I fear in the future people will read even less because of how often people cheap out and use AI to write.
I know the author of this article tells you never to use a single word it suggests, however I still, while reading, am checking for any amount of AI used.
This makes reading less enjoyable, and even a bit stressful.
If you can't spend the time to write it, why should anyone read it?
Everything I post is from my own finger tips, only to get a reply from someone using a bot. I'm tired.
Excessive generative AI output devalues all communication media unfortunately. As a greater and greater portion of text, imagery, audio, and video come to be synthetic, I don't see why anybody would be motivated to do deep reading, or listening, or analysis of said media. It's frightening to think what that might do to our civilization, almost like putting us back into a weird version of the ancient past when nobody was literate, save the priest.
Maybe humans can adapt to care about generated content and treat it with the same emotional weight that human communication has. I don't know if that's good or not.
> LLM can produce texts but we as people will not be able to understand anyway
LLM generated text oftentimes just do not have the point to be understood. LLM is training you to NOT read, because trying to do close reading of LLM generated text is usually a mistake. There is no deeper there. Either it was correct on the surface things or it is a gibberish.
PISA is a statistical measurement tool designed for sensitivity to differences in student performance. So it uses questions that some students are expected to get right and some are expected to get wrong, and places the result on a bell curve fit to a reference population.
It's not clear what you mean by "sufficient reading literacy," but I guess it's one of the PISA proficiency levels. Those are simply equally-spaced intervals on the bell curve. For example, level 1c in reading is 2.4 to 3.1 standard deviations below the reference mean and 21% of participants in Iraqi Kurdistan and Lebanon scored at that level. Relative to the baseline, they are definitely close to the bottom. However, even they must've gotten some questions right, or they would've ended up in the "below level 1c" bucket (like 3% in Iraqi Kurdistan and 5% in Lebanon did). (https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results-volum... Table I.B1.2a.11)
If you wanted to know how many people achieve "sufficient reading literacy," you would need a test specifically designed for measuring it (i.e. not PISA), where people with sufficient ability can be expected to get all questions right. For example, the literacy rate is typically defined via the ability to "read and write a simple statement about everyday life," a test which 99% of adults in wealthy countries pass, 92% in Lebanon and 84% in Iraq: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cross-country-literacy-ra...
Of course a test that 99% pass just becomes table stakes and boring, whereas PISA with its large differences between individuals is much more exciting, but you shouldn't let that mislead you into thinking that students scoring relatively low on PISA necessarily must be lacking even those table-stakes skills.
Even before AI, it was clear that developed societies will be weighted down with an underclass of welfare recipients who are unable or unwilling to develop skills necessary to meaningfully contribute.
As society/technology/the world moves faster and becomes more complicated, more and more of them will be left behind. 1 in 5 Americans are already functionally illiterate, and about 20% of working age men are already out of the labor force.
CIS is an anti-immigration hate group founded by a eugenicist and white supremacist. They're widely condemned for publishing factually incorrect and methodologically flawed reports by organizations across all of the political spectrum, save the furthest right extremists. That is not a legitimate source of information on immigration or welfare.
Do you have any numbers you'd like to provide to counter the claim that a significant portion of the population of working age individuals aren't already out of the labor force?
While I may have responded to your comment, I'm not debating you. My intention was to let other readers know that the sentiments you're expressing are little more than gutter eugenics hiding behind a flimsy facade of academic language and charts.
You're skipping any causal connection between the "as greater and greater" and "anybody would be motivated" parts. What is it in "excessive generative AI output" that "devalues all communication media"?
Not that I disagree much, but for myself I have an actual cause connecting the two parts, and it's not something inherent to AI.
Basically, synthetic content is like those fancy desserts - they look nice and the top layer possibly has an exquisite flavor (probably on purpose), but once you cut deeper, it's some weird fruit or nut or other foodstuff that belongs next to potatoes and meat, not in a cake. So I learned to avoid such desserts and stick to basic stuff I know are good entirely, like IDK a cream pie or cream-filled chocolate stuff or such.
