Maybe this will change one day but at the current moment this is an immediate turnoff. It's like someone trying to show you their project day 1 and it's a page filled with ads and a newsletter popup. You may have good reasons to do that but it doesn't instill a sense of trust and quality.
I don't know how much of it was hand-edited and how much was direct output, but this article has that unmistakable LLM voice. The rhythm, the rhetorical flourishes; it's all there even if it's diffused through some human revision.
The really weird thing is going to be when people start internalizing the LLM voice and writing that way. It's probably happening already.
I've seen many people do the latter, I get quite annoyed by it. Worst of all is wondering if I'm affected by it myself, I doubt most people who've gotten an 'LLM writing style' know so themselves.
Eventually no space where people can just 'publish' things will be safe from being completely filled with LLM writing/video/images. The only way to combat it is by forcing people to get punished for this behaviour and making it difficult to circumvent.
Some invite system where people get punished for the bad people they bring in, one that's linked to your identity/workplace/education. Even if these options were available, I doubt many people would care enough, they'd rather be in 'enshittified ' spaces.
I'm so embarrassed to say that I read it and didn't notice. But now that you pointed it out, I reread it and you are so right. It is clearly generated.
I have flagged this article on principle. Idk if it it's in the spirit of HN to do that or not, but the button's there, and I'm going to use it.
This actually seem quite flag-worthy to me. Look at the rest of the site, it's not at all trustworthy. The first post says it's by some random 16 year old (if we can actually believe that) and only has a few posts. One of them is a comparison of smart watches which says they tested them in the subheading on the article listing, but then doesn't show anything more than a surface level comparison from AI.
People on Hacker News with a high enough score get a "super downvote" that can downrank a story, with enough removing it off the page entirely (flagged). It's why you won't see stories critical of Elon Musk or the current administration last for longer than an hour.
HN has had plenty of large frontpage threads fitting each of those descriptions. What we don't want is too much repetition. Otherwise the small handful of hottest topics on the internet would dominate everything else, and HN isn't that kind of site.
Speaking as the user you responded to in the first link: I’m sure you get flak from all corners, but I (and presumably many others like me) take zero issue with your philosophy or design goals for the site. I’m with you all the way when you say you don’t want to HN to turn into a current affairs site.
The problem IMO is the current sensitivity of the filtering. You said upstream that a high enough number of upvotes could outweigh flags — but that CECOT thread was one of the top 5-10 posts of the month despite having been taken down for many hours overnight. If that wasn’t a thread where the upvotes should be a strong enough signal to override the flags, I dunno what is.
We’re asking for subtle knob tuning, not revolution.
It seems like this post got killed as well, but it's the first I'm hearing of the functionality. I wouldn't say I'm a frequent user of the site, but I think I would have noticed if people were posting this link often.
As I've said in the past*, avoiding repetition is a core principle here and applies to every topic - especially when it's a repetitive+indignant combo. There's no political exemption.
And as I’ve said in the past, to you, no one’s buying it. It’s obvious to everyone that the same tech and biz topics can and do appear here ad nauseum.
Trump emboldened a lot of racists. You don't need to make any logical sense, just show off your true racist inner self to the world. I guess having a hyphen in your name is woke now.
Hey there, early Gen X here. We lived with the existential dread of nuclear war (The Day After traumatized a whole generation), our parents left us on our own with just 3 channels of TV for company because they both had to work, and our sexual awakening turned into a horror movie because of fear of AIDS (a death sentence at the time).
Well, then, as a Millennial it seems like I had it the best. The ‘90s were fantastic. Then 9/11 and those wars weren’t great but didn’t affect life except in those countries. Started uni just before the GFC, only to finish grad school just as startups were picking up in the early 2010s and then when 2020 hit had lots of money already that work wasn’t critical. Then modern generative AI showed up and I have so much experience it just accelerated me.
My life rules hahaha. Only problem is that the older generations are going to parasitize my kids for disability money and shit but I’ll just move them to where humanity is growing if it comes to that.
