The revolt of the reader

cchmaynard about 3 hours ago 16 commentsRead Article on bcantrill.dtrace.org

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Discussion (16 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

duhhhhh1212•about 1 hour ago

Someone should make a browser extension to label HN posts with Pangram results of the top 100 posts, so I don't waste my time reading crap.

Always a pleasure reading Bryan's writing; it's like Bryan is sitting there with you and saying the words (hard to convey the feeling).

noir_lord•8 minutes ago

Agreed, I like the Oxide podcast as well, even though it’s hardware I’m unlikely to ever see never mind use, it’s nice that someone somewhere is still trying to be what they are trying to be.

Having dealt with Enterprise Hardware(TM) in a previous job, it’s refreshing simply to see someone look at that pile of crap and go “it doesn’t have to be that way” and then actually set out to prove it.

bcantrill•about 1 hour ago

That is honestly the highest possible praise -- thank you. And when this piece was starting to boil inside of me last night (triggered, I'm sorry to report, by an obviously LLM-authored guest blog entry from the Rust Foundation[0]), I messaged one of my colleagues: "Time to do what I do best: bluntly say what lots of people are thinking."

Glad those words proved prophetic!

[0] https://rustfoundation.org/media/how-the-rust-standard-libra...

jonstewart•about 1 hour ago

AI slop really needs to be auto-flagged. It’s been like 20% of front page links I click on lately.

Lerc•20 minutes ago

How can you tell if people can accurately identify AI generated text?

If a person reads AI generated text and does not notice, they by definition will not know about it.

There have been numerous cases of people accessing human created content as being AI.

There are instances where it seems relatively uncontroversial that it is AI generated, but without knowing both the amount of AI content people are exposed toand the amount that they register I don't think you can draw a conclusion of the overall state.

overgard•4 minutes ago

In a way, I think they're doing us a favor with LLM slop: It's rare to have a signal that's 100% accurate at telling me it's safe to stop reading.

MarkusQ•17 minutes ago

"I have fantasized about sentencing the author to read them aloud, certain that they themselves will be unable to endure the slop that they are foisting upon the rest of us.)"

I wish that were true, but I fear it may not be.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/canadian-legislator-reads...

turtleyacht•about 2 hours ago

A lot of similar pieces have not considered a post is both the first and final work of a thing: opinions, and experience, and less of much in cited facts; with AI, that there even was a revision pass at all.

I guess there is a kind of participatory element to the discourse where, if you want an audience, there is an editing process. Whereas in other cases, we wrote these as progress notes on an unknown journey, breadcrumbs or upturned stones to mark a path to the horizon.

Maybe it's the difference between writing as a mode of discovery, retreading the mental arc of a solution, and writing something honed to leave a mark.

smitty1e•about 1 hour ago

You could use AI to come up with a draft, and to critique ahead of posting.

The chief grief appears to be phoning in the whole process.

cagenut•about 1 hour ago

if its not worth your time to write, its not worth my time to read

this goes 10x for all the slide decks and google docs and wikislop everyone's trying to pass off as an accomplishment lately

CharlesW•about 1 hour ago

> Indeed, Pangram has become important to so many of us that I was thrilled when Pangram Labs co-founder and CEO Max Spero joined us recently on Oxide and Friends.

Is obvious AI-assisted writing better or worse than an obvious PR quid pro quo and/or cross-promotion?

bcantrill•about 1 hour ago

This is (obviously?) false, but considering how well-capitalized we are at the moment, you do have me wondering what a quid pro quo would be for; perhaps in this fictional universe Pangram has lucked into some of the PCIe clock buffers that we've been scrambling to secure enough of?

CharlesW•29 minutes ago

By "quid pro quo" I wasn't suggesting that Pangram's PR people's podcast placement was pay-for-play, just that they traded access for your positioning of their tech and their exec in your content marketing efforts.

That's pretty normal, but the point is that a blog post which is 35% Pangram promotion may not actually be less annoying than the use of AI to help write blog posts.

mplanchard•24 minutes ago

It is less annoying, at least to me. I can read a semi-promotional post. I just bounce right off LLM writing

bcantrill•20 minutes ago

Yeah, fair -- and definitely not: I am earnestly just a fan of what they built (and I also think it's really important as a way of getting a check against rampant LLM use).