Same is with content. My problem isn't that it's AI, but that it's wrong, full of mistakes human authors don't make. Hallucinations mid-text that make half of it convincingly argue bullshit. Or the uncanny or repetitive factor in art that kicks in after few seconds of looking.
Like with desert, I'm avoiding disappointment and wasted hopes. When synthetic context gets better, I'll be consuming it just like "vanilla" one, for the same reasons.
I think with the desert thing, you are getting at what was once described as "aura" of original art work. Things like photography have already made us question things like synthetic art and how it relates to "real art" and I am pretty sure this is how it will go with AI and art in general. I wrote about this in my full human only blog: https://decodingvibes.com/blog/3-hypothetical-paintings-and-...
Wait wait wait, why will humand syop wanting to read, listen to music, or watch movies and tv shows just because there are AI generated art? People will still feel the need for all those things, technology alone cannot erase the demand. The problem is generated art is not considered good by audiences because it usually lacks substance and genuine creativity. But that doesn't mean they will not want to watch The Odessy. If an AI can make a movie which is exactly equivalent to a Christopher Nolan movie, then yes people can adapt. But the current situation is that most AI art sucks and people do not like it. Not that people want to stop reading, listening or watching. We are doing that in much larger numbers than we ever did in history.
People have lessened what they read because they can more easily watch a video or listen to a podcast. It’s not like the 1800s where books were the only game in town. And why read an AI written article when you can listen to the AI generated podcast with banter between two fake personalities (yes, this is what I heard when I wanted info about qwen’s newest model on Apple podcast).
Yes, true, but in the 1800s, literacy rates were extremely low as well. Most people didn't read then either. By the time literacy improved, we already had competing media like radio, television, etc. But books still won because they were a different form of media. And most "popular" books since the invention of the printing press have usually been garbage, like guides on how to burn witches properly, etc. It wasn't like people were reading Dostoevsky in masses then and don't do it now. It was always a small minority of people that cared about actual literature.
I think it's also more about active vrs passive consumption these days. People these days consume media mostly passively (watch whatever is on a streaming service, hear a podcast/audiobook while driving, let AI summarize an article instead of reading it), whereas that wasn't really possible previously (go to a theater to watch a movie, actually read stuff with attention, etc.).
So yes, people might be reading less, but I don't think it's some massive fall in literacy as people make it out to be. We're much more busy and don't have time to actually sit down and actively focus on media consumption these days as well (assuming you're employed in a somewhat capitalism-based system).
> Yes, true, but in the 1800s, literacy rates were extremely low as well. Most people didn't read then either.
False, at least from an American or Northern European perspective.
In the 1800s reading was an extremely popular activity. Not something restricted to a few. Printing press had been around for ages and the majority of the population read.
If by majority of the population, you mean no women, no slaves, then yes, sure. And even from an American or NE perspective, you're still overestimating its popularity.
> According to data compiled by Our World in Data and the World Bank, the literacy rate of the world's population from secondary school age onward was only 12 percent in 1820 - around one person in ten. In 1900, it still barely exceeded 20 percent. From the 1950s on, world literacy began to take off, hitting 42 percent in 1960 and 70 percent in 1983.
As I said. If you look not at the entire world, but say Northern Europe, reading literacy (a different measure from the literacy discussed in many modern sources which includes writing literacy) was almost universal by the late 1800s.
For instance, in Sweden, to cherrypick a stat, in 1875 only 1% of military recruits were found unable to read [1].
We really must stop thinking that people of yestertimes where so much inferior to people today. Yes, there were differences between men and women, but this was also starting to change.
> If you can't spend the time to write it, why should anyone read it?
This isn’t your thought; you are merely regurgitating a sentence we have all heard many times before, practically word for word.
Presumably you think there is value in posting yet another copy of that other person’s thoughts in this discussion, despite having spent no time or effort in thinking it up yourself.
Why is that? Is it because you think there is inherent value in the sentence you transcribed, in spite of the near zero effort you spent creating it? If you think anybody here should read it, then you have undermined your own point. If you don’t think anybody should read it, then you shouldn’t post it.
How does that matter? Parent-poster asked about sincerity of thought, not originality.
