If anyone’s wondering why this replier is so angry, it’s because they spent a lot of time arguing with people further down the comment section over whether this article is too heavily written by AI. (I'd say it is.)
It probably irked them to find the top comment had no mention of AI, but is still getting at the same root problem… the article is 2-3x longer than it could be, with lots of rambling and repetition, so it makes for a frustrating read.
Funny that I feel this same way around articles published on The New Yorker but have never once seen the same criticism about their articles. Usually it’s praised as great writing in the comment sections wherever it’s discussed. This observation predates AI by quite a while. In this case, I think its repetition is on purpose. I heard of the Flipper One recently and assumed it was a new version of Flipper Zero. I didn’t understand it was different. Even after they asserted it was at first, I didn’t fully grasp it until later in the article where the Layer 0/1 infographic was presented. This is quite simply consumer education around their products. Repetition isn’t always a bad thing, sometimes it helps and sometimes it’s done purposely.
> If anyone’s wondering why this replier is so angry
Angry? I'm guessing it's the last part that made me seem angry, I'm not though, just human, and tired of people who say they want to help yet seemingly reading is too much. A bit of straightforward language seems more effective at communicating this, than dancing around the issue.
And why on earth would I care if the top comment mentions AI? I don't even read HN comments in the "points" order, I read comments in chronological order...
Why the vendetta, did I say something annoying to you in the other thread or what's going on?
Special client, I'm currently developing my own native, local-first, cross-platform HN client, a tiny little 7MB built-from-scratch beast: https://i.imgur.com/Y87KJwY.png :)
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They're responding to the same question I had, and others surely had.
Namely, we see a AI DDOS'ing blog entry, 20 pages text, 35 with images, thats a mishmash of specs and requesting help with...Linux kernel coding!? to support their selected SoC? For hardware they're already accepting preorders for?
Then, someone reframing confusion as many people failing to read, which is about the most incurious and thought short-circuiting idea possible, even before it is used in discussion.
This question is only more forward in my mind after noting you're taking things personally. (vendetta?!)
It is worth noting this is the second time in 18 hours HN is dealing with their AI spam.
Yesterday's was a preorder page with multiple "needs verification" and "needs clarification" markers, including in the darn spec sheet. (via ChatGPT's system prompt for non-coding writing tasks)
> as well as why you're taking things personally (vendetta? really?)
Yeah, if you bring up completely unrelated stuff I've said elsewhere in a different context, to bring up where it's off-topic, then how is that anything else than personal, even the assumption about what feelings I'm feeling? Reply to what I said in that thread, if it's so damn important for you that I read what you write.
Fine, I understand the two of you really, really want to discuss if this article is AI or not, and how much of it is AI, and what what other Flipper pages were submitted to HN, but do you really need to discuss that in every sub-thread in this submission, can't that conversation happen where it happened before?
Not at all. Pretending we’re so hyper focused on whether it’s AI that we’re mislabelling good writing as bad. And using abusive language. Marginally better than pretending everyone can’t read, I suppose.
Yeah, agree, ignoring would have been a much better response from my side, now in after-hand. I'm glad I said what I said though, although not sure where the "abusive" language comes from.
This is such a weird counter-argument, that only serves to prove OP’s point.
“It’s not that it’s not documentable. It’s just that it would take tens of thousands of pages and no one would be able to write that or read that to effectively take over the project.”
Okay, so surely this is what OP had in mind when they said documentation doesn’t work… Is it no longer safe to assume reasonable expectations when making an argument? Why the need to “well actually” them with this response?
This website lists no sources, no author, and all of the content is littered with traces of being AI-generated (both in the table and in the descriptions). It seems hard to trust any piece of it that you don't already know in advance to be true, which feels pretty useless.
It's also the first time I've heard of cheese made of Horse milk which feels like the absurd sort of thing you'd get if you kept prompting AI to "find the rarest types of cheese".
The article makes a good point about how Figma's non-open data model is limiting their utility as the source of truth.
But I think it's part of a larger mistake Figma is making: they seem to have shifted to an extraction mindset too early, assuming they'd captured the market, right when the ground beneath them is starting to shift.
