I guess you aren't kidding with your comments. Mentioning what something is, where that thing isn't that well know is not egregious. Also, don't the people who make SuperDuperer! want people to consider buying it? Telling them it's not a floor wax or desert topping might sell a few more copies.
The site looks like every other Claudesite, the docs are Claudemade, and I imagine Claude did the v4 rewrite. There's already been one bugfix release, probably more to come if the super-smart LLM took shortcuts around arcane MacOS esoterica in the name of "optimization".
HN detectives, hard at work. I wish there was a way to automatically hide all the comments saying "but I think LLM was involved in this software". These days it seems like most of the content here on HN.
This is especially galling when we discuss software that has been around for >20 years and that people (actual users, not HN haters) universally love. See other comments around here.
So, I put the notebook with that design in it on a shelf.
For nearly 20 years.
Today, I’m happy to say that I’ve finally been able to carve out enough time to grab that “old” redesign, flesh it out further, modernize it, and make that dream a reality.
Hmm, what could have allowed the sudden burst of productivity? /s
That said, we shouldn't assume that if he used an LLM we know what quality the finished product is.
For all we know, he used an LLM to get a working rough version, and then rewrote every method, bit by bit. For this sort of product - an decades-old app that can result in data loss and so the wrath of furious users - it is more likely the developer was prudent.
Eh. Sooner or later (likely sooner), every project is going to be at least, informed, if not completely written, by an LLM. There’s just too much upside.
It’s also very likely that most copy will be at least edited, if not completely written, by an LLM. There’s just too much upside. Some people may pass every comment they make, on every venue, through an LLM.
Some folks are likely to write agents to be their entire public persona, but that’s just silly (however, I guarantee it’s already happening -people are silly).
For myself, I’m in the middle. I use an LLM to assist in my development, but without resorting to a full agentic “write me a Facebook” methodology.
I will also often use an LLM to edit copy that I use in my apps, or in things like the App Store page for my apps. In some cases, the edit may be a full rewrite, and I’ll choose the rewrite, over my original copy. Usually, I will just use suggested minor edits, and grammar corrections.
I’m not [yet] confident in using LLMs for main translation, but they have been useful for very small “patch” translations.
Overall, LLMs have been a huge help, and I’ve been coding for over 40 years. I’ve been writing, for much longer. I’m not going to use a quill pen, just because it’s fashionable. I’m retired, and only have so much time left, to get a lot done. I appreciate these new tools.
If the bar is that all code and copy must be hand-written, artisanal prose, then it’s unlikely most modern, production-oriented venues will be satisfactory. I assume that new venues will appear, catering to that demographic. I doubt HN will be that.
>Expose brain to something, record it somehow, see if brains reaction in the recording helps you understand more about who we are and what cognition is.
It also helps companies like Moonbug Entertainment (Candle Media) understand how to build better Distractatrons.
It’s a small TV screen, placed a few feet from the larger one, that plays a continuous loop of banal, real-world scenes — a guy pouring a cup of coffee, someone getting a haircut — each lasting about 20 seconds. Whenever a youngster looks away from the Moonbug show to glimpse the Distractatron, a note is jotted down.
“It’s not mega-interesting, what’s on the Distractatron,” said Maurice Wheeler, who runs the research group. “But if they aren’t fully focused, they might go, ‘Oh, what’s that?’ and kind of drift over. We can see what they’re looking at and the exact moment when they got distracted.”
> p8: "A child watching television under normal conditions is subject to frequent interruptions and distractions. The TV must vie for his attention. In order to simulate this condition, we decided to program distractions into the laboratory situation... Slides could be used to fill the slide tray and they could be projected automatically, at regular intervals, onto a screen similar to that of the television set. The carousel projector allows the viewer to choose three exposure times. The 7.45 second interval proved most satisfactory with the preschool children.
And nowadays we think of Sesame Street as wholesome compared to today's content. They may have optimised attention but they were delivering positive-value content. That's not the case any more.
the same year as Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation, featuring computer generated characters, brainwashing television commercials, a light pulse gun that causes absence seizures, gun battles inside a plastic surgery clinic and an AR simulation environment, a sadistic computer, a physician who doubles as an action hero, and James Coburn giving a lecture explaining the enemy's evil plans in the opposite role that he played in the (excellent) The President's Analyst.
This time I was not so dazzled and saw it for as atrocious everyone else things it is. The minions of "Digital Matrix, Inc." manage several assassinations with the light-pulse L.O.O.K.E.R. gun but when they use real firearms they outdo Vader's stormtroopers by shooting each other. (Want to see the scene where somebody from E.Y. tells them to stick to the L.O.O.K.E.R. gun) The bad guys explain the penultimate secret to the protagonist early on but the ultimate secret is revealed in the L.O.O.K.E.R. lab which doesn't feel like a lab at all but rather a rather good room in a theme park experience where you're supposed to uncover the secret. (Contrast that to the lab Doug Trumbull outfitted in the Brainstorms movie a few years later which is packed with real surplus equipment... I've been to that lab!)
I can see it now.. The Distractatrons: a new chapter of protagonists in Transformers! The modern equivalent of evil in this day and age of ADHD and low attention span!
Sure, but we can't handwave away every observation about LLM output with "(some of) the original training corpora came from humans". Qualitatively, the vibes are off™.
Then the article isn't for you. That's okay!
Not every piece of writing has to be delicately crafted to the sensibilities of The Hacker News Reader.
Just because someone parachutes it onto the frontpage one day doesn't change that.
But if you're still curious and you can't find the easily reachable homepage then that's on you.