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I hear most loudly from software engineers far removed from ordinary non-technical end users

I am absolutely not far removed from non-technical end users. They are my client base, ultimately. As a freelancer I focus on building real things that make things better for people whose faces and voices I get to know. GenAI will be useless to them, because it is antithetical to what they do.

And that focus is only getting keener; I want nothing to do with the AI-generated web.

Luckily I genuinely don't care :-)

Are you saying AI isn’t useful? My product is painstakingly crafted and uses AI but in my opinion it uses it tastefully and with great utility.

Sure. And THEIR products are just thoughtless slop generators.

For better or worse, Reddit is really the only place to go find legitimate information anymore.

This is frightening and, I fear, true.

But I'd also add one odd little counterpoint: some of the most useful discussions and learning experiences I've had in the last four years have happened in private Facebook groups. As soon as the incentive to build a following using growth-hacking and AI -- which private groups mitigate to a greater extent -- is taken away, you get back to the helpful stuff.

The FreeCAD group on Facebook is great, for example. And there are private photography groups, 3D printing groups, music groups etc., where people have an incentive to be authentic.

Public Facebook feeds are drowning in AI slop. But people who manage their own groups are keeping the spirit alive. It's almost at the point where I think Facebook will ultimately morph into a paid groups platform.

I wonder: do all the HNers who are excited about their GenAI product or wrapper or startup understand, at a fundamental level, that they are an intrinsic part of this deterioration?

Or is this one of those fundamental attribution error things:

- MY product is a powerful tool for creators who wish to save time

- THEIR product is just a poorly-though-out slop generator

Does it occur to people to instead be part of something real and visceral, and not just blame social media's ad-driven impression model, not pretend they are only part of a trend for which they can't be totally blamed?

There are a finite number of poor countries.

This is a bit of an imaginary solution to the problem, is it not? And there will always be poor_er_ countries, which is the thrust of my point.

The economic incentive does not go away. Not least because it is clearly already cheaper to float it away on a huge boat than bury it where it is used.

One problem is land cost: it's extremely difficult to safely build new houses on top of landfill. But that doesn't explain everything, does it? After all the USA has plenty of room to bury all its consumer waste. Why is it exporting it?

And this stuff all started out in heavy metals deposits, it is already present underground somewhere.

It does not start out all in one place, though. It starts out in small, dispersed concentrations of heavy metals, and ends up all in a few giant landfills in poorer countries. It's not clear what the risk is, but the lack of clarity doesn't mean there's no risk.

I'd hazard the actual problem in this picture is Ghana's GDP/capita being in 4 digit territory and not the badly disposed of waste dump.

But if Ghana became a wealthy country and chose not to accept this waste, it will end up in the next one.

The waste exists regardless, and the economic incentive for the original market "export" it, that is, hide the problem, and the receiving country to reluctantly accept it for some other consideration, whether it be money or state aid or tariff-free export of something else, will always exist while the waste does.

Re: "badly disposed of waste dump", the difference between this and landfill anywhere in the west is largely just the soil on top. Staggering amounts of recyclable and dangerous stuff still gets thrown away in inappropriate ways right near where you live, I imagine. And if the global North exports waste to the global South, sooner or later the scale almost inevitably overwhelms the receiver.

Oh dear me. I can't argue with you if this satisfies you.

It also famously published As We May Think.

I really like this phrase:

Thank you. I don't think it really explains the distinction, of course. It just makes it clear there necessarily must be one, and it can't be wished away by discussions of larger training sets, more token context, or whatever. It never will be wished away.

You clearly, clearly do not understand what I am saying. But sure, waste your time and money making a parrot that, unlike the author it mimics, is incapable of introspection, reflection, intellectual evolution or simply changing its mind.

Words are words. Writers are writers. Writers are not words.

ETA: consider what would actually be necessary to prove me wrong. And when you hear back from David Karpf about his willingness to take part in that experiment, write a blog post about it and any results, post it to HN.

I am sure people here will happily suggest topics for the articles. I, for example, would love to hear what your hypothetical ChatKarpf has to say about influences from his childhood that David Karpf has never written about, or things he believed at age five that aren't true and how that affects his writing now.

Do you see what I mean? These aren't even particularly forced examples: writers draw on private stuff, internal thoughts, internal contradictions, all the time, consciously and unconsciously.

And it still won't produce the type of articles he produces. Because at the very least he is capable of writing new articles from something the LLM doesn't have: his brain.

Seriously. This is just the parrot thing again. The fact that AI proponents confuse the form of words with authorial intent is mindbending to me.

Wouldn't have confused Magritte, I think.