It's most visible in their pricing model evolution, which is now explicitly anti-collaboration. Figma used to be the obvious default because you could quickly share files with non-designers, so they could view and make small edits without fuss. Now that requires a paid "seat", along with a confusing mess of permission flows.
It's platform wide too. I taught a college design class recently, and had students sign up for Figma because it seemed archaic not to teach them to use it. Instead of just giving any ".edu" address a free account (like they used to) students are forced through a 3rd-party process of uploading transcripts to prove education status. A few of my students got rejected or ran into confusing errors, and never got access… Now I have to re-evaluate whether its worth using when teaching the class again. (And this is for a population with near-zero short-term purchasing power, but huge potential long-term value… why add barriers?)
This is such a weird self-inflicted wound for a collaboration platform to make. The big tools that won on collaboration (eg. Google Docs, GitHub) have understood that low-friction sharing is critical to becoming the default choice. And that being the default is a flywheel that drives adoption, both in users and in tooling.
It makes more sense if you see it through the lens of Figma trying to juice short-term numbers for their IPO. But it's sad to see because it had so much long-term potential.
Under that logic is a free trial a bait and switch? How about a 1-month free deal? How about what Adobe (and many others) do where they license to the school and students get it free until they graduate?
It seems like a really weird point to make, when you could just as easily argue that Figma giving their services for free to students is a gift that levels the playing field, by allowing students without means to gain experience with industry standard tools they might not have been exposed to otherwise.
> Under that logic is a free trial a bait and switch? How about a 1-month free deal? How about what Adobe (and many others) do where they license to the school and students get it free until they graduate?
No. The key difference being transparency. You know when signing up for a free trial what the actual long term costs will be and can plan for it.
We might be talking about different things. I was mostly replying to this line from the OP:
> But I think it's part of a larger mistake Figma is making: they seem to have shifted to an extraction mindset too early
I’m not sure if this was just awkward wording that seems to condone these type of strategies.
All these loss leading, vendor lockin strategies have distorted markets heavily. Complex tools cost a lot of money to develop; and if another player is just going to burn piles of cash from elsewhere to undercut you, it becomes a game of capital allocation and not individual product quality/costs. It’s terrible for consumers and a big reason why even common chat apps are barely functional.
That's fair. I'm also heavily opposed to VC-funded, market-distorting behaviors and the later extraction-oriented outcomes they produce. In this case I was framing it in terms that might be more widely received by folks who aren't, and pointing out that, even if that was their mindset and goal, they were still making a mistake strategically.
But I appreciate the reminder to not cede ground in wording, thanks.
Watching the hive mind of the industry go almost overnight from inVision to Figma shows there's just no mote in this segment... people can leave just as quickly as they came, have no loyalty, and are all about fashion and vibes.
That wasn’t my experience, having just driven across the city and back during tonight’s outage. It was actually weirdly inspiring how well people coordinated at so many of the powerless intersections.
There was a lot of confusion, and some people took advantage of it to rush through, but for the most part it was pretty orderly. Which makes sense because in many parts of the world where there are no traffic lights or stop signs, people get on just fine.
The Waymo’s, on the other hand, were dropping like flies. While walking from Lower to Upper Haight I spotted a broken Waymo every handful of blocks. The corner of Haight & Fillmore was particularly bad, with 3 of them blocking traffic in both directions — in the path of both the 7 and 22 bus lines.
I think a significant factor helping that to work is the mixing of all traffic on the street. I've noticed that in LA's Skid Row, where homeless people are constantly moving into the street on foot or on bicycle and they walk around in vehicle lanes pushing shopping cart armadas and so on, drivers are more cautious than usual and I see, if anything, less reckless driving and close calls there than in other parts of downtown, where pedestrians stick to the sidewalk and distracted or car-brained drivers don't look out for them. Just anecdotal observation, of course.
Different things. A country with lax rules is not the same as a specific environment with shared spaces, where according to known data it's safer to eliminate some specific kind of regulation and let the remaining part take over.
There have been some experiments that suggest that traffic flow is both safer and more efficient if you just turn disable the signals entirely. I doubt it applies to all, or even most, situations but it's definitely food for thought: https://www.npr.org/2008/01/19/18217318/german-towns-traffic...
