There’s a big difference between unnecessary applications taking up space on your storage device, and unnecessary services running in the background competing for RAM and CPU with the applications you actually want to run.
You've defined every OS that doesn't let you customize what services run, which Windows certainly does. As you strip away certain services, functionality is going to be limited, but the capability is there and has been since NT was released - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxIgY0tQqR4.
You have options on macOS via launchctl, but I'm not sure how low you can go.
Neither give you the same capability as Linux, of course.
What’s interesting to me is the number of commenters here making a case of the form “use your own words; grammar and spelling are not that important; we’ll know what you mean”, and yet it’s often the case that different discussions will often contain pedants going off-topic correcting someone else’s use of language.
Re-reading the HN guidelines, each seems individually reasonable, yet collectively I’m worried that they create an environment where we can take issue with almost anyone’s comments (as per Cardinal Richelieu’s famous quote: “Give me six lines written by the most honorable person alive, and I shall find enough in them to condemn them to the gallows.”)
Really, all the rules can be compressed into one dictum: don’t be an arsehole. And yet the free speech absolutists will rail against the infringement upon their right to be an arsehole. So where does that leave us? Too many rules leads to suppression of even reasonable speech, while too few leads to a “flight” of reasonable speech. End result: enshitification.
> If you find yourself unable to participate in this web forum without paying a proofreader (in time, money, or cycles) to copy-edit your writing, then you’re not welcome on HN as a participant.
It’s not sarcasm. If you feel if I have misunderstood the intent of the guideline we’re discussing — “Don’t post generated/AI-edited comments”, as the title currently reads, then I’m happy to discuss further. (I often make logical negation errors that I miss in proofing, so it’s possible I slipped up, too!)
I thought it was sarcasm given you are asking people to “pay a proofreader”. This sounds ludicrous. Could you clarify wha you meant by that line if it’s not sarcasm? Because I’m having a hard time thinking that it’s meant to be taken at face value.
No worries. The post I replied to was asking if use of ‘grammar improvement services’ (my paraphrase) qualified as AI-assisted writing at HN. All such services cost something; Grammarly makes a lot of money charging businesses, AI consumes watts of power that someone pays for, and even Microsoft Word’s grammar checker spins up the CPU fans on an old Intel laptop with a long enough document. I took from that the generic point that one “pays” for machine-assisted proofreading by one means or another, whether it’s trading personal data for services (Google) or watts of power for services (MSWord et al.) or donating writing samples to a for-profit training corpus (Grammarly free tier) or paying for evaluations where your data is not retained for training (Grammarly paid enterprise tier with a carefully-redlined service contract) and generalized to “pay for machine proofreading”.
Then, I considered whether HN would appreciate posts/comments by a human where they’d had a PR team or a hired editor come in and review/modify/distort their original words in order to make them more whatever. I think that this probably is most likely to have occurred on the HN jobs posts, and I’ve pointed out especially egregious instances to the mods over the years — but in general, the people who post on HN tend to do so from their own voice’s viewpoint, as reaffirmed by the no-AI-writing guideline above. So I decided instead to say “pay a proofreader” because, bluntly, if the community found out that someone was paying a wage to a worker to proofread their HN comments, the response would plausibly be the same mob of laughing mockery, disgusted outrage, and blatant dismissal that we see today towards AI writing here. “You hired someone to tone-edit your HN comments?!” is no different than “You used Grammarly to tone-edit your HN comments?!” to me, and so it passed the veracity test and I posted it.
It’s possible of course but reading all the comments from various non-native English speakers here it seems like a common story. It may indicate a subliminal bias in readers (most of whom are presumably American).
Note that those comments are written in perfectly understandable English. Further note how often you come across comments written in perfectly understandable English, but they're downvoted anyway.
It suggests a bias in writers to assume that people would agree with them if only they could express their thoughts accurately.
> You could run the comments everyone else posts through an AI tool and ask it to rephrase it so that it is clean, and easy-to-read.
For those coming from a language other than English, you are more likely to lose information by using a tool to “reconstruct” meaning from poorly phrased English as an input, as opposed to the poster using a tool to generate meaningful English from their (presumably) well-written native language.
> written English is starting to be seen as snobbish and AI-slop especially with younger generations growing up with AI
This is tragic. I write English well and will employ grammar and word choice effectively to make an argument or get a point across. English was my best subject at school 45 years ago despite a career in tech. In fact, I’d suggest that my career as an architect and the need to convey concepts and argue trade-offs with stakeholders of varying backgrounds has honed that skill. Should I now dumb down my language or deliberately introduce errors in order to satisfy the barely literate or avoid being “detected” as an AI? (as if the latter were possible. It’s an arms race).
> Should I now dumb down my language or deliberately introduce errors
Language is a tool. If it wins the argument, yes. I’ve absolutely gone back through drafts to tighten up language and reduce word complexity. And if I’m typing with someone who frequently typos, I’ll sometimes reverse the autocorrect. Mostly as a joke to myself. But I imagine it helps me come across as less stuck up. (Truth: I’m a bit stuck up about language :P.)
While this is true, it is not just a tool. Or, I should say it’s a tool with far greater utility than just winning an argument or making a localised point. Language is how we think, and the ability to reason well is absolutely dependent on our skill with language.
Language is the mark of humanity in the sense that how else can I convey to you a fragment of my inner state? My emotions, my feelings, my desires. The language of poetry and literature. That which sparks an emotional response in another.
I agree. But I don’t always see it as dumbing down. James Joyce’s Portrait starts out with a lot of nonsense, that doesn’t mean it’s dumb or dumbed down. It’s just communicating something that is best described that way. Even to an erudite audience.
I have expertise in some topics. I don’t think of communicating that in lay terms to be dumbing down. The opposite, almost: finding good analogies and expressing them clearly is a lot of fun, even if what comes out the other end isn’t particularly sophisticated.
Totally agree. But I’m seeing (or more sensitive to) increasing cohorts that can’t string two words together to express a single thought coherently. There’s a difference between adapting language and use of linguistic tools (such as metaphors) versus semi-coherent blathering.
EDIT: spread > express
Which may be a segue to a point regarding using corrective tools as a form of preemptive editing?
Those of us old enough to remember Compuserve know that the cost of entry was exactly why the quality was so high. I was lucky enough that my employer paid for it. I was also active on various comp.os.* Usenet forums. Both were great sources of quality information but Compuserve stayed “high signal” for longer. Usenet - the birthplace of trolling - eventually degraded to the point of near uselessness. The signal was drowning in noise. Mainly because some people are just shitty. Which is worth remembering here. Behind every AI agent spamming HN (and everywhere else) is a human who thought this was a good idea. Why do they think that? Maybe that’s the line to pursue for how to deal with this issue.
Probably because its not War and Peace. It's the hook for some app you're probably going top spend all of 2 minutes on deciding whether it may or may not be functionally useful, and that equation is going to be largely solved independent of the quality of that marketing copy.
AI oh,
It’s off to work we (used to) go.
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