[xienze]

> I can't fathom thinking that LLM writing is even remotely passable. People that think this should honestly read more.

This makes me think you're only exposing yourself to high quality writing online and from an intelligent circle of friends and coworkers. The average person's reading and writing abilities are _atrocious_ and only getting worse. We're almost at the point where kids are communicating through abbreviations and emojis exclusively. LLM prose is significantly better than what the average person can produce.

[xtracto]

Someone way more eloquent than me should write a column titled "Why do we read?"

Way back in the past (around 30 years ago) I remember reading an article on "how to read a book" or a similar subject. They argued that, you should not skip the acknowledgments, preface and other "personal" related sections of a book, because it was there where you got a glimpse of the person that was writing the book. The idea being that, you should had in mind that the person writing was explaining something through you.

Carl Sagan even has a video where he argues Books/Writing is some sort of communication through time.

Now, this has been the case historically: A person writes some text (even in botched language like my writing, as English is not my first language) with thinking that someone else in the future will read the ideas and reason about them.

But what about text written by an LLM? Does it have inherent intention? When reading LLM text, it feels like looking at those "this is not a person" photos. Yeah, they are words, yeah they form sentences and paragraphs but... they lack "soul".

[devin]

It's not "Why do we read?" but something related that is coming up a lot in my thinking lately is Walter J. Ong's "Writing is a Technology that Restructures Human Thought".

[avador]

Isn’t “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Human Thought” another way of saying that “feedback has an effect”?

If so, this seems to be a trivial (still worthy) assertion.

For example, I intend to, say, construct a shed. I make mistakes that I only see because I actually constructed. I revise future endeavours involving sheds.

I admit to not having read this piece, and am merely reacting to the title.

—-

Okay, I got through the first paragraph of Walter’s writings. While I nod to the bitterness (I assent to the existence of it), I do not bow.

[fcarraldo]

Do you think the first paragraph is enough of a basis to form an opinion from?

[avador]

Not normally, no. Can you point to a divergence of the bitterness in the subsequent text?

What I find to be the normal pattern (by intuition) is that the condensed leading text belies the expansive following text. This is likely lazy (a shortcut) and I am open to correction at your effort. If a call to your effort (I apologize) is unpalatable then I concede.

[cortesoft]

> Way back in the past (around 30 years ago) I remember reading an article on "how to read a book" or a similar subject. They argued that, you should not skip the acknowledgments, preface and other "personal" related sections of a book, because it was there where you got a glimpse of the person that was writing the book. The idea being that, you should had in mind that the person writing was explaining something through you

Maybe? That is one reason to read, but there are a lot of other reasons, too. It doesn't mean you are doing it wrong if you want to read something and don't care at all about the person who wrote it.

[customguy]

Yeah, but when we talk about food, there are different tastes, and there is stuff like "you can also use it as a doorstop". Fine, but that doesn't make a doorstop food.

[sublinear]

Are we also saying it's acceptable to feed people junk because it's better than what they would cook?

At some point you're just making bad excuses for false scarcity.

[cryzinger]

I think it's both true that most LLM writing ("writing") sucks and that it's better than what a lot of people can produce unassisted. Which to me doesn't mean that we should roll over and accept LLM output as a lesser evil... it just means that the bar is so low it might as well be in hell, and rapidly getting lower :')

[TheOtherHobbes]

It's nowhere close to good writing, but it's better than the dreck many self-published writers produce and sell - successfully.

But that's the real problem with LLMs. Culture is aspirational. It has a consistent goal - find the best, highlight it and distribute it so others can build on it.

LLMs are the opposite - produce as much of everything as possible at the lowest possible barely-acceptable-if-you're-lucky quality.

This was already a problem before LLMs. Mass market content farms - Kindle Unlimited, Wattpad, Spotify, social media in general - give everyone an equal voice, with mass popularity and "likes" as the only metric.

Now LLMs are automating the creation process, so everyone gets more of everything.

Except inspiration. Not so much of the "That's astounding, I wonder if I can learn from that and reach for something in that league."

