3 ms·

First few lines of the tutorial linked above the fold: > Welcome to Sonic Pi. Hopefully you’re as excited to get started making your own sounds as I am to show

by jyrkesh 1mo ago

First few lines of the tutorial linked above the fold: > Welcome to Sonic Pi. Hopefully you’re as excited to get started making your own sounds as I am to show you. It’s going to be a really fun ride where you’ll learn all about music, synthesis, programming, composition, performance and more. > But wait, how rude of me! Let me introduce myself - I’m Sam Aaron - the chap that created Sonic Pi. You can find me at @samaaron on Twitter and I’d be more than happy to say hello to you. You might also be interested in finding out more about my Live Coding Performances where I code with Sonic Pi live in front of audiences. > If you have any thoughts, or ideas for improving Sonic Pi - please pass them on - feedback is so helpful. You never know, your idea might be the next big feature! In an older age, I might have thought this overly flowery or indulgent, but it's SO refreshing to see technical prose that's so clearly written by a real human with an individualized voice, tone, writing style, etc. I'm by no means anti-LLM, but I'm becoming incredibly fatigued at seeing the same style of marketing speak as the intro text to nearly all the new software I come across. Kudos to being a human and injecting your voice into an increasingly impersonal space. The rest of the tutorial that I read below that doesn't disappoint, I intend to run through it despite my not so Copious Spare Time. I've really been looking to get into programmed music and this seems as good as a time and tool as any. Cheers!

saghm 1mo ago
I can't say I agree with this is take; it's never occurred to me "how rude of this author of the tutorial not to plug their Twitter handle before teaching me the thing I came for". I have no reason to suspect this is from an LLM (I don't have much confidence in my ability to spot anything other than the most obvious examples) but I also don't see any reason to assume that someone couldn't just say something like "add an introduction paragraph plugging my Twitter and live performances in a friendly voice" and get something like this pretty quickly.
- onion2k 1mo ago
  I have no reason to suspect this is from an LLM (I don't have much confidence in my ability to spot anything other than the most obvious examples) but I also don't see any reason to assume that someone couldn't just say something like "add an introduction paragraph plugging my Twitter and live performances in a friendly voice" and get something like this pretty quickly. The text has been there since 2018. BERT wouldn't have been able to write like that. https://web.archive.org/web/20180312062205/http://sonic-pi.net/tutorial.html#section-1 https://web.archive.org/web/20180312062205/http://sonic-pi.n...
  - saghm 1mo ago
    Fair enough! I think my meta-point still stands though; I don't see any fundamental reason to assume that an LLM wouldn't generate something similar to this without needing a ton of effort in prompting.
ghusbands 1mo ago
It's even more fatiguing to see so many comments about whether something is LLM-written or human-written. I hope we get past this stage, soon.
- abirch 1mo ago
  Is it worth a human reading it or not? There are many, insipid human-writers (me included). Historically I got a lot of value of reading info posted on HN.
- Krssst 1mo ago
  I don't want to read LLM written text (EDIT: just replying to parent comment, not implying at all that the tutorial might be written that way; it definitely does not look like it). It would be nice if people could just disclose when they used LLMs for their writing and how, then people who care can skip and people who don't can read. Of course this would have to come with not shaming the people who disclose actual use of LLM, otherwise we're back to square one.
  - samaaron 1mo ago
    For the record I didn’t use LLMs to write this tutorial.
    - Krssst 1mo ago
      Ah, sorry, I was only replying to the above comment but did not mean to imply that the tutorial might be AI-written; it very much looks human-written and generally a nice read :-)
- latexr 1mo ago
  I hope we don’t, or that if we do it’s because either it has become impossible to hide or everyone became honest about it. Tons of conversations are fatiguing, such as climate change, the rise of totalitarianism, the erosion of rights, mass surveillance… These conversations will only cease when we fix the problems or give up on trying to fix them. I feel your pain, I too am fatigued at these. But I’d rather criticise the ones causing the problem than the ones pointing it out.

by jyrkesh 1mo ago

saghm 1mo ago

I can't say I agree with this is take; it's never occurred to me "how rude of this author of the tutorial not to plug their Twitter handle before teaching me the thing I came for". I have no reason to suspect this is from an LLM (I don't have much confidence in my ability to spot anything other than the most obvious examples) but I also don't see any reason to assume that someone couldn't just say something like "add an introduction paragraph plugging my Twitter and live performances in a friendly voice" and get something like this pretty quickly.

onion2k 1mo ago
I have no reason to suspect this is from an LLM (I don't have much confidence in my ability to spot anything other than the most obvious examples) but I also don't see any reason to assume that someone couldn't just say something like "add an introduction paragraph plugging my Twitter and live performances in a friendly voice" and get something like this pretty quickly. The text has been there since 2018. BERT wouldn't have been able to write like that. https://web.archive.org/web/20180312062205/http://sonic-pi.net/tutorial.html#section-1 https://web.archive.org/web/20180312062205/http://sonic-pi.n...
- saghm 1mo ago
  Fair enough! I think my meta-point still stands though; I don't see any fundamental reason to assume that an LLM wouldn't generate something similar to this without needing a ton of effort in prompting.

ghusbands 1mo ago

It's even more fatiguing to see so many comments about whether something is LLM-written or human-written. I hope we get past this stage, soon.

abirch 1mo ago
Is it worth a human reading it or not? There are many, insipid human-writers (me included). Historically I got a lot of value of reading info posted on HN.
Krssst 1mo ago
I don't want to read LLM written text (EDIT: just replying to parent comment, not implying at all that the tutorial might be written that way; it definitely does not look like it). It would be nice if people could just disclose when they used LLMs for their writing and how, then people who care can skip and people who don't can read. Of course this would have to come with not shaming the people who disclose actual use of LLM, otherwise we're back to square one.
- samaaron 1mo ago
  For the record I didn’t use LLMs to write this tutorial.
  - Krssst 1mo ago
    Ah, sorry, I was only replying to the above comment but did not mean to imply that the tutorial might be AI-written; it very much looks human-written and generally a nice read :-)
latexr 1mo ago
I hope we don’t, or that if we do it’s because either it has become impossible to hide or everyone became honest about it. Tons of conversations are fatiguing, such as climate change, the rise of totalitarianism, the erosion of rights, mass surveillance… These conversations will only cease when we fix the problems or give up on trying to fix them. I feel your pain, I too am fatigued at these. But I’d rather criticise the ones causing the problem than the ones pointing it out.