kmaitreys

Can you clarify a bit more about the this two orders of magnitude? In what context? Sure, they have "agency" and can do more than outputting text, but I would like see a proper example of this claim.

I see the point.

Regarding changing the perception, I think you did not understand the underlying distrust. I will try to use your examples.

It's a moderate size project. There are two scenarios: author used git/some VCS or they did not use it. If they did not use it, that's quite weird, but maybe fine. If they did use git, then perhaps they squashed commits. But at certain point they did exist. Let's assume all these commits were pristine. It's 16K loc, so there must be decent number of these pristine commits that were squashed. But what was the harm in leaving them?

So these commits must have been made of both clean commits as well as broken commits. But we have seem this author likes to squash commits. Hmm, so why didn't they do it before and only towards the end?

Yes, I have been introduced to a new perception but it's the world does not work "if X, then not Y principles." And this is a case where the two things being discussed are not mutually exclusive like you are assuming. But I appreciate this conversation because I learnt importance and advantages of keeping clean commit history and I will take that into account next time reaching to the conclusion that it's just another one-shot LLM generated project. But nevertheless, I will always consider the latter as a reasonable possibility.

I hope the nuance is clear.

Fair enough. Thanks for the clarification. Personally, I think, everything before a versioned release (even something like 0.1) can be messy. But from your point I can see it that a cleaner history will have advantages.

Further, I guess if author is expecting contributions to the code in the future, it might be more "professional" for the commits to only the ones which are relevant.

My own projects, I consider, are just for my own learning and understanding so I never cared about this, but I do see the point now.

Regardless, I think it still remains a reasonable sign of someone doing one-shot agent-driven code generation.

Hmm I can see that. Some people are like that. I sometimes swear in my commit messages.

For me it's quite funny to sometimes read my older commit messages. To each of their own.

But my opinion on this is same as it is with other things that have become tell-tale signs of AI generated content. If something you used to do starts getting questioned as AI generated content, it's better to change that approach if you find it getting labelled as AI generated, offensive.

Leak what?

Can you explain the philosophy behind this? Why do this, what is the advantage? Genuinely asking, as I'm not a programmer by profession. I commit often irrespective of the state of the code (it may not even compile). I understand git commit as a snapshot system. I don't expect each commit to be pristine, working version.

Lot of people in this thread have argued for squashing but I don't see why one would do that for a personal project. In large scale open source or corporate projects I can imagine they would like to have clean commit histories but why for a personal project?

I would be very concerned about someone working on a 16k loc codebase without a VCS.

I mostly I agree with what you said. Comparison with a google project is bad though. That's a corporate business with a lot of people that might touch that codebase. Why are you comparing that to someone's personal project?

Also I can see you and I both agree that it's disingenuous to call all LLM generated content slop. I think slop has just become a provocative buzzword at this point.

Regarding drawing the line, at the end, it comes down to the person using the tools. What others think as these tools become more and more pervasive will become irrelevant. If you as a person outsourced your thinking than it's you who will suffer.

In all my comments, I personally never used the word slop for this project but maintained that LLMs were used significantly. I still think that. Your other comparison of LLMs with things like doxygen or translation tools is puzzling to me. Also points about hammering every nail and every comma are just strawman. 5-6 years ago from today people used these things and nobody had any issues. There's a reason why people dislike LLM use though. If you cannot understand why it frustrates people, then I don't know what to say.

Also people do write assembly by hand when it is required.

I understand your position. If I were in your place where someone else posted my personal (?)/hobby project on a public forum where it got discussed more on the point if it was LLM generated or not rather than the more interesting technical bits, I would also be frustrated.

Regarding the writing style, it's unfortunate that LLMs have claimed a lot of writing styles from us. My personal opinion is to avoid using these AI-isms but I completely get that for people who wrote like that from the start, it's quite annoying that their own writing is now just labelled as LLM generated content.

While I would not call this AI slop, the probability that LLMs were used is high.

> It's really demeaning to call someone's hard work "AI slop".

I agree. I browsed through some files and found AI-like comments in the code. The readme and several other places have AI-like writing. Regarding author not spending time on this project, this is presumably a 16k loc project that was commited in a single commit two days ago. So the author never commited any draft/dev version in the time. I find that quite hard to believe. Again my opinion is that LLMs were used, not that the code is slop. It may be. It may not be.

Yes this whole comment chain is the top comment misreading LLVM as LLMs which is hilarious.

> My beef isn't with you personally, it's with this almost auto-generated trend of comments on HN calling everyone's work "AI slop".

Now this doesn't necessarily is about this particular project but if you post something on a public forum for reactions then you are seeking the time of the people who will read and interact with it. So if they encounter something that the original author did not even bother to write, why should they read it? You're seeing many comments like that because there's just a lot of slop like that. And I think people should continue calling that out.

