anonymous_sorry (u/anonymous_sorry)

anonymous_sorry commented on To those who fired or didn't hire tech writers because of AI passo.uno/letter-those-wh... · Posted by u/theletterf

throwaw12 · a month ago

I will share my experience, hopefully it answers some questions to tech writers.

I was terrible writer, but we had to write good docs and make it easy for our customers to integrate with our products. So, I prepared the context to our tech writers and they have created nice documentation pages.

The cycle was (reasonably takes 1 week, depending on tech writer workload):

    1. prepare context
    2. create ticket to tech writers, wait until they respond
    3. discuss messaging over the call
    4. couple days later I get first draft
    5. iterate on draft, then finally publish it

Today its different:

    1. I prepare all the context and style guide, then feed them into LLM.
    1.1. context is extracted directly from code by coding agents 
    2. I proofread it and 97% of cases accept it, because it follows the style guide and mostly transforms my context correctly into customer consumable content
    3. Done. less than 20 minutes

Tech writers were doing amazing job of course, but I can get 90-95% quality in 1% of the time spend for that work.

anonymous_sorry · a month ago

Your docs are probably read many more times than they are written. It might be cheaper and quicker to produce them at 90% quality, but surely the important metric is how much time it saves or costs your readers?

anonymous_sorry commented on Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI skyview.social/?url=https... · Posted by u/christoph-heiss

bigyabai · 2 months ago

> I want no local storage anywhere near me other than maybe caches. No disks, no state, my world entirely in the network. Storage needs to be backed up and maintained, which should be someone else's problem, one I'm happy to pay to have them solve. [0]

I can't help but think Pike somewhat contributed to this pillaging.

[0] (2012) https://usesthis.com/interviews/rob.pike/

anonymous_sorry · 2 months ago

"I apologize to the world at large for my inadvertent, naive if minor role in enabling this assault"

anonymous_sorry commented on Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban reuters.com/legal/litigat... · Posted by u/chirau

pizza · 2 months ago

The platform operators have a responsibility to remove garbage from their site. I don’t see how it’s better if adults are the recipients of these alleged harms. And I definitely don’t see how the platform operators are going to clean up their act if — rather than being penalized — they can pretend that the problem has vanished into thin air because a specific category of vulnerable users is now de jure disappeared.

anonymous_sorry · 2 months ago

In the same way it's better that adults are the recipients of the harms of smoking, drinking or gambling. It's still not desirable, but societies have settled upon thresholds for when people have some capacity to take responsibility for their choices.

Not saying those thresholds are always right and should definitely apply in this case, but it surely isn't an alien or non-obvious concept.

anonymous_sorry commented on Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now dosaygo-studio.github.io/... · Posted by u/keepamovin

hbn · 2 months ago

"Hallucination" has always seemed like a misnomer to me anyway considering LLMs don't know anything. They just impressively get things right enough to be useful assuming you audit the output.

If anything, I think all of their output should be called a hallucination.

anonymous_sorry · 2 months ago

Others have suggested "bullshit". A bullshitter does not care (and may not know) whether what they say is truth or fiction. A bullshitter's goal is just to be listened to and seem convincing.

anonymous_sorry commented on Windows drive letters are not limited to A-Z ryanliptak.com/blog/windo... · Posted by u/LorenDB

leptons · 2 months ago

Windows can still run software from the 80's, backwards compatibility has always been a selling point for Windows, so I'd call that a win.

anonymous_sorry · 2 months ago

It's very impressive indeed.

Linux goal is only for code compatibility - which makes complete sense given the libre/open source origins. If the culture is one where you expect to have access to the source code for the software you depend on, why should the OS developers make the compromises needed to ensure you can still run a binary compiled decades ago?

anonymous_sorry commented on Amazon confirms 14,000 job losses in corporate division bbc.com/news/articles/c1m... · Posted by u/mosura

phoe-krk · 3 months ago

These aren't "job losses", these are "firings". They aren't unfortunate accidents of external origin that happened to them, they are conscious internal decisions to let people go.

anonymous_sorry · 3 months ago

There's an interesting asymmetry in language in this area.

Jobs are "created" by a company or an industry.

But they never seem to be "destroyed", instead they are "lost".

If the company starts hiring again, they're "creating" new jobs, not "finding" the ones they were careless enough to lose.

anonymous_sorry commented on Why do LLMs freak out over the seahorse emoji? vgel.me/posts/seahorse/... · Posted by u/nyxt

lxgr · 4 months ago

I'm the last to stand in the way of more precise terminology! Any ideas for "lying to a moral non-entity"? :)

“Lying” traditionally requires only belief capacity on the receiver’s side, not qualia/subjective experiences. In other words, it makes sense to talk about lying even to p-zombies.

I think it does make sense to attribute some belief capacity to (the entity role-played by) an advanced LLM.

anonymous_sorry · 4 months ago

I think just be specific - a suicidal sixteen year-old was able to discuss methods of killing himself with an LLM by prompting it to role-play a fictional scenario.

No need to say he "lied" and then use an analogy of him lying to a human being, as did the comment I originally objected to.

anonymous_sorry commented on Why do LLMs freak out over the seahorse emoji? vgel.me/posts/seahorse/... · Posted by u/nyxt

lxgr · 4 months ago

> And "lying" to it is not morally equivalent to lying to a human.

I never claimed as much.

This is probably a problem of definitions: To you, "lying" seems to require the entity being lied to being a moral subject.

I'd argue that it's enough for it to have some theory of mind (i.e. be capable of modeling "who knows/believes what" with at least some fidelity), and for the liar to intentionally obscure their true mental state from it.

anonymous_sorry · 4 months ago

So for me, it's not about being reductionist, but about not anthropomorphizing or using words which which may suggest an inappropriate ethical or moral dimension to interactions with a piece of software.

anonymous_sorry commented on Why do LLMs freak out over the seahorse emoji? vgel.me/posts/seahorse/... · Posted by u/nyxt

wongarsu · 4 months ago

I don't think deception requires the other side to be sentient. You can deceive a speed camera.

And while meriam-webster's definition is "the act of causing someone to accept as true or valid what is false or invalid", which might exclude LLMs, Oxford simply defines deception as "the act of hiding the truth, especially to get an advantage", no requirement that the deceived is sentient

anonymous_sorry · 4 months ago

Mayyybe, but since the comment I objected to also used an analogy of lying to a person I felt it suggested some unwanted moral judgement (of a suicidal teenager).