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Comment by skipkey | Hacker News Reader

I honestly don’t know why people get worked up over this. I assume that either the person doing it isn’t a native speaker, or they are a techie that just doesn’t have good English language writing skills. And having those skills is rare for technical people. It’s much easier to deal with Claude than what those people would have written without assistance.

Over the last few decades I’ve read many technical docs that were obviously mechanically translated from some other language. This is much better.

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Technology doing code is really cool because you give it an input, a functional purpose, and your intended function output - and it can do a pretty darn good job at producing the code that fulfills the requirements.

But when you want me to read something AI written, without the human refining the UI I see, it almost seems like I'm a test case and all the author cares about is my output in terms of "I like it" or "I don't like it". There's no information about _why_ the author wanted me to see this. Can you tell me your inspiration for making this? Some sort of personal connection I should have with the thing I'm seeing?

Vibe coded apps can still be useful in this state as tools, but don't expect me to use my creative brainpower to provide feedback on your product in a constructive manner if you can't be asked to ensure the text is your intention for the code, not how the AI interpreted it.

I don't really get worked up over it, but I do have a preference for original writing these days. If it's someone's pet project or something creative, I prefer the authenticity of the creative's actual writing. AI writing is just so boring and sterile out of the box. You lose nuance and personality.

It is a bit different with translation, in that case AI translation might get closer to the original intent than manual translation by the author. But otherwise I want the words from their brain meats, not layers removed and cleansed by system prompts and training.

I just know if the first spoonful tastes like dung then I'm not going to keep eating the soup.

> Over the last few decades I’ve read many technical docs that were obviously mechanically translated from some other language. This is much better.

I don’t think it’s better. Any frontier LLM is capable of competent translation without significantly re-wording the text.

I use Whisper to transcribe foreign language videos and then run them through a couple of models to translate into English. It works really well, and much better than mechanical translation because they can figure out likely mistakes based on how whisper might have misheard (or surrounding context from the script).

I dont find it better. I fimd it significantly worst.

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