Speak for yourself (re learning)? Lots of young ppl are curious and determined and willing to dig into the guts of a thing to understand how it works.
I agree re LLMs lowering the barrier of entry generally being a good thing, but I also find it disingenuous to present this as anyone's work at all, really.
All of the copy on the page (e.g. the "Made with <3 for X") reads to me as empty mimicry of 2018-era coastal tech, and not something a 13 year old would have much context for at all. The tech itself feels like a very simple CRUD app. There is nothing wrong with that and many useful and interesting applications are just that, but I also know that this app is borderline trivial to generate/vibe code in a handful of prompts nowadays
I am sorry to be a downer! To be clear, shipping alone is a hurdle, and that counts for something. Also, not every work needs to be novel or demonstrate outstanding creativity or copywriting skills
But one element of making things that's overlooked is taste. I think that's what is missing here for me -- it's not really transparent which choices were made by the LLM and which were made by the kid.
If you mandate force feeding at scale, then yes, some instructors will do so clumsily -- this is virtually guaranteed, although it is true that some topics are more prone to this than others.
But I think you misinterpreted my comment -- I am not advocating for doing away with schooling or testing understanding in school in general, which is entirely my fault as my post was a bit unclear. But I agree with you that one should learn to read and write in school!
OP used the phrasing "force them", which I read as a stronger statement than "it'll be on the exam", and more "there will be an exam or entire course on this topic that must be passed or else". My point, more or less, was that there are many other more fundamental topics we already do this with other than cursive, and that adding another has a steep cost with uncertain payoff that is heavily dependent on the implementation.
There was an enormous volume of material that I never understood in high school because at the time I either didn't care or other things seemed more important -- my mom was dying, for starters.
But just having exposure to that material planted it in my mind and, in many cases, I revisited those topics later as an adult and learned them properly.
To be clear, I am not advocating for doing away with testing or schooling altogether. I am only pushing back on the idea that a 16 year old who doesn't care about cursive or calculus or Chaucer or whatever today won't ever care about those topics unless we mandate he pass an exam or course on it.
More broadly, my point is that there is a cost to "forcing them" as the grandparent advocates with regard to learning cursive. The moment you "force them" you also guarantee that some people won't graduate because of that extra requirement. There are other ways to enrich people's lives without force feeding, e.g., mention it and devote a question on an exam to it.
I appreciate the sentiment, as someone who vastly prefers handwriting, but the downfall of this might be the situation we have historically had in the US with math, where the experience of being clumsily force fed this additional material can be so painful that it induces PTSD-like symptoms and a lifelong aversion to the material. A similar phenomenon even occurs with cursive and PE class.
That obviously isn't to say that I don't think people should learn these subjects, nor that we should avoid presenting them at all to young minds. It's just that, as someone who failed math all through grade school and now does pure math research as an adult, I don't think "forcing them" in the sense of introducing yet another high stakes and high pressure set of evaluations to all the others is really the enlightened path here
It's not pedantry at all, there are simply different paradigms of AI. The dominant one today is DL, symbolics/GOFAI were dominant decades ago. These methods are still used today in some fields, not merely gamedev
There are paradigms of AI that are not deep learning. If you took an AI course in the 90s or earlier, implementations like this are much closer to what you would learn about -- symbolics/GOFAI. It remains basic to some fields where stakes and complexity are high (air traffic control and military systems) but determinism is a strict requirement, not to mention others like gamedev that have lots of performance constraints -- and usually don't actually need or want anything non-deterministic or overly smart.
Deep Blue, the first chess engine to defeat a world champion, was a GOFAI system
There was an article recently about a system used in production at a pasty chain in Japan to classify pastries at checkout that didn't use DL for most of its existence. Now it seems to be a hybrid system that uses symbolics and DL for certain functions
RE who writes these things: I know you're probably referring to code here but on the actual dialogue side, there was a charming interview recently with the person responsible for translating Miyazaki's vision into English. He apparently did all of the writing (dialogue, item descriptions, UI text) for Dark Souls, and split the work with just one other person for all the later games including Elden Ring.
