5 ms·

Human Routers of Machine Words

76 points by zx321 3mo ago

horticulturist 3mo ago
[dead]
Animats 3mo ago
> Anyone can imagine a programing language that is as fast as C and as dynamic as Lisp, but when you sit down and think through what those goals entail, you realize the design becomes contradictory. Ignoring the usual LLM rant, that's an interesting observation. Those conflicting goals reflect a problem that comes up quite often - the conflict between efficient volume production and flexibility. It's solvable for programming languages. That's what just-in-time compilers are for. Anything can change, but in practice, most things don't change that often. It's a caching problem. This hits much harder in manufacturing. An extreme case is what was once called "Detroit automation" - totally specialized lines of machine tools that could make V8 auto engines all day and all night with very little human attention. But that's all they could make. Even switching to a V6 or a different cylinder size required new equipment. The other extreme is 3D printing in metal. It works, but it's so slow it's only useful for high-value items. Space-X makes Raptor engines that way. Nobody makes auto engine blocks that way. A decade ago, there was a huge enthusiasm for 3D printing for making everything. That's declined. It's become another machine in the machine shop. It works, but if you want to bang out thousands of something, injection molding or stamping is far faster. There's a sizable tooling cost, and then each item is cheap. This is the tradeoff between efficiency and dynamics. A year or two ago, someone posted a link on HN to a video of someone making a small screw on a lathe. Nobody does that except out of desperate need for a non-standard part. Small screws are made by special purpose machines that bang them out at machine-gun speeds. American culture does not know this any more. Too few Americans today have been inside manufacturing plants. The culture has forgotten where stuff comes from.
- bxk76 3mo ago
  As the buddhists have pointed out for thousands of years nothing is permanent. Attachment to things that are ever changing is the path to suffering.
- inigyou 3mo ago
  The language implementation that is faster than (!) C and almost as flexible as Lisp is called LuaJIT. I think it's no longer maintained. * JITs can be faster than C by specialising at runtime on runtime-knowable values such as the length of the input or the tag of a tagged union.
Foxhuls 3mo ago
This just seems weirdly similar to Plato's comments on writing: "And so it is that you by reason of your tender regard for the writing that is your offspring have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only the semblance of wisdom, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much while for the most part they know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom they will be a burden to their fellows." Maybe it simply comes down to how things get used and people are trying to figure out how to use this strange new tool that's available to us.
- zetalyrae 3mo ago
  But writing, calculators, search engines etc. are specific tools, you drop a skill to gain effectiveness in another. While AI is a general tool whose builders intend it to be able to perform all cognitive work. Past a certain point, what is left of the human?
  - NewsaHackO 3mo ago
    I do not agree that the concept of writing can be considered a specific tool at all. Maybe a pencil, but writing opposed to remembering everything is a more substantial level of a paradigm shift than AI use is.
cadamsdotcom 3mo ago
> ... I feel contempt for the author, because if you use AI to write, you are a waste of biomass. Let’s not mince words here. Someone who is so eager to replace themselves, that they would have a machine write in their stead, when the machine can’t even write good yet: what do you call that, if not contemptible? It’s like making yourself into a eunuch so Claude can fuck your wife. Unfortunately due to how tasteless this passage was, I won’t be reading this or your future writing.
- NateEag 3mo ago
  I agree that it was a rude, tasteless metaphor. Alas, for rude, tasteless behavior, such as replacing your own authentic self-expression with the mellifluous spew of verbal diarrhea that bullshit machines slather across all surfaces they touch, rude, tasteless metaphors are the only fitting ones.
  - altcognito 3mo ago
    If only everyones authentic self-expression were so important to hear, to say nothing of unique and inciteful. I'm not against authentic self-expression, but this is more about being wrapped up in ones own self-importance.
    - NateEag 3mo ago
      The only way people will get to self-expression that's worth hearing is by working their way through the self-expression that wasn't. In a better world that would happen in school and as a normal part of growing up, but at least in the US, that mostly doesn't happen. If humans use LLMs to write, it's much more likely they will never uncover the unique perspectives they could share with the world. So, for those whose parents and teachers failed them, embracing, encouraging, and engaging their clumsy, self-centered rudeness is, I think, the best path forward. Granted, when it is clumsy, self-centered, and rude, one of the more helpful things we can do is offer the critiques that clearly and coherently point that out, as you've done here. ...though I stand by my claim that using LLMs to write is actually deeply offensive and rude, a rejection of what it means to be human, and that it should be met with strong rejections.
SeriousM 3mo ago
> A “thinker” who doesn’t write, who skips the step of “merely” synthesizing their vague thoughts into prose, is not thinking. And then these people give their noise to the AI. OP is quite good with words and has a high standard and world view. The reason why people use AI to manifest their ideas is probably because they have no other way communicate otherwise. It's a medium to pack the idea into "something" that represents the idea. It was never about a finished and polished product. It's the sign language for deaf people - a way to show your thoughts. I'm certain that the people presenting their github repo do put quite some effort (= prompt work) into it, which IS the thinking process. At the end of the day, most developers are introverts that can think very well but have hard times with soft skills. Everyone wants to be proud of his work, let us don't blame them how the show it off.
