Thanks for putting this so nicely! We'd much rather hear you in your own voice, and the cost of a few mistakes is far less than the cost of losing that.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

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drittich 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Voice is everything. Don't relinquish the best part of yourself.

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Freedom2 an hour ago | parent [-]

For hackers, wouldn't the best part of ourselves be our technical excellence?

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bruce511 36 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

If that's true, it would be very sad indeed. Techical excellence is a very low bar to clear. It's so easy even AI can do that part.

When I was young, and learning my technical skills, then naturally I was focused on improving those skills. At that age I defined myself by what I did, and so my self worth was related to my skills. And while the skills are not hard to acquire, not many did, and they were well paid. All of which made me value them even more.

As I've grown older though I discovered my best parts had nothing to do with tech skills. My best parts (work wise) was in translating those skills into a viable business, hiring the right people, focusing my attention where it's needed (and getting out the way where it's not.) My best parts at work are my human relationships with colleagues, customers, prospects and so on.

Outside of work my technical skills mean nothing. My family and friends couldn't care less. They barely know I have drills at all, and no idea if I'm any good or not. In that space compassion, loyalty, reliability, kindness, generosity, helpfulness, positivity, contentment and so on are far (far) more important.

I hope at my funeral people remember those things. Whether I could set up email or drive an AI will (hopefully) not even be in the top 10.

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altairprime 40 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There is value in technical excellence, but it’s not substituable for having and using a voice that isn’t the crowd-averaged AI normal. Better an unpracticed voice than a dull one, etc. (Also, AI is nullifying a great deal of excellence in favor of barely sufficient, just like Java did! so betting on the continued value of technical prowess requires some particular specializations that are not so easily replaced as the high quantity of devopseng cogs turn out to be.)

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Nevermark an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Have you tried that line in a bar?

More to the point, Hacker News is much more interesting for encouraging idiosyncratic (i.e. original, diverse, nuanced views of specific) human viewpoints, not just being raw technical information.

Model rewrites remove much of specific human dimension.

	▲	lmz 12 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> Model rewrites remove much of specific human dimension Great. Isn't that part of being anonymous if one so desires? This would have decent potential to avoid stylometry deanonymization, no?

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saagarjha 36 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Only if you’re a very boring person.

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eleventyseven 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I routinely call out people of writing in an LLM assisted fashion that clearly shows they have just been "vibe commenting". You know, just paste it in and copy the output without even thinking. The people who for some insane reason think they are making a genuine conversation with their copy pasting skills and $20/mo subscription. As if they are like the archive.whatever of the AI era. Because those comments are objectively terrible and contribute little. The ones with all the consultant sycophant speak and distracting prose that comes off the default prompt and RLHF.

But that's really what you're now enforcing: writing in an easily detectable LLM prose and voice. LLM detection is very difficult especially at small comment scale texts. There is never proof, only telltale phrases. How will this be enforced? What the heck even is "AI"?

The thing that really frustrates me is that I can't put tokens through a transformer in any way in editing my post? I can't have an LLM turn a bare link after a sentence into a [1]? I can't have it literally do nothing more than spell check in an LLM, but could with a rule based model? Or what about other LLMs or SLMs or classic NLP chained together? Or is it just the transformer?

And it is officially sanctioned that people ought to be keeping in the back of their mind "does this feel LLMish?" instead of "is this a good comment that contributes to the discussion?" Maybe LLM prose is so annoying and insufferably sycophantic that even if all the content and logic was sound, it still should be moderated completely out. But the entire technological form is profane and unclean?

I am 100% not interested in participating in a community that seeks to profile and police the technological infrastructure that its members use. I want my comments judged by the contributions they make and do not make to the discussion. If the LLM makes the comment better, it is good. If it makes it worse, it is bad.

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lelanthran an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> I am 100% not interested in participating in a community that seeks to profile and police the technological infrastructure that its members use.

I suppose, then... goodbye?

After all, there are a ton of different forums where you can have your chatbot talk to other chatbots.

	▲	thirtygeo 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Definitely agree. If you look at comments posted in places like Slashdot - is is basically ruined forever (and at one time it was quite excellent for real comments, from real experts and experienced people)

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calmoo 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think a more generous interpretation of dang's comment is that it's fine to use LLMs / tools to fix grammatical errors / spellchecking, but a heavier pass where the prose, wording and tone is altered (even mildly) can create a 'slop ambience' over time, death by a thousand paper cuts.

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dang an hour ago | parent | next [-]

There's a gradient here for sure, but it's getting clear that people using LLMs "only" for grammar and spelling fixes are underestimating how much else the LLMs are doing.

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eleventyseven 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Slop ambience just sure sounds to me like HN is banning a prose style. I guess I just think that if this is how the rule will be enforced, that is how it should be written.

	▲	calmoo an hour ago \| parent [-]
		HN already does a decent amount of content-policing, which helps keep the discussion higher quality. I don't see a huge diversion here from the usual moderation.