For every argument against AI slop, you will get a variation of it's the future, or I'm 10x more productive now, I've shipped 3 applications in 2 days, etc.
They won't stop talking about it and defending it. But I can't get anyone to share their amazing work with me.
There is a reason the Show HN projects that are mostly vibecoded don't get much response. It's because they aren't any good. Comments that are AI generated are hollow. Videos that AI generated a shell of their sources.
Obvious slop still makes it to the front page of HN, and sometimes farms GitHub stars.
These posts also usually get all these glowing comments from users who clearly haven't checked the code. It's even worse when authors get busted and claim "Okay, Claude wrote it, but the design is mine" despite clearly not understanding the output themselves.
Unfortunately, that makes high-effort projects less visible. The SNR will probably keep getting worse until slop can be flagged on HN.
One thing I learned is that AI written text is not hard to spot. Usually, when I meet slop, I close it one or two paragraphs in. Although tools like this will become more common, they usually serve to win an argument, or confirm what you already believe.
Also, it was painful to learn that my very first blog post I wrote in 2013 is AI generated. But I'm fine with it because I read this:
> A short punchy opener (≤10 words) followed by two or more substantially longer elaboration sentences — the LLM "hook then evidence pile" rhythm.
... and realized that the entire app is AI generated.
If you can spot it, an AI can spot it too. We have a website with some AI generated content (about AI). I added a skill to correct AI slop. Content got a lot better when I put that in place. I actually made codex research slop patterns and it came up with a list of known AI slop linguistic anti patterns. It now fixes its own content using that list. I also put a guard rail in place to do a critical review of all produced content as a final quality gate. That actually catches a lot of baseless claims, and other slop. And there's another skill that ensures we use the right SEO relevant language (a list that is produced by a separate agent).
It's actually starting to generate interesting content based on me giving it a few bullets and ideas. I won't claim it's perfect but it does a decent enough job.
I have my reasons for doing this (we help people set up agentic work flows) and I appreciate that not everybody likes the idea of AI generated content. But I think it will start getting harder and harder to spot AI slop. Basically slop is what you get without guard rails and quality gates. Of course, most people still lack the skills to configure their AI tools properly. Particularly non technical people. But it's not that hard and I bet there are a few handy journalists out there getting better at this. Also, for technical writers this is not going to be optional.
Since voting is that power we say we have in the US. Does the public get to vote on this? If not...
> Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster - Neil Postman
The US is a representative democracy, not a direct democracy. You don't get to vote on specific federal policies, you vote on the people who vote for those policies.
Voting with your wallet doesn't exist. Try to boycott Amazon by blocking the AWS IP ranges and see how unusable the internet becomes for everyday tasks. Corporations continue to push the personal responsibility narrative so they can externalize costs of unethical business practices.
how are you making them lose money by blocking their ip ranges? Your are pretty much giving them money because now they dont need to pay for bandwidth.
We can also engage in direct action the other 364.9 days of the year. Call/email your representatives, go to a town hall, call the leaders of both parties of both senate and house, go to a march or protest. There are other ways we can be heard, be substantive and thoughtful, they tally and track messages which are not hyperbole or copy-paste. If you can make it personal, even better. It only needs to be a few sentences.
You can look up Maroun Al-Ras [0] and it's map coordinate [1]. If you search for the name, you find a garden of the same name, but not the village. The instagram reel that was posted earlier had more context [2].
From wikipedia:
> In October 2024, IDF forces operated in the village as part of its invasion of southern Lebanon. The Israeli flag was raised, after the victory.
Which Apple might use as a justification. There is a Israeli flag, so it must belong to them.
One thing that will be incredibly useful is to limit comments from brand new accounts. A combination of vouching, limiting the posts velocity (5 daily limit), clear rules for new accounts, etc.
I understand we often see insightful comments from new accounts, but I always find it suspicious when non-throwaway accounts are created just in time only to make a quip.
This was discussed before. People will age accounts and buy/hack inactive ones. Meanwhile, often a link gets posted, the project owner (or someone affiliated) finds out, and they make a new account to comment; it would be a shame to lose these people.
800 is a huge achievement. But I have to admit, around 2011 I had completely given up on the Simpsons. Story and content aside, they did something with the audio. The quality of the voice is so clear that it sounds un-natural. You can see the same effect on many shows around that time. The voice is disconnected from the background music and sfx.
Anyway, they also improved the way the characters are drawn so much that it lost it's crude nature.
The cell layers constraint led to better art. The detail in the background was minimal and the artists world compensate for it by interesting framing and lighting. Go back and watch one fish two fish or the black widower episodes from early seasons - just incredible animation.
You can see the number of lines drawn go up like crazy around season 10 or so, making it feel less realistic. Coincidentally, the writing also started to get worse around this time.
The app didn't work for me. One that was shared right here on HN. I selected 25 miles radius, same ethnicity. Naturally I was matched with a person 700 miles away, of different ethnicity. So we got married... and deleted the app.
We were interviewed as a success story and our faces are plastered on the Internet now. My friends didn't find the same success, I concluded that they didn't know how to date. (wear the right clothes, etiquettes, conversation, navigate ghosting, etc.)
"What if the app could teach you how to do just that?" That's what I asked in our interview. That part was never published.
There’s no need to fear the construction of mass surveillance anymore. It’s already here. We built it one convenience at a time [0]. When I see all my friends with Alexa devices at home, ring cameras, and a million food apps on their phones, it feels like it’s already too late.
The blog that I started ~13 years ago started as 3 .html files. Everything else followed as needed (styling, rss, comments, etc.). If you can get past building it, the next question becomes "What should I write about?" [0]
My answer is usually that you can write whatever you want on your websites. It's yours after all. None of the limitations that exist on third-party platforms exist. You can make all the pages read upside down if you want to.
Thanks for reporting this. I'm assuming you are referring to the RSS feed?
The actual feed is https://idiallo.com/feed.rss in the meanwhile until I figure out the issue
No, they're referring to an error that pops up when you visit a page whose url ends in 'women-in-the-world.html'; you can click okay and still browse the page though :-)
Haha thank you. That went over my head. I dismissed that box without reading the error. But... I can neither confirm nor deny I understand what you are referring to ;)
They won't stop talking about it and defending it. But I can't get anyone to share their amazing work with me.
There is a reason the Show HN projects that are mostly vibecoded don't get much response. It's because they aren't any good. Comments that are AI generated are hollow. Videos that AI generated a shell of their sources.
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