- jrmg 3mo ago
  The reason why people use AI to manifest their ideas is probably because they have no other way communicate otherwise. What?! This is nonsense. You’re really making the argument that most people getting LLMs to write for them just couldn’t communicate in any way five years ago?
  - recursive-call 3mo ago
    The five-years-ago internet was certainly full of incoherently expressed ideas (and still is now). For some people AI is just spellcheck on the sentence/paragraph level.
    - ekelsen 3mo ago
      As a reader, I appreciate reading writing that lacks large amounts of spelling mistakes. Everyone agreeing on spelling seems like a useful monoculture, like driving on the same side of the road. But I don't feel the same way about AI writing. It feels totally different in a way that good spelling does not. Even if I liked the style, I would object strongly to that style quickly becoming a monoculture. We're on a path to a style optimized for shallow attention maximization becoming the majority of text we read.
lawgimenez 3mo ago
> because if you use AI to write, you are a waste of biomass Damn, that is so hurtful. I'm sorry if English is my third language. But for my project documents I would love to read it like a proper documentation so I'm thankful for AI.
- zetalyrae 3mo ago
  Translation is fine.
  - throwaboat 3mo ago
    Is it, though? The post author is railing against it.
    - xboxnolifes 3mo ago
      Nobody cared if you translated using Google Translate in the past. People don't care if you use claude to translate now. But people are clearly doing more than they claim when they just translate their text, since their "translations" end up full of AI-isms.
  - layer8 3mo ago
    It’s a crutch, it’s rarely as good as from an experienced translator or native speaker, and often distorts the original to some extent. It can be the lesser evil when someone doesn’t know the language well, but it still tends to be a subpar experience.
huflungdung 3mo ago
[dead]
jrmg 3mo ago
This is a very good essay when you get past the arrogant tone evident especially at the beginning (is that a form of engagement bait?…) The argument that communicating an idea is a necessary part of shaping it feels counterintuitive, but it’s really true. Whether it’s debugging, ‘big’ writing, or even down to the scale of a tweet (RIP Twitter) or an HN comment, I’ve often had the experience of starting to explain a process or opinion and only then discovering that it’s inconsistent or even indefensible. I suspect (I hope!) that this is something everyone can empathize with.
- zetalyrae 3mo ago
  > This is a very good essay when you get past the arrogant tone evident especially at the beginning (is that a form of engagement bait?…) We have reached the point where you have college professors who defend[0] using AI to write scientific papers (in a seemingly AI-written tweet). Everywhere I go online, I see spam written with the exact same voice. Scientific journals and literary magazines are inundated with AI-written submissions. Software projects have shut contributions because maintainers are tired of reading AI-written slop pull requests. What's the right tone to take here? "Please stop defecting"? "I wish you would kindly stop ruining the commons"? I don't know. Maybe, if we raise the reputational cost of slop, we get less of it. [0]: https://x.com/harryjwang/status/2062710375884148945 https://x.com/harryjwang/status/2062710375884148945
  - jrmg 3mo ago
    Perhaps I meant ‘crude’ rather than ‘arrogant’. Or another word that a blend of the two. I mean, I think there’s a middle ground between defending all uses of AI writing and saying “It’s like making yourself into a eunuch so Claude can fuck your wife.” Edit: or “if you use AI to write, you are a waste of biomass”
    - zetalyrae 3mo ago
      Maybe you're right.
- nelsonfigueroa 3mo ago
foreigner 3mo ago
"the machine can’t even write good yet"
- SaucyWrong 3mo ago
  That fragment of OP’s writing was so funny to me I’m not sure it isn’t intentionally placed. Regardless, I would rather read a thousand pages of imperfect writing than a single page of machine slop.
  - zetalyrae 3mo ago
    It's a joke, c.f. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ-8IuUkJJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ-8IuUkJJc
conradludgate 3mo ago
> I take this to mean they threw a bunch of incoherent bullet points at the AI for it to denoise and render into paragraphs What I generally tend to do is have a long conversation with an LLM for at least 30 minutes, and then have that turn into the first draft. It might be considered lazy, but I've never been very good at editing prose - I always end up making a mistake that makes it more confusing. If after the conversation I find it's an idea worth sharing (usually with colleagues), then getting the LLM to turn it into something readable is the best option available to me. If I had to do it myself, it likely wouldn't make it before I move onto something else. And it has had my genuine input throughout the long conversation, I wouldn't call it incoherent nor am I an idiot for not being able to express myself in long form writing
hackboyfly 3mo ago
I feel that the author mistakes intelligence with mental energy. Even if you are smart you still have to budget your mental energy and one way to do that is to delegate tasks to AI. Some people might hate writing documentation but love to write code and vice versa. Delegating things you don’t want to spend time on is ok in my book. That’s why the analogy “might as well let Claude hump your wife” does not hold, unless you really don’t enjoy that process.

