Interesting complaint, because many might not share any of their ideas if it weren't for LLMs making it easy. Not everyone has the incentive to dedicate a day to producing writing worth publishing. But maybe they would if it took significantly less time.
Even considering HNs no LLMs for comments rule, which I mostly agree with, I think we would all lose of the same rule were applied to publishing in general.
All of the output beyond the prompt contains, definitionally, essentially no useful information. Unless it's being used to translate from one human language to another, you're wasting your reader's time and energy in exchange for you own. If you have useful ideas, share them, and if you believe in the age of LLMs, be less afraid of them being unpolished and simply ask you readers to rely on their preferred tools to piece through it.
I have also found that LLMs do not help me communicate my ideas in any way because the bottleneck is getting the ideas out of my head and into the prompt in the first place, but I will disagree with the idea that the output beyond the prompt contains no useful information.
In the article you linked the output he is complaining about probably had a prompt like this: "What are the downsides of using Euler angles for rotation representation in robotics? Please provide a bulleted list and suggest alternatives." The LLM expanded on it based on its knowledge of the domain or based on a search tool (or both). Charitably, the student looked it over and thought through the information and decided it was good (or possibly tweaked around the edges) and then sent it over - though in practice they probably just assumed it was correct and didn't check it.
For writing an essay like "I would rather read the prompt" LLMs don't seem like they would speed up the process much, but for something that involves synthesizing or summarizing information LLMs definitely can generate you a useful essay (though at least at the moment the default system prompts generate something distinctively bland and awful).
Pretty balanced take. I think if a human gains information or saves time, it's still worthwhile. Surely, I don't publish those clickbaits. That's AI slop.
Thank you. I wanted to mostly stay away from algorithmic feed to stay true to RSS. On the non-minimal version of the site, you can sign up and follow blogs to have a "For You" tab, but it's still recent posts from blogs you follow.
I've used canvas quite a bit since it was release in Obsidian. It's good, not great, but the simplicity of the file type opens up a lot of opportunities to build on top of it.
It took me a while to start using canvases. But now I think they should be a much more common UI pattern. They really shine on large (40"+ non-retina 4k) screens. The simplicity at launch made me feel more confident in using them at all. I don't use most of the other obsidian features/plugins.
Not OP, but I use canvas all the time (Thank you!) in preference to something like Miro because I really value the open format and being able to keep the file. Something that really holds me back is the inability to use different shapes for the nodes - a use case for me is creating flow charts and process diagrams, so being unable to use the standard shapes for those is a challenge.
Web crawlers didn’t routinely take down public resources or use the scraped info to generate facsimiles that people are still having ethical debates over. Its presence didn’t even register and it was indexing that helped them. It isn’t remotely the same thing.
AI bots must've taken down that link you shared, it won't load :/
And search crawlers/results have been producing snippets that prevent users from clicking to the source for well over a decade.
Edit: it loaded. I don't see how the problem isn't simply solved by an off the shelf solution like cloud flare. In the real world, you wouldn't open up a space/location if you couldn't handle the throughput. Why should online spaces/locations get special treatment?
Why should everyone else pay the price for VC-funded, private companies? They should incur the cost.
This is no different than saying “robbers aren’t causing any problems, you just need to lock your doors, buy and set up sensors on every point of potential ingress, and pay a monthly cost for an alarm system. That’s on you.”
search crawlers used to bring people TO your site
llm boots are used to keep people OUT of your site, because knowledge is indexed and distributed by corporations.
Why are you presenting the latter option as if it were mainstream? It's such a small percentage of use cases that it probably isn't even a rounding error.
People who want to disseminate information also want the credit.
I'd still like to know why you are presenting this false dichotomy. What reason do you have for presenting a use case that has fractions of a percentage as if it were a standard use case? What is your motivation behind this?
In any case, people who want to disseminate information with credit can do so without standing up a blog (any place that allows posting of comments, such as Reddit, HN, etc).
In the context of this discussion, we're talking about site owners; people who put up a blog.
Lots of money being made by luring people into this trap.
The reality is that if you actually know what you want, and can communicate it well (where the productivity app can be helpful), then you can do a lot with AI.
My experience is that most people don't actually know what they want. Or they don't understand what goes into what they want. Asking for a plan is a shortcut to gaining that understanding.
Problem is they don’t know how to express themselves and many people, especially those interested in tech, don’t want to learn.
I can’t tell you how many times I have a CS student in my office for advising and they tell me they only want to take technical courses, because anything reading or writing or psychology or history based is “soft”, unrelated to their major, and a waste of their time.
I’ve spent years telling them critical reading and expressive writing skills are very important to being a functioning adult, but they insist what they need to know can only be found in the Engineering college.
Much of my time at work is reading through quickly typed messages from my boss and understanding exactly what questions I need to ask in order to make it easy for him to answer clearly.
Engineers who lack soft skills cannot be effective in team environments.
RTFM and being able to quickly reduce problems to the simplest possible test case are my superpowers.
