This being 3 years late is indicative of how far HN is falling behind the curve. Do not expect much convo here around software technology to be skating towards the puck. It is increasingly reactive and lagging the frontier, which is a shame from its former self.

What's strange about this is that tons of the upvoted posts on the front-page are LLM generated text

So....?

I won't name where and which one for the obvious reason that you can and should learn to know better, but I observed a comment that was obviously and blatantly copypasted from an agent, with all the signature "it's not just X, it's Y" patterns, the emdash abuse, the "In summary,' section, generating dozens of replies in organic engagement from people who genuinely couldn't tell the difference between a real comment and an aggregation of a prompted, synthetic response.

Whatever happened to "knowing is half the battle?" Why do we accept this kind of intellectual laziness as exemption from a duty to learn and know better?

THANK YOU!!

Sometimes I collect my comments here to run through my draft writing skill to see how it might shake out as part of a blog post. Doing the opposite would be weird. I earned that karma. It's mine to burn making bad posts.

You're all a bunch of tedious ignoramuses, your own fields of studying notwithstanding. I'm out here face-to-face with the Bullshit Asymmetry Principles. I'm not about to give up the only leverage I have!

The fact of the matter is that there're not hours enough in the day to read, in realtime, to each and every one of you the reams they've written on why you're wrong. Do I have to establish a tag-team?

The fact is that I've spent thousands upon thousands of hours painstakingly collating the perspectives that I'm now delivering to you—I am a river to my people. And it's only because they pass under the bridge of an LLM that they're objectionable?

This is a bit like challenging your plumber for charging you over a minute's fix, when they've spent 20 years getting it down to that minute.

The work's been done. You're paying for the outcome.

Edit: All fresh off the top of my head, folks.

Ah, that reminds me: I wouldn't feel compelled to do all this refutation if radical reactionary political extremism was properly moderated.

AI does not have LONG context, Long Term Memories or LONG intentionality -its not aware and it can't remember the plot without being spoonfed the details each time from scratch.

Its like an amnesic genius who once he already wrote a masterpiece and keeps cycling, and looses his train of thought after some fixed amount of time.

This groundhog day effect is mitigated in some respects by code -we create key-value memories and agents and stores and countless ways to connect agents via MCP and platforms/frameworks like A2A and the like but until we solve that longer lived instance problem we won't be able to trust these systems without serious HITL (human oversight)

I think we need models that update their own weights and we need some kind of awareness cycle rather than just a forward pass inference run with a bigger context window

Aye

Sure, ban everyone that uses em dashes from the digital commons. That will certainly stop the existential threat to your livelihood.

Sarcasm aside—there is no reliable way to prove this. So it begs the question: you really care if something is AI generated? Or is this just an another excuse to silence people you don’t like?

You know, those people. The ones who didn’t win a full ride to <prestigious university> or pay a fortune for a sheet of paper. The ones who haven’t spent thousands of man hours handcrafting a <free-and-open-source-cloud-native-hypermedia-aware-RESTful-NoSQL-API> framework implemented in Rustfuck, a new language that you made in your free time that borrows from Rust and Brainfuck (but they wouldn’t know about it).

(this is to anyone reading, mostly rhetorical, not dang in particular)

The obvious way to keep human spaces is via webs-of-trust.

If you play bluegrass or old time (or beopop or hip-hop / proto-hip-hop) or other traditional styles of music where the ensemble is a de facto web-of-trust, join us on pickipedia to build and strenghten it. https://pickipedia.xyz/