Scored 100% on a Pangram of the first few paragraphs.
Things that alerted me. (Note that any one of these things could be fine and explainable, but so many in short order makes it obvious).
> And it rang. We both did our jobs.
What is the human's job here? Waking up?
> the whole morning minute by minute, as if someone had laid it out on a table and labeled every piece.
Labored metaphor that doesn't add anything. Laid out a minute? On a table? Even if we accept the non physical metaphor for style, how does that add anything on top of "minute by minute".
> I made two pieces of toast. The left one burned. The left one in my toaster always burns; my toaster has a favorite side.
This sort of short staccato phrasing is an LLM smell. It's hard to describe why precisely and how it varies from natural human text, but LLMs like to do this when writing fiction, especially when told to "write with a good style, don't write like an LLM."
Is the joke that it took me like 3 minutes to write this? If so, I think that's a bit unfair to the author. I think this is something that was at least shaped. But I feel very confident its LLM written. If it isn't LLM written, then I also think it is bad writing, but that's a separate point.
The story itself is decent and competently written, see how it keeps track of the analogies and phrases by different characters (wrapping it all up in the end, tying the "no-man's minute" or how the ex wife told him he was always somewhere else than here). If an un-assisted LLM did this, I'd be surprised. I think there may have been LLM-assistance to polish it up (maybe) but there are some human ideas in here. I'd be interested in the author clarifying this.
Living in a totally conceptual space all day has major downsides on your ability to enjoy your meat suit. Meat suit firmware can only apply updates when you are offline. A lot of us are walking around with severe security vulnerabilities and runtime bugs.
On the contrary -- AI would either replace you completely OR (more likely) allow you to produce more per unit time. There was never any thought or suggestion to reducing the total amount of time you would work.
I don't think it's that bypassing enjoyment is trivial.
It's that enjoyment is a secondary function to contentment and the user is allowed to pursue this secondary function according to their own desires. It is just that we often aren't taught the value of or the techniques involved in finding enjoyment.
Consider a professional athlete, a recreational league player, someone who watches their favorite team, and a team manager.
They are all engaged in their activities, originally, because of some enjoyment derived from the game.
But how often does each of them enjoy playing the game?
The recreational player probably gets more fun out of playing the game than the ones who choose to watch, even if they played in highschool.
When was the last time the player enjoyed the ritual of watching a game they aren't involved in?
The one who goes to every game probably gets more enjoyment from watching the game than a player on the sideline.
How often does a player enjoy arm-chair calling another game as opposed to a manager?
But, what happens as we age or in the face of injury? We learn to adapt to enjoying other aspects of our favorite activities. We do so because we are forced to without realizing that we could have been enjoying watching the game just as much as we do now post-injury.
We see this in streaming and video games: People who watch endless hours of games they'll never play, and streamers who never watch others play.
We see this in labor. As the buddhists say, "Before enlightenment; carry water, chop wood. After enlightenment; carry water, chop wood." Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life, in other words.
The difference between a miserable manager and a jovial janitor is their ability to find enjoyment.
The problem is that enjoyment has, oddly enough, been misallocated to all the liminal spaces and moments in life. So most optimization tends to elide enjoyment.
Enjoyment elision is the number one cause of meat suit user dissatisfaction. The engineers insist it's not a compiler design bug, stating that those moments of enjoyment are, in fact, unreachable. The UX team says it's not the user's fault either, as it's a fully intended UX choice. The current proposed solution is to push this issue upstream, requesting that all enjoyment be moved from the journey to the destination.
What year is this set in? 2027? 2028? A lot of it feels like present day.
About the future: I don't believe it's really necessary to mix traffic and pedestrians on the same road. Certainly not 3000 pound vehicles and pedestrians. I think at some point we will start new cities with completely different assumptions from what we have now.
The _prose_ itself here is 100% LLM-generated, with the famous ticks present and all. You like it not because it's not Claude-prose (it is), but because it has a nice concept and some smart writing in human parts of it.
I had to skip lots of it. Funnily enough I didn’t think it was LLM made, just someone who wanted to practice their storytelling skills a bit eagerly. A bit of a /r/LinkedInLunatics feel to it.
Bottom bit was confusing. Did he actually get hit or was it just a story? I assume the later but you never know these days…
> Bottom bit was confusing. Did he actually get hit or was it just a story?
What do you mean? This is clearly fiction. The person in the story is dying, the author hasn't died.
Or do you mean whether the person in the story actually died? Yes, he did. He's not typing, these are meant to be his thoughts. He's "stretching" the minute of his death; the story makes an analogy with the no-man's minute of the bug he was trying to debug:
> Tanya used to say I was always somewhere other than here. Now it's true. Only I still don't know where. Sometimes I think it's in that very minute. The server thinks I've been sent. The warehouse thinks I haven't been received yet. And both are right, each by its own clock.
