[Michelangelo11]

> Marshall McLuhan gets the credit for the medium is the message, but Claude Shannon had beaten him to a colder version of it years earlier: to a machine moving your words, the meaning doesn’t matter at all; only the medium does, and which of its signals can be told apart. Bravo and Delta survive a bad line; B and D don’t.

> I didn’t arrive there as a mathematician; I’m not one.

> This wasn’t a speed problem I could optimise away. It was a wall, and it asked a question I couldn’t answer

Very strong LLM whiff. A line of thought that constantly, constantly turns back on itself, negating and doubting and qualifying in one way or another, is the biggest tell (the classic "It's not X, it's Y," is only the baldest example).

Noticing that whiff instantly turns me off from reading on.

[busymom0]

A few hours ago, on another post, I had someone explain/teach me why another article may be written by LLM and they pointed out the "It's not X, it's Y" thing. Since I read that comment, I instantly picked that up in this post article too.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48739555

[throawayonthe]

which really sucks, because it's a good structure for emphasis in some limited situations, but now human writers that use it correctly get accused of being LLMs

[stavros]

> This wasn’t a speed problem I could optimise away. It was a wall

[jamwise]

Well it certainly was a wall. That's how I kept describing it to my partner, I was hitting a wall.

[stavros]

Yes but I'm fairly sure you didn't use the words "this isn't a speed problem. It is a wall" when talking to your partner.

I liked the post, I just don't like Claude writing every article I read, just like I didn't like every website I visited looking like Bootstrap.

[freehorse]

> Yes but I'm fairly sure you didn't use the words "this isn't a speed problem. It is a wall" when talking to your partner.

I am not afraid of a future where people use llms to write. I am afraid of a future where people adopt themselves the writing style of llms because that's all they ingest.

Oops

[jamwise]

Yeah that's fair. I might dust off my draft and re-edit myself, I foolishly thought this would lead to a better post, and I guess am not as attuned to the AI smell as others.

[tapland]

That's fair. When you start to notice the smell, it reeks. Put some time into it, it doesn't have to be perfectly worded, it will be a fun read

[Michelangelo11]

I agree, and I'm completely sure it will be better than this, so long as you say just what you want to say.

[stavros]

Yeah I'm now in the camp where it's just refreshing to read something another human wrote, even if it has mistakes, just because I'm tired of only reading a single author everywhere.

[alehlopeh]

I’ve noticed that A.I. can’t help but talk about Marshall McLuhan when you mention “medium” and “message” for some reason. Personally I don’t find the guy’s “medium is the message” bit to be so insightful as to merit pinning his name to every mention of the phrase, forever. It just seems kind of obvious.

[jamwise]

Sorry about the turn off ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I tried to put my best foot forward by reading about prose, engaging story telling, and did use an LLM to help me edit and reword parts of the post. Either way, I appreciate the feedback.