If the spouses-to-be at a marriage ceremony say "I do", would you leap up from the audience to denounce them as frauds because obviously they heard the vow-formula before a hundred times? Hopefully not, and not only for reasons of decorum.
In contrast, most of the LLM slop I deal with from coworkers involve statements that--while less formulaic--are ones they can't even recall saying and are unwilling to defend when questioned.
JimDabell said they didn't come up with that thought themselves. They never implied the poster didn't mean it. sm-silversight responded, "How do you know it's not his/her thought?" You can reasonably interpret them as asking how we know they didn't come up with that thought independently.
If we go with your interpretation instead, then sm-silversight simply misread the comment they replied to and their post doesn't follow. No one doubted OP felt sincere about not wanting to read AI.
Some things are worth repeating, so the community knows that many people share the belief. Often they're slogans, sometimes they're just plain good arguments.
There's a big difference between reintroducing this unoriginal point in the context of this thread and presenting an entire piece of LLM writing as your own. That phrase from this comment isn't pretending to be an original piece of writing.
OK, how about 'nothing is real, nobody will ever care again, let's all never listen to anybody else ever again'?
That's more or less the same thing expressed more nihilistically. But nihilism is, like, just a word man (to 'The Dude' it up a bit). Perhaps we are either fiddling on the deck of the Titanic, or just staring at the waves?
What do you think the results will be of the machines consuming only their own slop and Habsburging themselves intellectually, and then all the humans abandoning any attempt to either talk or listen? As a global civilization of humans? I'm not sure we've explored the likely consequences of 'if you can't spend them time to write it why should anyone read it'.
You are moving the goalpost. OC is not talking about thoughts having to be unique. You can very much read someone else's thoughts, examine them critically and come to the conclusion of agreeing with them. You might then write a comment like OC putting these thoughts into your own words – maybe abridging them, placing different emphasize according to what you find most important or even adding new ideas – and quote or paraphrase something you found very fitting.
That is completely different from generating words that are not an expression of your thoughts or at the very best take some concise thoughts from the prompt and stretch them into a lengthy word soup.
Of course there are people who just parrot other people's thoughts without understanding them. That's closer to using an LLM. But you can often see how well someone understands something and how much reasoning of their own they put into it through their writing. And for the writer writing is a very good way to reflect on their own thoughts and to get them into order. Proper writing is thinking.
> despite having spent no time or effort in thinking it up yourself.
I mean, how can you say that he didn't think it himself? I thought this same thing and realised apparently I'm not the first. You have no idea how many of my blog posts ideas have come in HN first before I could publish. People can have the same thoughts. And have em all the time as well.
Psss.. See how @sm-silversight who commented on your post said the same thing I did? That's realtime example right there.
Coming back to the topic at hand. I agree with the OP. If you don't care to write it, why should anyone read it? AI has good usecases. But am not sure writing is one.
Writing is not just about the end result. It's also about the thought process. I learn about the topic more as I write. I correct my incorrect understandings as I write. When am pissed, my article has a different tone. Am rude, too direct. When am content/happy, different one. All of this is sterilised into something robotic where the author won't even remember what he/she wrote? What's the to like? For brownie points?
> how can you say that he didn't think it himself?
Because the same sentence has been repeated practically word-for-word ad nauseam all over social media for years. What do you think is plausible - that they repeated something that is damn near omnipresent in the discourse, or that they never saw any of the many, many times it has come up and independently came up with the exact same formulation? They are perfectly able to step in and claim that it was their original thought if they want to.
> What do you think is plausible - that they repeated something that is damn near omnipresent in the discourse, or that they never saw any of the many, many times it has come up and independently came up with the exact same formulation?
Both are fully possible.
We're talking about a simple sentence that sounds a lot like something a primary school teacher or parent of young children would say. "If you won't do/don't/haven't done X, why should I Y?" is very normal moral/ethical phrasing.
I suppose I heard someone say it before I spelled it out in that way, but I am pretty confident I would ultimately have used a sufficiently similar expression, because I have been on the receiving end of the problem.
And that is putting aside the communicative compression of aphorisms. People don't use shared aphorisms to avoid ever doing the thinking themselves; they use them to shorthand more complex arguments for a listener who has already heard them. They are shared macros for agreed concepts. (Using them correctly requires having done the thinking they package up at least once).