76 points by zx321 3mo ago

[dead]

> Anyone can imagine a programing language that is as fast as C and as dynamic as Lisp, but when you sit down and think through what those goals entail, you realize the design becomes contradictory. Ignoring the usual LLM rant, that's an interesting observation. Those conflicting goals reflect a problem that comes up quite often - the conflict between efficient volume production and flexibility. It's solvable for programming languages. That's what just-in-time compilers are for. Anything can change, but in practice, most things don't change that often. It's a caching problem. This hits much harder in manufacturing. An extreme case is what was once called "Detroit automation" - totally specialized lines of machine tools that could make V8 auto engines all day and all night with very little human attention. But that's all they could make. Even switching to a V6 or a different cylinder size required new equipment. The other extreme is 3D printing in metal. It works, but it's so slow it's only useful for high-value items. Space-X makes Raptor engines that way. Nobody makes auto engine blocks that way. A decade ago, there was a huge enthusiasm for 3D printing for making everything. That's declined. It's become another machine in the machine shop. It works, but if you want to bang out thousands of something, injection molding or stamping is far faster. There's a sizable tooling cost, and then each item is cheap. This is the tradeoff between efficiency and dynamics. A year or two ago, someone posted a link on HN to a video of someone making a small screw on a lathe. Nobody does that except out of desperate need for a non-standard part. Small screws are made by special purpose machines that bang them out at machine-gun speeds. American culture does not know this any more. Too few Americans today have been inside manufacturing plants. The culture has forgotten where stuff comes from.

bxk76 3mo ago
As the buddhists have pointed out for thousands of years nothing is permanent. Attachment to things that are ever changing is the path to suffering.
inigyou 3mo ago
The language implementation that is faster than (!) C and almost as flexible as Lisp is called LuaJIT. I think it's no longer maintained. * JITs can be faster than C by specialising at runtime on runtime-knowable values such as the length of the input or the tag of a tagged union.

