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0 pointschrisweekly14d ago0 comments

I like this guideline, at least in principle.

But I have some concerns about suppression of comments from non-native English writers. More selfishly, my personal writing style has significant overlap with so-called "tells" for AI generated prose: things like "it's not X, it's Y", use of em-dashes, a fairly deep vocabulary, and a tendency toward verbosity (which I'm striving to curb). It'd be ironic if I start getting flagged as a bot, given I don't even use a spell-checker. Time will tell.

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TomatoCo14d ago

I think translation should be the only exception. It might even need to be, given how all automated translators use LLMs these days. The only alternative I see is to have people post in whatever language they're most comfortable in and then everyone else has to translate for them which just feels inefficient.

And of course, a more limited exception for posts about LLM behavior. It might be necessary for people to share prompts and outputs to discuss the topic.

kccqzy14d ago

Almost the entirety of the technology world is English-native. That ship has sailed a long time ago. One can’t learn about any new technology without English, whether it’s a new algorithm, a new library, or a new SaaS service. I don’t think HN should be that exception. Just learn English. (English isn’t my first language either, but then I look back at my parents forcing me to learn English from a young age and really appreciate that.)

ninjagoo14d ago

> Almost the entirety of the technology world is English-native.

I wonder if the Chinese might have to say something about that [1]: 33% of 2 million funded studies were in Chinese. I posit that as China strengthens and no longer feels the need to be admired internationally, that declining % will reverse.

Another example is of the Huawei Matebook Fold [2]. It's an interesting dual-screen PC Laptop (?) that I saw in a YouTube video from India, but the product page doesn't even come up in Google search results. Its product page is in Chinese, and the only way to find it seems to be through the wiki page [3].

[1] https://academic.oup.com/rev/article-abstract/doi/10.1093/re...

[2] https://consumer.huawei.com/cn/harmonyos-computer/matebook-f...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MateBook_Fold

degamad14d ago

Almost the entirety of the technology world is English-speaking, not English-native.

Pretending that it's English-native is why there's unspoken incentives to sound more "native", and thus use these grammar-correcting tools.

Some of the intelligent comments on here come from people who learned English in recent months or years, rather than in childhood.

Their English isn't always fluent or well-structured. If they rely slightly more heavily on suggested-next-word tools or AI translations, is that a reason to exclude them from the conversation?

Conversely, many English learning resources for non-native speakers focus on strict formal language, similar to AI-generated text. Do we risk excluding people who have learned a style more formal than we're used to?

getnormality14d ago

This is for their own good. Nobody cares about imperfect language online so long as you are trying to express real human thoughts. But if it smells like AI then everyone will hate it, rule or no rule.

The rule just makes the will of the community clear to those who want to respect it.

yellowapple14d ago

> Nobody cares about imperfect language online

lol

lmao, even

If I had a nickel for every time I've encountered someone who cared about imperfect language online, I'd have enough nickels to buy Y Combinator.

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