Well usually when people refer to someone as a prepper its the specific type of person that is buying hundreds of guns, tons of dehydrated meals but still living on city water - like they're preparing for a disaster movie but not anything real. Specifically the idea that you would be able to stay in place, with all your hoarded disaster crap, during the end of the world is kind of funny.
I don’t think we have a term for people who quietly keep a well stocked pantry, have a water setup, garden, have hobbies like canning, etc. That’s just being a bit rustic/prudent I guess. So then, the “prepper” derogatory label is only applied to the people who do it in the action movie/silly way. But, the question of how prevalent they are is a good one…
the specific type of person that is buying hundreds of guns, tons of dehydrated meals
Both of which are available at Wal-Mart.
I always knew about the guns, but only recently discovered that Wal-Mart stores (at least in Louisiana) carry huge buckets with weeks worth of dehydrated survival food.
A lot of this is also missing understanding the software we're creating. I have a deep knowledge of our SaaS because I've spent years working on coding it. If I had been prompting an LLM this entire time, I can't imagine I would actually have near the same understanding. That is assuming purely planning and prompting could actually result in a product that's in active use for years and not just a pile of prototypes which apparently desperately needed to be created and were just waiting for AI to come along to make it possible.
I've been using AI tools more but this idea of never actually writing any code seems way too black and white to be serious.
Yeah really the take away apparently is that Democrats should just lie, brazenly, about everything. I mean that's what Trump and JD Vance did and continue to do. When you can just invent your own world to live in, how are rational people supposed to deal with that? Would people have reacted different if Biden and Harris had truthfully said "oh and the world is still fucked up because of COVID, electing Donald Trump won't change that"
Beyond folks for whom English is a second language, I agree with you. I don't understand why people are immediately trying to find some loophole in this with spelling, grammar, etc checks. We just want to communicate with you, and if you sound like an idiot without the help of an LLM then maybe work on that rather than pretending to be Hemingway.
>Beyond folks for whom English is a second language
I am one of those folks, and I’m strongly against AI writing for that use case as well.
The only reason I can communicate in English with some fluency is that I used it awkwardly on the internet for years. Don’t rob yourself of that learning process out of shyness, the AI crutch will make you progressively less capable.
Why do you need to communicate in English with us native English speakers? Why don't we need to learn your language to communicate with you?
The way I'm looking at it is that you're putting all this effort towards learning how to communicate with people who would never without an outside pressure do the same for you.
If language learning is intrinsically a positive thing what can we do to encourage it in native speakers of English, specifically Americans who are monolingual (as they dominate this website)?
Imagine a scenario where Dang announced that we're only allowed to post in English one day week -- every day is dedicated to another language, like Spanish, Russian, Mandarin and the system auto deleted posts that weren't in those languages. Would that be a good thing? Would we see American users start to learn Spanish to post on HN on Tuesdays?
Honestly, having a common language that offers access to most knowledge and people in the western world at once is already amazing. If it happens to be the native language of most Americans, all the better for them.
A century ago it was French or Latin, and a century from now it might be Mandarin or something else. The existence of a standard is what matters.
The only complain I have about Americans and language is that most tech companies fail spectacularly at supporting multilingualism, from keyboards struggling with completion to youtube and reddit forcing translations on users.
Why exempt people who use English as a second language? Anyone with a level of proficiency sufficient for reading the comments here can manage writing English at a passable level. If that takes effort and requires looking up idioms or words, then good! That is how you learn a language — outsource that and you don't. It won't stick even if you see what is being output.
I don't care if they use an LLM to ask questions about grammar or whatever, as long as they write their own text after figuring out whatever it was they were struggling with.
> Anyone with a level of proficiency sufficient for reading the comments here can manage writing English at a passable level.
I'm an English speaker with some Spanish education and practice. My experience is that reading, writing, listening, and speaking can be quite uneven. Uneven enough to matter.
In the long-run, yes, learning a language is better, assuming your goal is to learn the language. I'm not trying to be snarky: sometimes people simply want to communicate an idea quickly in the short-run and/or don't prioritize deepening a language skill.
I would rephrase the comment above as a question: "Given the set of tools available (in person tutoring, online tutoring, AI-tooling, etc) and what we know about learning from cognitive science, for a given budget and time investment, what combination of techniques work better and worse for deepening various language skills?"
I've seen this comment but can't square it with the LLM-induced outcry from translators over job loss.
We've all pasted news articles into 2022 Google Translate and a modern LLM, right, and there was no comparison? LLMs even crushed DeepL. Satya had this little story his PR folks helped him with (j/k) even, via Wired June '23:
---
STEVEN LEVY: "Was there a single eureka moment that led you to go all in?"
SATYA NADELLA: "It was that ability to code, which led to our creating Copilot. But the first time I saw what is now called GPT-4, in the summer of 2022, was a mind-blowing experience. There is one query I always sort of use as a reference. Machine translation has been with us for a long time, and it's achieved a lot of great benchmarks, but it doesn't have the subtlety of capturing deep meaning in poetry. Growing up in Hyderabad, India, I'd dreamt about being able to read Persian poetry—in particular the work of Rumi, which has been translated into Urdu and then into English. GPT-4 did it, in one shot. It was not just a machine translation, but something that preserved the sovereignty of poetry across two language boundaries. And that's pretty cool."
---
edit: this comment has some comparisons incl. w/the old Google Translate I'm referring to:
Today Google Translate is Gemini, though maybe that's not the "traditional translation tool" you were referencing... but hope there's enough here to discuss any aspect that might be interesting!
