We can only have "scientific consensus" in maths (and even there there are doubts), every other science is a social science if one digs hard enough. Even particle physics.
When it comes to Roman history, and for those that can read French, I heartedly recommend Histoire romaine - Tome 1 - de origines à Auguste, by François Hinard, beats the Mary Beard slop by a very long mile. I only knew the most general facts about the Romans going into this book, but after reading it I can say I'm way better informed on who the Romans were and how and thought.
Also, I was literally thinking about these very lines just before clicking on this link:
> The average modern historian passed a few tests then wrote a book on their laptop next to their cat. And worse, they all passed the same tests at the same institutions.
not specifically about historians (even though I mostly had them in mind). Not sure if there's an easy solution for that, at least not when it comes to "soft" sciences. For what it's worth it looks like the scientific departments the less influenced by the Anglo worldview are the least affected by that, but they're getting very few and far between.
i don't think that's what this means. it just means to me a certain population of people are clueless and don't use these tools enough. what's _actually_ damaging/obnoxious are the ones arguing that this guy is a good writer and that this isn't AI. IMO, telling the difference can be as simple as looking for the common giveaways, or as complex as reading between the lines of the structure of sentences, the terrible adjectives, and the soullessness of it. If you have half a brain and are well read, you can _probably_ tailor these LLMs to write in a way that reads better. But, it requires people to read a lot of content and literature to understand what good writing is, and this contrived, overly convoluted soulless soup of words is certainly not an example of it.
I agree with you and I definitely noticed the “it’s not just X, it’s Y” pattern.
But I find your comment funny because it ironically has the same “not that, this” pattern in a more verbose and less polished & less formulaic pattern.
It's not written "well", it lacks that human touch, especially when writing about such a sensible subject, such as getting fired. It's too cold, actually too well written from a syntactic pov, which makes it inauthentic hence most probably AI.
i've been using AI for as long as GPT has been out, so if you can't see through the rambling, overly complex to make you sound smarter kind of text, as well as the written patterns that are always used ad nauseam like "this thing isn't JUST this, it's THIS" -- i dunno how else to prove it to you. IYKYK.
I have also used GPTs since 2020. I am also a writer. Much of the writing equated with “generated by AI” is so precisely because it’s broadly trained on real writing.
So the claim of “AI slop” without proof is little more than heresy. It would be helpful to have any evidence.
It’s not about just the writing in one example, it’s about writing patterns—which are common—being equated with AI simply because they’re common.
if you're a writer, and you're using GPT for so long and you can't see it as obvious, i dunno what to tell you at this point. i guess LLMs are trained particularly on this guy's writing.
If you read his original draft you can see how much of it was still carried over, as well as how his original writing conveys much of your same arguments that an AI wrote the final text.
I don’t think your point is as strong as you believe it is.
Lastly, I work directly with AI models and utilize all popular generators every single day, so I don’t know why you think you’re the expert here.
my point was that its AI slop. whether his original point is intact doesn't matter to me. the fact that you're now defensively doubling down and steering the conversation into a direction which serves you better is just cringe. i bet you're a pleasure to work with. c ya later nerd.
i just don't feel like enumerating all of the common patterns ai slop produces. again, if you don't see this as obvious, i can tell you're clearly not using this stuff often enough (which might be a good thing)
The thing is, these stylistic patterns existed before AI, and weren’t completely atypical. Maybe you’re using LLMs so much that you’re over-associating them with AI now. Or maybe the author is using LLMs so much that he’s unconsciously adopted some of the patterns in his own writing.
Well he literally confirms it was from ChatGPT in a later reply, so there's that.
And his original draft is conspicuously missing the telltale "it's not X -- it's Y" and overall breathless dramatic flair that people like the poster you're replying to (correctly) picked up on.
i think the much higher probability isn't that this guy wrote literally like an LLM before LLMs came out, but rather that he just used an LLM to write all of it. You can see even more of these examples directly on his campaign site.
> certainly feels nice to place these obnoxious HN know-it-alls into their place.
You don't have to take the time to explain your reasoning if you don't want to, but "obnoxious know it all" is not a stone you should throw while at the same time refusing to explain yourself and saying anyone who can't see what you see is necessarily missing the obvious.
it's too difficult honestly. there are a lot of the classic easy traps -- "it's not just X, it's y" which are a dead giveaway, especially when they're used like 3-4 times in one essay. But the harder to spot ones, IMO, are ones where the overall tone is unnecessarily complex. E.g:
"When replacement is cheaper than retention, the decision gets framed as strategy instead of consequence."
