I was a couple of images in before I sussed it. Bullshit images, but pleasing enough to look at. Without the images, it would have either been a big wall of text, which would have put me off reading, though I did give up about 25% of the way through after sussing the images and thus the incoherence in the argument.
The images bring something to the article. They were cheap/quick to generate. The increase the potential payoff (more reader) without significantly increasing the cost. Without the images, the payoff(readers) would likely have been lower, below the cost of actually writing the article. Same goes for a history of knitting podcast or that video. Production costs would not be worth it for a very niche viewership.
Reading that made me feel like you wanted to be contrarian from the get-go and dismiss the article with the least effort possible. The whole point of the images is that they're low-effort AI slop, it's part of what she's trying to point to when someone is generating unsupervised automated podcasts about knitting.
I came in indifferent but it doesn’t take much to make me give up on an article linked on hacker news. I use it as bubblegum while waiting for a compile/prompt, intent ally for stuff that can be dropped easily. I saw her disclaimer at the end. My point was that the slop images make a more appealing article than if they were absent
So you're saying you can spot AI generated bullshit, but not spot a deliberate and hilarious contrivance that the author uses to reinforce their point?
I may have different perception facilities in the brain, but to me the images in the article are horrifying. Such bad, Frankenstein-level, criminal butchering of absolutely everything!
The “it does X for you” aspect of technology is not completely without its downsides, for various values of X.
For example, take “X” to be “walking”. Do we have the technology that allows us to pretty much never have to walk? Sure. As far as I am aware, though, we do not generally favour a lifestyle of being bound to a mobility aid by choice, and in fact we have found that not walking when able in the long run creates substantial well-being issues for a human. (Now, we have found ways to alleviate some of those issues for those who aren’t able, but clearly it is not sufficient because we still walk.)
The problem is exacerbated immensely as the value of X approaches something as fundamental to one’s humanity as “thinking”.
> "It does X for you" is the point of many technologies. You still require knowledge to work around it.
When running water replaced the need to pump water out of the ground yourself, were people urged to "learn faucets"? You kind of just need to twist a knob and water comes out, right?
Maybe there was an intermediary stage where running water was slightly more complicated and there were more steps to learn, but devoting time to learning those steps would have been a waste of time, since the end goal of the system was for it to function without much input.
Not at all. It’s a tool. It can be used well and it can be used badly, the difference often being others things thought in a CS curriculum. But a well trained engineer using the tool will be more productive than that engineer doing everything by hand, so leaving that tool out of the curriculum is doing a disservice to the students
There’s queries and there’s queries. Many queries are effectively undefined bookmarks. You know this exists but haven’t saved it but your know a few key words to get to it. “Rustdoc moka api”.
And then there’s the “I’m researching a subject queries”.
Google used to be useful for both. But for the later case it send to have gotten worse. Which is irrelevant because LLMs are so much better. So people will use LLMs for these usecases.
So Google search basically becomes a phonebook. And that’s easy to emulate. Their calculator is still my go to though
I recall CodeWarrior being the official ide for SymbianOS when I started there. And it sucked, but likely more due to the integration. I think sucky custom rarely working IDEs is what pushed me to full time emacs
> At the time of Jurassic Park’s release, the meteor as the cause for the dino-extinction was still a nascent theory and more than a decade out from being cemented as fact.
This assumed me. Like many people who were interested in dinosaurs, the interest didn't last much past by early teens, so the "nobody knows for sure, maybe meteor" reason for their disappearance was the accepted explanation until something triggered me to look a 2 or 3 years ago and see that the science had changed.
You grow up thinking the mystery is still unsolved, only to check back years later and find out, "Oh yeah, giant rock from space is basically settled science now."