I don’t care what’s possible, I asked what was plausible.
Do you think that they came up with it independently? If you aren’t willing to say you believe this, you are just asking me to waste my time arguing with a phantom opinion nobody holds.
“Just do it” is an incredibly common, generic phrase, but if a new shoe manufacturer chose it as their slogan, it isn’t plausible that they came up with it independently of Nike.
> I don’t care what’s possible, I asked what was plausible.
OK then. BOTH ARE PLAUSIBLE. Clear enough?
It's absolutely not up to me to decide whether they came up with it independently.
But then again, it isn't up to you, Jim.
> If you aren’t willing to say you believe this, you are just asking me to waste my time arguing with a phantom opinion nobody holds.
This is the weirdest thing to put in a comment you could simply not have made. If your time is so valuable why are you here commenting on HN?
Again: aphorisms have value regardless of how many times they are used. People can use them without you having the right to demand proof they thought them up for themselves like some prep school debate bully picking on a younger child.
> > If you aren’t willing to say you believe this, you are just asking me to waste my time arguing with a phantom opinion nobody holds.
> This is the weirdest thing to put in a comment you could simply not have made. If your time is so valuable why are you here commenting on HN?
It’s basic intellectual honesty. If nobody believes that they came up with it independently, putting it forward as if it’s a real argument is just a form of trolling. If I don’t believe it, you don’t believe it, and even the person who posted it doesn’t claim it’s original, you’re just baiting me to respond to a position nobody holds.
Do you believe that they actually came up with it independently? If you do actually believe this, then a discussion is not a waste of time. But if you aren’t willing to claim that position, it’s pointless me arguing against it because it’s just you deliberately wasting my time on something you don’t believe.
> aphorisms have value regardless of how many times they are used.
This is a cornerstone of the point I was making. You’re literally supporting the point I was making.
Selecting between alternatives is also a very valuable skill. Also known as "taste".
You are a senior software architect, you "prompt" 10 junior architects to write a software architecture proposal and then pick one which you send the client.
Would you say it's worthless, because the senior architect didn't care to write it?
There are plenty of industries where "taste" is a real job.
Or you think that for some reason prompting a LLM and forwarding it's output after vetting is different than prompting a human and forwarding the output after vetting.
> Would you say it's worthless, because the senior architect didn't care to write it?
Lemme ask you a counter question, the senior architect writes the proposal and the junior writes it. Which one do you think client likes better?
Moreover, Your focus is on the end-result. Sure, in corporate environment, most people don't care about what they do as long as the end results checks some boxes. That wasn't the discussion here. The discussion is about writing and reading in general. Whether it's worth my time or not if you don't mean (forget mean, don't even remember) what you wrote.
Also, in your own example, the client don't care as well. As long the client's checks all the boxes his/her/their manager said should satisfy. Nobody really gives a damn about the quality.
Also, are you saying you'll be fine paying for Financial Times, WSJ and NYTimes KNOWING all they do is shove the story through an LLM? Neither will there be a soul, nor will there be any material effect on people who reads it.
> Or you think that for some reason prompting a LLM and forwarding it's output after vetting is different than prompting a human and forwarding the output after vetting.
There is difference no? I forward the output to get good feedback and correction from someone BETTER. And there is a process involved in it which showcases the "TASTE" you mentioned from the person whom you are forwarding your output to be vetted and that person comes up to you with feedback. And guess what? You learn from the person's feedback. You don't go back again and again forever to learn the same thing. That's exactly what am trying to point out.
> nor will there be any material effect on people who reads it.
This is a ridiculous thing to say - "because the Weather app in my phone is 100% automated with no human "soul" in it, I will not take it into account into how should I dress today"
> the client don't care as well
This applies here too. If you didn't pay for author's output, are not a subscriber to their Substack, why should they bother to hand craft you a quality human written post?
