Top all-time · #4760
Gerben Wierda
Personal blog · ea.rna.nlbusiness
Gerben Wierda writes R&A IT Strategy & Architecture, a personal blog at ea.rna.nl about business. Since 2020, 16 different Hacker News readers have linked it 30 times, most often “When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-31, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (14) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Gerben Wierda's blog mostly for its argument that LLMs can shorten text but cannot truly summarise, and for posts on enterprise architecture and IT complexity.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 14 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
R&A is the vehicle for Gerben Wierda's 'extracurricular activities' (what he does next to his day job and family life — or what's left of that). Mostly writing and sometimes a bit of training or consultancy. R&A is also the publisher of Mastering ArchiMate and Chess and the Art of Enterprise Archite
Most-linked posts?
- When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind9 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2024-06-16
- No-IT. Really. No. I. T. – R&a IT Strategy and Architecture2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-07-19
- The psychology of architecture and the architecture of psychology2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-11-02
What Hacker News says?
This article seems more relevant than ever and was posted a few days ago: https://ea.rna.nl/2024/07/12/no-it-really-no-i-t/
Comment linking /2024/07/12/no-it-really-no-i-t/
on “CrowdStrike Update: Windows Bluescreen and Boot Loops”Submitted When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind as a story · 251 points
HN discussionYou are definitionally incorrect. From Wikipedia: > robots.txt is the filename used for implementing the Robots Exclusion Protocol, a standard used by websites to indicate to visiting web crawlers and other web robots which portions of the website they are allowed to visit. From robotstxt.org/orig.html (the original proposed specification), there is a bit about "recursive" behaviour, but the last paragraph indicates…
Comment linking /2024/05/27/when-chatgpt-summarises-it-actually-does-nothing-of-the-kind/
on “Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent”Submitted The many lies about reducing complexity part 2: Cloud as a story · 224 points
HN discussionIf you want summaries from my website, go to my website. I want a way to deny any licence to any third-party user agent that will apply machine learning on my content, whether you initiated the request or not. LLMs — and more importantly the companies that train and operate them — should not be trusted at all, especially for so-called "summarization": https://ea.rna.nl/2024/05/27/when-chatgpt-summarises-it-actu... W…
Comment linking /2024/05/27/when-chatgpt-summarises-it-actually-does-nothing-of-the-kind/
on “Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent”Submitted Enterprise, IT architecture and strategy is getting more and more frustrating as a story · 195 points
HN discussionYou are not. Perplexity should always respect robots.txt, even for summarization requests. If I say that I don't want Perplexity crawling my site, I mean at all , and I explicitly would not want them "summarizing" my page. The response from Perplexity to such a request should be "The owner of this page/site does not permit Perplexity to process any data from this site." Period. LLMs can't summarize in any case: http…
Comment linking /2024/05/27/when-chatgpt-summarises-it-actually-does-nothing-of-the-kind/
on “Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent”Submitted No-IT. Really. No. I. T. – R&a IT Strategy and Architecture as a story · 7 points
HN discussionNo, because an LLM cannot summarise. It can only shorten which is not the same . Citation: https://ea.rna.nl/2024/05/27/when-chatgpt-summarises-it-actu...
Comment linking /2024/05/27/when-chatgpt-summarises-it-actually-does-nothing-of-the-kind/
on “No AI* Here – A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter”Submitted Is Your Consultant a Parasite? as a story · 4 points
HN discussion> If an LLM is tasked with translating a full text to a summary of that text then it is very reliable. Hrm. I've found LLM summaries to be of... dubious reliability. When someone posts an article on this here orange website, these days someone will sometimes 'helpfully' post a summary generated by a magic robot. Have a look at these, sometime. They _often_ leave out key details, and sometimes outright make shit up.…
Comment linking /2024/05/27/when-chatgpt-summarises-it-actually-does-nothing-of-the-kind/
on “The AI Investment Boom”Submitted A code inspection of 'serious' LLM-generated code as a story · 3 points
HN discussionhttps://ea.rna.nl/2024/05/27/when-chatgpt-summarises-it-actu...
