Agents get a little upset when you ask them to do this and then check their work with a hook. They do not enjoy the process and create some weird looking text!
Dude, it's a text prediction engine. It can no more "enjoy" a process than a
stapler enjoys poking wire through paper.
Don't kid yourself. It's the first step down a slippery slope, one that ends
in assigning gender to a bunch of statistics, falling in love with it, and a
lot of terrible software, writing, pictures, and so on. It's a machine. Make
sure not to anthropomorphise inanimate machinery.
I couldn't get past all the network errors on OpenCode. Seemed smart enough, and was useful when I was low on usage on Claude, but beyond that, really hard for me to say whether it was Good or Bad.
I asked it to create a design system in Paper, and it actually did a fairly decent job when it wasn't getting network errors. I'd say it's much, much closer to good than bad.
Handcrafted software will find it's own market the same way that handcrafted clothing, furniture and other previously industrialized goods that became commodities did. They'll be more expensive generally and it'll be a smaller market overall, you'll always have some people who will love them all the same. Not my choice, but I can understand why they would want it.
The difference is that one is physical and the other digital. Digital art, even if exceptionally high quality, has been commoditized by artists from developing countries asking dumping wages, and not recovered since. People who have enough money to buy for the "soul" of an object, and the labor behind it, usually buy physical.
I doubt it. Software is, well, software. Most people have their aesthetic preferences in regard to clothing or furniture, and aesthetics of these are obvious to anyone. Code that runs on a device and implements some functionality is not like it. It is more like infrastructure - nobody cares about handcrafted sewage pipes. Plumbers possibly can have strong preferences regarding plumbing, but other people don't.
I agree with you but I believe the definition of handcrafted will shift to include software produced partly by AI, just as most handcrafted things involve industrial machinary at some point.
But then, I can also imagine a world where nobody cares enough about writing code and instead we have "human designed software" just as we currently have human designed cars and fridges but few made by hand (and no market for them). Then, handwritten software becomes an impressive curiosity like Chris Sawyer's original Rollercoaster Tycoon written entirely in ASM.
Etsy like situation is very possibly. Where people will simply lie about something being handcrafted to sell it at some sort of premium. And then when questioned defend it with reasoning like everyone else is doing it or it doesn't matter or it is actually superior.
Raising the is–ought fallacy here i s a category mistake that weakens the author’s argument.
“Software is about people” argues:
> I used to think software was fundamentally about code. Experience taught me that I was mistaken. Software is fundamentally an artifact made by people, for people’s purposes, and its success depends on them.
“Software ought to be about people” says:
> Software isn’t necessarily about people, but I believe it should be.
You may argue the latter, but I think the OP believes software is already shaped by humans .
Previously, I had done a fair amount of research into how Google's monopoly on web crawling further entrenches their monopoly in the search engine market. You can read more about this here, https://knuckleheads.club, there is a long report from ~2020 or so that explains how it worked at the time. The club is mothballed, I am doing other things with my life, and I'm happy to say that we played a very small role in the DOJ ordering Google to share their crawl data with qualified competitors (a work in progress, but it's progressing).
Chatbots have super charged this dynamic though, to the point that it is showing up in the robots.txt data. The last few weeks I've been having Claude rerun some old analysis of Common Crawl from back then, when I have spare usage and time. What I've found is that you can see pretty clearly the rise in people outright blocking AI chatbot related crawlers likely because of how aggressive they have become.
GPTBot is OpenAI, ClaudeBot is Anthropic, CCBot is Common Crawl, Google-Ext is a way for website owners to indicate they don't want their content to be used for AI, Bytespider is Bytedance, Bing and Google are the last two. Take these numbers with a truck of salt, haven't had time to verify them.
It's very clear that website owners do not like getting their content scraped and are indicating to GPTBot et al. that they are not welcome. It's a shame that CCBot is caught in the cross fire, but that's life. Bing and Google are doing just fine though, almost like having significant power in the search engine market gives you an advantage in other markets too. Who knew!
RIP to a real one. Have you considered using one billion Chinese residential ips to address your problem? I’ve heard one billion Chinese residential ips really does the trick here.
