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- Hacker News
- I do wonder if all of the automated linting and the LLM-powered editor assistance is contributing to your very LLM-sounding writing voice that seems to be triggering everyone's internal AI-writing detection alarms here (also Pangram detects parts of the post as ~20% AI-written for what it is worth). It makes sense that a lot of what the linters would red squiggly on (e.g. weak passive voice) would also be the type of prose that gets trained out of LLMs as not "punchy" enough. So, basically, did you accidentally RLHF yourself into sounding like an LLM?by thallada
- How did people come to the conclusion that "over-engineered" is something positive?by _def
- I set out likewise to write a highly structured book with FOSS, therefore: git, some hierarchical plain text format, and a visually rich editor. Markdown could not seem to meet the third point. For instance, progress-related comments that would be stripped from final output were essential, but Markdown's HTML-style comments are intolerably unergonomic, and editors know how to de-emphasize no other syntax.
Ended up with Org-mode. Emacs with a bit of customization color- and font-codes richly. Org text goes into an Org-to-HTML converter that I hacked up in Go, incrementally added to as new wants arise.
Most recent completed production was a photo album for relatives. In HTML form, it could be put on line, but I used Weasyprint so I could give them self-contained PDF as a keepsake.
- It is perhaps ironic that I find this post very difficult to read. I'm super interested in the content, but it reads like it is generated.by stephantul
- Custom linting is so cheap and easy, why not!
> "Please add in this repo, a pre-commit hook in the form of a script that prints all filenames and line numbers on which the hyphenated "open-source" string exists, and if any instances are found, will exit nonzero. Then please install it in `.git/hooks` so commits are blocked until me or an agent removes all the instances, so we never again commit the string "open-source"."
1 minute after hitting enter you've created yourself a guarantee your repo will never again see the string "open-source".
by cadamsdotcom - Seeing that list of tools you're using in automations, I'm guessing you'll enjoy this, as another tool to add to the pile: https://t-kalinowski.github.io/yamark/
(disclosure: I wrote it)
by t-kalinowski - Thank you for the demo! I like the concept. However, I personally find that the writing style you've designed for reads very strongly as AI-generated. For example, opening a section with phrases like "Here's the irony: after automating everything up to this point," or "Turning emoji into images solved the missing-font problem and created a subtler one."
These are both strong tells of AI-generated prose, though I find it surprisingly difficult to articulate exactly why. It makes me wonder whether your style has evolved to sound more like AI-generated prose, or whether AI-generated prose has evolved to sound more like you!
by sinab - I saw a Bruce Eckel talk one time after Thinking in Java became a best seller.
I expected him to talk about Java, and lessons learned about it writing the book (he did not start nor end in Java and documented a number of programming languages.)
What we got instead was a rundown of how he 'overengineered' the book. He had interns solving a problem for him: How to make sure the published code examples actually run when transcribed into an editor.
They wrote a tool to mark up live code with extraction points to excerpt it automatically into his manuscript.
About five years later I worked at a F50 company with a bunch of contractors who were all Getting Shit Done and making some of the more bureaucratic org units around us a bit nervous. Someone thought they found a gotcha by complaining about how our developer documentation didn't meet the defined documentation standards the company had devised. They weren't wrong, but people used to the platform we were building on wouldn't have been stymied at all by what we gave them.
If we had done it the way they suggested, it would have added almost a week of my time to every release, and I was already struggling with delegating enough work to make me not the bottleneck. So that extra week would have taken our velocity down a notch and made us a bit more comparable to everyone else. It was a clever ploy, but Bruce saved me.
Instead of spending a slog every release on updating the docs, I found that Bruce's strategy had already been made into a FOSS tool, jcite. So I spent about 50 hours the first quarter learning to use it, and fixing up all of my integration tests to be suitable to use the way Bruce taught me.
With that done, it took less an hour per release to fix the developer documentation, and half of that hour I got one of our tech writers to take off my plate (I couldn't get the documentation template to exactly match the corporate template, so she manually fixed the handful of errors). So within another quarter we were back to full speed. It's possible I imagined the disappointment when we explained what we did but it was a delicious hallucination if so. Nice try. Maybe you could learn from us instead of trying to pull us down with you, hmm?
Thanks Bruce, for teaching me a lesson I didn't even know I needed.
by hinkley