Comment linking /2024/05/27/when-chatgpt-summarises-it-actually-does-nothing-of-the-kind/
on “The Story of Samsung's failed deal with iFixit, as told by iFixit's CEO”Submitted Anthropic/OpenAI may be spending more than $1000 for every $100 you pay them as a story · 3 points
HN discussionPart 1 is linked in article https://ea.rna.nl/2016/01/10/a-tale-of-application-rationali... "This was actually part 1 of this story: A tale of application rationalisation (not)."
Comment linking /2016/01/10/a-tale-of-application-rationalization-not/
on “The many lies about reducing complexity part 2: Cloud”Submitted When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind (2024) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIt's linked in the article https://ea.rna.nl/2016/01/10/a-tale-of-application-rationali... "This was actually part 1 of this story: A tale of application rationalisation (not)."
Comment linking /2016/01/10/a-tale-of-application-rationalization-not/
on “The many lies about reducing complexity part 2: Cloud”Submitted Don't forget all the things that a core team performs, but that you never see as a story · 3 points
HN discussionInterestingly your comment is the very opposite of my experience with LLMs. You can rely on them for creative stuff (write a poem, short story, etc.), but you cannot depend on them for factual stuff. Time and time again they will state "facts" that turn out to be false, and so now I no longer trust it for anything without manual verification. And since I then need to do the research myself for the verification, I ra…
Comment linking /2024/05/27/when-chatgpt-summarises-it-actually-does-nothing-of-the-kind/
on “The AI Scientist: Towards Automated Open-Ended Scientific Discovery”Submitted From Dark Scrum to Broken SAFe – some real problems of Agile-at-scale. A way out as a story · 2 points
HN discussionOne of the more interesting aspects is that the idea of what (enterprise) 'architecture' is, depends on who you talk to. There is an interesting relation between agile and architecture. https://ea.rna.nl/2018/09/01/agile-teaches-us-the-true-meani...
Comment linking /2018/09/01/agile-teaches-us-the-true-meaning-of-architecture/
on “Enterprise, IT architecture and strategy is getting more and more frustrating”Submitted Agile teaches us what Architecture _really_ is as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> I thought summarization was a task AI was considered good at. I found this article was a good explanation why this isn’t the case: https://ea.rna.nl/2024/05/27/when-chatgpt-summarises-it-actu... TLDR: it all comes back to the same principle: LLMs are predicting words based on their training. Which means they are not actually summarizing ideas from documents (or whatever other task we give them).
Comment linking /2024/05/27/when-chatgpt-summarises-it-actually-does-nothing-of-the-kind/
on “Google defends scrapping AI pledges and DEI goals in all-staff meeting”Submitted Gossip, Trust and the Information Revolution as a story · 2 points
HN discussionOh dear... I had a look at the article more closely to see if they shared their prompts and found this: https://chatgpt.com/share/f24e84a3-8ae3-48ec-b38d-10ab90e0f8... Can youb give me a summary of this: https://ea.rna.nl/2022/10/24/on-the-psychology-of-architecture-and-the-architecture-of-psychology/ That's not a robust way of testing summarization. Especially when that https://ea.rna.nl/2022/10/24/on-the-psycholog…
Comment linking /2022/10/24/on-the-psychology-of-architecture-and-the-architecture-of-psychology/
on “UK accounting body to halt remote exams amid AI cheating”Submitted AI State of the Art: Gemini, GPT and friends take a shot at learning as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThat ChatGPT summarization study is from May 2024: https://ea.rna.nl/2024/05/27/when-chatgpt-summarises-it-actu... - it looks like it considers original GPT-4 with its 8,192 token context limit.
Comment linking /2024/05/27/when-chatgpt-summarises-it-actually-does-nothing-of-the-kind/
on “UK accounting body to halt remote exams amid AI cheating”Submitted The psychology of architecture and the architecture of psychology as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Let's bury NIST's outdated definition of Cloud Computing as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted How well does your top management get IT? Do they fall for 'quackery' easily? as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
