Hacker News Reader

I’m glad people will have to evaluate the substance of the deck rather than using a cheap heuristic like how visually appealing the presentation is.

I understand there tends to be a correlation between visual appeal and effort, and correlation between effort and merit, but correlation is notoriously flawed. Flawed models can be useful, but only if one qualifies their use sufficiently. I don’t think most people who used are using the aesthetics heuristic you mention to gauge merit are using it rigorously to sharpen their thinking, they’re using it as a shortcut to prevent themselves from needing to think.

An equally plausible scenario to that of which you mention is that technical people can make presentations that are similarly visually appealing as the non-technical people, and that their opinions will be valued more than before. Maybe this will happen, maybe this won’t happen, but I am certain that we do not know yet.

I really love this take. AI both increases and decimates the ability of people to BS you with fancy graphics and text.

The apparent quality of our pull request messages and documentation is sky high (at least from a language and grammar perspective), but I do miss the days of hand crafted prose, it was easier to tell the low effort crap from the gold.

From Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design:

A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately.

Presentation will always be important as long as humans are involved because we're biologically wired to be attracted to good-looking things. Now I do think that what we associate with "good" will violently change, as it always does (look at fashion).

My guess is that verbosity will be an immediate turnoff, em dashes another immediate turnoff, and we'll value ooga booga conciseness over all other aesthetics. We've already unknowingly begun to move in that direction with the minimalism trend.

> The purpose of making a powerpoint deck before a meeting is rarely the value of a deck. Rather it is signaling that someone spent some time actually organizing their thoughts instead of bloviating spontaneously.

> All of this is lost with AI led design. Producing designed artifacts are free and instant. Yeah you will impress the old folks for a year or so who haven't caught onto the joke.

I was at an AI/LLM themed hackathon recently. At the end the winning teams presented what they’d done.

The slides were all AI generated, which was fair given the theme and the short time they had at the end to prepare to say something (~10 minutes given to prepare after winners were announced, and before that all teams were spending all the three or so hours we had fully focused on the tasks rather than wasting time making presentations about what had been done).

Still felt a bit weird to see someone speak with slides that were as surprising to themselves as it was to the audience. Like I said, no shade on them in this case given the theme of the hackathon. But it does make me wonder how the future will be at many jobs where “velocity”/“productivity” is so much in the focus that unreviewed LLM generated slides becomes the norm. Hopefully not.

Obviously if you make the slides yourself then you'd know the content well.

The way of using these tools is not to one-shot your slide deck (unless you have plenty time to learn the content) but give it a base product you've already worked on and ask it to make it pretty, interesting, etc. and perhaps make small changes to the content which you'd review and learn.

You can probably use a knife as a fork but it wouldn't be the best way of using the knife.

> The way of using these tools is not to one-shot your slide deck

This line of thinking IMO is hopelessly naive. Yes, the responsible way to use AI and perhaps the way _you_ use it is to do some formatting/cleaning up/enhancement of slides that you primarily authored yourself. The reality is that _most_ people are using and will use AI as a way to breeze through as much work as possible either out of laziness or pressure and their "reviews" will primarily consist of "LGTM." Which is going to lead to an explosion of "did you even read this?" or "did you even test this?"-style disasters.

It’s even worse when you cant push back with “did you even read this”, because the politics haven’t evolved to constrain the slop.

We are getting pre-solutioned massive epics, dozens of files, from senior leaders (non-ICs); when shit goes sideways, what do you do? Our jobs are already at risk just in general, and we have new KPIs around generative AI (as do those senior leaders). I’m not sticking my neck out get chopped off.

Just last week I had to make some shit up in my uplevel status report to shift blame away from an AVP. Technically it’s my fault, for not digging into the 30 files (and tanking my own metrics,m); I don’t even feel like it matters - the devs just hand that off to an LLM anyway to meet their KPIs. I’m just thankful it didn’t go to prod.

For some reason, I read "LGTM" as "Let's Go to Market," and spooked myself with the realization that that's absolutely the way this is all headed.

I beg people to send me their prompts rather than the stochastic text expanded drivel they send me as memos/plans/etc... Massive waste of my time responding to ghosts - actually taking 10 pages seriously that often the "author" has barely read. I'd much rather get some unstructured bullet points if those are actually a person's ideas.

I love AI. Used well it's a massive enhancer to make things. But yeah whats the value of a presentation that the presenter is also seeing for the first time. Not just zero. Since it wasted everyone's time and bandwidth the value is negative.

