lobsters score: 1 · tags: practices
Not sure what is the best place to bring it up, but I’m a bit confused about the moderation policy here.
This post is currently +11 and on the front page and seems to be talking in generalities about accelerating software development using LLMs.
But one of my previous posts about accelerating understanding of system dynamics using LLM-generated visualizations was removed by moderation. https://lobste.rs/s/awlefz/animations_for_system_builders
The stated reason for removal was “Article is about using LLMs”.
If articles about using LLMs are off-topic, then isn’t this post is off-topic too?
(I’m fine either way, I can stop submitting posts related to LLM usage, but it’s confusing to see posts extolling the benefits of LLM usage on the front page at the same time.)
score 3 · canonical
At this point, it’s got more off-topic votes than anything else, which is consistent with what happened to your post.
It also has 5 spam votes, which indicates that people are still using spam as an “I don’t like this” veto, because this has meaningful human authorship, isn’t self-promotion, isn’t promoting a commercial service.
In general, whether things get voted into oblivion is going to be a little unpredictable–lots of people may be on the fence and will be tipped over into voting or not based on annoyance more than anything else. I think that’s unfortunate, but inevitable and so I try to suppress my annoyance.
score 1 · canonical
There’s an expected guerrilla warfare by ai vegetarians so both articles are subjected to a lot of off-topic flags because they mention LLM usage. I didn’t post this article here because while I found it interesting, I know it’s not really a welcomed content by a significant number of people, and tbh I don’t this think it’s good enough - hardly any writing about ai is because it’s been chewed to death.
I think the visualizations article is maybe 75% ai slop in terms of content and feels low effort, while this article is practically 0% slop.
score 1 · canonical
I find it kinda hard to take seriously the advice to be “more ambitious” when the author’s own ambition ends at “set up the bare minimum CSS to make a blog readable” ;)
(I know reader mode exists, but Dan’s site is the only one where I need to reach for reader mode.)
score 2 · canonical
I think what that shows is that you and Dan have different ideas of which ambitions are most important.
score 1 · canonical
I disagree with Dan Luu’s style choices as well but the style isn’t due to lack of ambition or effort. He has put a lot of thought and measurement into it:
Another funny thing here is that the people who appreciate the styling generally appreciate that the site doesn’t override any kind of default styling, letting you make the width exactly what you want (by setting your window size how you want it) and it also doesn’t override any kind of default styling you apply to sites.
https://danluu.com/slow-device/
score 1 · canonical
I don’t see a lot of relevant measurements here. He compared a small number of sites on a good selection of rendering devices. But then it’s all about “older sites” and “sites that use techniques like […]”, no specific measurements. It’s a wall of text, but I couldn’t find measurements e.g. between his site as is and the same with a one-line max-width statement.
The quote and the whole section around it smells a bit of survivorship bias, maybe even another s-word.
I mean, as far as edgelording goes, it’s a rather harmless variant. I’m okay with people doing sites like they want, that’s one of the nicer things about the web. I’ve got my set of bookmarklets to cope with this and other common idiosyncrasies (inject max-width, change font, capitalize a few things etc.).
score 1 · canonical
There’s no max-width, this can make text difficult to read on very wide screens.
score 2 · canonical
I’m not quite sure what’s meant with “more ambitious” if it’s prompted by a “rewrite Postgres in Rust” project, and to be honest, it’s hard to eke out what’s meant given the rather unstructured nature of the post. Maybe I’m supposed to feed it to an LLM?
In order to get more posts out, I’m trying to crank posts out in half an hour and not review them much.
Ah, ok.
score 1 · canonical
I’m not sure what you consider confusing about it. The way I read it, “rewrite Postgres in Rust (with new optimizations)” is meant to be an example of the kind of ambitious thing we can/should be doing.
Postgres is a huge project, and rewriting it would’ve been prohibitively expensive in the past. If it’s doable now, with two people, that’s an indicator that a lot of things that were prohibitively expensive have become feasible.
That’s a genuine if. I don’t have a firm view on how good pgrust is.
score 1 · canonical