It does, but what does that say about the state of communication in our industry? I've seen a lot of writing that reads like an AI produced it in contexts where I could be pretty sure no AI was involved. We want to sound professional, so we sanitize how we write so much that it becomes... whatever this current situation is.
No offense intended to @yz-yu, by the way. I miss the times when more people wrote in an eccentric style -- like Steve Yegge -- but that doesn't detract from what you wrote.
The comments here turned out much more interesting than I expected—this has become a great place to discuss the difference between AI-generated, AI-written, and AI-assisted content.
So let me start from @jbarrow's comment: "AI written, generated from the codebase."
My actual learning process looked like this:
1. I walked through the nano-vLLM codebase, asking Claude Code some high-level questions to warm up.
2. Then I asked detailed questions one by one, let it explore, and double-checked the code myself. As someone without an ML background, it sometimes took hours to understand a single concept.
3. Once I felt I understood enough, I started drawing Excalidraw diagrams to explain what I learned.
Does this count as "generated from the codebase"? I don't think so.
Where we might disagree is the writing process.
As a non-native English speaker, my workflow looks like this:
1. Write a short paragraph (<100 words), then ask my writing agent to "fix this for readability and grammar."
2. Review the output. *If it changes any technical meaning, I correct it.* I consider this a responsible way to write a tech blog.
3. Move to the next paragraph.
Is this "AI-written"? I'd call it "AI-assisted." Every idea in every sentence is mine. Honestly, things like "em dashes" never stood out to me when reviewing. I suspect that's common for non-native speakers.
I wrote this comment the same way. The LLM fixed 14 grammar mistakes that I think would distract readers more than any LLM-ish phrasing.
That said, I'm open to suggestions on how to improve my writing process :)
> I wrote this comment the same way. The LLM fixed 14 grammar mistakes that I think would distract readers more than any LLM-ish phrasing.
I don't think that assumption is correct. As you can see by the discussion we're having here, the LLM "fixed" text is actually quite distracting, while text written by a reasonably proficient non-native speaker is generally perfectly readable. It's only if your English is extremely poor to non-existant that it makes more sense to use machine translation or editing rather than writing it yourself.
One problem is that people are becoming quite sensitive to slop, where people just post completely unreviewed, AI generated text. It's quite frustrating, because it's asking readers to read something that no one has ever bothered to write, and it frequently crowds out discussion that people are more interested in. So everyone is kind of hyper-sensitive to signs of AI written text right now, which means when you start to see such signs, your brain moves over to trying to interpret whether it's AI generated rather than reading the text itself.
Yeah, people do seem to think that em dashes are an indicator of GenAI. I have been accused of using AI to write my posts on a forum, precisely because of em dashes. That's how I found out about that particular sniff test people use.
Hasn't made me change the way I write, though. Especially because I never actually type an em dash character myself. Back when I started using computers, we only had ASCII, so I got used to writing with double dashes. Nowadays, a lot of software is smart enough to convert a double dash into an em dash. Discourse does that and that's how I ended up being accused of being an AI bot.
Getting rid of malware is good. A private for-profit company exercising its power over the Internet, not so much. We should have appropriate organizations for this.
The proxies is the reason why you get spam in your Google search result, spam in your Play store (by means of fake good reviews), basically spam in anything user generated.
It directly affects Google and you, I don’t see why they should not do this.
Spam in Google search results is due to Google happily taking money from the spammers in exchange for promoting their spam, or that the spam sites benefit Google indirectly by embedding Google Ads/Analytics.
I don't see any spam in Kagi, so clearly there is a way to detect and filter it out. Google is simply not doing so because it would cut into their profits.
"SEO spammers being more advanced than multi-billion-dollar search conglomerate" is a myth. Spam sites have an obvious objective: display ads, shill affiliate links or sell products. All these have to be visible, since an ad or product you can't see/buy is worthless. It is trivial to train a classifier to detect these.
But let's play devil's advocate and say you are right and spammers are successfully outsmarting Google - well, Kagi does use Google results via SerpAPI by their own admission, meaning they too should have those spam results. Yet they somehow manage to filter them out with a fraction of the resources available to Google itself with no negative impact on search quality.
> I've often dreamed of a system where normal users, give money as a promotion for a certain issue to be fixed or even created
It might be good to have such a system as an option, but I wouldn't want it to become an expectation. I've got a couple of side projects that are out on GitHub. They have open source licenses and anyone is welcome to fork them, send bug reports, or pull requests, but I don't want to have any obligation of supporting those projects.
One of my favorite details about Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" is the name he chose for his main character: Hiro Protagonist. It's not just a lovely bit of wordplay, it immediately makes you think about whether the protagonist is a "hero" or not.