Almost 20 years ago, a professor I had in grad school agreed to let me submit my very detailed outline rather than filling in all the text to turn it into paragraphs. It's still the way I write presentations where I'll be speaking.

Maybe the "fill in the paragraphs" step was always unnecessary and we've finally stopped making people do it.

Look I'm speaking here as a career designer:

I think design as a "signaling function" for determining the quality of a thing was already broken. It was already possible to put up an impressive-looking site for anything; already possible to to dupe people with cheap product wrapped in fancy packaging.

Movies with insane budgets that spend forever in production are often still terrible. One of my favorite songs was written by the artist in a hotel room on a Sunday afternoon.

One thing to consider: if it's cheap and immediate to wrap any content in design, it can now also be cheap and immediate to customize the design of content. Maybe we can finally return to a user-focused internet like the one that was promised to us by browser custom style sheets.

Finally, I can see democratizing design in this way will make more content more pleasant to look a (which is a win). And we'll also make better decisions with design out of the decision matrixes it doesn't belong in (another win).

One use of design is signaling, but not all - successful design is that which fulfills its purpose.

Many designed things do not need to be differentiated and will benefit from a homogenous AI-powered design (internal documentation, local service business communications, etc) in the same way that desktop publishing replaced hand or type-written notes but did not replace professional designers (although it did require them to learn digital tooling).

For designs that do benefit from being differentiated it'll be interesting to see what happens. If anything, AI homogeneity provides more opportunity for talented human designers who can provide "design alpha" beyond whatever trends the LLMs sucked up in their last crawl.

Human communication moves ever closer to its final form: bullet pointed lists of lower case text and emoji

  > bullet pointed lists of lower case text and emoji

preferably in caveman prose to save tokens, shit is getting expensive...

https://medium.com/luminasticity/art-as-a-tool-for-storing-m...

>The modern world is design rich and art poor. That is to say that with the introduction of mass production it became possible to distribute everywhere items that in previous eras would have been seen as full of Mana, but now, not unique — they have none.

That was in reference to mass produced design, but it seems to apply 10X to AI produced Art.

> The inevitable outcome here is that designed materials become so generic and infinitely produceable that they become worthless background noise.

Hopefully. The process has taken way too long. Compare to something similar like PowerPoint animations. Fun the first time you see them, and then annoying after that.

The best possible side effect of the cost of producing content dropping to zero would be more effort spent honing a message into its most concentrated form.

This is why I beg people to send me their raw prompts rather than the output of running that prompt through a generic LLM. Same semantic content in a half page prompt as the 10 page stochastic text expansion LLM memo version but 1. takes me 1/10th the time to process and 2. I'm not forced to guess which ideas are real ideas I need to respond to and which are just text expansion ghosts.

The medium becomes the message

That idea around LLMs reducing the signaling value of certain types of work is very interesting, and I hadn’t really thought about it.

I think about this effect with targeted advertising a lot, every since I read this article about why targeted advertising is so useless for both consumers and advertisers, even when it seems like on the surface it should be better for both: https://zgp.org/targeted-advertising-considered-harmful/

Once it becomes very cheap to do something, it becomes completely useless as a way to differentiate quality from crap.

This is true if you that assume the only purpose of design is aesthetic differentiation. There actually is a lot of science in how you scan information in a design, how it's presented, the visual hierarchy, grouping and things that actually have utility in and off itself.

It could also be that It just shifts the burden from execution to strategy.

It's not enough anymore to have someone push nice pixels for you.

You'll need to consider if your design aligns with how you want to position yourself wrt to other players in your space.

And the result will be people creating their own flawed but unique designs as a counter signal. Think of the early internet and the janky but wonderfully personal websites it spawned.

I don't disagree, but I'm not sure I see the point you're trying to make.

Maybe ask your LLM to explain it?

Ah, I see, you weren't making a point, fair enough.

Everything is already pretty homogenous I wouldn't blame AI for this.

True. But this makes it easier to stand out in a sea of monotony.

Everything goes back to plain text. Would be kind of nice.

It's cheap. That's all.

As someone who also designs, the few web page designs I saw produced by LLMs were ugly, generic, not accessible… unusable.

Even after prompting, I had to throw away all. No useful ideas just slop.

I’m sure there’s a lot to philosophize about a distant future when these work, but right now a waste of time.