This sentence is tight and on paper reads well, but it's robotic. It's kind of like taking a dead simple if/else statement that's pleasurable to read into a one line ternary statement. Technically a one line sentence, but now I have to re-read it like 5 times to understand it. The flow is dead.
Another example:
'AI becomes the excuse, not the cause. It’s the clean narrative that hides what’s actually happening: experienced workers being swapped out through global labor substitution while leadership talks about “efficiency” and “the future of work.”'
Starts off with a short & trite sentence (LLMs loves this if you don't steer it away). The other thing LLMs _love_ to do unprompted is: "It's the X: _insert_next_loaded_statement_here"
It's hard to get my point across, and I hope you kinda see it? I'm not a linguist, but these patterns are literally in every piece of LLM writing I've ever seen.
Again, you don't have to explain yourself, just don't be rude about it. It's hypocritical to call someone obnoxious and a know it all while you are engaging in schoolyard behavior and refusing to allow them to challenge your reasoning.
Saying nothing is an option. Other people who agree with you will be happy to explain their reasoning. Or maybe they won't and the conversation quietly fades away. Both are preferable.
give me a break. have you read the other comments? asking for proof in the most smug attitude possible. it's the definition of obnoxious HN commenters. and that's not even counting the one guy that wrote "you sound and write like a bot", got downvoted and deleted the post. i don't need to take any high roads here--it's the internet. As far as being "rude" it's a solid 2/10.
I'm not saying "take the high road" as much as "don't wrestle with a pig." It certainly isn't appropriate to call you a bot. But they probably insulted you to provoke you, right? Why give them any additional ammunition?
That's just my two cents, ultimately it's your business.
One thing I don't understand when it comes to these big data-center investments in India is what will they do when the water runs out? Because I do not think that this is environmentally sustainable.
Looping water through a closed heat exchanger doesn't consume the water, but using water to evaporatively cool a condenser in an industrial chiller does.
Also, what is the outrage about? This administration has deported the least number of people compared to all previous administrations. Obama deported 3.1 million people, ten times more than Trump today. Same ICE, same border patrol.
It literally say it is a crowdsourced list... a completely legal activity. If you can't figure out what the outrage is about after Alex Pretti and Renée Good then you're being intentionally obtuse.
Their deaths are an outcome of the heavy handed immigration enforcement that has caused the outrage. The raw number of deportations is not the only metric. The enforcement tactics of the Obama admin are not the same as Trump's, this is obvious and incontrovertible.
You don't have to agree with the criticisms but to not even be able to understand why people are upset stretches believability.
Duh... You're still collapsing cause and context. The protests preceded the deaths; the deaths occurred during confrontations created by the protests. That makes them an outcome of escalation, not the original trigger.
And 'different tactics' doesn’t explain the reaction gap, as i said, under Obama there were 3.1M+ deportations and at least 56 documented deaths in ICE custody (https://www.detentionwatchnetwork.org/sites/default/files/re...) with nowhere near this level of outrage. What changed is media framing and amplification, not the existence of harsh enforcement.
It doesn't have to be the original trigger, you asked "what is the outrage about?" and those deaths are part of it.
> And 'different tactics' doesn’t explain the reaction gap, as i said, under Obama there were 3.1M+ deportations and at least 56 documented deaths in ICE custody
You continuously ask this same question, get an answer, and ignore it. ICE enforcement was not the same under Obama and Trump even if Obama had high deportation numbers. The deaths in that report were from medical issues or neglect. Horrible, absolutely, but not shootings, not American citizens, and not protesters.
Maybe instead of assuming everyone is a stooge that can only do what the media tells them, consider they may actually have some legitimate grievances?
I don't know what they think they're doing there. If the most interesting thing they found was the public website leading to a fundraising platform for mutual aid a) there is literally nothing illegal there, and b) you can find that website linked to publicly by conservatively 25% of the twin cities population. It's literally the most prominent fundraising website anyone has been posting.
Wrong. The "protesters" were conducting counterintelligence to locate where ICE was operating. The plan was to disrupt the operation. Like it or not, this is against the law. Period.