Reminds me of the idea of Radical Monopolies from Ivan Illich in a way. If a technology or service becomes so wide spread within society, even though many different versions of the technology or service may exist, a Radical Monopoly means that non users will suffer for their non use. Cars and non drivers in cities are the typical example. And I wonder, whether mathematicians who don't user theorem provers will soon suffer under the tyranny of the theorem provers, whether it be Lean or one of the others.
I immediately thought that’s not totally fair due to the size of the Netherlands vs other countries.
I asked Mistral to do an analysis: nearly zero R^2 for car ownership vs log country area, and it’s the same with proportion of urban population in OECD countries.
Netherlands isn’t very different from peers in car ownership, they just treat cyclists very well it seems.
This is a total tangent, just found it interesting.
As it turns out, people live in cities[1]. The amount of empty space a country has outside of cities doesn't have much bearing on navigation and infrastructure inside cities.
Right, but there’s zero correlation between urban population percentage and cars per capita either, which was surprising to me. I’d have expected a vague logistic curve.
I ran this through an AI checker and it flagged half of it immediately. @dang, I know Substack just enabled Pangram integration, is there anyway you could get Y Combinator to spring for a Pangram subscription for the front page or something ?
Yes, I am asking if that particular policy could be changed. A little AI here and there is fine, to each their own, but I would prefer not to read posts that are overwhelmingly so.
It's one thing for us to detect and autokill generated comments on our own site; it's our site and we can set the rules and run software on our own servers to process the comments and handle things in the way we and the community are happy with.
It's a big additional leap to for our software to try to reach into others' sites, get through any anti-bot defenses they may be running, try to scrape their content and evaluate on whether it's sufficiently human-authored to be on HN.
There's generally a wider range of LLM involvement with a long-form post than the typical, relatively brief HN comment, which then opens the way for more debate on HN about "how much" LLM influence the post has and how much should be allowed on HN. Part of what we're trying to optimize for on HN is minimizing offtopic/meta discussion, so we don't want to encourage this kind of debate.
Our heuristic about article quality is largely unchanged from before LLMs were an issue: if an article is badly written, it shouldn't be on HN, and should be flagged.
You should talk with dang, as the email I received about this from him, to my eyes, does not agree with your stance here in the long term. I don’t want to get into the interminable blood quantum debate over Llm authorship either, however, I see substack doing something about it, and, as a long time hn reader, it makes me want to spend more time over there than here.
We're talking about it all the time :) My comment above doesn't contradict the email. I didn't say we're not wanting/planning to do anything about it, just that there's more to it than plugging in Pangram. If Substack is being more proactive about it on their own site, that's great. It would make life easier for all of us if all the major content platforms cleaned up their own sites. We're already proactive about detecting/autokilling genai comments posted to our own site. It's detecting genai content on 3rd party sites that introduces more complications.
In the meantime, please feel free to flag items that are badly written/unpleasant to read, and email us if something is on the front page that shouldn't be there.
There are AI-detection tools which exist. Even if those won't run against all URLs, using them where possible should provide some utility. HN already penalises sites based on various criteria, and if it takes hand-pasting some examples from a site to find that it is/isn't using AI slop, that's another option.
As to what should be tested: front-page items, possibly even a subset of those (top 10--15 of 30). That's going to be a limited set of items per day, though more than just 30. (I don't know how many items cycle through the front page on a daily basis, though I believe daily submissions as of 2022 were about 1,000/day (<https://web.archive.org/web/20220116193045/https://whaly.io/...>)).
Working this into the HN story-processing lifecycle might be a good call.
I'd much prefer not seeing a bunch of AI slop in submissions, by way of generated output. AI as part of the resarch process I think I could live with.
AI-generated content seems, definitionally, not to be intellectual in nature, and would seem to go against HN's prime directive. It also seems to make HN lose its collective mind, which has long been another mod consideration.
Congrats! I very much enjoyed my time at Recurse Center back when it was Hacker School and idly daydream about returning some time. Thanks for making something so great!