The ones that are “pretty darn good” are the ones that use the same underlying AI/ML tech as the average LLM, and would be in violation of this newly-formalized guideline.
One heartbreaking loss from LLMs are the funny little disfluencies from ESL speakers. They're idiosyncratic and technically wrong, but they indicate a clear authorial voice.
AI polished writing shaves away all those weird and charming edges until it's just boring.
As someone who learned English as a second language, I would encourage people to use LLMs and any other resources to practice, and then use what they've learned to communicate with others.
Telling an LLM to "refine" your writing is just lazy and it doesn't help you learn to express yourself better. Asking it for various ways of conveying something, and picking one that suits you when writing a comment is OK in my book.
The way I see it, people will repeat the same grammar and pronunciation mistakes, and use restricted vocabulary their whole lives, just because learning requires effort, and they can't be bothered.
I can accept that nobody is perfect, as long as they have the will to improve.
>Telling an LLM to "refine" your writing is just lazy and it doesn't help you learn to express yourself better. Asking it for various ways of conveying something, and picking one that suits you when writing a comment is OK in my book.
To me those are the same thing excepting the number of options given to the human...
Also, there is nothing wrong with looking like an idiot. Thats only in your mind. As long as you have put thought into your reply, even if it not structured correctly, or verbose, or does not have perfect English, humans can still decipher it and understand it.
> Then you should have no issue with people using LLMs to communicate more clearly.
My raw thought: I wonder how many people are really objecting to the loss of exclusivity of their status derived from their relative eloquence in internet forums. When everyone can effectively communicate their ideas, those who had the exclusive skill lose their advantage. Now their core ideas have to improve.
Same idea, LLM-assisted: I wonder how many objections to LLM-assisted writing really stem from protecting the status that comes with relative eloquence. When everyone can express their ideas clearly, those who relied on polished prose as a differentiator lose that edge. The conversation shifts to the quality of the underlying ideas — and not everyone wants that scrutiny.
Same ideas. Same person. One reads better. Which version do you actually object to?
I don't object to either version. I think the LLM'd version is a little clearer; I also don't think I'd peg it as LLM'd if you hadn't marked it as such.
English is my 3rd language. I still disagree with using an LLM to write on one's behalf. I either get to read your thoughts in your voice or the comment is getting a downvote/flag.
> I don't understand why people are immediately trying to find some loophole in this with spelling, grammar, etc checks.
First, what "loophole" is the comment above referring to? Spell-checking and grammar checking? They seem both common and reasonable to me.
Second, I'm concerned the comment above is uncharitable. (The word 'loophole' is itself a strong tell of that.)
In my view, humanity is at its best when we leverage tools and technology to think better. Let's be careful what policies we put in place. If we insist comments have no "traces of LLM" we might inadvertently lower the quality of discussion.
Its disingenuous to claim that OP spent that much time and money to know when the washing cycle was complete. That's one of several different things the screen can do in addition to everything else it can display.
It's amazing how enticing dominos of chiming in with snark can feel.
It's also possible that the sentence struck a nerve because it's a pretty simple lens and test.
All the scrolling is free labour for tech/social media companies. Other folks seem to use it more as a platform to create, publish or be more mindful of their interactions compared to passive consumption and reaction.
Family schedules can be a unique and valuable problem to solve, namely how much more valuable time becomes, as well as how much a little bit of optimizing can give back.
I think you can divide the comments in here between people that have a family and don't. "Why would you need to know when the washer is done! Just set an alarm". When you have (young) kids, you'll be wandering around the house looking for the pen that's in your left hand. Little reminders like that are really nice.
Without it, if you want to know when something is happening on camera, you have to use motion detection. Motion detection sucks. Everything sets it off. Shadows moving, insects... anything moving.
Object detection, and then human detection, is extremely useful. Thankfully thats become nearly trivia enough to happen on device, but even with just "dumb" cameras the open source, on network solutions are very good.
Fastmail seems to go through periods where they're a little slower to adjust to new spam techniques, and they do rely on users filtering somewhat. About twice a year a few will slip through, but if I report them as spam they soon stop.
I've been a happy customer otherwise for years, for what its worth.
Google is at least less arbitrary than Microsoft. Microsoft will decide an email is spam today, and tomorrow the exact same email is perfectly fine. I think Google relies more and more on sending IP and domain reputation rather than content.
Deliverability to Microsoft famously took a dive a bit over a year ago due to random arbitrary failures within their infrastructure causing DMARC/DKIM problems which they clearly were having problems diagnosing.
Even with a six-figure email spend and weeks of troubleshooting the best response we could get from our mail provider was that they were having problems getting traction with Microsoft on the issue.
Worth mentioning is that there are several email umbrellas under Microsoft... including the newer office/365, the slightly older outlook.com hosting, the old corp hosting and hotmail and sub-properties... each with different rules and services to determine spam in inconsistent ways between them.
One of my main emails is still on a "free" outlook.com hosted with a personal domain that I never shifted to paid 365. I've also got an MTA server (mailu) of my own that I've been testing with... my own email under outlook.com is literally the only one of the MS systems I can't seem to deliver to, the rest work fine. Same for google.com for that matter... kinda wild.
This issue didn't seem to discriminate. I was seeing deliverability failures to Office 365 clients as well as consumer-facing brands like hotmail and msn
Okay... I was just adding my own experience as I was able to deliver to some without issue and not the one. It's entirely possible this has changed in the past couple years since I was actively testing.
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