To be fair, LLMs can be quite useful for quickly finding the correct place in TFM to look when you don't necessarily have a function or feature name to go on.
Haha. I always say that I'm only a good IC not because of my technical skills but because of my communication skills and my willingness to, as Steven Covey says, seek first to understand.
I literally got a transfer to a more exciting position and most likely a raise (discussing it on Tuesday =P) just because I communicated things related to the new position proactively and more than other people who, after the fact, expressed interest in the position.
Nice, congrats! A former boss once told me that over communication never hurt anyone. Of course there are ways to fine-tune and get the point across more succinctly but I think the point still stands - err on the side of over than under communication.
I asked Claude whether these elaborate words like "walk down the design tree" actually mean anything to the LLM and make a difference. The answer confirmed my gut feeling: You can just tell me to "be critical" and get mostly the same results.
Matt did incredible work teaching people TS, but this feels more like trying to create FOMO to sell snake oil and AI courses.
> I asked Claude […]. The answer confirmed my gut feeling.
And i drawn a tarot card and the card refuted your gut feeling.
Joking asside, there is no reason to suspect that an LLM is telling you correct information about how best to use an LLM. The way to confirm your thesis is by running experiments, or finding someone who has already done them. It is a valid move to use an LLM to find primary sources, but in itself the LLM is not an authority you could or should trust.
It feels to me that "walk down the design tree" has a specific meaning with respect to treating the design as a hierarchy (although whether that means BFS or DFS is still ambiguous). "Be critical" lacks that specificity.
Yes but then it’s better to spell those instructions out explicitly, eg state facts, state ambiguities / assumptions, inspect codebase, challenge assumptions, etc.
How odd, are you under the impression that LLMs have self-awareness or understand their own internal mechanisms? Do you know that you can tell an LLM almost anything and, absent a tool, it will tell you that you're correct? By your logic, why do we even experiment with skills, planning modes, harnesses, etc. when we could just ask the model what the best way to get it to produce information is?
I thought that was supposed to be “decision tree” but otherwise, totally agree the exact words don’t actually matter all that much in most instances. I copy-paste templated prompts and every now and then notice some baffling grammar on my side after the fact… claude doesn’t mind
> My experience is that most people don't actually know what they want. Or they don't understand what goes into what they want.
1000%. This is why people whose job it was to figure out how to make a thing are thriving with AI tools, and those who operate in the conceptual/abstract are flailing and frustrated with it. (it really is a mirror in this case, and the frustration they have is unknowingly directed at themselves)
Or, as I like to put it: I need to activate my personal transformers on my inner embeddings space to figure what is it I really want. And still, quite often, I think in terms of the programming language I'm used to and the library I'm familiar with.
So, to really create something new that I care about, LLMs don't help much.
No, but definitely tired of the "influencer" takes. You would think that this AI thing has been all but figured out, when really, even with the biggest openest claws we are still barely scratching the surface of a new era human-computer interaction
There's going to be a lot of complaints about open-source restricting access.
It's going to keep happening because it just doesn't make sense for a lot of previous business models that supported and open-source project, something that was seen recently with tailwind.
In one of my projects, one that remains source-available, I had encountered an "open-source justice warrior" that made it their mission to smear the project because of the switch, grasping at straws to do everything they could to paint my intentions as malicious.
It's really too bad, and will only hurt the availability of free alternatives if one cannot provide the source under a "just don't commercially compete with the paid version of the product" license without getting branded as a scamming cash grabber
Source available with various arbitrary restriction is non-free software. What the "open source warriors" take exception to is presenting a project as "open source" or "free" when in reality it is not.
A thing cannot be considered free/open source if there are restrictions on what users can do with it. If a maintainer wishes to put a "don't compete commercially" license then it should be clearly labelled as source available, not open source. To do otherwise is to deceive the open source community, which has a particular and well defined understanding of what "open source" entails.
> 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
>
> The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
A non-commercial clause is a discrimination against a field of endeavor and thus non-open-source. The license cannot restrict how the user is able to *use* the software and still be open source. There can however be requirements to distribute the source code when distributing the software, ala GPL.
My main complaint about the project changes we've seen lately is that these companies are happy to take all the code that previous contributors have written for free in good faith, and profit off of it without any sharing. The whole reason I and many people have contributed to some of the projects out there is under the premise that I've been given something great/useful for free so I'm going to give back for free. If you want to create a project that's source-available or whatever you want to call it, from the start, you'll probably even get my support.
Sure, it's totally legal for the company to change how they operate in the future. But it burns all that good faith of previous contributions in favor of profit. And so yeah, I hope the companies that pull this crash and burn in proportion to how much free code they accepted from contributors that they now wish to profit from.
This is the way. Even more so now that LLMs can reliably write simple utilities, the kind of things a dependency would previously frag in hundreds of other utilities (that go unused) all while depending on another dozen dependencies
Even considering HNs no LLMs for comments rule, which I mostly agree with, I think we would all lose of the same rule were applied to publishing in general.
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