He did attack the argument - he argued reductio ad absurdum that classifying "democratic" as "open to everyone" wouldn't be a sensible definition, because the argument would set such a high bar for democracy that no state is democratic.
The irony of this comment is that leaning back and snarkily accusing someone of "playing internet" is precisely the kind of disengagement you're complaining about.
The irony of submitting an AI slop article to hacker news about AI slop in shared forums diminishing trust.
I'm irritated that I got far enough that it was the article's semantic meaning being nonsense and not a Claude authorship tell that got me.
A developer added a "not for commercial use" license on their project and... it reduced adoption amongst commercial actors. Wow Claude, what a terrible situation.
You don't need to speculate about whether a tech company with a monopoly over a major distribution channel will extract rent from it - it's incredibly profitable to do so.
The complaint is that the offer is a great deal with no downsides for consumers, and this is likely to result in Cloudflare having a lot of power (which they currently don't have) as a market maker. This position as market maker would grant them the power to extract economic rent from the web economy by charging both sides of the web provider and web consumer market to get access to the other.
I hate when people say this, as if there's any world in which I would want my AWS API gateway to do this, let alone accidentally. HTTP is littered with these footguns, differences between slashes and no slashes is a classic. A good piece of software would make it hard to do this by accident, and probably should default to having the same behaviour with or without trailing slash.
Yes yes, I know, folder/file naming convention dating from...
I recently saw a funny video on TikTok of someone's proposal where the man was lunging weirdly far forward in order to present the ring.
The comment section was full of AI-generated edits to this image which exaggerated it or changed the setting in various creative ways - making his leg even longer, making his leg extend over a giant chasm, adding a bench behind him so he was performing a Bulgarian split squat. I giggled my way through the comments.
This form of humor - of being able to take human in-jokes and run with them - was not possible before artificial intelligence, and it was very funny! Memes are about to get so much more varied and funny as the effort requirement drops. We're nowhere near the effort ceiling in terms of making great memes, most people just simply do not have the time, resources or patience to actualise their mind's eye. It reminded me of exactly the kind of dumb joke and rehashing that made YTPs so special in the first place. I don't know if this is high art, but it is art, and I don't think YTPs were a particularly special form of comedy outside of our rose-tinted memories of childhood.
There's still the capacity for human labor and uniqueness to be embedded in AI-generated media - only the first breaths of low-quality algoslop lacked that. Expression and mimetics will change, and I think children born today will get to enjoy richer and funnier content than we did now that they are unshackled from GMod stop motion.
I do think that AI tools make creativity better and not worse. I grew up with Youtube poops, photoshop, garry's mod, and flash. Being able to go from idea to asset in a fast, throwaway capacity lets you nuance and remix jokes and media on a level that isn't possible with traditional creative software. I got into software because I wanted to make things that I wanted. I think it is a great thing that the ability to make software is now in the hands of more people than ever, just as 3D printing did for widgets, as cheap chinese manufacturing did for electronics, diffusion models are doing for media.
Media production is often laborious and unfun. I learned that the hard way the first time I whipped out the physgun in Garry's Mod and started trying to make something funny. That experience was absolutely buns and the consequence is I didn't get to make as many fun things to share and enjoy as I could have.
My suspicion is that the people leading the outrage from a creative perspective is people who were, by-and-large, struggling/failing to make it in a creative industry before AI, and this is the outlet for that pent up frustration.
The closest I've come to sympathising has been witnessing the death of the farmer's market under a sea of generic AI slop and Temu garbage. And while sad, that feels like more of a story about globalising supply chains than one about the death of creativity.
The pessimism of Blueskyism feels very alien to me.
one of my favourite genres of AI generated content is when someone gets so mad at Claude they order it to make a massive self-flagellatory artefact letting the world know how much it sucks
and then all the serverless platforms will start using Astral's new rust-based runtime to reduce cold starts, and in theory it's identical, except half of packages now don't work and it's very hard to anticipate which ones will and will not and behold! You have achieved Deno
It's from the rapid exploitation of an asset. If I have a cow, I can milk the cow or kill the cow. If a cow costs $1, maybe I can get $5 worth of milk over the cow's lifespan, or I can kill the cow immediately and get $2 of meat. The man with $100 who buys all the cows in town and kills all of them doubles his money in a short timespan, but now there's a shortage of both meat and milk next season.
It failed on Reddit because Reddit is maintained by a bunch of volunteers to whom Reddit provides woefully, woefully, horrifically underdeveloped tooling to automate their communities in a more nuanced way. Hacker News has three advantages. First, it is moderated by the same people who build the tooling, so the incentives are aligned. Second, it is an enormous source of soft power for a venture capital firm with the resources, incentives, and likely the competence and capacity to keep it running smoothly. Third, the scale is smaller and is not tied to hardline revenue constraints like CPM, user LTV and DAU-maximization which restrict what Reddit can do.
...and I usually come to doubt my own intuitions that this is the case when people say things like this, but my experience is usually that the LLM is doing more heavy lifting than you realise.
> Distill - deterministic context deduplication for LLMs. No LLM calls, no embeddings, no probabilistic heuristics. Pure algorithms that clean your context in ~12ms.
I simply do not believe that this is human-generated framing. Maybe you think it said something similar before. But I don't believe that is the case. I am left trying to work out what you meant through the words of something that is trying to interpret your meaning for you.
Absolute middlebrow dismissal incoming, but the real thinking atrophy is writing blog posts about thinking atrophy caused by LLMs using an LLM.
It is getting very hard to continue viewing HN as a place where I want to come and read content others have written when blog posts written largely with ChatGPT are constantly upvoted to the top.
It's not the co-writing process I have a problem with, it's that ChatGPT can turn a shower thought into a 10 minute essay. This whole post could have been four paragraphs. The introduction was clearly written by an intelligent and skilled human, and then by the second half there's "it's not X, it's Y" reframe slop every second sentence.
The writing is too good to be entirely LLM generated, but the prose is awful enough that I'm confident this was a "paste outline into chatgpt and it generates an essay" workflow.
Frustrating world. I'm lambasting OP, but I want him to write, but actually, and not via a lens that turns every cool thought into marketing sludge.
https://thestu.art