> If you didn't bother to write it, I won't bother to read it
So the argument is that effort should be somehow matched. Ok, let's go with that. It's well know that writing something takes 10x more effort than reading it. So if we use the market argument, if it takes you 10 min to read a blog post, the author should spend 1 min writing it, because writing is 10x more intense, and this is only possible with a LLM. You might say "but there is one author, and 1000 readers". That gets us back to the paying argument.
> If you can't spend the time to write it, why should anyone read it?
Because the value of writing are not the words on a piece of paper but the idea they convey.
Politicians speech are not worth listening too because they have a copywriter polish them?
Teacher assistant homeworks are not worth to do, because they are made by a TA and not by the course professor?
Of course there are writing as: "Hey ChatGPT write me a piece around coding with LLMs" and yeah, those are not worth reading.
But most of the writing is usually, these are the ideas, this is how the idea are structured together, now let's review them and then let's get a nice prose out of it.
> But most of the writing is usually, these are the ideas, this is how the idea are structured together, now let's review them and then let's get a nice prose out of it.
I know lots of AI-enabled writers believe this, but I've never actually seen it be true.
How about Anthropic? I've seen people say it's surprising that their blog isn't written with AI, but I think it's far more likely that it is written with AI; they are just good at reviewing and getting a nice prose out of their models.
Yeah, it's phrased like a reductio ad absurdum but it's close to being literally true. It's not technically "copywriters" but their words are "polished" for pleasantness, often with the explicit guidance of consultants, until most of the truth or novelty is gone.
what do you think this process is? why don't we just write lists of ideas to each other, in the raw format you presumably started with? is there any value in it?
my opinion is that the process is literally nothing more than thinking deeply about the ideas and trying to phrase them in the clearest possible way such that you lead someone else into understanding them.
LLMs have awful, terrible judgement of what other people know, or are likely to infer from a piece of text.
> If you can't spend the time to write it, why should anyone read it?
That's actually a legitimate question, and one I've been thinking about, as I've been using LLM tools to compile factual information based on various search tools it uses. The workflow gets sources, fact checks them, filters them according to my needs, and gives me clean urls for source information to hand off to an editor for writing a short listing. It's very hard for the editor to do a much better job at this type of writing; the real benefit of the work was in the research, which was handled by the LLM. The rest is basically just putting the facts in the right order, with some guidance on style, preferred word choices, etc. I'm not comfortable with this at all, as giving work to an LLM that a human could do strikes me as wrong. But using LLM tools gives me a big competitive advantage (for now), in the space I'm doing this in.
>I'm not comfortable with this at all, as giving work to an LLM that a human could do strikes me as wrong
Where does this feeling come from? Is it just because the work is complex? We’re all (excepting maybe the amish) comfortable with using at least some automation, be it mechanical or digital, elsewhere in our lives
Not sure. I don't like LLMs inserting itself into human to human communication, as it can shape our thinking in many ways. Delegating this also makes it much harder for a person to become a subject-matter expert, which is a real loss.
> compile factual information based on various search tools it uses. The workflow gets sources, fact checks them, filters them according to my needs, and gives me clean urls for source information to hand off to an editor for writing a short listing.
What’s preventing the editor from using one of your prompts/tooling and replacing you entirely?
There’s zero value in sharing ai-generated output unless your ai has access to something nobody else’s does on which to base things. If all it’s doing is web research you should share your prompt instead. That way people don’t have to deal with ai-written walls of text.
> What’s preventing the editor from using one of your prompts/tooling and replacing you entirely?
Well, they don't have the many other pieces of the business in place that makes this work meaningful. They certainly could try, though. If they succeeded, this aspect wouldn't be what made the difference, though.
The thing is, that was the internet before AI. In fact, generative AI almost certainly raised the AVERAGE quality of stuff on the internet, human slop was/is absolute trash, whereas AI slop is just bland and meandering.
The problem here is that the volume of low-mid content is making it harder to find the best content.
The way I see it is that a clearly AI generated article is the result of some prompts. So the "author" wrote tens of words, which then got inflated to hundreds and maybe thousands by a computer program. This is a very inefficient way to convey an idea, especially if the reader has access to the same program. I'd rather the author shared their prompts, because maybe there's some originality in it, and I can then decide if I want to explore the idea further, maybe even with an LLM.
