Hacker News: low_tech_love

New comment by low_tech_love in "Throwing AI-generated walls of text into conversations"

low_tech_love — Sat, 23 May 2026 07:30:34 +0000

I understand what you mean and it’s not wrong, but still there is a contract that is being fulfilled: human in both ends. Whether it’s rambling or not, someone wrote it, and it represents a person’s idea of whatever is being discussed. That contract is now broken, but in an asymmetrical way, only one side gets to save time. My brain refuses to spend time reading crap that I don’t even know if someone even took time to prompt. Maybe they just wrote “give me something to post, whatever makes me look smart”. It’s just completely broke for me and makes me actually sick in the stomach when I read almost anything (textual uncanny valley?)

New comment by low_tech_love in "Throwing AI-generated walls of text into conversations"

low_tech_love — Thu, 21 May 2026 21:03:23 +0000

And worse, you use it so much that when the question is actually great, you can’t convey that convincingly anymore.

New comment by low_tech_love in "Throwing AI-generated walls of text into conversations"

low_tech_love — Thu, 21 May 2026 21:00:20 +0000

I’m still holding on to my hope that LLMs will destroy verbosity and usher in an era of concise and objective human-written works. Especially in academia. In my research area people write 10-page articles that could easily have been 2 or 3, for no reason other than that 10 page is the publication limit most of the time and if you write less it’s seen as lazy or something. Not to mention 20-page journal articles with humongous literature reviews that everyone skips, and so many meaningless diagrams and sections. I still hope that LLMs will make people so tired of reading slop that they’ll beg you to please submit shorter articles.

New comment by low_tech_love in "Throwing AI-generated walls of text into conversations"

low_tech_love — Thu, 21 May 2026 20:55:03 +0000

Yeah, you’re spot on, and I hope people catch up on this soon (it’s already taking too long). I think one thing that most people haven’t realized yet is that reading AI slop bombs is really time consuming and stressful. We’re still operating on the assumption that reading is “free”, which came from the fact that writing took time and effort and written words were mostly meaningful before (at least you read something that you know took someone some time to write). But now that “writing” slop is so easy, reading can’t keep up. We can’t just keep reading all the meaningless crap people dump everywhere. It’s not scalable or even doable.

New comment by low_tech_love in "Throwing AI-generated walls of text into conversations"

low_tech_love — Thu, 21 May 2026 20:50:40 +0000

I think you’re wrong in one thing: Reading through meaningless walls of text takes time and effort that I’m not willing to waste. So it’s not just accepting a different culture; it’s not “free”. Reading AI grenades is really stressful (at least for me).

New comment by low_tech_love in "Stop throwing AI-generated walls of text into conversations"

low_tech_love — Thu, 21 May 2026 20:44:37 +0000

The sad thing is that the website itself is AI written, only made to be shorter and more concise. But still not human written.

New comment by low_tech_love in "Solving the “Zork” Mystery"

low_tech_love — Tue, 19 May 2026 21:01:30 +0000

Don’t want to be that guy but brace yourself for part 2… if the first one disappointed you in some places, the 2nd is going to beat you to a pulp. And I won’t even start on the third. I’m the kind of person who prefers not to finish a game than to read hints or walkthroughs, and parts 2 and 3 have been sitting on my unfinished stack for literally decades. :(

New comment by low_tech_love in "Accelerando (2005)"

low_tech_love — Sun, 17 May 2026 07:58:04 +0000

He writes that the book was written in 5 years and it is a personal record; does anyone know if that means a record slow or a record fast?

New comment by low_tech_love in "Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format"

low_tech_love — Sun, 17 May 2026 07:05:33 +0000

It’s unavoidable, but really sad, isn’t it? Thinking about the incredible creativity and hard work that went into creating such challenges and now it’s probably history. I feel something similar with free-to-play gacha video games. The gacha mechanics are slowly creeping into every type of game, and where you once had very clear and obvious slot machines, now you get them transparently mixed in with beautiful and fun games (e.g. ZZZ, Where Winds Meet, Genshin, etc) in a way that sounds like in the near future no company will have any incentive to not have gacha mechanics in any game.

