4 ms·
I don’t buy it, Dan, because non-native English speakers were somehow managing to produce, publicize, and communicate before LLMs did the heavy lifting for them
by otterley 4mo ago
I don’t buy it, Dan, because non-native English speakers were somehow managing to produce, publicize, and communicate before LLMs did the heavy lifting for them. Perhaps they had human assistance before, but the slop that’s so endemic today reminds us of its value.
- dang 4mo agoNot on HN they weren't. Right?
- otterley 4mo agoNon native speakers have been on HN since its inception. Unless you mean something else?
- dang 4mo agoSorry, I was posting hastily and can see how that was unclear. Unfortunately I've forgotten my point. Perhaps it was this: there are many non-native English speakers who have valuable things to contribute to HN, who don't yet have sufficient English or don't feel they do, and therefore resort to LLMs to do their English for them. Should they automatically be excluded?
- girvo 4mo agoThey should be included! But there's a difference between machine translation and technical-writing-using-an-LLM, in my opinion. One has a lot more humanness to it, still.
- otterley 4mo agoYou said earlier that we don't allow LLM-generated content on HN itself (i.e., the comments). So, at least in principle, that's already taken care of through exclusion. If you mean the linked content: can come from anyone and anywhere--it's just whatever someone submits and is deemed good enough by The Algorithm to get attention. So that's not "HN content" - the content exists independently of HN. As for that, I'll repeat myself: the scientific community has managed somehow to intercommunicate for centuries despite language barriers before LLMs existed. (English was neither Einstein's nor Madame Curie's first language.) It's an existence proof that LLMs aren't needed to overcome those barriers.