That publication has always been a bit of a whack job of an outfit

This is a bizarre take about a 167-year-old, continuously published magazine.

Jobs was a sort of cracked genius and a very imperfect human who wanted to be a better human. Money didn't make him worse, or better. It didn't really change him at all on a personal level. It didn't even make him more confident, because he was always that. Look back through anecdotes about him in his life and he's just the same guy, all the time.

Even the stories I heard about him from one of his indirect reports back in the pre-iCEO "Apple is still fucked, NeXT is a distracted mess" era were just like stories told about him from the dawn of Apple and in the iPhone era.

Musk and Altman are opportunists. Musk appears to be a maligant narcissist. Neither seem in a rush to be better humans.

now you can use AI to easily write the type of articles he produces and he's pissed.

You really cannot.

I wonder if they will. I can't imagine anything trackpoint-like -- too expensive -- but it's not impossible they'll put a trackpad in.

The Pi 400 is small because it's meant to be aimed at the young. But young children are good with clicking buttons and poor with fine dexterity; they will likely do better with mice.

A clip-on trackpad to go alongside it would be nice, though.

I'm not really the target market but I am hoping a Pi 500 will tick all the right boxes to use as a cheap computer in a space-constrained workshop.

since most people are likely not buying the keyboard form factor as a headless device

A big part of the aim was simply to provide a nearly-all-in-one device for educational computing.

Physical computing is part of the school curriculum in the UK, mainly starting in Key Stage 2 (7-11 year olds, though there's some in Key Stage 1, as well).

This device exists in a very particular market space where for example the CrowPi laptops sell quite well. But it has been made by team of people who are influenced by the BBC Model B and the profound impact it had.

The presence of a GPIO connector in a keyboard format computer is basically the entire point of the Raspberry Pi 400.

You can consider the Pi 400 to be a very particular love letter to the BBC model B, with the GPIO port providing the kind of physical computing access provided by the "Tube" port.

Sure, if you're writing a novel, maybe.

But there's not much more important, stylistically, to writing an business email or document than clarity. It's absolutely the most important thing. Especially in customer communications.

In the UK there is/used to be a yearly awards scheme for businesses that reject complexity in communucations for clarity:

https://www.plainenglish.co.uk/services/crystal-mark.html

But anyway, you don't have to act on all the suggestions, do you? It's completely different from the idea of getting an AI to write generic, college-application-letter-from-a-CS-geek prose from your notes.

But it does favour _clarity_, rather than tropes.

It does now, perhaps, for complete rewrites. I've not looked recently.

But its suggestion system, where it spots wordy patterns and suggests clearer alternatives, was available long before LLMs were the new hotness, and is considerably more nuanced (and educational).

Grammarly would take apart the nonsense in that screenshot and suggest something much less "dark and stormy night".

Thanks.

2018 would tie in with about when I first got the impression he was not a fan of WP Engine. I'm sure there was fuss once before (about them not being on the "recommended hosting" page?)

Neal Katyal though. Someone you hire if you expect to go the distance.

Where is it documented Automattic (or Mr Mullenweg) owns any of WP Engine?

(ETA: Not saying it's impossible he or they have an interest -- I've just never seen this suggested. WP Engine is in many ways a competitor to wordpress.com, so it would be unusual, I think. And he/they have long not been a fan of WP Engine.)

No. But then all of these products are marketed to people who are, at some domain-specific level, still towards the "but I wore the juice!" end of the scale, right?

Unskilled and unaware of it. Or rather, unskilled and unaware of what a skilled output actually involves. So, unaware of the damage they do to their reputations by passing off the output of a GPT.

This is what I mean about the writing, ultimately. If you don't know why ChatGPT writing is sort of essentially banal and detracts from honesty and authenticity, you're the sort of person who shouldn't be using it.

(And if you do know why, you don't need to use it)

"Please say this, but in more sentences"

Part of the issue is that people who are experts at creating ML models aren’t experts at all the downstream tasks those models are asked to do.

Yep. CAD, music, poetry, comedy. Same pattern in each.

But it's more than not being experts: it's about a subliminal belief that there either isn't much to be expert in or a denial of the value of that expertise, like if what they do can be replicated by a neural network trained on the description, is it even expertise?

Unavoidably, all of this stuff is about allowing people to do, with software, tasks they would otherwise need experts for.

For lots of East Asian researchers it's really embarrassing for them to send an email riddled with typos, so they spend a LOT of time making their emails nice.

OK -- I can see this. But I think Grammarly would be better than this.

It's not, is it? It's meant to be the draft it created from the notes.

:-)