How my e-reader lost its stripes(serpentine.com) |
How my e-reader lost its stripes(serpentine.com) |
Like the x-axis label of the first plot mentions that it shows gridlines every 8 ticks - I don't think that's a choice I've ever seen a person make. The next plot does the same thing, but in the title: "(dotted lines: evenly spaced reference)". Again, would anyone making a chart ever include such a specific detail in the title? Probably not beyond undergrad level.
I encounter a similar thing when trying to work with LLMs to write articles - they cannot help including information or detail from the conversation, rather than empathising with the reader and filtering out what they might already know or not care about. They may be capable of solving decades-old maths problems, but on this particular axis they seem to be floundering at the level of a fresh graduate that's desperate to talk about what they've done rather than what their audience needs to know.
It's definitely gotten worse over time as well. Looking at older README files I generated using Opus/Sonnet 4.5, its actually quite shocking how clear and concise they are. Whereas eg, Opus 5 will write paragraphs and paragraphs about random things I prompted, or a partial solution that was then scrapped for something else.
My theory is that the increasing strength in performing long-context tasks has led to this particular quirk.
The worst is when it walked through a dozen or so questions, and it decides to litter comments with "Per answer 7, ..." with no further context.
> Like the x-axis label of the first plot mentions that it shows gridlines every 8 ticks - I don't think that's a choice I've ever seen a person make
The spacing being 8 is important and seems not so bad to call this out in an extra place.
Imagine LLMs didn’t exist for a moment. Is this the part of the article you’d find most intriguing? That the grid lines being an unusual distance apart is written both on the axis and in the description? Would it have seemed inhuman on a blog post about debugging a weird display issue on an e-reader?
> They may be capable of solving decades-old maths problems, but on this particular axis they seem to be floundering at the level of a fresh graduate that's desperate to talk about what they've done rather than what their audience needs to know
Have you ever worked with people beyond graduate level? Ever seen scientific posters at a conference?
I would think it's odd! That's why I mentioned it. I like to pay attention to vis, I feel like I've seen many charts from Tufte-y perfection, to slapdash undergrad presentations, and to experienced consultants banging things together in Excel at 1am. This tic feels very LLM-y to me, which imo makes it interesting to think about - how does it arise? I also think this failure mode has been resistant to model upgrades in a way that mathematical reasoning has not, which I also find interesting as someone in ML research. It feels like this kind of mentalisation or theory of mind is a capability which isn't obviously elicited from the frontier labs' crop of RLVR tasks.
> Have you ever worked with people beyond graduate level? Ever seen scientific posters at a conference?
I've worked with a fair number of people beyond graduate level. In previous jobs I've run teams and hired people - hence my comment about graduates. We used to have an interview stage where candidates presented some simple data analysis, and it often centred on what they had done rather than what was most worth knowing. I have also attended scientific conferences, in fact I was at one a week ago! Is there a particular inference you would like me to make from those experiences?
The fact that we are now in the ai era where figures like this come so easy with no thought is actually even more damning to the article author. How can I trust anything in this article is any good given that they thought these figures were fit to publish? Either they didn't proof the work or they didn't care, and both are pretty bad possibilities.
It's about half the price of a kobo Clara bw, which has much better specs, higher ppi, waterproof etc.
I am tempted though.
That said, I read enough in the HN thread to get the sense of not bothering with “out of the box” and just flash Crosspoint Reader on it. I played with stock for a few minutes, it was functional, but not notable. Crosspoint took ten minutes to flash, and is head-and-shoulders above the stock FW. Better reader functionality, better font rendering.
For installing CrossPoint, that is very easy. The CrossPoint website walks you through the installation, which only takes 5-10 minutes. After that, you can put content on the device using the build-in SD card, via Wifi, and a few other methods.
You're on HN ffs...
It absolutely should be 8 here. The fact that it is 8 is extremely relevant because the figure is showing a pattern that has that frequency.
> Is there a particular inference you would like me to make from those experiences?
The incredible amount of unnecessary detail people put into their posters specifically (hence the better poster movement), desperate to show everything.
No, because every time any text appears here most comments seem to be discussing how and why this particular word choice is the worst of all words and ignoring anything to do with the actual article. It's tiring.
Did you find the article interesting? Any useful additions about eink screens to add? Anything you could add to the unanswered questions? A related anecdote perhaps?
> ike it's quite clear people do not like LLM generated content and feel betrayed when they didn't consent into consuming LLM generated content.
It's a correct and valid label on a plot pointing out spacing that's non-standard but extremely relevant. That's it.
Pretty much yep - it struck me as odd and reminded me of an LLM tic I've been thinking about recently, so I thought I'd write a short comment.
> The incredible amount of unnecessary detail people put into their posters specifically (hence the better poster movement), desperate to show everything.
I hadn't heard of the better poster idea before, thanks for clueing me in. I largely agree that posters have a lot of unnecessary detail, but I think it's a different flavour to the LLM stuff - more like they're so excited to tell you everything in their paper. Whereas LLMs focus on odd details, or fail to explain things.
Can I ask, if you use LLMs often in your work, have you never run into this experience?
Having been through so many, I get what you mean but broadly disagree. They have not actually considered or understood the audience.
> Can I ask, if you use LLMs often in your work, have you never run into this experience?
I have, but I also have with people and to a greater extent. And this isn't some gotcha I'm throwing out it's so incredibly common and a well thought out piece really working with the audience is so rare that this is the standard for talks/posters/etc. Far beyond blog posts about an e reader I'm talking about people giving the most important presentations of their lives. And far from not appreciating the mental state of the audience they'll not even consider whether what is put on the screen can even be viewed by them! "You can't see this but..." is something I've heard too many times.
This isn't however a case of that, it's adding in a duplicate bit of information about something that is genuinely important. It's not an odd detail, it's absolutely central to the plot. It's the point of the plot that one shows a repeating 8 (specifically 8 not 7) pixel pattern and the other does not.
> Pretty much yep - it struck me as odd
It's repeating a point about a visualisation that is not obvious at first glance. Frankly given most people would scan through this (one of the other comments complaining in parallel didn't seem to even get why it was 8) calling it out in the viz itself I'm not certain is a bad idea.
This is a fun blog post about hardware issues, an ereader and power. And the top comment is about one axis label on a plot, not even whether it's correct just why it adds what is seen as a correct and relevant but repeated bit of information.
I had been looking at the clara bw when I thought my hd was broken but managed to repair it.
Do you have the X4 or X3? I imagine with the small size it's barely a few sentences per page? Feels like it would be difficult to read comfortably. Maybe it's like reading one of those tiny bibles.