So, just to make it clear… you define good art by “whether the artist is any good at art”.
Illuminating…
——
For anyone who’s interested in a slightly more nuanced take on how people in the Middle Ages perceived of “art” — and how different that notion was to how we perceive it today — Forgery, Replica, Fiction by Christopher Wood [1] is a really interesting read.
Here’s the last sentence of the Goodreads summary, which describes the major transition in thinking:
“… Ultimately, as forged replicas lost their value as historical evidence, they found a new identity as the intentionally fictional image-making we have come to understand as art.”
I can't help but feel that this article was written in a format that is the textual equivalent of thin desires…
Every sentence is separated into its own paragraph, like each one is supposed to be revelatory (or maybe tweet-worthy). It's pretty common design knowledge that if you try to emphasize everything, you end up emphasizing nothing. The result is that reading the article feels choppy, and weirdly unsatisfying, since the larger arc of each point is constantly being interrupted.
Why choose such an antithetical form, to what is otherwise an important and deep message?
The only answer that comes to mind is that the author's livelihood, or at least their internal gauge of success, is tied to manipulating readers' thin desires.
Reading, I knew someone would comment on it. I actually prefer the style - maybe because my attention span is shot. But I think it’s more because the author made sure each sentence was content heavy. No verbose paragraphs. And paragraphs made of dense sentences are themselves dense and become harder to read.
Reflect on the structure of your own comment. I suspect you were not intentionally trying to be ironic.
Edit: revisiting the article, I’ll allow that the author may have over-done it in some parts. But I think the bias was in the right direction.
A paragraph is a feature designed to help the reader understand the writer's intentions.
If it is used all the time, just like here, then it ceases to be helpful in marking breaks in trains of thought; or anything for that matter.
Consider the following excerpt of the post:
The thick life doesn't scale.
That's the whole point.
So: bake bread.
There is absolutely no information there that would warrant three full stops. I also don't know the author nearly well enough to consider pondering its meaning: To my eyes there is only a need to stop and ponder at most once. It is essentially just noise.
There is something to be gained from the text, but it is overblown in size due to what appears to be a lack of time or skill of the author.
PS: If some context is missing in the excerpt: Well to bad that there is no natural marker signifying that a train of thought has concluded (or started).
Wouldn’t it be handy if the browser could intelligently join this author’s sentences into paragraphs?! (in connection to the thread about Mozilla putting AI in the browser)
The prose is self-consciously different, makes the reader work a little harder. One can almost feel a literary water ripple or pebble garden, stillness and simplicity.
Consider an analogy: the writer knows that a reader readily digests concepts in C++ and purposely pivots to something obscure like Pony. The reader says "this is inconvenient, I need to change my process to digest your work" and the author says "that's the point."
I've never baked anything more complex than a pre-packaged cornbread mix, or a frozen pizza.
Baking has always been someone else's problem.
But having now skimmed through this bit of weirdly-formatted writing, I might give it a shot.
(Oh, and of that formatting: It reminds me a bit of what suck.com looked like in the mid-late 1990s. I still have the sticker they sent me stuck to a thing ~30 years later, but the suck-branded Gold Circle Coin condom they sent with it got mangled pretty bad in the mail.)
I started baking bread because I had a bag of plain flour (i.e. not bread flour, only 9% protein) sitting in the cupboard and approaching its sell-by date. So I made 'ships biscuits', and one thing led to another.
So a bag of what in the UK is called 'strong white flour' (i.e. protein around 12%, I think it is 'all purpose' in US) and a sachet of instant yeast and some salt. Followed the instructions on the bread bag and it worked sort of, a bit solid but edible and it toasted nice.
Then you just iterate. Lots of stuff out on the Web. I use supermarket flour and the dried active yeast and the ingredients are 10x cheaper than even a basic bought loaf. And mixing and baking is fun.
Sourdough is OK but you then have a pet to look after...
Maybe you like being restricted to reading in the ad-copy register, in which case go ahead and make virtue of vice, but otherwise: this lack is well within your power to remedy.
Same reaction - I could immediately tell this person had learned to write on Twitter (or Linkedin), not real meaty writing. I had an English professor who wrote "FORM = CONTENT" on the chalkboard; this article would send him into a fury.
