> Osaka recorded more than 90 cases of water pipe leaks under its roads in the 2024 fiscal year, according to the city's waterworks bureau.

I must admit, that seems pretty small given how many roads and many people said infrastructure supports.

Still a good idea to get ahead of maintenance, but I am pretty impressed.

I wonder if Japan is suffering the same issue many western countries are facing, where regulation and wages are becoming too high to get much done with that amount of money. In my country, I would be surprised if you could replace a single roads water pipes for 3.6million.

It's just good writing structure. I get the feeling many people hadn't been exposed to good structure before LLMs.

LLMs can definitely have a tone, but it is pretty annoying that every time someone cares to write well, they are getting accused of sounding like an LLM instead of the other way around. LLMs were trained to write well, on human writing, it's not surprising there is crossover.

It's really not "good" for many people. It's the sort of high-persuasion marketing speak that used to be limited to the blogs of glossy but shallow startups. Now it's been sucked up by LLMs and it's everywhere.

If you want good writing, go and read a New Yorker.

I was specifically talking about structure, less content, because yes an LLMs content is usually the airy corporate cleansed speaking I can't stand.

I don't see that in the comment we are talking about mind you.

Not so sure about that. There are many distinct LLM "smells" in that comment, like "A is true, but it hides something: unrelated to A" and "It's not (just) C, it's hyperbole D".

I personally love that phrasing even if it's a clear tell. Comparisons work well for me to grasp an idea. I also love bullet points.

So yeah, I guess I like LLM writing.

Sure, but you can read articles that predate LLMs which have the same so called tells.

> Sure, but you can read articles that predate LLMs which have the same so called tells.

Not with such a high frequency, though. We're looking at 1 tell per sentence!

You're absolutely right, that isn't just good writing — that's poetry! Do you need further assistance?

There is such a thing as a distinct LLM writing style that is not just good structure. Anyone who's read more than five books can tell that.

And the comment itself seems completely LLM generated.

That's not just false. It's the antithesis of true.

It's not just using rhetorical patterns humans also use which are in some contexts considered good writing. Its overusing them like a high schooler learning the pattern for the first time — and massively overdoing the em dashes and mixing the metaphors

LOL :-))

It's true that LLMs have a distinct style, but it does not preclude humans from writing in a similar style. That's where the LLMs got it from, people and training. There's certainly some emergent style that given enough text, you would likely never see from a human. But in a short comment like this, it's really not enough data to be making good judgements.

Contrastive parallelism is an effective rhetorical device if the goal is to persuade or engage. It's not good if your goal is more honest, like pedagogy, curious exploration, discovery. It flattens and shoves things into categorical labels, leading the discussion more towards definitions of words and other sidetracks.

If it indicates, culturally in the current zeitgeist, that an AI wrote it, it becomes a bad structure.

Or prepare your soldering iron. Maybe both.

If you don't mind looking like a blade runner extra who's gone missing while working in public, there's not much difference carrying these around. The moonlander is a great portable option. Just slip it in your laptop bag.

I quite like it because it gives me a bit of flexibility on where I put them, and gives me a bit of extra room in the middle. Great for a small airport table or whatever, can even use them rested on your legs

By what metric makes a keyboard "best"? It's crazy subjective, and objectively diverse as we are all shaped differently with different levels of injury/wear etc.

Who cares if it's "better" if it's working better for you?

I forget the name of the layout (the board is a Lily58), but my keyboard does away with the staggered key spacing and has keys aligned vertically with a subtle bowling. You're usually pressing keys with your pad, not the sides or tips, and I suspect it would be even better with flat low profile keycaps.

There are some styles of "chording" keyboards that might help too, and some that would be way worse. Chording keyboard are also wildly different to regular keyboards, totally alien by comparison to just splitting a keyboard.

A split keyboard does a good job of enforcing stricter adherence to the home keys so you end up getting quite accurate at the special functions too since everything is within reach. I think extra thumb buttons on a non-split keyboard gets you all the same benefits, I'd love to see more boards explore that.

It does make the lowest common denominator easier to reach though. By which I mean your local takeaway shop can have a professional looking website for next to nothing, where before they just wouldn't have had one at all.

I think exceptional work, AI tools or not, still takes exceptional people with experience and skill. But I do feel like a certain level of access to technology has been unlocked for people smart enough, but without the time or tools to dive into the real industry's tools (figma, code, data tools etc).

The local takeaway shop could have had a professional looking website for years with Wix, Squarespace, etc. There are restaurant specific solutions as well. Any of these would be better than vibe coding for a non-tech person. No-code has existed for years and there hasn't been a flood of bespoke software coming from end users. I find it hard to believe that vibe-coding is easier or more intuitive than GUI tooling designed for non-experts...

I think the idea that LLM's will usher in some new era where everyone and their mom are building software is a fantasy.

I more or less agree specifically on the angle that no-code has existed, yet non-technical people still aren't executing on technical products. But I don't think vibe-coding is where we see this happening, it will be in chat interfaces or GUIs. As the "scafolding" or "harnesses" mature more, and someone can just type what they want, then get a deployed product within the day after some back and forth.

I am usually a bit of an AI skeptic but I can already see that this is within the realm of possibility, even if models stopped improving today. I think we underestimate how technical things like WIX or Squarespace are, to a non-technical person, but many are skilled business people who could probably work with an LLM agent to get a simple product together.

People keep saying code was never the real skill of an engineer, but rather solving business logic issues and codifying them. Well people running a business can probably do that too, and it would be interesting to see them work with an LLM to produce a product.

> I think we underestimate how technical things like WIX or Squarespace are, to a non-technical person, but many are skilled business people who could probably work with an LLM agent to get a simple product together.

In the same vein, I think you underestimate how much "hidden" technical knowledge must be there to actually build a software that works most of the time (not asking for a bug-free program). To design such a program with current LLM coding agents you need to be at very least a power user, probably a very powerful one, in the domain of the program you want to build and also in the domain of general software. Maybe things will improve with LLM and agents and "make it work" will be enough for the agent to create tests, try extensively the program, finding bugs and squashing them and do all the extra work needed, who know. But we are definitely not there today.

Yeah I've thought for a while that the ideal interface for non-tech users would be these no-code tools but with an AI interface. Kinda dumb to generate code that they can't make sense of, with no guard rails etc.

You get diminishing returns up there though, the cutest cat photo in the world would look remarkably similar to the next 2,000 photos of cats in the cutest cat photos leaderboard. I feel we should filter on diverse topics rather than best by metrics, perhaps we'll want to discern on concern.

I for one am happy to live in a world awash in the cutest kittens.

Same, all projects get a .notes folder where plain text goes. Home directory gets a .notes folder also. It helps to have good command over text based search tools.

There was an exception though, where text just didn't cut it, which was a brief period where I was importing vehicles from Japan and needed lots of images, documents and comparisons up on a big digital whiteboard. I used LogSeq for that.