More topical, I do actually appreciate some of the persistent jankiness like this that hasn't changed since their original games. They experimented with different approaches in DS3, where certain NPCs you encountered would essentially evaporate after you exhausted their dialogue, and they would later materialize back in the hub. I personally hated this -- one element I really enjoyed in the earlier games was this sense that the world doesn't revolve around you. The NPCs feel like rich characters with their own goals and motivations
Having them leave when you're finished talking to them sort of reduced them to utilities, which of course they are ultimately, but the gamefeel suffered a bit from making that more explicit. Don't me wrong though, I love DS3, but I didn't care for that particular change
Anyway, handling NPC progression in this way where the player needs to reload the area is more about navigating a technical limitation than anything else. But like many constraints it conspires with others to produce a certain gamefeel that I enjoy. It would feel a bit less impactful if Hyetta just moved on the instant I exhausted her dialogue -- it's more interesting for me to return and see that she has moved on
Another example of this sort of thing is FromSoft supposedly historically being bad at animating eyes, hence many critical NPCs being blindfolded or with faces hidden by helmets or otherwise obscured. This imagery plays nicely with their other sensibilities around character design and is thematically pretty rich
Not all work requires every facet to be so sharply optimized, and there may be other constraints that are completely invisible to you. Some that were easy for me to imagine: the parent works in a heavily regulated industry, their IT team is slow-moving and paranoid and this is a safe, under-the-radar workaround, the output is "good enough" for their purposes and they find tinkering with it to be fun.
Regardless I don't think it's fruitful to be so condescending with such little insight into this person's situation. Even if you had total insight -- let people be and withhold your judgement, or at least keep it to yourself. Making people feel stupid is a great way to turn people off to pretty much anything else you have to say
About your second point, the site guidelines suggest assuming good faith and responding to the strongest possible version of what someone has written. I would interpret that to mean here that "they had no trouble understanding the post but had reservations about it, which felt important to them".
I will also add that I feel characterizing what they have written as nitpicking feels rude and uncharitable.
Personally I appreciated the parent comment because although I enjoyed the article, it didn't completely sit well with me, and the comment helped to clarify why. There are some activities in my life that I've poured years of blood, sweat, and tears into, and I'm realizing as I get older that my goals and dreams with regard to this category of work will probably never be realized. This feels a bit different to the snowboarding narrative, which for all I know may have been chosen not because the writer hasn't been in a situation like mine, but because it's easier to digest and doesn't require a level of vulnerability that would muddy the light-hearted tone of the post.
In any event, I don't feel your hostility is fair or warranted here
I agree that AI is likely a driving force here, but it is also likely not the only driving force. COVID likely played a devastating role, along with curriculum changes in high school, reactionary cultural shifts towards anti-intellectualism, and broader declines in literacy that have been in progress for a while now. It would be interesting to see data for the past 5-10 years or so.
> It's reading my requests more clearly than (for example) Google's search input ever did
I see this take a lot and it puzzles me.
While I think LLMs provide some advantages over traditional search in some modestly nontrivial contexts, they tend to be inferior to traditional search at its peak. I attribute this attitude to two things: the broad progressive enshittification and productization of search, and the fact that (re)search is a skill that most people tend to be bad at. Without massaging, LLMs spit out the most utterly braindead boneheaded queries, which are fine in cases where the problem is very well understood with minimum uncertainty or critical nuance. If your problem has either, God help you. But perhaps those queries are at least as good as the average human generated query
The game very explicitly implores the player to question the ethics of monster slaying -- most directly through the character of Djura, who points out that the beasts were once people too. The game goes so far as to give you a dialogue box when talking to him, with the options to spare the beasts or not
There is also the romp through the Hunter's Nightmare, whose first act is replete with beasts cowering in fear at the sight of the player character. Even if you spare them you'll usually see them brutally slain by mad hunter compatriots anyway
And it's no mistake that all the "kin" type characters you encounter in the game, like Rom, Ebrietas, and Moon Presence, are all deeply tragic.
