logoalt Hacker News

gchamonlive • today at 8:50 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

  I get the brain scramblies [1] from trying to parse this writing style at work so I hate to see it elsewhere
This sounds to me a lot like mass hysteria, people reading other people's behaviour online and reproducing it unconsciously.

More and more really important and useful information will arrive like this for us to consume. There's no way around. So this is a disservice for newcomers that could come and go unscathed but instead is crippled by these kinds of comments that brings nothing of substance to the table and has the potential to make them hate something they otherwise wouldn't even notice.

Also, from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:

  Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. 

  Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

Replies

johnfn • today at 8:59 PM

Curious how you see low-effort writing as a "shallow dismissal" or "tangential"

➕ show 1 reply
majormajor • today at 9:17 PM

Look at the specific AI habits called out in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50037220

This sort of writing decreases readability. People say "just have your own LLM rewrite it" like you don't lose value when you go from prompt -> slop you didn't review enough to clean this crap up in -> someone else's prompt to change the style -> finally someone reads it.

Do you know what happens a double-digit percentage of the time when I ask Claude to rewrite some shit that it gives me like this? It says things like: "I overstated this, I rechecked and actually..." or "this claim doesn't hold up, actually [this other thing is true]..."

So it's a sign that the claims in the post likely weren't vetted very hard.

So if you aren't proofreading I'm gonna be skeptical. And saying "deal with it" doesn't rescue it. Does it?

And then there's the reflexive "you must just be an ideological hater." No. I'm someone who uses the tools in a domain where quality matters enough that I have to dig into the quality of the tool output and spot the tells for when it's low output, so that I can deliver shit that works reliably and consistently.

➕ show 1 reply