People on my FOSS project couldn't see the issue with their AI slopped documentation contributions.
On one hand I'm like, yeah fair enough it needed writing and something is better than nothing.
On the other I know nobody wants to read it now because it's just word vomit rather than how a human would write something they'd like another human to read.
On Debian we recently voted whether to permit or forbid llm usage (spoiler, AI usage at will won).
One person was arguing that they need llm because english isn't their first language and then it helps them write better and be understood. I was incapable of reading their (extremely long) email of arguments; I tried but my mind just went elsewhere as my eyes were moving through the lines.
At the very end there was a disclaimer that llm had been used to "aid" in writing that very email.
Poor guy thinks he's communicating better but all he's doing is making his emails completely unreadable. It's a sad state of affairs.
It kind of makes sense that if English is not their first language, the can't review the LLM English output also.
However most likely they just don't understand what good communication looks like, LLMs are perfectly capable of turning anything into clear concise communication, in fact an easy tell that something is LLM written is that it's just too precise and clear, humans are much more rambling.
There is now increased evolutionary pressure for rules protecting scarcity to become norm. Communication media will likely adopt limits on the size and throughput of messages.
Just read people you can trust. Why are you giving yourself all this busy work?
Just make your own tree of material to read. You should have a couple dozen writers/journalists you admire, look at who these people read then start reading those people, then you repeat the cycle.
Don't waste your time reading anything new, most new things are bad. Most ideas we struggle with, are ideas we have been discussing since the written record was invented out of necessity.
Anything new worth reading will assuredly make your way to you if you are at all connected.
I think we could agree that everyone already does this up to a point. This is basically just an exploration-exploitation dilemma, where everyone tries to maximize how much value they gain from the things they read, and a lot of people have strategies to pick what material to read.
Reading trusted authors is likely to be valuable, but they may devalue over time. We don't know if our chosen authors maximize our value, nor whether exploratory reading does, etc.
No it really wouldn't. I like the authors Jeff VanderMeer and Peter Watts. They have had multiple interviews where they talk about their peers, who they respect from the past, and who they like in our current age. I have found maybe subsequent authors + journalists to read from these two.
Try to think a little more critically here. If you can't trust the opinion of people you supposedly like, already established in their craft, who can you trust?
Have no idea why you think this would increase influencer culture, but thanks for telling us all publicly how you interact with social media: in an sloppy uncritical way.
My advice for you is to pull the plug and read books that are older than 125 years.
For everyone that you consider "good" there are at least a dozen people who are equally "good" but without the social proof. What you describe played out exactly in music and art pre-AI. The record exec and the gallery owner were the people you "trusted" who king-made and gate-kept what we saw based on what they thought was most marketable.
> Have no idea why you think this would increase influencer culture, but thanks for telling us all publicly how you interact with social media: in an sloppy uncritical way.
This is a personal attack that is unsubstantiated by what I wrote, read the guidelines and follow them or go elsewhere.
Agreed. Recently I've made the effort in disclosing on my website posts that 100% of the words are written by me. I do make graphs and share data here and there, and the same applies - I'm transparent if an agent happened to be used in the process. I don't mind if someone used an LLM to write something, but disclosing such is a good rule to go by IMO.
Language is meant for sharing information. I don't think there's anything wrong with using AI to write - the real issue is that AI-generated writing can be hard to understand. Once AI solves the readability problem, its writing will actually be better suited for communicating with humans.
Not only hard to understand, but if one uses it without first understanding the topic, it's a disaster.
Couple weeks ago I had someone linking to a doc page in my ticket "Made this summary, hope it helps". It was 100% AI generated, the person clearly had no understanding of the problem, it only mentioned UI changes although the thing required changes in many systems. Complete waste of time, I don't think I will humor anyone who makes AI summaries anymore.
To focus your point: we fear that with ideas having easier replication that the noise in the signal will increase.
But this is what people said about the printing press. And the internet. Less effort to spread the memes. Has it been a net negative? Maybe in some respects. Can you stop it? Probably not.
Strongly agree. Whenever I see an "AI-written" disclaimer, I skip it entirely. And if it's not disclosed, the exact moment I realize it's AI output, I immediately close the tab.
