skippyfish

It's 100% AI-generated, including nonsense illustrations. And it's just so pointless too - there are many good, better-illustrated, and better-explained human articles about the same circuit.

I very much doubt that. We now have nearly-perfect AI image generation and it hasn't really changed the nature of human expression. I don't see my friends getting wildly creative. I mostly see it used for spammy blogs, spammy books, and cringeworthy corporate marketing - basically, a negative signal, rather than "ooh, AI image, I'm in for a treat". Is your experience different? If not, what changes with moving images?

Ultimately, most people don't have ideas for the kinds of personalized entertainment they want, and they don't want to be in charge of content production (even if you have an LLM do most of the work). I don't doubt that there are niches for it, especially stuff like porn, and I'm sure that pros (game studios, film studios) will leverage AI more and more, but I suspect that most of us will just want to sit on the couch, watch Spiderman XVIII, and then be able to talk about that shared Spiderman XVIII experience with all our friends.

I know that we're discouraged from meta-comments, but what is going on in this thread? It's a nearly 800-page book about the art of programming. A huge amount of work on a topic that should be dear to our hearts. News for hackers, right?

But somehow, the discussion has three themes. It's 50+ comments of "I don't like the first sentence of the marketing copy", "I don't like the tool the author is using", and "what would happen if we train an LLM on this book?". Has anyone read the sample chapter? Did you like it? Anyone here owns volume 1 and has opinions about that?

No one is writing purely for themselves. It's something we like to say, and there's some value in writing down your thoughts - but deep down inside, every blogger is dreaming of having a positive impact on other people's lives. That requires reaching these people in the first place.

I promise you that Bartosz would be bummed out if he had an audience of one. And while relying on HN to accidentally discover you can work, it's not a sustainable model for anything.

Counterpoint from someone who's been publishing on the internet for decades: no one will visit your website. It's as simple as that. You need a push mechanism to reach readers.

RSS could be it, but it's too niche. Social media is kinda it, but algorithmic feeds reward political clickbait and just because someone clicks "follow" or "subscribe" is not a guarantee that they will ever see your posts. Substack gives you a way to push content to your subscribers without an intermediary deciding what they get to read.

So no, there's no special value to having a website or syndicating across the web. There's a lot of value in backing up your Substack subscribers' emails so that you can move somewhere else down the line, and the nice thing about Substack is that they let you do that. If they stop, that's a trap.

ACM has been leaning heavily into AI-generated content for their journals in the past year, and this article is no exception: it appears to be 100% AI generated and full of LLM verbiage.

There's something hilarious about that, but also, snake eating its own tail.

With respect, the way you talk about corrections makes me suspect you weren't working in tech in the US at the turn of the century.

A "correction" in this model isn't a reasoned and gradual re-evaluation of the market cap of every company. It's a broad pullback where people panic and no one wants to be left holding the bag. Money shifts into other assets for years and tech employment, incomes, and the availability of funding takes a big hit.

As to your comment about profitability... every unprofitable company is on a path to be profitable. Some even get there.

Plus, look at it this way: Kellogg's is a profitable company and a part of almost every person's life. Does this make them worth trillions of dollars? No, they just provide boring, commodity products, their valuation is basically a low multiple of the assets they hold and the revenues they bring. There's a future where OpenAI or Anthropic are more powerful than all the world's governments combined, but also a future where they're Kellog's.

> I do think the valuations are quite and they would need to meet the reality, but don’t think there’s gonna be a crash or we’d ever go back to pre-AI era. It would more or less would be a correction to valuations.

Something to consider: would your description also apply to the dot-com boom of the late 1990s? The internet was real, the ideas for internet business were real, and we were not going to the previous reality. But the valuations weren't quite right and a "correction" happened at some point.

When people talk about AI crash, that's what they mean. Not that AI is a hoax, but that the correction could be quite violent and have effects on the broader economy.

That's like saying "politicians are crooked, so every bad thing you can think of about politicians must be true". It doesn't and we shouldn't fall for it.

In fact, the one industry where enshittification is widely embraced is our own, so I guess maybe it's projection?... Most other goods and services are not deliberately designed to get worse over time. We're the masters of giving people something cool for free and then progressively worsening their experience until they're forced to pay.

Things like appliances don't get worse on purpose. They sometimes get worse as a combination of market pressures and regulations. Take fridges: you can buy a full-sized kitchen fridge for less than $600, that's kinda crazy? And yes, it probably won't last a lifetime, and they won't make it serviceable because it's not worth servicing given today's labor costs - if your bonded-and-certified repairman quotes you $500, you're going to toss it out either way.

It's not just emotions, it's also a matter of time and uncertainty.

I was in a buying situation where my old lease was expiring soon, I had a second kid on the way, and the last thing I'd have wanted is to buy a place where I'd have contractors milling around for weeks or months to make various repairs. I was willing to pay a hefty premium for a place that's in a move-in condition.

I don't think this extends to "you'll get $10k less if you don't vacuum", but it's a common courtesy on a million-dollar transaction to maybe not leave a mess.

The page is entirely AI-generated and each piece is written with the same silly thesis (things used to be better and then they ruined everything). I see why this works, but it's frankly disappointing to see so many smart people fall for it over and over again. There's no human on the other end of these essays that believes these things. They're not true and not meant to be true. Yes, they're what we want to hear, but that shouldn't be enough.

As to why it exists: when generation of content costs next to nothing, I think that question is harder to pin. The basic answer is "clicks".

Indoor GPS reception is spotty, especially in urban / high-rise environments, so I don't think that's a realistically marketable product. Not unless you some have some window- or balcony-mounted probe, which would then require battery changes (although I suppose you could make it solar-powered).

I can't decide how I feel about this article. On one hand, it's great. It's great that the author wanted to get something done, and thanks to the marvels of modern tech, they could do it with very little effort.

But on the other hand... gosh, this was about the simplest software engineering challenge imaginable (toggle some I/O pins) and the simplest design task imaginable (make a featureless rectangular box). And the author - a technologist! - isn't just saying "I wanted to try out some new tech". They're saying "this was too hard, I needed help from an LLM" ("would absolutely not be able to meet this challenge", "hit another wall").

And that... I mean, I just don't know what to make of this. Were we always like this? Are LLMs making us like this? Is it good? Is it bad?... and don't give me the calculator analogy...