Foxhuls 3mo ago

This just seems weirdly similar to Plato's comments on writing: "And so it is that you by reason of your tender regard for the writing that is your offspring have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only the semblance of wisdom, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much while for the most part they know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom they will be a burden to their fellows." Maybe it simply comes down to how things get used and people are trying to figure out how to use this strange new tool that's available to us.

zetalyrae 3mo ago
But writing, calculators, search engines etc. are specific tools, you drop a skill to gain effectiveness in another. While AI is a general tool whose builders intend it to be able to perform all cognitive work. Past a certain point, what is left of the human?
- NewsaHackO 3mo ago
  I do not agree that the concept of writing can be considered a specific tool at all. Maybe a pencil, but writing opposed to remembering everything is a more substantial level of a paradigm shift than AI use is.

cadamsdotcom 3mo ago

> ... I feel contempt for the author, because if you use AI to write, you are a waste of biomass. Let’s not mince words here. Someone who is so eager to replace themselves, that they would have a machine write in their stead, when the machine can’t even write good yet: what do you call that, if not contemptible? It’s like making yourself into a eunuch so Claude can fuck your wife. Unfortunately due to how tasteless this passage was, I won’t be reading this or your future writing.

NateEag 3mo ago
I agree that it was a rude, tasteless metaphor. Alas, for rude, tasteless behavior, such as replacing your own authentic self-expression with the mellifluous spew of verbal diarrhea that bullshit machines slather across all surfaces they touch, rude, tasteless metaphors are the only fitting ones.
- altcognito 3mo ago
  If only everyones authentic self-expression were so important to hear, to say nothing of unique and inciteful. I'm not against authentic self-expression, but this is more about being wrapped up in ones own self-importance.
  - NateEag 3mo ago
    The only way people will get to self-expression that's worth hearing is by working their way through the self-expression that wasn't. In a better world that would happen in school and as a normal part of growing up, but at least in the US, that mostly doesn't happen. If humans use LLMs to write, it's much more likely they will never uncover the unique perspectives they could share with the world. So, for those whose parents and teachers failed them, embracing, encouraging, and engaging their clumsy, self-centered rudeness is, I think, the best path forward. Granted, when it is clumsy, self-centered, and rude, one of the more helpful things we can do is offer the critiques that clearly and coherently point that out, as you've done here. ...though I stand by my claim that using LLMs to write is actually deeply offensive and rude, a rejection of what it means to be human, and that it should be met with strong rejections.

SeriousM 3mo ago

> A “thinker” who doesn’t write, who skips the step of “merely” synthesizing their vague thoughts into prose, is not thinking. And then these people give their noise to the AI. OP is quite good with words and has a high standard and world view. The reason why people use AI to manifest their ideas is probably because they have no other way communicate otherwise. It's a medium to pack the idea into "something" that represents the idea. It was never about a finished and polished product. It's the sign language for deaf people - a way to show your thoughts. I'm certain that the people presenting their github repo do put quite some effort (= prompt work) into it, which IS the thinking process. At the end of the day, most developers are introverts that can think very well but have hard times with soft skills. Everyone wants to be proud of his work, let us don't blame them how the show it off.

jrmg 3mo ago
The reason why people use AI to manifest their ideas is probably because they have no other way communicate otherwise. What?! This is nonsense. You’re really making the argument that most people getting LLMs to write for them just couldn’t communicate in any way five years ago?
- recursive-call 3mo ago
  The five-years-ago internet was certainly full of incoherently expressed ideas (and still is now). For some people AI is just spellcheck on the sentence/paragraph level.
  - ekelsen 3mo ago
    As a reader, I appreciate reading writing that lacks large amounts of spelling mistakes. Everyone agreeing on spelling seems like a useful monoculture, like driving on the same side of the road. But I don't feel the same way about AI writing. It feels totally different in a way that good spelling does not. Even if I liked the style, I would object strongly to that style quickly becoming a monoculture. We're on a path to a style optimized for shallow attention maximization becoming the majority of text we read.

