LLMs have supercharged it though, it's so much easier to create dozens or hundreds or thousands of ultra low effort LLM written webpages and websites that it ever was before LLMs.
I'm not Dang, but I agree AI articles are a disease - but with reservations.
In this case, a Chinese developer who's not a native English speaker - I feel is _adding_ to "interesting conversations" not detracting from them but using AI assistance to publish an article like this in readable/understandable English.
I know HN and Ycombinator is _hugely_ US focused and secondarily English-speaking focused. But there's more and more interest in non US based "intellectual curiosity" where the original source material is not in English. From YC's capitalism-driven focus, they largely don't care. From my personal hacker ethic curiosity, I'd hate to miss out on articles like this just because of a prejudice against non English speakers who use AI to provide me with understandable versions.
Having said that, AI hype in general certainly feels like a disease to me. I was noting recently how the percentage of homepage like/discussions I click has gone way down. I remember the days where I'd click and read 80 or 90% of the things that made it to the homepage. These days I eyeroll my way past probably 2/3rds of them because they look at first glance (and from recent experience>) to just be AI hype in one form or another. (I've actually considered building myself a tool that'd grab the first three or so pages and then filter out everything AI related - but the other option is just to visit less often...)
I'm all for people who aren't native English speakers publishing their thoughts and opinions. But I would much prefer they still wrote down their own thoughts in their own words in their native language and machine translated it. It would be much more authentic and much more interesting--and much more worth reading.
> I have my doubts that this will succeed if it's just one guy
Normally, I'd agree with you 100%.
But there are some interesting mitigating circumstances here.
1) It's "just one guy" who's running a fairly complex open source project already, one which uses minio.
2) The stated intention is that the software is considered "finished" with no plans to add any features, so the maintenance burden is arguably way lower than typical open source projects (or forks)
3) they're quite open about using AI to maintain it - and like it or hate it, this "finding and helping fix bugs in complex codebases" seems to be an area where current AI is pretty good.
I'm sure a lot of people will be put off by the forker being Chinese, but honestly, from outside the US right now, it's unclear if Chinese or American software is a more existential risk.
I'll admit I'd never heard of their Pigsty project before, but a quick peek at their github shows a project that's been around for 5 years already, and has pull requests from over a dozen contributors. That's no guarantee this isn't just a better prepared Jia Tan zx utils supply chain attack, but at least it's clearly not just something that's all been created by one person over 2 or 12 months.
The amusing thing (to me at least) is that while the DX7 gave users almost infinite options as to how they could create and shape sounds, if you know what to listen for you'll hear the E PIANO 1 and BASS 1 presets an about half of all mid 80s hits. Turns out when they gave musicians a tool with immense flexibility, many of them still chose to use two of the (admittedly great) preset sounds.
Apparently this happens every time. A sample disk included with tracker software was used in hundreds if not thousands of modules and pretty much defined the sound of the Amiga.
Yup. FM Synthesis is challenging enough to implement, but doing so on the DX7's interface is a whole other level of frustrating. It's far from the hands-on interfaces of most subtractive or modular synthesizers.
Imogen Heap created a set of gloves that transform finger flexing and wrist movement into midi signals you can use in whatever way your performance software allows.
That is literally the GitHub repo the original article shows as being "real".
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