Bizarrely my parents also feel like their generation had a great time. So who can tell. Maybe I’ll make it so that Gen Beta says the same story.
And our every moments weren't being tracked by flock cameras or a cell phones. If something embarrassing happened at school, it didn't end up on tiktok. We still thought if we got to college we could get out of that shitty town and have a real grown up job and get a house. That is increasingly out of reach. I haven't even touched on something like 25y of constant combat deployments, or politics yet. Or the environment.
I'm telling you about what Gen X had to go through, not because I think we had it worse than you--I'm sure we didn't, but to show that it gets better.
Gen X was called the Slacker Generation because we didn't think it was worth trying very hard. We didn't want the life of our parents: working all day at a job they hated just to buy stuff to impress neighbors that they didn't like. [Yes, Fight Club was about Gen X--or at least that's what we tell ourselves.]
But it got better. For me, computers were a salvation. I found that all that time I spent writing PC video games resulted in skills that companies valued. We were the first digital natives. I remember having to teach 50-something year-old CEOs how to type ("Hold down the shift key for uppercase").
I don't know what unique characteristics will save today's Gen Z. They be able to take advantage of the wrenching change that AI is about to unleash. They'll be in the thick of the changes, but still young enough to adapt. Us older generations will have a harder time.
> I'm telling you about what Gen X had to go through, not because I think we had it worse than you--I'm sure we didn't, but to show that it gets better.
Their words implied they were a member of your generation.
There is some difference between real struggles, and uncomfortable fear for things which didn't happen. Were you unable to afford a home because of fear of nuclear war? Or for fear of AIDS?
I was unable to afford a home because of fear of bouncing checks. I lived in an apartment with 3 other roommates.
And we all knew people who had died of AIDS, and I wasn't even in an at-risk community. Gay men I knew felt that they had gone through an apocalypse, like they were the survivors of a secret war that no one talked about.
Home ownership when I was growing up was around 50%. Not owning a home was extremely normal, not a sign of deprivation.
Not ever in your life being able to afford a home is the new normal, and to me it's a sign of deprivation. That's the reality younger generations are dealing with, not only temporarily renting, but renting for life.
Which isn't anything new. It's feudalism, and the way things usually are. But that's a far greater concern for those in that situation, than AIDS or nuke scares.
Sure, 2010 wasn't great, but it wasn't this bad in terms of career aspects, or rather: it did improve.
I'm not as confident it's bouncing back as fast this time. College debt wasn't as bad in 2010. You didn't need to compete against thousands of people around the globe in 2010. There were still human interviews in 2010.
I only felt the empathy someone can have when they have also lived through the same events, for all the zoomers graduating into the post Covid job market.
Millennials and younger are all fucked for the same reasons and are going to continue getting fucked over unless some revolutionary change happens.
We’ll also be in this together as we watch our boomer/genx parents burn up the last of any existing generational wealth sitting comatose in a nursing home because they refused to accept that they will actually die some day, and so made no plans for it
Yeah, I saw some posts on there the other day that felt a bit suspect, went to look at their profile, and nothing. I'd already become an infrequent user of reddit since some earlier changes, but that makes me even less likely to go back.
But suddenly adding cameras that resulted in catching more people fixed the issue? Surely if the catch and release was the issue, that wouldn't make a difference.
There's a lawsuit ongoing about Valve threatening developers with delisting if they sell non-Steam copies of games (that's NOT Steam keys, but, say, a version on the Epic store) on other stores.
Can you provide a source for this? This is the first I've heard of anything like this and searching only gives results about the game delisting due to payment processor problems from a few months ago.
edit: after some additional search tweaking this is most likely in reference to Wolfire v. Valve, which is now a class-action suit.[0] The argument seems to be that Valve is engaging in anticompetitive behavior by disallowing developers from reselling Steam keys for their games for lower prices on other platforms, not selling the games themselves on other platforms. So this may or may not be what the parent post was referencing.
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