It's not just you. I've read this person's stuff before. Every sentence comes off as if they are presenting the results of a major epiphany.
You can write things which sound pretty. It's the equivalent of wordy sugar. It's much harder to to write things you've learned from life experience or thought deeply about.
Subject your beliefs to the Socratic method. If they've survived your own criticism to the fullest extent and can be validated by your own lived experience, then maybe they've got an inkling of truth and they're worth writing about.
News is the ultimate in thin writing, by definition.
I think the article would've been improved by varying sentence structure and paragraph length. There is a time and place for short paragraphs, and they do make things easier to read. However, the whole point the article is making is that many things that are worth doing are not easy, and many things that are easy are not worth doing. It's explicitly advocating for people to engage with the world around them, even if that means they have to face the possibility of changing themselves.
Long-form paragraphs are exactly that: harder to read, but they invite you to grapple with the material that's being written.
I agree with you to a degree. I considered that as a reason as well, and "meeting people where they are" in communication design is something I think about a lot.
But if using an approachable format to deliver an alternative message was the strategy, I think we'd see a few places where the author tried to stretch the format slightly, to give a few core ideas more chance to resonate. In which case it could have been a masterful use of an antithetical format, to prove and point and enrich the message.
Instead, since the entire post conforms, it feels much more like an internalized autopilot, or purposefully manipulative technique.
Hah, that’s a good point. It’s always interesting to see somebody find a clever little bit of redemption for a widely disliked aspect in an article—nice.
>The only answer that comes to mind is that the author's livelihood, or at least their internal gauge of success, is tied to manipulating readers' thin desires.
From the about page:
>Free subscribers get previews of these essays and occasional full posts. Paid subscribers get all essays, the most useful ideas, conversations, and community access.
I really don’t like this new feeling of not knowing if what I’m reading is from a person or a machine but I can’t quantify why it bothers me. I wonder if it will be a temporary thing like in 5 years nobody will ever care again even though the chance of it being a machine might be higher.
When I was young my parents were scared that the MTV generation couldn't focus long enough to watch the "real news".
Not long ago I feared that twitters short form content was shortening peoples attention spans so much that they would stop being able to appreciate nuance at all... Then came TikTok.
I don't know what comes next, but I promise you it will be worse. Either way, it's a race to the bottom and we're not there yet.
I think that LinkedIn writing style is so infectious that people who do have something to say wind up getting sucked into it and wind up dodging tomatoes in the comment section as a result.
There’s the prolific curmudgeon with a tomato cannon backed by a whole tomato farm and then there’s what you get when people thought your blog post was written by A.I. Ignore the first.
I've seen this author's work elsewhere like Substack/Threads.
Good article, good writer.
But this whole post reminds me of a series of 1 or 2-line tweets. And I think that's the point. It's almost written as a series of scheduled posts that dribble out once a day for the next X days. Write once, re-purpose many times.
In my perspective, this is a style of writing that emphasizes the poetic side of speech. The thin paragraphs you see is a result of a rhythmic decision to make it short burst.
More than anything it seems to make sense to read it out loud in a theatrical performance.
Didn't really come off as design-y or antithetical form and definitely not manipulating lol, maybe a little poetic or artsy fartsy. Agree that it's important and deep.
Same. It looks like the author is playing with poetry to me. They're clearly playing with the stanza with the similar lines and the contrasting lines. Yeah, it's amateur, but who cares? It tracks with the message.
If anything I think the GP's comment is an example of a thin desire. Being nitpicky/petty to justify internalizing and actually reading the post. There's no lines to read between here, it's plain as day. We are addicted to dismissing things because it's gratifying and easy. It's trivial to find errors or complaints about anything, but it's difficult to actually critique. I'd argue in our thin desires we've conflated the two. It's cargo cult intellectualism. Complaints look similar to critiques in form but they lack the substance, the depth.
That's not always the intention behind that style of writing.
Often, when I'm communicating with someone who is either dyslexic, or uses English as a second (or even third or fourth) language, then I make an effort to shorten sentences, and almost make bullet points of them.
It's actually a good exercise for the person writing too. Less can indeed be more.
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