I'm not framing anything. There are screenshots of the chats where people literally say "ICE vehicle has been identified, everybody, go there!". This is called interfering.
18 USC 111 does not apply here. Forcible action is an element. The action doesn’t have to be itself the use of force; it’s sufficient that a threat being some action that causes an officer to reasonably fear bodily harm. But obviously the actions we’re talking about on this subthread fall well short of that definition. If they didn't the law would be unconstitutional.
Those other two laws seem like an even weirder fit for the fact pattern in this subthread.
But that's not the end of the analysis. The legal line isn't 'force or nothing'; it's intent + conduct. Speech and observation are protected, but coordinated action intended to impede enforcement is not.
If "ICE vehicle has been identified, everybody go there" is followed by mobbing vehicles, blocking movement, inducing agents to disengage, or warning targets to evade arrest, that crosses from protected speech into actionable conduct.
Is that your theory, or is there case law that backs it up? From what I saw the bounds on 18 USC 111 are quite narrow indeed: I found a case where the defendant _fired at federal agents with his shotgun_, and the appeals court threw it out because the jury was incorrectly instructed that they could use the fact that he shot at them when considering he misled them afterwards. But actually, the jury was not allowed to do that. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/199...
Quote: (1) speech can be prohibited if it is "directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action" and (2) it is "likely to incite or produce such action."
Brandenburg v. Ohio was decided in favor of the appellant. As I suspected, there are no cases of a US court interpreting your theory of the law on 18 USC 111.
As to your point [7], no need for China to "spread doubts about the performance of French-made Rafale ", I have at this very moment this book on my desk: Le Pouvoir sans visage: Le complexe militaro-industriel [1], written by a Pierre Marion [2], former head of the SDECE/DGSE in the early '80s, where said Pierre Marion does the same thing, i.e. he heavily criticises the Rafale programme and Dassault (the company and the man himself, Serge Dassault)
It's really not when it comes to the internet. First of all I'm in a very big minority here in Romania because I can read French (I can also speak somehow), but the majority of the people around me cannot. And let's not mention German. So, when the majority of EU citizens cannot speak the languages of EU's two biggest countries by population then it means that the market is not unified.
And, no, using English as a lingua franca across the continent going forward is not going to cut it, that will mean cultural erasure. Maybe in the future some EU bureaucrats will advocate for that, i.e. to replace French, German, Spanish, Italian etc as people's main language, but I think we're pretty far away from that. Also, making everyone around these parts bilingual is also not going to work, it's either English as a first language (or French, or German) or nothing.
When the computer code many of us are working on is directly shaping that politics I think that we should talk about it and stop hiding behind the bush.
Yeah so find a forum that’s for discussing that and discuss it there. Don’t try and force people who are discussing something else to talk about politics with you. Do you also randomly go onto GitHub issues and start talking politics because the people who are talking about repo bugs are “hiding behind a bush” and should talk about the political things you think are important instead?
I think that forums like this one should discuss politics as affected by computer code seeing as HN is one of the main (for lack of a better word) computer programmers' forums based/located in/with a focus on SV, it's not some random computer forum which specializes in some random computer programming issue.
Hacker News is not lambda-the-ultimate.org, seeing them as similar is part of that hiding behind the bush, people commenting on here actually work at companies like Palantir, Alphabet, Meta and the like, companies whose recent involvement in politics affects us all, at a worldwide level. Also see this recent FT article [1] in connection with how the leaders of those companies have gotten a lot reacher since Trump ascended to power for a second time.
> Tech titans lined up for Trump’s second inauguration. Now they’re even richer
> Silicon Valley bosses who lined up behind the US president for his inauguration have fared well under his administration
Absolutely and it's unfortunate that all essential topics that need discussion, which is the only thing that works to understand and find solutions for problems, is being flagged off the front page. Some of the flagging seems political as well, why isn't that recognized as a problem as well?
They’ve just moved the pollution out of the gentrified areas that can afford to purchase EVs at scale. Which was part of the initial goal when pushing for this insanity, as the plebs were polluting with the air of the much better off by using their 20-years old clunkers (or at least that was the discourse here in Europe). Mission about to be accomplished, those plebs now can take the bus if they still want mobility.
Can you blame them? I personally can't.
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