Hacker News
points by foltik 2 days ago | 0 comments
Think about how you'd feel about receiving:

- An interesting sweater

- A sweater from a friend who thought you'd like it

- A handmade sweater from your grandma

- A worn-out sweater that belonged to one of your favorite artists

Little of what you’d feel comes from the sweater itself, or how much effort it took to make it.

The value largely comes from the person behind it. What it says about them, how they connect to you or the wider culture.

These kinds of projects used to be that same kind of window into another like minded hacker’s thoughts, personality, taste, and sense of humor.

That sort of thing is still out there, just getting drowned out by these low effort AI generated attention grabs, which really don’t say much of anything besides “here’s a statistically average rendition of a random thought that passed through my head.”

[–] kinduff 2 days ago
This is my reasoning about trusting authors rather than judge the tools they used.
[–] foltik 2 days ago
Agreed, and I don't care what tools someone uses. But if all they have to show is an AI generated README and pile of slop code with no sign of any human choices or curation, "don't judge the tools" doesn’t really apply.

It’s not “using a tool” when you farm out 99.999% of decisions to coin flips besides a random initial seed set by a few sentence prompt.

It’s like asking some guy “make me a project that does X” and then claiming you curated it and the other guy was just a tool.

[–] gordic_sara 2 days ago
hey sooo, not sure if it matters, but I went to art school and have been a designer for 8+ years; so definitely made a lot of human choices here. hope that helps lol!
[–] foltik 2 days ago
It does and I appreciate that. Really don’t mean to discourage your creativity, just explaining why it didn’t sit right with me.

The main thing is the presentation. Unrepresentative AI generated image at the top, AI generated readme, AI prose in every file I opened. It’s hard to tell which decisions were actually yours.

It’s the same sort of feel to me as a novel with an interesting original plot, but written in generic AI prose.

I want to hear your voice, not the AI’s.

[–] q4y2u35uk 2 days ago
I don't doubt there's a human touch, but the point is art school and being a designer are orthogonal to what would have made this project impressive in the past. This project interfaces with deep and partially undocumented macOS internals. A few years ago this project would have been a pet project of a master systems programmer.

I don't think that making software should be gatekept. I suppose it's a bit melancholy that software has to be appreciated differently now.

[–] kinduff 2 days ago
Love what you did. Keep creating with the tools you have. Just like you did in art school. Don't get demotivated nor try to justify in today's mood.
[–] kinduff 2 days ago
That last line rings a bell in how corp works sometimes.
[–] brookst 2 days ago
Honest question: do you think art’s value is proportional to the time it took to create it? Like a painting that took hundreds of hours is necessarily better art than a minimalist work that might have taken a few hours, or less?
[–] dumberquestions 2 days ago
Not op but I don't think it's proportional, it's more like an extra layer of value on top of the creation's innate value.
[–] foltik 1 day ago
No, I think the value is in how much of and how well the human experience is compressed into the work (and how well it decompresses in the mind of the beholder).
[–] jdironman 2 days ago
So...sentiment and bias?
[–] AlexeyBelov 1 day ago
Yes? Not all bias is bad.