."
True. But it doesn't even feel like they tried. Why is it fashionable to shit out something that feels low effort?
The English language has no words (yet) to capture that special combination of nausea and embarrassment one feels when they commit in good faith to reading a long piece of prose... only to slowly realize the whole thing is AI generated. But I'm feeling it more and more often these days.
I think it lands differently for different kinds of prose (e.g. informational, persuasive, etc.)
Persuasive prose, in particular, which is probably the majority of the things that get posted here, is less persuasive to the extent to which it includes obvious "AI tells". Even in the cases where AI is more articulate, (1) the emotional weight of the text feels manipulative when it is clear that the emotions were, at best, "vetted" by a human as opposed to having been produced by one, and (2) I think we have a built-in "bullshit-proximity" sensor, and have recently been trained to expect AI to be more willing to engage in bullshit than humans due to their obsequious disposition. (For the record, I think humans are also full of bullshit, so this one's more of a toss-up.)
Does that have something to do with OP's post, though? I mean, it's written like someone who's mostly formally familiar with English. Maybe your infamiliarity with formal English itself is factoring in, because the AIs are ALSO formal in diction?
I didn't get the same "AI wrote this" that you did, but I get a lot of people saying "AI wrote this" to stuff I definitely wrote by hand, all the way.
> Does that have something to do with OP's post, though?
Yes, the post reads to me as AI-generated, and then the author lightly revised the intro. They aren't evil for doing this. I just personally prefer reading things written by a human.
> I didn't get the same "AI wrote this",
The tells aren't always the same. For me LLMs have a certain indefatigable "bounciness" in their output that is impossible to miss. Everything has to be punchy. Everything shows the same level of (strangely elevated) excitement. At some point a human will do human things: put a little more detail here, vary their tone there, maybe lose the thread a bit and talk about something that's unrelated to the main flow. LLMs don't do any of those things–the writing is one speed from beginning to end. It's like riding a conveyor belt
> but I get a lot of people saying "AI wrote this" to stuff I definitely wrote by hand
I agree that there is a flip-side here where many people are eager to accuse AI usage for sometimes bizarre and facile reasons. And this is unfortunate, too. But it should illustrate the general frustration that many people are feeling about AI and its effects on social norms.
Genuinely curious, do you find HN to be AI-negative? (For whatever that mostly meaningless label is worth.) Would an "AI-positive / tech-positive" version of HN be just the same site, but with a smaller user base that holds similar opinions to you?
There's a wide spectrum of folks with different opinions on everything here, but I wouldn't say there's some lean towards LLM-hate. I'm not a fan of AI projects, but I can live with the (frankly) very high proportion of AI content co-habitating on this site.
For that reason, I don't think the root post here should be flagged really. That might get reversed, I think there's a flag-count threshold that triggers it automatically. But thinking HN is actively against AI projects stands in preeeetty stark contrast to the front page of HN! It's highly likely that people consider the concept of this metaframework to be bad, and they clicked the flag button instead of not interacting/leaving a curious comment, which is generally the way HN works.
Saying that, you should make one! Hacker mindset and all. It wouldn't be for me, but you might find a less confrontational atmosphere in your own space.
> I don't think the root post here should be flagged really.
If you're referring to my post ...then of course I agree with you!
I should clarify that I am in no way whatsoever opposed to AI usage. I use it all day, every day like most of us here and, if we are doing labels now, then I guess I would consider myself generally AI-positive.
What I don't like is when people use AI to produce low-effort content, and then package it in such a way that it masquerades as high-effort content. Of course what is low-effort or what is high-effort are highly subjective. But publishing an article that has your name at the top, it's written in the 1st person, and yet it's very obviously 100% copy/pasted AI output -- this falls on the wrong side of ethical for me.
I suppose OP could put "AI-generated" or some such disclaimer on the article. But I would rather people just revise the output, actually engage with what they're creating before they dump it on the rest of us.
I think the comments on AI related projects are filled with negativity and uninformed opinions and I too find the atmosphere around here pretty off-putting lately.
I won't say that HN is some bastion of objectivity, but I do find people tend to be a little more direct on here. Individual comments can be pretty harsh as a result, but I tend to put at least some weight in the "HN hivemind" simply because I know there's a lot of people in important fields participating here. You absolutely don't have to agree with that, but I've rethought some things before because of that "negativity" that in hindsight; were indeed not great ideas.
If it feels that AI-generated projects are getting negative feedback, it might be worth interrogating why that is. It might not be because they're made with AI, it could be because they're not a great idea/not well implemented.
> find the atmosphere around here pretty off-putting lately.
Hehe. I chuckle because I've been reading comments like this one for more than 10 years now. You might be right. But if HackerNews is dying then it sure is taking its time.
There's no objective measurement of “better”, which in itself refutes your argument, but I personally feels AI prose to be very annoying for mostly two reasons:
- it's the same everywhere. People could use AI to write in different styles by prompting and through few-shots learning, but they don't and as a result every AI generated prose looks like something I've already read. Its junk prose the same way way Mac Donalds is junk food.
- if someone doesn't make the effort of writing or even customizing the AI output, then what I'm reading is a low effort post and it's highly unlikely that I'm going to learn anything in the process. As a result as soon as I realize that I'm reading AI slop, I feel the immediate disappointment of having committed some time to reading something that wasn't worth my time.
> Historians will look back at all the silly dead humans in the past that icked and yucked about AI.
Like we look at the silly dead humans in the past who fought back against opium, cigarettes and leaded gasoline?
What alternative would you suggest? "Sent a message in our enterprise chat application about the version control system that our engineering team sometimes uses (no, not that one, the other one) but they need it in the project management app that our Design team uses (good luck requesting access from IT, we have more than a dozen project management tools in our catalog)"
I'd suggest a descriptive name. Baking what makes it unique in the name would be ideal, but even narrowing it down to a category, like your version of my message had, would be an improvement. Knowing what class of thing the noun is would be an improvement over a tree or a or a sound effect or an obscure foreign concept being equally interchangeable as titles.
Further, while your version wven presupposes that the name is useful enough to narrow it down to a category, if the name was specific enough it would avoid the confusion of your example. "Which program of this category? Oh, the one with that unique feature."
The solution is to always add a second name. Like people, projects could have short name and full names. Could be organization (Apache Spark), could use type (Oak Versioncontrol), could be longer name (Violet Spring). Then can use short name internally, and full name globally. I like the type name cause tells what it is.
Interesting. Although it seems they are focusing primarily on detecting AI generated video and imagery. But most of the annoying slop videos I come across seem like they are using real footage/video clips. It's just edited together by AI and there's an AI narrator reading an AI script. I wonder if they'll do anything to guard against this type of junk