It feels like a waste of the reader's time.
I don't ever watch TV or streaming shows anymore. It's been a huge improvement in my life. It's the same with reading. Reading is mostly a waste of my time, with some notable exceptions. I'm glad I spend way less time doing each of these!
It's sad that reading has become that way for you.
I love reading, but I mostly read non-fiction and I'm a bit of an amateur history buff. Last time I read a fiction book I was left feeling like I was preached to by an alien about how life doesn't really matter (sci-fi authors will often do that). The state of literature is pretty dire.
It’s hard to find good new literature - it may be out there, but it’s hard to find. But there’s lifetimes worth of good older literature, that’s much easier to find, that you haven’t read yet.
> I still, while reading, am checking for any amount of AI used
Im sorry for you. It must be hard to detach yourself with a fixation. I also cant help but spend my attention spotting where the magician is hiding the coin instead of trying to enjoy the show
> If you can't spend the time to write it, why should anyone read it?
Most people in these threads repeat this question. As if pre-ai all writing was from deep thinkers full of genuine intention.
At work the jira tickets have become massive walls of AI slop. What’s worse is they contain huge amounts if useless “thinking” where the LLM explains what it did and checked rather than just giving the final result.
As a result, when I see an AI wall of text I just don’t bother reading it and DM the submitter asking what it’s about.
More than the average person, I suppose. For some reason, AI writing isn't as irritating to me as it seems to be for everyone else.
I treat it the same way I treat human writing: by speed reading most of the article so I can find the points the author is trying to make and decide whether I should read the entire thing.
Why are you spending your precious time and energy trying to guess if something was written by AI? Does it make you happy? Does it add value to your life? Why do you do this now when there has always been low quality content generated by lazy authors? You admit it is making reading less enjoyable. Why not just enjoy reading?
You still have to grapple with the merits of their argument to find out if the indicator is correct or not.
In a world where everybody seems to be quoting grok with no further thought process you would think people would be more welcoming of someone who is "slightly wrong" on occasion. It's the strongest indicator that a flawed human being got their information not directly from a machine.
If someone is spreading deception, intentionally or not, then it's entirely within my rights to point out they are without engaging further. If they want to be taken seriously, they have to at least indicate that they are willing to self-correct in the face of direct evidence that they are wrong.
> If someone is spreading deception, intentionally or not, then it's entirely within my rights to point out they are without engaging further.
What is it with millennials and "rights"? It's a sincere question. People don't owe you anything and neither do you owe me anything, sure... so why do you demand another have a higher standard that you yourself hold to. I know you don't hold yourself to that standard because you would rather nitpick someone on a single inaccuracy then grapple with a very real issue (which you yourself would not appreciate if they did that to you). The respectable thing to do is to note the inaccuracy and approach the valid portion of the argument sincerely.
What you demonstrate is a lack of care for those around you, and a lack of care for what is actually true. You would rather "umm actually" then treat others with an ounce of respect. It's shameful and devoid of grace.
Maybe yours do, but all the CyrusOne date centers outside of Chicago smell like is grass and landscaping; they smell a great deal better than the car exhaust choked strip malls that dominate the exurban sprawl areas they tend to get sited in. I would much rather have one of those DCs as a neighbor than I would a Walmart.
As long as they can operate under capacity (for the grid) I don't disagree.
However I live in a much nicer area than Chicago and any Walmart, large mass of people, or DC would really destroy the PV as well as it would be an eyesore.
I don't really understand why so many just want to over industrialize so many beautiful places so that a corp. can sell the next gimmicky iteration of our "best model yet" which is just slightly slower and more expensive then the previous.
They're stinky? How? And how do they pollute water sources? A datacenter is a building filled with computers that uses water and air for cooling. What pollutants get "emitted" by a bunch of CPUs and video cards? No one seems to go into details.
There are certainly problems that can be crated by dumping heat into a body of water, but that's not the argument being made.
I'm willing to bet that a datacenter creates a fraction of the pollution of a similarly sized industrial facility such as a chemical plant, refinery, smelter, or steel mill.
