notashelf

Thank you for clarifying :)

It's neither satirical, nor by an agent on the loose/in a loop. I read the comment section with good intentions, assuming good faith---and in their defense there is plenty---but the amount of misattribution is counterproductive. Nothing about the post-mortem section is "pissed off". I wrote it in complete serenity, like I am writing this comment to explain. There are three groups of commenters:

1. Skeptic, but engaging in good faith - thank you, much appreciated

2. Skeptic, not truly engaging with the post - that's fine, can't win 'em all

3. Completely disengaged with anything in writing. They're under the impression that I am criticizing their taste, and felt the need to "strike back" - what?

The post-mortem is a response to all three groups. I've explained the situation, apologized for what I agree I did wrong, and clarified my boundary. It's not worth pointing time and time again it was not LLM authored, and I do not have anything to add.

Em dashes are mine. I will use them whether they have been appropriated by LLMs or not. I used to use commas in their place. That resulted in a much more dense post layout and far less readable text.

FWIW I actually use three dashes (-) and my blog's build system transforms those into em dashes. This is not a defense, but nor is "this character is associated with slop" an argument. Yes LLMs use lots of words, phrases and patterns. Would you rather I stop using altogether? I am all for criticism, but please pick something I can actually change and improve without cutting a part of my style for no reason other than "Claude uses it too!"

But that means they're good enough for the short them. This is why I find it such an interesting question to wield, but also, it is why my wording was poor in the post.

I'll risk sounding antagonistic and ask you this: if LLMs are not "good enough", why are they still around?

Obviously "good enough" was a poor pick of words of words on my behalf---and I'll gladly own it---but they should be "good enough" for something if a significant amount of resources keep getting allocated to them. Yes on a very personal level you look at LLM-generated code and think to yourself "wow this is garbage" but what about the people, as pointed out many times in this thread, that simply do not care? Does that not count as "good enough"?

I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to conclude AI can acquire what I have described, and would continue to defend as taste. The real question, then, could be whether its acquired taste renders you obsolete? So what if you can be replaced, what then? A question that popped into my mind is whether taste, as immeasurable as a metric as it is, would be what keeps you relevant just enough to matter.

For what it is worth, I appreciate you sharing your experience. Looks like you have more programming experience than I have in life, so your comment matters to me. It also gets rather close to something I wanted to evaluate in the post: "whether any real intuition or judgment went into [its] design". I think that's a big question to dwell on these days.

Ironically, though, I had written a post that had people debating whether I put any intuition or judgement into. Would've been real ironic to instead add a post-scriptum that said "Yep, none of it matters. I just slopped something in 5 minutes and it easily went to the frontpage. Look how easy it is!" but unfortunately that is not why I write, not what I intended to achieve, and not something I am equipped to do. I care about my work, which is why I care about your comment as well.

This is an incredibly insightful comment, thank you. I had not read "Notes On 'Camp'" at the time of writing (and nor do much reading for the post in particular) but it seems very intriguing from what I can find on the internet.

I think you agree with what is in the essence of the post, but has been worded poorly. I do agree that most things are mediocre at best. Hell, I'd argue that most of my comments on everyday observations are negative. Ranging from "this sucks :/" to "holy fuck". They are, however, "good enough" for some and despite how clever I must to notice how much something sucks, that does nothing to the fact that it will receive adoption. Turns out I'm not clever. Huh.

In hindsight, I have worded this rather poorly and let some phrases do a lot of heavily lifting for me in the post. Ultimately, I agree with you. Knowing, for this instance, is not half the battle.