If vibey readmes are for LLMs like the other comments suggest, they should be banished to a folder where it's clear they're just for a robot so I don't have to look at them.
The README.md can actually be a reserved space for human beings to read with whatever the author thinks is most important to communicate to the human operator.
> You go to a university because you are deeply interested in understanding the subject that you study. Doing the homework and the tests are just the "goalposts" to check for yourself whether you made progress on this.
I think this was true a long time ago. Perhaps with LLMs this can become true again in the future. But definitely that was not why I went the first time, nor most of my classmates. (Second time I did post-secondary, sure, 100% -- but I was almost 30, not an average student)
Yeah, it's 100% the better term. We've got rules against using engineer here in Canada though several companies I've worked for have called me an engineer. Apparently Professional Engineers Ontario sometimes goes after people for calling themselves engineers but I've never heard of it actually happening, and I don't know that they have any real teeth given that the places I worked that called me an engineer were Canadian-owned. (In fact, the only place where they checked if I could use the title was the one multi-national. Go figure.)
I have fond memories of a boss who was an actual, licensed engineer while the rest of us were very much normal software devs. Boss was pretty chill except when someone someone suggested we should be called "engineers" rather than "developers", at which point they said "if you guys were building bridges, people would be dead." (I don't think all software needs to be built to rigorous engineering standards but man... I think about that line a lot.)
I think the `e` looks better in the 'real pixels' example they gave; I find my tends to 'fill in' the space of the top part of the letter, and I suspect in the context of a longer sentence it'd be pretty easy to parse.
(but yeah, it's not quite right, and is especially jarring in the nice, clean, blown up pixels in the top example)
> And when the EU/Australia/China.. tries to regulate punish those corps, suddenly everyone comes out on HN to explain protectionism, overreach, some -ism, and "actually we need to give them the benefit of the doubt" etc... why not support that momentum?
I really, really want to believe it's bot warfare. But there is this running theme of HN posters who think because something is _legal_, or because you can point at it historically and go "acktually it's always been like this", it's therefore _moral_ and we should not ever push back on the excesses of these awful fucking companies.
> Unfortunately many believe they can, and it is impossible to disprove. So now real people need to write avoiding certain styles, because a lot of other people have decided those are "LLM clues." Bullets, EM Dash, certain common English phases or words (e.g. Delve, Vibrant, Additionally, etc)[0].
I think people will be able to detect the lowest-user-effort version of LLM text pretty reliably after a while (ie what you describe; many people have a good sense of LLM clues). But there's probably a *ton* of LLM text out there where some of the instructions given were "throw a few errors in", "don't use bullet points or em dashes", "don't do the `it's not this, it's that` thing" going undetected.
And then those changes will get built into ChatGPT's main instructions, and in a few months people will start to pick up on other indicators, and then slightly smarter/more motivated users will give new instructions to hide their LLM usage... (or everyone stops caring, which is an outcome I find hard to wrap my head around)
>I don’t want more “leverage to build and ship”, I want to live in a world where people aren’t so disconnected from reality and so lonely they have romantic relationships with a chat window; where they don’t turn off their brains and accept any wrong information because it comes from a machine; where propaganda, mass manipulation, and surveillance aren’t at the ready hands of any two-bit despot; where people aren’t so myopic that they only look at their own belly button and use case for a tool that they are incapable of recognising all the societal harms around them.
Preach. Every time I read people doing this weird LARP on this website of "you have so much more leverage, great time to be a founder" I want to put my head through the drywall.
>The time saved matters, but the real unlock was the mental overhead removed. Every PR used to be a small context switch: stop thinking about the code, start thinking about how to describe the code. Now I type /git-pr and move on to the next thing.
This one's interesting to me. For a lot of my career, the act of writing the PR is the last sanity check that surfaces any weirdness or my own misgivings about my choices. Sometimes there would be code that felt natural when I was writing it and getting the feature working, and maybe that code survived my own personal round of code review... but having to write about it in plain english for the benefit of someone doing review with less context was a useful spot to do some self-reflection.
>Like...jesus, I expected more/better from folks who digest mathematical proofs and Arxiv papers for funsies, yet so many people here just cannot think critically about complex issues that involve people other than themselves.
People who LARP about digesting mathematical proofs and Arxiv papers for funsies.
>No one reads books for entertainment anymore, because paper is an inferior entertainment platform
There are more forms of entertainment and people have diversified how they spend their leisure time. I don't think that it necessarily follows that it's an inferior platform unless your only metric is "more people is more good".
>Because everyone alive today has the same perspective, and none of us have experienced a wide breadth of anything
Completely bonkers statement.
>I don’t know if she’s ever talked publicly about religion or democracy or climate change or immigration, but I could tell you exactly what she thinks about these things anyway. So why would you bother reading what she thinks about Rome? The answers are just as predictable
I mean, I could take a stab at what a dork named Roman Helmet Guy is going to think too.
> Esquire writing is so weird. It’s genuinely like a relic from another age.
I agree: but to me that's at least something kind of interesting and evocative, even if it's a trainwreck. (In fact, it might even be better when it's a trainwreck). A nice break from LLM's this-not-that. This one's not so bad IMO.
The README.md can actually be a reserved space for human beings to read with whatever the author thinks is most important to communicate to the human operator.