It's mostly the emissions from diesel generators which many DCs use as it's far too expensive to ever shut them down. Often diesel generators are used to lighten the load on a power grid as well, so many DCs will run generators 24/7.
That source of power, since our grid is so outdated and struggles with the weight of these power-hogs, EVs as well as increased usage of AC during the summers create some dangerous conditions.
There is the risk of heavy metals getting into the water supply as the copper degrades but that will only be a problem down the line, that's prescient but not yet realized.
> I'm willing to bet that a datacenter creates a fraction of the pollution of a similarly sized industrial facility such as a chemical plant, refinery, smelter, or steel mill.
I agree; however I would not want a DC or a refinery, smelter or steel mill anywhere near my town. We have industrial districting for that reason, and because a lot of DC projects want to be put next to lakes and water sources, this causes issues for the residents.
In the case of one amazon data center, they were pulling in water that already had nitrates in it due to agricultural run off, but it wasn't enough nitrates to cause a problem for anyone until the data center came. It pulled in a massive amount of water, a lot of which was evaporated and that left behind water with very high concentrations of nitrates.
Normally, the nitrates would be filtered naturally and would mostly remain in the top layers of soil. Amazon pumped out 10s of millions of gallons of the vastly more contaminated water. It was so much water that it was forced much deeper into the ground. It was pushed deep enough to reach the aquifer which contaminated the water source for an entire community of 45,000 people.
Suddenly the water coming out of people's taps was polluted at 10x the federal level for safe drinking water. People got sick. Cancer rates spiked. Babies died. Amazon was forced to settle and pay out 20 million for water treatment and to dig new deeper wells for the community.
> I'm willing to bet that a data center creates a fraction of the pollution of a similarly sized industrial facility such as a chemical plant, refinery, smelter, or steel mill.
This is whataboutism. The existence of other bad things, or even worse things, doesn't make data centers good. They are a problem for the environment regardless of whatever else is also a problem and that's something that needs to be considered every time someone wants to build one. The companies who build and operate data centers should be held 100% accountable for the harm they cause.
Conveniently the only companies that warn of a new and dangerous advancement are the ones hemorrhaging money.
Remember when Mythos marked the end of man and the birth of a new race of bots nuking secure systems from orbit?
If a company of a bunch of startup grifters can come up with a tactical nuke of LLM supremacy, why can't the brightest China has to offer already have that technology?
How would you suggest someone make a good tutorial for DF that doesn't leave the player exhausted by the time they start a new game?
That's my core complaint w/ strategy games. By the time I'm done with the tutorial i have to do other things only to forget everything I learned the next time I get to sit down with it.
At best "hints" or a glossary/help menu is the best way imo.
Several people have given the opinion in this thread that DF is basically immune to having a tutorial; I am trying to figure out why. I don't see a tutorial as an end-to-end blueprint of everything the game is capable of. It's just a series of info, hints, and follow-along instructions, possibly with railroaded / simplified UI. I mean, the first time I booted up DF with no context circa 2013, it took me a few minutes to figure out that we're seeing a top-down view. I certainly would have appreciated a hint or a tutorial (though I do not necessarily fault the game for not having one; it's _not_ a game that is aimed at onboarding heaps of fresh newbies by the truckload each week).
macOS is also just a proper PITA through and through. I'm annoyed that I can't play it on my m4 but I also understand that supporting macOS has always been a nuisance.
If I were making games I wouldn't support it either. Apple does just about everything to not support backwards compat.
It’s kind of insane that we can play windows x86_64 games on macos arm almost perfectly. I got a bit annoyed with it being slightly jank and built a (linux) gaming pc for my kids in the end but it worked fine for most things for a while.
The term "original assembly code" is sufficient enough to communicate that the binaries that are being reversed are what is disclosed to the public intentionally.
Their comment still stands; whether it's machine code or "original assembly code" that shipped on the disk it falls under "clean room" reversing and by extension implementation.
Being available to the public if they bought the game doesn't mean it's in the public domain and you're allowed to upload a copy of it (or a derivative work) onto GitHub, though
(I like these projects but I really don't think they could defend themselves legally if you company went after them)
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