New comment by low_tech_love in "Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format"

low_tech_love — Sun, 17 May 2026 06:59:18 +0000

Yeah but for the brief time window (which is probably coming to an end right now) where getting your name on the leaderboards was still worth it anyway, because people had not yet realized that the game is over, players will use the car anyway. Now that the game is over, leaderboards are meaningless, so we will figure out ways to move past that (like playing with people who care). But that will change the game in unavoidable ways: the tiny, fragmented scale will give less incentive for creators to come up with massive intricate complex challenges (it would be like hoping Bethesda would make Skyrim for a handful of die hard players). And soon, maybe on a few years, people will invariably start questioning whether it even makes sense to waste their time with this hobby if learning CTF skills is basically useless in an AI dominated world. There are still people learning Assembly for fun, but almost nobody does Assembly programming challenges as a hobby.

New comment by low_tech_love in "Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format"

low_tech_love — Sun, 17 May 2026 06:51:12 +0000

It’s different, unfortunately. I wish you were right. The problem is that creating interesting and fun CTF challenges is a very active, time consuming, creativity-heavy task. A chess board is always the same, and always will be, but every CTF competition is unique. There is little to no incentive anymore to spend time creating the challenges. You might say “well create the challenges and share them with people who care and who want to play honestly” which is probably the right answer here, and might happen at a smaller scale. I picture CTF in the future almost like a tabletop RPG experience, one where a small amount of people will share with close friends who they trust. But the usual “open” CTF scene (as mentioned by op) is probably over for good, if we’re being honest.

New comment by low_tech_love in "I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis"

low_tech_love — Sat, 16 May 2026 20:45:05 +0000

We built too many layers of abstraction, so much that even the people in power have forgotten where the fantasies are. The objective reality is behind so many curtains that we forgot what is powering the whole theatre play to begin with. Or maybe we know but became too far detached from it to care. If you are at the same the better and the player, then what’s left?

New comment by low_tech_love in "A few words on DS4"

low_tech_love — Fri, 15 May 2026 07:38:56 +0000

Haha the same here!!

New comment by low_tech_love in "Fired hacker twins forget to end Teams recording, capture own crimes"

low_tech_love — Fri, 15 May 2026 07:05:38 +0000

Did you move to Texas afterwards?

New comment by low_tech_love in "Reverse-engineering the 1998 Ultima Online demo server"

low_tech_love — Tue, 12 May 2026 00:19:16 +0000

I never got to the endgame but I solo-levelled a couple of characters in a slow pace in classic wow (pre-tbc) and it was mind blowing. The world is so well crafted, the lore, the art design, it is just fantastic. I guess if we have to be on rails at least they did it well.

New comment by low_tech_love in "Reverse-engineering the 1998 Ultima Online demo server"

low_tech_love — Wed, 06 May 2026 17:55:22 +0000

The “rails” thing is very much the gist of it. Don’t get me wrong, I think classic WoW is probably one of the best games ever made, but after it came out, nobody wanted the raw experience of early online worlds anymore. Which is just life I guess.

New comment by low_tech_love in "Reverse-engineering the 1998 Ultima Online demo server"

low_tech_love — Wed, 06 May 2026 17:49:55 +0000

A lot of grinding, first and foremost. The idea of a massive multiplayer game was new so just having the thing itself was enough to get you excited to go in and spend days repeating the same 5-second loop to get a level. It was also a much more social thing, servers were usually small (and niche) enough that you would know most people by nickname, know when someone new entered, etc. Most games were mostly sandboxes so the fun was just to have this shared world and compete in it, more than doing quests, etc. There was a lot of full drop PVP so the stakes were really high, you could lose in a second the items you worked for weeks or months to get. It was exhilarating.

Then WoW happened.

New comment by low_tech_love in "The Visible Zorker: Zork 3"

low_tech_love — Tue, 05 May 2026 09:42:47 +0000

I don’t know, the way I see it, if you read the title and you know Zork then you know, and if you don’t then… skip it I guess? I don’t mean to be a jerk, seriously, I skip 90% of what I see in HN because I don’t know the tech and thus am not interested. I just assume that whoever is interested in that can click away.

New comment by low_tech_love in "Roger Sweet, Creator of the He-Man Action Figure, Dies at 91"

low_tech_love — Mon, 04 May 2026 06:34:51 +0000

As someone dealing with a few cases of cancer in the family (including a child) I can’t help but think what an amazing miracle to live to 91 years old. Some people really hit the jackpot! Rest in peace.

New comment by low_tech_love in "VS Code inserting 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' into commits regardless of usage"

low_tech_love — Sun, 03 May 2026 06:45:19 +0000

I personally don’t understand the need to treat a tool as an “author” but that’s not important, my comment is mostly regarding the backlash of what happened. A feature was rushed in and does not work as intended, in a kind of disastrous way. Now we feel like our customers do when they have to deal with all the crap that our AI co-authors push forward without the right process.