How my e-reader lost its stripes
serpentine.com186 points by simonmic 14 hours ago
186 points by simonmic 14 hours ago
Sorry for the tangent, but as a chart nerd it is so interesting to me the way that LLMs produce charts for articles like this - it's like they have no concept of a 3rd party (the reader). So the writing and the vis gets overloaded with the particular context of the conversation, even if it would be irrelevant to a reader.
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.
This happens with everything LLMs write - code comments, readmes, user facing UI text, etc. It just can't help but include every irrelevant detail from the context.
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.
>It just can't help but include every irrelevant detail from the context.
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.
This is so tiring.
> 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?
> Imagine LLMs didn’t exist for a moment. Is this the part of the article you’d find most intriguing?
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?
I want to really understand this, your issue is that the non-standard grid spacing is called out on the axis? The grid spacing being 8 is unusual but clearly sensible here - your issue is just that this is written also on the axis label?
> 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.
> I want to really understand this, your issue is that the non-standard grid spacing is called out on the axis? The grid spacing being 8 is unusual but clearly sensible here - your issue is just that this is written also on the axis label?
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?
Do you really have a hard time imaging that someone would call out an obvious AI slop label as weird and poor quality? Like it's quite clear people do not like LLM generated content and feel betrayed when they didn't consent into consuming LLM generated content.
If I saw the charts in the pre AI era I would also be confused. I mean it is just awkward and not done like this. OP is right, no one on earth says they put gridlines every so and so ticks anywhere, much less the figure title. Gridlines should be obvious what they are trying to show on a chart like this. They should actually be aligned with the tick marks on the x axis. In fact, why are those on a nice even 10s scale while gridlines are on 8 ticks? If this was undergraduate work I saw at a conference, I'd guess they were hungover when they made it and didn't realize they made the tick marks and axis labels incongruent with eachother, and it should have been 10 marks. I'd still have no clue why they wrote that in the title. I'd guess that they'd never presented a figure like this and guessed what might be important to include.
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.
> and it should have been 10 marks
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.
I got an X3 a couple of weeks ago, they are dirt cheap and the form factor is amazing. It's so easy to leave it in the pocket and just pull it out when you have an idle moment somewhere out in public. I wasn't certain how comfortable reading would be on such a small screen but it works well. With crosspoint, you can sync your page position with koreader on a larger form factor device.
I'm not convinced on the price. It's about 75 euro delivered for me.
It's about half the price of a kobo Clara bw, which has much better specs, higher ppi, waterproof etc.
I am tempted though.
those LookUp Tables are the most difficult thing to get from a display manufacturer; never thought to let an AI tune one itself using image feedback, incredible!
Related to the Xteink X3 reader mentioned in TFA:
I assume these fixes did not go yet in the latest release (1.6.0) and are going to be part of a later release? Looking forward to it, specially since anti-aliasing improvements were mentioned.
I believe someone built a Linux print driver that let you print straight to these and it would upload the file.
Been really enjoying the X3 lately. This is a great piece and ideally how a good blog post written about an experience with AI should go – authentically written, and not AI generated. I had fun reading it.
If you’re interested in this, you should check out the Modos project.
wow, an e-reader with opensource firmware? been living under my kindle rock for a while, this sounds exciting.
I’m interested in your debugging of this device. I’m not interested in what your llm did in the process. Just mention at some point you used one; "Claude led me on this dead end" is not interesting content.
Okay ill give you points because I never heard of Xteink X3or the open-source CrossPoint. I have a Kobo reader/pen note taker and a Kobo ereader (somewhere) one is too large and one is just meh. Im going to try one of these but it would have been easier to pick something if you actually said HOW DOES IT WORK OUT OF THE BOX AS AN ACTUAL EREADER!
The reader functionality was not the point of TFA. If you want a product review, there are plenty, including the prior HN discussion linked in this thread.
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.
I recently purchased an Xteink 4 Pro. My understanding is the built-in software is somewhat ok. You can find reviews on YouTube if you want to know more.
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.
reviews I've seen have been very positive, with the caveat that "out of the box" includes reimaging it with open source firmware. make sure you get a device that can be reimaged this way.
This is a good point. Devices purchased on AliExpress often have their firmware locked. Apparently, it is possible to get around this, but you're better off just getting one that's unlocked from the manufacturer, either via Amazon or the Xteink website,
As far as I understood a locked device can install other firmware if the current firmware supports it. A cooperative flush, so to say. But not an uncooperative one. Fine for using, not good for tinkering.
The author never intended their article as a review. So why not look up "xteink x3 review"?
You're on HN ffs...