6 ms·
> LLM output is expressly prohibited for any direct communication I would like to see this more. As a heavy user of LLMs I still write 100% of my own communica
by hamdingers 9mo ago
> LLM output is expressly prohibited for any direct communication
I would like to see this more. As a heavy user of LLMs I still write 100% of my own communication. Do not send me something an LLM wrote, if I wanted to read LLM outputs, I would ask an LLM.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- giancarlostoro 9mo agoYeah I use LLMs to show me how to shorten my emails because I can type for days. It helps a lot for when I feel like I just need a short concise email but I still write it all myself.
- willio58 9mo agoYeah I do the same. I’ve seen great results from writing out a large slack, copying it into ChatGPT and saying “write this more succinctly”. Then, of course, I review the output and make some manual edits here and there. That last thing is the key in both written communication and in code, you HAVE to review it and make manual edits if needed.
- gonzalohm 9mo agoSame can go for LLM code. I don't want to review your code if it was written by an LLM I only use LLM to write text/communication because that's the part I don't like about my work
- adastra22 9mo agoI’m glad they have a carve out for using LLMs to translate to, or fix up English communications. LLMs are a great accessibility tool that is making open source development truly global. Translation and grammar fix up is something LLMs are very, very good at! But that is translation, not “please generate a pull request message for these changes.”
- Gigachad 9mo agoBetter to use Google Translate for this than ChatGPT. Either ChatGPT massively changes the text and slopifies it, or people are lying about using it for translation only because the outputs are horrendous. Google Translate won't fluff out the output with garbage or reformat everything with emoji.
- embedding-shape 9mo ago"Translate this from X to X, don't change any meaning or anything else, only translate the text with idiomatic usage in target language: X" Using Google Translate probably means you're using a language model in the end anyways behind the scenes. Initially, the Transformer was researched and published as an improvement for machine translation, which eventually led to LLMs. Using them for translation is pretty much exactly what they excel at :)
- habinero 9mo agoYep. If you don't know the language, it's best not to pretend you do. I've done this kind of thing, even if I think it's likely they speak English. (I speak zero Japanese here.) It's just polite and you never know who's going to be reading it first. > Google翻訳を使用しました。問題が発生した場合はお詫び申し上げます。貴社のウェブサイトにコンピュータセキュリティ上の問題が見つかりました。詳細は下記をご覧ください。ありがとうございます。 > I have found a computer security issue on your website. Here are details. Thank you.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- adastra22 9mo agoGoogle Translate uses GPTs under the hood. GPT was invented by Google’s machine translation team. I think you are misunderstanding my point.
- Gigachad 9mo agoI didn’t say GPTs in general. ChatGPT specifically should be avoided. So many people are posting the most blatant ChatGPT slop full of em dashes and emoji and then claiming they just used it to translate.
- Kerrick 9mo agoRelevant: https://noslopgrenade.com https://noslopgrenade.com
- IggleSniggle 9mo agoWhat do you recommend if I've been regularly producing blog-length posts in Slack for years, no LLM present? It's where I write man...should I quit that out? I try to be information dense...
- Kerrick 9mo agoIf you're writing it, that's not a slop grenade. From the page: > They asked you because they wanted your human judgment.
- gllmariuty 9mo agoyeah, you could ask a LLM, but are you sure you know what to ask? like in that joke with the mechanic which demands $100 for hitting the car once with his wrench
- dawnerd 9mo agoI see this on Reddit a lot. Someone will vibe code something then spam a bunch of subreddits with LLM marketing text. It’s all low effort low quality sooo.
- pixl97 9mo agoI mean this is how spammers have always worked. If spam were high quality and useful people wouldn't complain about it.
- epiccoleman 9mo agoI completely agree. I let LLMs write a ton of my code, but I do my own writing. It's actually kind of a weird "of two minds" thing. Why should I care that my writing is my own, but not my code? The only explanation I have is that, on some level, the code is not the thing that matters. Users don't care how the code looks, they just care that the product works. Writing, on the other hand, is meant to communicate something directly from me, so it feels like there's something lost if I hand that job over to AI. I often think of this quote from Ted Chiang's excellent story The Truth Of Fact, The Truth of Feeling: > As he practiced his writing, Jijingi came to understand what Moseby had meant: writing was not just a way to record what someone said; it could help you decide what you would say before you said it. And words were not just the pieces of speaking; they were the pieces of thinking. When you wrote them down, you could grasp your thoughts like bricks in your hands and push them into different arrangements. Writing let you look at your thoughts in a way you couldn’t if you were just talking, and having seen them, you could improve them, make them stronger and more elaborate.” But there is obviously some kind of tension in letting an LLM write code for me but not prose - because can't the same quote apply to my code? I can't decide if there really is a difference in kind between prose and code that justifies letting the LLM write my code, or if I'm just ignoring unresolved cognitive dissonance because automating the coding part of my job is convenient.
- IggleSniggle 9mo agoTo me, you are describing a fluency problem. I don't know you or how fluent you are in code, but what you have described is the case where I have no problem with LLMs: translating from a native language to some other language. If you are using LLMs to precisely translate a set of requirements into code, I don't really see a problem with that. If you are using LLMs to generate code that "does something" and you don't really understand what you were asking for nor how to evaluate whether the code produced matched what you wanted, then I have a very big problem with that for the same reasons you outline around prose: did you actually mean to say what you eventually said? Of course something will get lost in any translation, but that's also true of translating your intent from brain to language in the first place, so I think affordances can be made.
- wolvoleo 9mo agoI have many colleagues that use copilot for it and it's so dumb. This hyper-excited corporate drone style, the emoji dragged into everything, the bullet points. In my opinion it really devalues the message they're sending. I immediately get this dismissive rolleyes feeling when I see it.
- voidr 9mo agoI take Linus's stance on this: how are you going to enforce it? How do you know I didn't just generate this with an LLM?