lawgimenez 3mo ago

> because if you use AI to write, you are a waste of biomass Damn, that is so hurtful. I'm sorry if English is my third language. But for my project documents I would love to read it like a proper documentation so I'm thankful for AI.

zetalyrae 3mo ago
Translation is fine.
- throwaboat 3mo ago
  Is it, though? The post author is railing against it.
  - xboxnolifes 3mo ago
    Nobody cared if you translated using Google Translate in the past. People don't care if you use claude to translate now. But people are clearly doing more than they claim when they just translate their text, since their "translations" end up full of AI-isms.
- layer8 3mo ago
  It’s a crutch, it’s rarely as good as from an experienced translator or native speaker, and often distorts the original to some extent. It can be the lesser evil when someone doesn’t know the language well, but it still tends to be a subpar experience.

huflungdung 3mo ago

[dead]

jrmg 3mo ago

This is a very good essay when you get past the arrogant tone evident especially at the beginning (is that a form of engagement bait?…) The argument that communicating an idea is a necessary part of shaping it feels counterintuitive, but it’s really true. Whether it’s debugging, ‘big’ writing, or even down to the scale of a tweet (RIP Twitter) or an HN comment, I’ve often had the experience of starting to explain a process or opinion and only then discovering that it’s inconsistent or even indefensible. I suspect (I hope!) that this is something everyone can empathize with.

zetalyrae 3mo ago
> This is a very good essay when you get past the arrogant tone evident especially at the beginning (is that a form of engagement bait?…) We have reached the point where you have college professors who defend[0] using AI to write scientific papers (in a seemingly AI-written tweet). Everywhere I go online, I see spam written with the exact same voice. Scientific journals and literary magazines are inundated with AI-written submissions. Software projects have shut contributions because maintainers are tired of reading AI-written slop pull requests. What's the right tone to take here? "Please stop defecting"? "I wish you would kindly stop ruining the commons"? I don't know. Maybe, if we raise the reputational cost of slop, we get less of it. [0]: https://x.com/harryjwang/status/2062710375884148945 https://x.com/harryjwang/status/2062710375884148945
- jrmg 3mo ago
  Perhaps I meant ‘crude’ rather than ‘arrogant’. Or another word that a blend of the two. I mean, I think there’s a middle ground between defending all uses of AI writing and saying “It’s like making yourself into a eunuch so Claude can fuck your wife.” Edit: or “if you use AI to write, you are a waste of biomass”
  - zetalyrae 3mo ago
    Maybe you're right.
nelsonfigueroa 3mo ago

foreigner 3mo ago

"the machine can’t even write good yet"

SaucyWrong 3mo ago
That fragment of OP’s writing was so funny to me I’m not sure it isn’t intentionally placed. Regardless, I would rather read a thousand pages of imperfect writing than a single page of machine slop.
- zetalyrae 3mo ago
  It's a joke, c.f. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ-8IuUkJJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ-8IuUkJJc

conradludgate 3mo ago

> I take this to mean they threw a bunch of incoherent bullet points at the AI for it to denoise and render into paragraphs What I generally tend to do is have a long conversation with an LLM for at least 30 minutes, and then have that turn into the first draft. It might be considered lazy, but I've never been very good at editing prose - I always end up making a mistake that makes it more confusing. If after the conversation I find it's an idea worth sharing (usually with colleagues), then getting the LLM to turn it into something readable is the best option available to me. If I had to do it myself, it likely wouldn't make it before I move onto something else. And it has had my genuine input throughout the long conversation, I wouldn't call it incoherent nor am I an idiot for not being able to express myself in long form writing

hackboyfly 3mo ago

I feel that the author mistakes intelligence with mental energy. Even if you are smart you still have to budget your mental energy and one way to do that is to delegate tasks to AI. Some people might hate writing documentation but love to write code and vice versa. Delegating things you don’t want to spend time on is ok in my book. That’s why the analogy “might as well let Claude hump your wife” does not hold, unless you really don’t enjoy that process.