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Comment by roxolotl | Hacker News Reader

Wow I’d never have expected Kate Davies to show up on Hacker News. I think it’s important to understand her background a bit when she talks about knitting as a matter of life and death. She was a scholar of 18th century literature before she suffered a stroke young[0]. She focused on knitting as a means of recovery and never looked back. She built a business and a community and attributes a lot of her physical and mental health to knitting.

So while this post hopefully hits a chord for anyone in a creative field she embodies a particular type of person for whom slop is a genuine risk to their being. Not their job; their whole personhood. In a world where slop has chased out the humanity of things and the bullshit machines fill all content what are the chances someone like her could build a second life better than her first?

0: https://katedaviesdesigns.com/2015/01/28/five-years-on-part-...

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Wild. This kind of empowerment and long lived effort is the type of story we should be sharing.

I'm concerned that we've taken an amazing character like this and turned the world against her for frankly a bet against human intellectual development.

> Not their job; their whole personhood

I hate so much that while I read your reply this particularly phrasing was grating to me.

There's nothing wrong with it, and I have no doubts you, whoever you are, wrote it.

What annoys me to death is that a perfectly fine language construct is tarnished to a point that a mere glance reflexively caused me to wince, and I had to actively interpret it as fine.

Interesting, sounds like a similar experience to my reading of this reply

The root comment brings insight and value and stakes out a human position. I don’t see a need to snipe from the hedges

I think maybe they were saying that their personal AI slop detector had produced a false positive on "whole personhood", and they felt sad about that? Or perhaps I'm missing it.

Correct. Perhaps I originally phrased it poorly?

I am annoyed at my slop detector firing at something completely benign.

It’s not just you. I reread it and it really struck me as odd too lol. I wrote it in bed after just having woken up maybe 5min earlier(note to self what does this say about my internet use habits?).

This does make me wonder if consuming AI writing will cause the style to be subconsciously picked up.

For me it did. I used dashes very often when writing prior to AI, and now I mostly replaced it with semicolon.

I am also actively avoiding the same construct you used (not X; Y). It is particularly annoying as I used this very frequently as a rhetorical tool.

And ultimately, I think this is sad. Communication is now less optimal as one has to evaluate if the other is just regurgitating AI. Ideas are important, but so are their shape.

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