Please rethink the “edited” bit on accessibility grounds.
I have a kid with severe written language issues, and the utilisation of speech to text with a LLM-powered edit has unlocked a whole world that was previously inaccessible.
I would hate to see a culture that discourages AI assistance.
> I would hate to see a culture that discourages AI assistance.
Mostly I think the push back is about ai assistance in its current form. It can get in the way of communicating rather than assisting. The cost though is mostly borne by the readers and those not using the AI for assistance. I have seen this happen when the ai adds info and thoughts that were tangental to the original author and I think, but I can not verify times where an author seems to try to dig down on the details but seemingly can not.
That's totally legit and your kid, should they ever take an interest in Hacker News, is welcome here.
These rules are always fuzzy and there's always a long tail of exceptions. All the more so under turbulent conditions like right now. I wrote more about this elsewhere in the thread, in case it's useful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47342616.
Yes, please at least have a carveout for accessibility. I definitely have dictated HN comments in the past, and my flow uses LLMs to clean it up. It works, and is awesome when you're in pain.
Hear hear. And like many other aspects of accessibility, it will help a huge number of people who may not have any severe issues. e.g. non-native English speakers using LLM-powered edits.
Since it's mostly a good-faith rule to begin with, it seems easy to add something like, "unless you are using it as an assistive technology for accessibility reasons".
Yes, and that's the case with all the rules. I don't want to say "you should break them when it makes sense" because if I do, someone will post "Tell HN: dang says break the rules". But the rules are there to serve the intended spirit of the site—not the other way around. If you're posting in that spirit, I would hope we would recognize and and welcome that, not tut-tut it with rules.
I have a kid with severe written language issues, and the utilisation of STT w/ a LLM-powered edit has unlocked a whole world that was previously inaccessible.
What is amazing is it would have remained so just a couple of years ago!
Agreed... there's often other perspectives people never thought of like this, which is why they say "strong opinions about issues do not emerge from deep understanding."
Even if you're just inexperienced in the language you're communicating in and are trying to have better conversations, it's very helpful.
For cases like that, I say just don't tell people... I think it's unlikely anyone will be able to tell either way.
> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
the title being the changelog is still probably the better choice because the discussion here and linked are about guidelines in the page rather than absolute rules or a discussion about the title alone.
Many of the other guidelines have exceptions too, and various strengths. E.g. "Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information..." is a pretty weak guideline in practice while "If the title contains a gratuitous number or number + adjective..." is often over-enforced by automatic tooling and stuff like "Please don't use uppercase for emphasis..." CAN sometimes just make sense where a use of italics might easily get missed WHILE OTHER TIMES BEING THE REASON THE GUIDELINE WAS ADDED.
I wonder what the breakdown is between AI-generated comments and AI-assisted comments. If I write anything substantial, I run it through the following prompt: "Please rewrite the following message for clarity, spelling, and grammar, but only return the revised text without any additional commentary."
Articulateness is a decent (not perfect) signal for intelligence, which is a decent (not perfect) signal for sound ideas. In a sea of online garbage, it was a quick and easy way to discard that not worth reading. Nowadays, a whiff of AI's brand of articulateness tells me the author couldn't manage on their own, either due to skill or discipline. In either case, the result is the same: close tab / scroll past.
Use a local model such as Gemma3 with a prompt such as "strictly limit changes only to spelling issues, syntactical errors, and punctuation."
That way, it's basically functioning like Grammarly on steroids. Asking an LLM for a "rewrite" is basically dissolving your writing style into the homogenized gloop.
To be fair, comments here are graded on kindness, civility, curiosity, intellectual gravity, technical merit, novelty, thoughtfulness, substantiveness, objective fact, not fulminating, not cross examining, steelmanning vs strawmanning, not containing memes, not containing humor, not expressing positive emotion, not expressing negative emotion, not being snarky, sneering, overly cynical, not cynical enough, being "curmudgeonly", class bias, political bias, religious bias, cultural bias, not using "flamewar style" and many other heuristics.
If you followed all of the guidelines for comments to the letter, you would wind up sounding wooden, if not entirely like an AI.
I'm kind of curious how you.... I guess, interpret the responses to when you send someone AI-assisted content. I previously thought "I don't care if it's AI or not; quality is quality", but I'm increasingly taking the position that I do care, and intentionally have started ignoring comments and especially product reviews where you get the formatted 2-4 sentence paragraphs with formal tone and rule-following. It's come to the point where as long as you don't write as poorly as Epstein, I want the errors. Actually, I'm getting so weird and romantic about it, that I think I'd argue having errors and unusual style shows an openness and vulnerability that's now a necessary gate price; like journalists have so many tools available to them, but they still make typos, factual errors in articles they have no business writing about, and fail to quote people properly -- that's great, I think.
The Norwegian Consumer Council's entire yearly budget is about 100M NOK, or about $9.5M USD at the current exchange rate. They most assuredly did not spend >$1M USD on a short video clip.
Microcenter is good if you are in a pinch and want to quickly grab a Raspberry Pi. +1 for Robotshop too! Pololu is way underrated and has the fastest shipping I’ve ever seen.
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