> (side note I put your comment into LLM to make sense of what it meant re my comment without mentioning HN, it said "this is a classic Hacker News–style metaphysical sidestep: You made a practical design aphorism, He responded with ontology and epistemology. That usually signals polite disagreement or intellectual one‑upmanship" LOL)

Woah homie, watch out for the model which is trained on reddit comments dataset to talk about intellectual one-upmanship xD

Also another thing but holy shit, LLM's are sycophantic man, it tries uses big words itself to show how the person has intellectual one-upmanship while cozying you up by saying practical design aphorism.

Like I agree with both of you guys and there's nuance but I am pretty sure that nobody's tryna sound intellectual hopefully.

Sorry for turning this into a rant about LLM's being sycophantic but man I tried today watching big bang and asked it if sheldon and raj were better duo in more common about physics (theorist and astrophysicist) since I was watching a episode where they both have dark matter in common and chatgpt agreed

Then I just felt the sycophancy in my heart so I opened up a new thread and I think I used the same prompt and changed it to sheldon and leonard and it ended up saying yes again.

The problem felt so annoying to me that I ended up looking at a sycophancy index being frustrated of sorts and wrote a lengthy ddg prompt lol to find this https://www.glazebench.com/

We really don't need more yes man's in our lives and honestly I will take up a less intelligent model than a sycophantic one. So I am curious what your guys opinion are on it too as sometimes I use LLM's as a search engines to familiarize myself with things I don't know and I am lately feeling it will just say yes to anything even silly ideas so I would never know what's the truth matter of the reality ykwim?

LLMs say yes to a lot. I often find myself priming it first with "absolute mode" type prompts before dealing with it. And also keeping my own opinions close to my chest

Seriously for my part, LLMs incarns exactly the only type of person that can break my nerves. Far too often I spot an hallucination, some bullshit rambling, sycophancy, or ----hughhhhh----- rethorical elements of language that makes me go mad :(.

examples for ---hughhhhh--- inducing stuff :

"I'll be blunt !"

"Here's the ground truth, no bullshit"

"Bottom line : <UPPER CASE EXPRESSION>"

"No fluff, technical, precise, no bullshit, devoid of unnecessary rethorical shapes, <etc..."

"Blunt answer: <bold text>"

"<title> : the hard truth"

I am becoming snob ?

No, you are human.

We can hope that "Elements of Style", or similar, comes back into fashion.

Pragmatically, you can design things to be highly readable for yourself and people that are "like you".

Alignment between the shape and the content is done in a circular fashion : what you see educates you to fabulate about design, once you fabulated enough you begin to say things are bad or well designed.

I often express myself online by writing a bit what goes through my mind, in a joyful and not very attentive manner, and I find it amusing to be barely understandable sometimes (I like the fact you had to use an LLM, lol) because, well, I feel it may bring a certain color to the otherwise often too uniform and immediate/instantaneous world of internet -- So, what I said previously is also mostly what occurs when you let your mind wander;

now, if I rejoin my own person and body, I can agree with you that my culture of good design is about the testimony of the removal of intention, in such a way that I feel content is highly readable, (fictionnaly) devoid of style, and somewhat raw or pure.

But again, at the "philosophical stage" all of this is pure fiction, and with a certain mindset, I am pretty sure I could shift my habits to adapt to what I feel as weird design, ugly, barely readable etc... It would be totally useless and absurd, but I could (given I have no specific perception-related medical conditions) !

We saw the web become a repetition of the same design, and while it IS good design in our "minimalism" addicted brains, I am pretty sure stumbling upon weiiiiird websites makes us great good sometimes, so much that maybe we also start to think about the absurdity of our standards : we arrived to the point in the "lie" where we identify this specific style as "the shape" of our perception, and yes : it become invisible to us, and is good design, but also it is a bit depressing.

My window manager and my emacs/vim/terminal configuration aren't what I call good design. They are highly readable but stratosphere-reaching levels of kitsch (yes ! I WANT to cosplay and feel as if I was writing code for aliens or to fight the matrix at work, and yes that's a bit cringe but at least I am honest with myself).

I don't wish the world and internet to be "more like that" and am ok with the actual state of design. Nevertheless I find that's a bit arbitrary and somewhat boring.