[solumunus]

It’s acceptable for someone to buy a ready meal or takeout if it’s better than what they can cook. Why wouldn’t it be? Is that the greatest choice for their personal development? Probably not, but life is complex and folk have limited capability and bandwidth for acquiring skills.

[dspillett]

They weren't saying it is aceptable, or making excuses, just stating how things are. Average reading and writing abilities seem to be dropping noticeably in many circles. Probably as a consequence of falling attention spans rather than an issue in is own right.

[xienze]

Tell me your thoughts on the quality of LLM-generated code. I've never understood this attitude where people are absolutely disgusted by the slightest whiff of AI prose but will happily slurp up AI-generated code by the bucketful and proudly proclaim that it's OK because it's better than the average developer can produce.

[dvt]

The key difference is that code is not the end product, but writing is itself the product. (No one's doing "vibe-product-management" for example.) Tbh, I still think code can have a beauty and elegance to it (like a logical proof can, or like a mathematical theorem can), but there's a difference between the two and I'm way less forgiving of AI writing than I am of AI code, especially considering most code (by line count) is just boilerplate anyway.

[ryandrake]

> The key difference is that code is not the end product

I think this is open to debate. To me, the code has always been the goal, and the fact that writing it sometimes serves to produce a product is important to others (and what brings the paychecks in), but ultimately not something I've ever been excited about or interested in throughout my career. So I judge a developer based on the beauty and quality of the code he produces, just as I judge an LLM by the same sorts of things.

The fact that AI can one-shot a working CRUD app is not really that interesting to me. If it could make the code beautiful, concise, maintainable, extensible, minimal, performant, readable, and bug-free: a work of art and love that a craftsman would be proud of... that would impress me.

[dvt]

Imo, this is like saying "I judge a carpenter based on how straight they can cut a piece of plywood." Or like saying "I judge an artist on how accurately they can draw a circle by hand."

I mean that's certainly one way of looking at it, and both can be impressive technical feats. But most people judge carpenters and artists on their end products, their overall vision, their motifs, their philosophy, and so on. On the other hand, as a trained logician, I definitely see proofs (which, by the Curry–Howard isomorphism, are computer programs) have some degree of beauty-within-themselves, but that's quite hard to achieve. Not everyone is a Gödel, after all.

I also think programming languages, despite being Turing complete (which is frankly not saying much), are far too limiting to truly construct magnificent things with.

[seba_dos1]

No, it's more like saying "I judge an artist on my terms regardless of how well they sell on the market".

> artists on their end products, their overall vision, their motifs, their philosophy, and so on

The main output of programmer's work is their understanding of the system they work with, the rest comes from that. Behind the code there's its author's intention, vision, their tastes, philosophy and experience that makes them tackle problems in specific ways. Code review is, aside of quality assurance, mostly about communication between people, convincing them to your ways of doing things (or getting convinced by others) and communicating needs. It's what keeps projects running and what makes people improve their skills.

You don't need to see magnificence in code to realize that there's more to it than just the syntax tree to compile.

[ryandrake]

What I'm trying to get at is more like: I judge a carpenter based on how beautiful, minimal, and functional he makes a chest of drawers, not based on how quickly he can go to market with particle board and glue."

[sublinear]

I'm not sure if your question is serious, but I've been a developer for over a decade now.

I write code for a living mostly by hand. In the odd case where I need help I still use google like I always have. I spend more of my time in meetings or staring at the ceiling than writing code. This was also true a decade ago before LLMs. It was also true several decades ago when someone else's ass was in my seat.

[ryandrake]

...or read.

At least in the USA: 21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2024. 54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level [1].

1: https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-liter...

[watwut]

In an international comparisons, USA comes out somewhere in the middled of developed countries - as it always did. And the differences between countries are not that large.

54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level is simply not a some kind of catastrophe and it does not mean those people cant read. There is this idea that 6th-grade level is almost like not knowing how to read, but that is simply not the case at all.

[torginus]

Hasn't this always been an intelligence thing? I think across all societies and eras we find that generally a a rather alarmingly large section of population is unable to grasp basic written instructions - and that section usually increases to the majority of people, when we start getting into things like an employment contract, or mortgage document.