Again, this project specifically may or may not be slop. So here the reactions are a bit too strong.

What do you mean by harnesses?

It's quite amusing the one time I did not make an anti-AI comment, I got called a clanker myself.

I'm glad the mood here is shifting towards the right side.

Can you prove that this is what happened?

It's actually quite easy to spot if LLMs were used or not.

Very few total number of commits, AI like documentation and code comments.

But even if LLMs were used, the overall project does feel steered by a human, given some decisions like not using bloated build systems. If this actually works then that's great.

That's right. Historically, nebula was anything that looked cloudy, so a lot of astrophysical objects that we now understand are distinct, were simply labelled as nebulous. M31, as you said, being a great example.

Modern astrophysics still carries the baggage of obsolete terminology to this day, from names of objects to names of units.

I feel uncomfortable labelling nebulae as collection of stars. The more appropriate term is stellar nursery if you want to allude to their role in star formation.

They themselves are just clouds of gas and dust where protostars have begun to form.

Stellar clusters are what you would call a collection of stars.

Also on the note of cosmology and astrophysics being strikingly young fields, I think that's fair statement if we consider their modern definitions. Although their core ideas have already been discussed in a lot of ancient civilizations. It was a lot more philosophical and less rooted in science though (except for the observational astronomy, which remains perhaps one of the oldest scientific discipline).

Well that's not what the claim and clarification was about. The question was: can a mountain rise higher in the equator as compared to higher latitudes?

It is not about highest point from centre of Earth. That's is related to equatorial bulge but irrelevant to the discussion.

Not a geologist either but an astronomer. Never heard that tectonic activity has any association with proximity to equator.

Mountains can rise higher near equator because you have the least gravity there. The whole Earth bulges along the equator. But I don't think it's measurable.

Something that looks and sounds impressive but in the end not of much substance.

This will be true for next 2 years, 4 years, next decade, few decades. Until the state of the art ML paradigm remains language models.

Weird analogy. This makes sense if you liken this automatic editor to a LSP or compiler of the language you're writing in.

The more I read about things like this more I realize that software engineering today's just bloat and grunt work that people want to escape.

It's so ironic because computers/computer programs were literally invented to avoid doing grunt work.

I see this retort pasted everywhere. What exactly are you referring to? I think it's fair to assume any competent person never spends their brain in what may be considered as rote in the first place. If one was doing that, well it's unfortunate.

I just keep coming to the conclusion about devs who use agents or other AI tooling extensively: these are programmers who did not like to program.

> Open source" is no longer about "Hey I built this tool and everyone should use it".

Was open source ever about that? I thought it was "Hey I built this tool and I'm putting it on internet if anyone wants to use it" often accompanied by a license saying "no warranties".

> It feels like pretty soon, no one is going to just have a bunch of apps on their phone written by other people. They're going to have a small set of apps custom built for exactly the things they're trying to do day to day

I think today's AI tools like Agents are for people who are programmers but don't want to program, not ones who aren't programmers and don't want to program. As in, "no one is going to..." is a very broad statement to make for an average person who just uses apps on thier phone. Your average person will not start vibe coding their own apps just because they can (because they couldn't care less).

Half the comments on this forum itself have this incessant it's not X, it's y" pattern.

i would think humans would start writing in a way that doesn't scream ai generated writing by now, or perhaps the internet is truly dead

It's a great collection. Do check out "The Dead Past" as well (it's the first story in the version I have).

I have it in print. As part of Isaac Asimov: The Complete Stories Volume 1 (Published by Harper Voyager)

I got some additional context from another reply. Your replies are vague and don't clear things for me. Just like the article.

In your earlier reply you said relevancy of something was subjective. No. Inference of facts from given information by each person may be subjective. But the information itself, must never be influenced by the subjectivity stemming from the information provider.

I get that revealing some information which maybe considered sensitive will be used by awful people. But that doesn't apply here. You cannot withhold information on the pretense that it will be used maliciously. Otherwise it's no different that dystopian stories of catching criminals before they commit crime.

Thanks for more context. Yeah the article seems very neutered (I think it's fair to say lying by omission, especially to me who just learn about the incident through this thread/this article). I think that's the whole argument. Wikipedia is not news and you cannot get first hand full context picture from it.

Instead, like everything else, it's another opinionated aggregator of information.

Your incompetence doesn't imply everybody else's.

Your examples are not equivalent at all. Why do you think the person was bullied? It's additional information that makes the picture clear, which is the purpose of an encyclopedia.

Any information which is relevant to the subject of article and brings clarity should not be censored, ideally.

Also if you could understand what I'm saying, you would realise I'm not asking to put birth names of every trans person with a wikipedia article in their article. Because it's not relevant.

You keep mentioning "harm" but never exactly describe what harm? What more harm can you imagine for a person who committed suicide due to bullying?