Thematically Bloodborne is deeply concerned with humanization/dehumanization and how those interact with violence, and it plays a lot with this in the narrative to subvert with the usual power fantasy of the soulslike genre -- the beasts cowering in fear in the nightmare seem more human than the mad hunters, Ebrietas appears to be grieving when you encounter her, and with Rom you might systematically murder her children before directing your blade at her. Like you can live out that power fantasy, but it won't always feel great.
So no, I don't think that Ebrietas being optional works against this idea at all. It just allows the narrative to explore different facets of this question -- it humanizes her, and if you choose to fight her it's because you chose to be the aggressor.
This is not common in an in-person setting -- nearly "unheard of" outside of elite schools or particular faculty at particular programs. So it is the latter
I mean, given that belief in moral decline is essentially based on illusory perceptions anyway[1], it's not too surprising that someone handwringing about it would also hallucinate connections between two disparate phenomena they opted to characterize as examples of such.
If you opt to habitually rationalize human behavior in a manner that is detached from concern with nuance or driving forces then some amount of reality denial is probably inevitable
You can certainly learn a bit about how a company thinks about UX, accessibility, and its users more broadly by looking at its error messages. Although I didn't care for much of the specifics proposed, I am glad about this post as I think it is important to think through error messages with intention and treat them as products in their own right.
Regarding the proposed "good" alternative, it has less actionable information than the original "bad" message, depending on what the product is and who its users are. In particular, you can't determine whether "fetch data" is impenetrable jargon without looking at the product itself and its users.
I also frequently see people use the designation of a user as non-technical as an excuse to dismiss their intelligence. It's true that tech folks generally underestimate how confusing computers and software are to the average person, but erring too heavily in the other direction also has negative impacts for accessibility. Either way, you can at least hide away that extra detail, with jargon and all, using that link tip she mentioned.
Finally, this writer seems to overestimate the extent to which most users view "contact Customer Care" as "giving them a way out" and not an invitation for further aggravation.
Why are you baffled? The most upvoted critical comments are mostly explaining themselves and I don't think their reasons are very technical. When the stakes are higher, we should generally be more critical, not less.
You are right that this happens frequently in the United States compared to Europe, but you are overstating the degree to which this culturally and legally acceptable. People who are doing this are not typically broadcasting it to others, and I can assure you that when they do, for the most part people will tend to "bat an eye" at the very least.
Note that motor vehicle insurance in most of Europe is more tightly regulated and generally more affordable than in the United States. Also, I suspect the car-dependent individuals in urban areas with robust public transportation in Belgium are generally vastly higher income than the typical uninsured compulsory driver in the United States. Happy to be corrected though
There is a very popular app for macro counting called Cal AI that was reported to have been written by a high school student with over $1M in revenue. Looks like it was just acquired by MyFitnessPal
I agree re LLMs lowering the barrier of entry generally being a good thing, but I also find it disingenuous to present this as anyone's work at all, really.
All of the copy on the page (e.g. the "Made with <3 for X") reads to me as empty mimicry of 2018-era coastal tech, and not something a 13 year old would have much context for at all. The tech itself feels like a very simple CRUD app. There is nothing wrong with that and many useful and interesting applications are just that, but I also know that this app is borderline trivial to generate/vibe code in a handful of prompts nowadays
I am sorry to be a downer! To be clear, shipping alone is a hurdle, and that counts for something. Also, not every work needs to be novel or demonstrate outstanding creativity or copywriting skills
But one element of making things that's overlooked is taste. I think that's what is missing here for me -- it's not really transparent which choices were made by the LLM and which were made by the kid.