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You can be a seasoned engineer but making websites is still a major b**. The small tasks required to make it "presentable" site just compound, until you just don't even want to do it.

Thank you Lordy for LLMs because I am going to hurt myself if I ever have to design and wire another contact form.

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One of the reasons why people just go "meh, whatever, good enough" and install wordpress, use some popular wordpress contact form. Have it give mail to a postfix daemon on same server that listens only on localhost and relays outbound via your own infra. Or similar. A base wordpress install is pretty hard to screw up if you don't start adding weird plugins to it, and it will auto-update itself by default. I can't even imagine taking the time now to do this by hand.
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Okay, but how about a shiny LLM website but with human-written text that's actually nice to read and not some unedited AI output? That doesn't take a week.
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Yes, it takes a month or two.

Depends on the project.

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People manage to write 500 word essays in school in a few days just fine, but writing a website landing page suddenly takes two months?

According to wordcounter.net, this landing page has 850 words. Most of that is just LLM fluff that could easily be removed, but even if you want to keep the original size, to spend two months on this you have to be writing less than 15 words a day.

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> People manage to write 500 word essays in school in a few days just fine, but writing a website landing page suddenly takes two months?

What the h... I mean, it's an opensource software to make Logitech's users life less miserable, and you are comparing that to the effort of a student writing an essay, where their only or main job during those days is writing the essay?

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> where their only or main job during those days is writing the essay?

Writing 850 words shouldn't take you two months even if you only have 10 minutes a day to spend on it. The discussion is about the short description on the product's website, not the product/code itself.

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It’s different. You can’t measure it by word count.

I’ve thought “hey I’ll just throw together this 5 page website on Squarespace, it’ll take a week at most” and despite only having like 5000 words it can take over a month. When you see how slowly it’s coming together it really destroys your motivation as well.

The words depend on the layout. The layout depends on the words. It all depends on art, and call to action, and SEO, and mobile responsiveness, and…

You can spend like an hour tweaking one hero sentence. It’s a lot more complicated then what we did in school, ie “Atticus Finch defends Tom Robinson, a Black man falsely accused in a racist town, knowing he will lose.”

If you had to write those 18 words on a website it’d probably take half a day to decide how you wanted to write them, and where you wanted to put them.

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But the discussion is about AI-generated text, not the website. It's totally possible to AI generate a website design and then write the text on it yourself.
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For some of us writing good text takes a lot of time and effort.
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It's just a bit of text for a website that describes what a product does, what features it has, and maybe an FAQ. It shouldn't take you long. For something like this you can even start with LLM text and then rewrite it in your own words and it will sound much better .
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Having had to edit the documentation from native English speakers in the past, rewriting "in their own words" made it unclear, way too detailed about unnecessary options, and badly formed sentences.

The average person cannot write good documentation (or website copy). It's an actual skill to learn how to phrase things, ensure that the documentation delivers the right level of detail to the different reader types etc.

As English writers, software developers make great programmers, not authors.

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Saying that the average person can't write good documentation or copy means nothing when the LLMs can't write good documentation or copy either. I'd rather have crappy human written docs than the LLM word salad. For example,

> A background watcher reads the foreground app's identifier once per second; when it changes, the overlay you authored for that app is layered on top of the device's global bindings, with per-app entries winning and any unlisted button falling through to the global map.

as is in the documentation right now could have just read

> Your device will automatically use app-specific keybinds when a given app is in focus.

So much of the documentation copy especially is typical of the ways LLMs leak implementation instructions into their written copy.

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Perhaps you can offer your time to proofread the website?
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If you never take the time, of course it will always be a lot of effort. But with experience it’ll take less time and effort.
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That is true but maybe not the thing I want to work on, so much other things to spend my limited time on.
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Then throw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing into your context and call it a day. there is no excuse for not proof-reading what you expect others to read.
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But isn’t that still AI-slop?
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I think you'll find it's mostly effort.
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Except "website made by LLM" almost invariably means the software was "written" by an LLM too, and thus is likely full of security vulnerabilities, bugs, and so on. It may also mean that github issues are being reviewed by an AI, which opens the door up to the AI to malicious prompting.
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I think I strongly disagree with your first sentence. Strongly. I've worked with enough people with fine coding skills and terrible English to know that the two are not an uncommon combination. Last year, I worked with someone whose first language was something from China - no idea which flavour - and they would often pass their written comms through an LLM. I could tell when they had done so by the onset of sudden grammatical correctness. But I don't think they were doing this with the intention of deceiving, merely of communicating clearly and correctly.

Now, I often find Claude's idea of idiomatic prose to be a bit load-bearingly seam-hitting as it lands not this point, but THAT one, but it is probably better than something hacked out by a person who confuses tenses, cases, pronouns and when they can enverb a noun. So I tend towards giving people the benefit of the doubt on this.

Lastly, if you think LLM-written software is full of security vulnerabilities and bugs, I have terrible news for you about the state of human-written code. The fact that what we do is often better than nothing at all, is no big recommendation.

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> I've worked with enough people with fine coding skills and terrible English

What about people with fine English and terrible coding skills?

What about people with both terrible English and terrible coding skills?

> Now, I often find Claude's idea of idiomatic prose to be a bit load-bearingly seam-hitting as it lands not this point, but THAT one, but it is probably better than something hacked out by a person who confuses tenses, cases, pronouns and when they can enverb a noun. So I tend towards giving people the benefit of the doubt on this.

Personally, I find AI writing as insufferable as anyone else (though Anthropic's is particularly bad, maybe just due to my familiarity with it), but I wouldn't judge individuals for using it to make communication more readable, rephrase what they mean etc. If anything, any difficulty in reading my prose would support that.

> Lastly, if you think LLM-written software is full of security vulnerabilities and bugs, I have terrible news for you about the state of human-written code. The fact that what we do is often better than nothing at all, is no big recommendation.

I guess a lot depends on how you use the LLMs (I bet horrible coding skills coincide with horribly lazy and problematic usage of LLMs for development too), but I wonder how humans actually stack up to the slop-machine when it comes to how good or bad the code they produce is on average, since I'm sure that SOTA model code by now tends towards the upper end of that.

In other words, if a person wants to limit themselves to avoiding LLM code over fears of it being bad, they would also have to avoid any any all code written by people that essentially produced the problematic training dataset, as well as any programmers with the same capabilities (or lack thereof). You'd basically have to avoid using a lot/most of the software out there if that's your quality standard.

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Dumb question but its because I genuinely do not know better. What is the security risk of what is as far as i understand a mouse driver with config options?
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For downloadable software there is the risk of a supply chain attack. The website is altered to provide a download with a malware-infected version of the software.

See the recent hack on CPU-Z: https://gist.github.com/N3mes1s/b5b0b96782b9f832819d2db7c668...

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That's a problem wether AI is involved or not.
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Sure, but LLM use is a warning sign of developer laziness.
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a mouse is an input device. most security challenges (passwords, etc.) are input via input devices. those are at a risk of being compromised. also clicks on an on-screen keyboard, etc. in fact, if u think about it, input device data (also know as telemetry - ironically, what we are trying to prevent in the first place by the logi app to do) security is a very serious potential attack vector.
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> Except "website made by LLM" almost invariably means the software was "written" by an LLM too,

please provide some kind of statistics to back up this claim.

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Right you are, Ken. With the amount of new low-effort software we can expect to see over the next decade, taste becomes a hallmark.
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