How information theory saved my word game

jamwise•1 minute ago

EDIT: I used an LLM as an editor, and clearly that stank. So I just touched up my original draft and updated the page.

Michelangelo11•about 2 hours ago

> Marshall McLuhan gets the credit for the medium is the message, but Claude Shannon had beaten him to a colder version of it years earlier: to a machine moving your words, the meaning doesn’t matter at all; only the medium does, and which of its signals can be told apart. Bravo and Delta survive a bad line; B and D don’t.

> I didn’t arrive there as a mathematician; I’m not one.

> This wasn’t a speed problem I could optimise away. It was a wall, and it asked a question I couldn’t answer

Very strong LLM whiff. A line of thought that constantly, constantly turns back on itself, negating and doubting and qualifying in one way or another, is the biggest tell (the classic "It's not X, it's Y," is only the baldest example).

Noticing that whiff instantly turns me off from reading on.

busymom0•36 minutes ago

A few hours ago, on another post, I had someone explain/teach me why another article may be written by LLM and they pointed out the "It's not X, it's Y" thing. Since I read that comment, I instantly picked that up in this post article too.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48739555

throawayonthe•1 minute ago

which really sucks, because it's a good structure for emphasis in some limited situations, but now human writers that use it correctly get accused of being LLMs

stavros•about 2 hours ago

> This wasn’t a speed problem I could optimise away. It was a wall

jamwise•about 2 hours ago

Well it certainly was a wall. That's how I kept describing it to my partner, I was hitting a wall.

stavros•about 2 hours ago

Yes but I'm fairly sure you didn't use the words "this isn't a speed problem. It is a wall" when talking to your partner.

I liked the post, I just don't like Claude writing every article I read, just like I didn't like every website I visited looking like Bootstrap.

jamwise•about 2 hours ago

Sorry about the turn off ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I tried to put my best foot forward by reading about prose, engaging story telling, and did use an LLM to help me edit and reword parts of the post. Either way, I appreciate the feedback.

terabytest•about 2 hours ago

I have the feeling that this article was hurt rather than helped by being written using LLMs. It was really hard to follow, and even though I read it hoping to learn something new, I left feeling more confused than when I started. The feeling while reading was that the prose was trying to hold my hand but had absolutely no empathy for the build up of my understanding over the article. It’s a bit like when, as a child, you’d do homework with your parent and the parent would start saying “don’t you see how it’s obvious that 25/5=5” with no further explanation and a building tone of frustration.

jamwise•about 2 hours ago

Seems like others feel the same. I guess getting an LLM to help with editing was a bad choice. Thanks for the feedback.

avvt4avaw•about 1 hour ago

This is impossible to read as every other sentence sounds like it was written by an LLM. I had to stop after a few paragraphs.

jamwise•2 days ago

Information theory has been a really fascinating topic to get more acquainted with. Not really related to the crossword, but I highly recommend 3Blue1Brown's video "Compression is Intelligence", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6DKRf-fAAM

yepyoukno•2 days ago

Compression is not intelligence.

While intelligence and compression both may have similar goals (to optimize paths of information), intelligence negotiates probability (allowing multiple divergent outcomes) while compression requires an idempotent symbolic translation.

nl•about 2 hours ago

> intelligence negotiates probability (allowing multiple divergent outcomes) while compression requires an idempotent symbolic translation.

What does this mean?

Lossy, non-deterministic compression is a thing. Does that meet the "allowing multiple divergent outcomes" criteria?

plasticeagle•about 1 hour ago

Jesus Christ another AI slop post. I give up. Have the internet you fools, enjoy the world of shit you've created.

This might even have been an interesting journey if it had been REMOTELY READABLE.

How information theory saved my word game

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