This overloaded meaning of the word "hero" is especially pertinent when discussing the differences between the interpretation of "hero" in US culture and other cultures. Outside overt dictatorships, the US is the only country I know of where people are taught that anyone who serves or served in the military is automatically a "hero", regardless of whether they've actually done anything that would normally be considered heroic.
That's something a bit odd about Douglas Adams's reply. Arthur Dent isn't heroic, but he's the hapless protagonist. The protagonist doesn't have to be a hero. I'm not sure in what way he has "non-heroic heroism".
As GP pointed out, "hero" is a word with overloaded semantics. I think Adams was using different semantics for different occurrences of "hero" in that phrase. Arthur Dent has a "heroism", as in a kind of courage that people would want to emulate, without being "heroic", as in performing great sacrifices for a noble cause.
I also believe Adams was trying to point out, very gently, the same cultural difference I called out in the comment I replied to, i.e. that the American culture attaches certain expectations and connotations to the word "hero" not because they are intrinsic to it, but because of American bias.
"We can fix it later" is not the staple of Marketing Driven Development. It's not why Windows has been getting more user-hostile and invasive, why its user experience has been getting worse and worse.
Enshittification is not primarily caused by "we can fix it later", because "we can fix it later" implies that there's something to fix. The changes we've seen in Windows and Google Search and many other products and services are there because that's what makes profit for Microsoft and Google and such, regardless of whether it's good for their users or not.
You won't fix that with AI. Hell, you couldn't even fix Windows with AI. Just because the company is making greedy, user-hostile decisions, it doesn't mean that their software is simple to develop. If you think Windows will somehow get better because of AI, then you're oversimplifying to an astonishing degree.
Every place where the marketing types are making us take on dev workloads has always deprioritized bugs. The only place I ever worked at where I felt like I could get things done, and done correctly, all the managers were former devs, including the director, and didn't waste any time taking crap from anyone if the dev needed time to make sure he got something done and done correctly. That didn't mean a license to waste time by any means, but it meant we knew we could get things done correctly. Some of our products were completely off the grid once published and might not see updates for months, years, or ever again.
I've lost count of people who have read Tolkien's work and never dug deeper than "cool fantasy story" level. I was no different when I read the Lord of the Rings as a teenager. Unlike C. S. Lewis, Tolkien does not shove his message down your throat.
We have technofascists trying to bring AI into the military and saying it's Star Trek. Star Trek! One of the most clearly socialist, "woke" tv series! Media literacy is not a conservative value while illiteracy and ignorance is.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? If all ICE did was deport immigrants, following the established laws and procedures, I would agree with you. As it stands, ICE is more evil, because they are abusing power and breaking laws they are supposed to uphold. And they're able to do so because people like you enabled those who are letting ICE get away with it.
> There's a lot of thinking that Congress won't allow Trump to withdraw from NATO
I wonder how that is supposed to work when the Executive branch has proven they can do whatever they want regardless of the other two branches. The rules are worthless if there are no consequences for breaking them.
> Then I thought "why not just remove the borrow checker?" without any real motivation.
Reminds me of a chemistry kit I had as a kid. None of this tame, safe stuff you can buy these days. Mine was a gift from my dad and I never thought of asking him where he dug it up, but it had stuff like pure sulfuric acid in it.
One day, when I was done with all of the experiments I had planned to do, I decided to mix a few things and heat them up, just for fun, without any real motivation other than "let's see what happens".
Let's just say I was lucky we only had to replace some of the clothes my mom had left out for me to put away. ;)
> Another point is, as you guys are well aware, the borrow checker will reject some valid programs in order to never pass any invalid program. What if I'm sure about what I'm doing and I don't want that check to run?
Then you do it using the "unsafe" keyword, and you think long and hard about how to design and structure the code so that the unsafe code is small in scope, surface, and blast radius.
That's precisely what unsafe code is for: to get around the borrow checker and assert you know what you're doing. Of course, if you're wrong, that means your program will blow up, but at least you know that the culprit is hiding in one of those unsafe areas, rather than literally anywhere in the whole codebase.
Alternately, you can switch to a language with a different ethos.
The ethos of Rust is caring for memory safety so much that you willingly limit yourself in terms of what kind of code you write and you only step out of those limits reluctantly and with great care. That's something that resonates with a lot of people and Rust has been built on top of that for years.
If you suddenly take the product of those years of hard work, strip out the foundation it has been built on, and unironically offer it as a good idea, a lot of people won't like it and will tell you so. Mind, I'm not excusing the personal attacks, I'm just explaining the reaction.
No offense intended to @yz-yu, by the way. I miss the times when more people wrote in an eccentric style -- like Steve Yegge -- but that doesn't detract from what you wrote.