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> There were entire classes of Hacker News submissions that I refused to read the comments on. Including the comments about this article, should such comments e

by abound 7mo ago

> There were entire classes of Hacker News submissions that I refused to read the comments on. Including the comments about this article, should such comments ever materialize. The author has made the correct call. There's a pretty deep irony that all the top-level comments at the time of this writing are about how the article is too long. It's quite clearly not trying to succinctly convince you of a point, it's meant to be a piece of genuinely human writing, and enjoyed (or not!) on the basis of that.

fuball63 7mo ago
Author writes an interesting, nuanced, wide-reaching essay about AI and society, with a main theme being about AI and its impact on our humanity. All other top level arguments offer AI summaries that miss all of the interesting, nuanced, wide-reaching topics about AI and its impact on our humanity, and complain it was too long to read. Truly a gem of irony.
- anal_reactor 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - lproven 7mo ago
    I am not here to tell you what to like or not, but doing my English Literature 'O' and 'A' levels were among my favourite parts of all my schooling, and even the books and plays and poems that I forced myself to wade through and hated have informed me for the rest of my life. Poems I hated at 15 I realised I loved deeply 30 or 40 years later. And I really loved this essay. It's the single best piece of writing on "AI" I have read yet. Everything you say, I disagree with.
  - jbxntuehineoh 7mo ago
    My takeaway from this comment is that your emotional development was somehow arrested at the "angsty teenager who's mad at the world" phase
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
colbyn 7mo ago
Design can go a long way when reading long form text. If someone here is in contact with the author please tell them to improve the typography; most notably smaller and justified text for mobile phones. Other designers could probably weigh in. I’m not an expert, but well designed text goes a long way towards comfortable reading. Apart from that, content wise a preliminary abstract is nice to have. I do like how the author provides a table of contents.
amoss 7mo ago
I personally love the appearance of the tl;dr about a third of the way through, that is some S tier trolling.
coffeefirst 7mo ago
Yeah, this thread is eye opening. I loved the essay. If anyone didn't enjoy it, quit halfway, or decided not to read it, that's absolutely fine. There's plenty of thoughtful writing I don't enjoy or don’t feel like spending my time with. But it is well-executed. But apparently a sizable percentage of today's HN user base can't get through it, and finds the very idea of being able to get through anything longer than an LLM summary objectionable. If I wanted to be an ass, I would call it a "skill issue." But I don't want to be an ass. It's just deeply sad.
- nh23423fefe 7mo ago
  It's not worth 40 minutes to learn no new facts, while irrationally hoping for a payoff. The feeling of boredom created in me is the author's fault. This is just content.

by abound 7mo ago

fuball63 7mo ago

Author writes an interesting, nuanced, wide-reaching essay about AI and society, with a main theme being about AI and its impact on our humanity. All other top level arguments offer AI summaries that miss all of the interesting, nuanced, wide-reaching topics about AI and its impact on our humanity, and complain it was too long to read. Truly a gem of irony.

anal_reactor 7mo ago
[flagged]
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- lproven 7mo ago
  I am not here to tell you what to like or not, but doing my English Literature 'O' and 'A' levels were among my favourite parts of all my schooling, and even the books and plays and poems that I forced myself to wade through and hated have informed me for the rest of my life. Poems I hated at 15 I realised I loved deeply 30 or 40 years later. And I really loved this essay. It's the single best piece of writing on "AI" I have read yet. Everything you say, I disagree with.
- jbxntuehineoh 7mo ago
  My takeaway from this comment is that your emotional development was somehow arrested at the "angsty teenager who's mad at the world" phase

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

colbyn 7mo ago

Design can go a long way when reading long form text. If someone here is in contact with the author please tell them to improve the typography; most notably smaller and justified text for mobile phones. Other designers could probably weigh in. I’m not an expert, but well designed text goes a long way towards comfortable reading. Apart from that, content wise a preliminary abstract is nice to have. I do like how the author provides a table of contents.

amoss 7mo ago

I personally love the appearance of the tl;dr about a third of the way through, that is some S tier trolling.

coffeefirst 7mo ago

Yeah, this thread is eye opening. I loved the essay. If anyone didn't enjoy it, quit halfway, or decided not to read it, that's absolutely fine. There's plenty of thoughtful writing I don't enjoy or don’t feel like spending my time with. But it is well-executed. But apparently a sizable percentage of today's HN user base can't get through it, and finds the very idea of being able to get through anything longer than an LLM summary objectionable. If I wanted to be an ass, I would call it a "skill issue." But I don't want to be an ass. It's just deeply sad.

nh23423fefe 7mo ago
It's not worth 40 minutes to learn no new facts, while irrationally hoping for a payoff. The feeling of boredom created in me is the author's fault. This is just content.