He's been "sent" (to the afterlife) by this plane of existence (the server), but the warehouse (the afterlife) still hasn't received the message, hence "the minute". He's living in that eternal minute, Owl Creek style.
HN has a lot of people submitting/upvoting AI-generated content, and also a lot of people who work with AI extensively and therefore know how to identify it. It's not a big surprise.
Scored 100% on a Pangram of the first few paragraphs.
Things that alerted me. (Note that any one of these things could be fine and explainable, but so many in short order makes it obvious).
> And it rang. We both did our jobs.
What is the human's job here? Waking up?
> the whole morning minute by minute, as if someone had laid it out on a table and labeled every piece.
Labored metaphor that doesn't add anything. Laid out a minute? On a table? Even if we accept the non physical metaphor for style, how does that add anything on top of "minute by minute".
> I made two pieces of toast. The left one burned. The left one in my toaster always burns; my toaster has a favorite side.
This sort of short staccato phrasing is an LLM smell. It's hard to describe why precisely and how it varies from natural human text, but LLMs like to do this when writing fiction, especially when told to "write with a good style, don't write like an LLM."
It seems you have more time on your hands than the author.
Is the joke that it took me like 3 minutes to write this? If so, I think that's a bit unfair to the author. I think this is something that was at least shaped. But I feel very confident its LLM written. If it isn't LLM written, then I also think it is bad writing, but that's a separate point.
The author was an LLM.
i wrote three paragraphs of a management summary today, fully by hand, and got 100% ai back from pangram. ymmv.
100% Human or 100% AI?
The story itself is decent and competently written, see how it keeps track of the analogies and phrases by different characters (wrapping it all up in the end, tying the "no-man's minute" or how the ex wife told him he was always somewhere else than here). If an un-assisted LLM did this, I'd be surprised. I think there may have been LLM-assistance to polish it up (maybe) but there are some human ideas in here. I'd be interested in the author clarifying this.
Living in a totally conceptual space all day has major downsides on your ability to enjoy your meat suit. Meat suit firmware can only apply updates when you are offline. A lot of us are walking around with severe security vulnerabilities and runtime bugs.
AI was supposed to give us more time to enjoy our meat suits.
On the contrary -- AI would either replace you completely OR (more likely) allow you to produce more per unit time. There was never any thought or suggestion to reducing the total amount of time you would work.
Why doesn't the meat suit enjoyment program comes with stronger guardrails or systems to enforce this?
One often wonders why bypassing enjoyment is so trivial, would you say this is a feature or a bug?
I don't think it's that bypassing enjoyment is trivial.
It's that enjoyment is a secondary function to contentment and the user is allowed to pursue this secondary function according to their own desires. It is just that we often aren't taught the value of or the techniques involved in finding enjoyment.
Consider a professional athlete, a recreational league player, someone who watches their favorite team, and a team manager.
They are all engaged in their activities, originally, because of some enjoyment derived from the game.
But how often does each of them enjoy playing the game?
The recreational player probably gets more fun out of playing the game than the ones who choose to watch, even if they played in highschool.
When was the last time the player enjoyed the ritual of watching a game they aren't involved in?
The one who goes to every game probably gets more enjoyment from watching the game than a player on the sideline.
How often does a player enjoy arm-chair calling another game as opposed to a manager?
But, what happens as we age or in the face of injury? We learn to adapt to enjoying other aspects of our favorite activities. We do so because we are forced to without realizing that we could have been enjoying watching the game just as much as we do now post-injury.
We see this in streaming and video games: People who watch endless hours of games they'll never play, and streamers who never watch others play.
We see this in labor. As the buddhists say, "Before enlightenment; carry water, chop wood. After enlightenment; carry water, chop wood." Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life, in other words.
The difference between a miserable manager and a jovial janitor is their ability to find enjoyment.
The problem is that enjoyment has, oddly enough, been misallocated to all the liminal spaces and moments in life. So most optimization tends to elide enjoyment.
Enjoyment elision is the number one cause of meat suit user dissatisfaction. The engineers insist it's not a compiler design bug, stating that those moments of enjoyment are, in fact, unreachable. The UX team says it's not the user's fault either, as it's a fully intended UX choice. The current proposed solution is to push this issue upstream, requesting that all enjoyment be moved from the journey to the destination.
What year is this set in? 2027? 2028? A lot of it feels like present day.
About the future: I don't believe it's really necessary to mix traffic and pedestrians on the same road. Certainly not 3000 pound vehicles and pedestrians. I think at some point we will start new cities with completely different assumptions from what we have now.
> About the author...Once, at the Nürburgring, he nearly collided with Kimi Räikkönen.
Anyone else here interested in road course tracking (HPDE) or racing? If so, where do you go?
I'm in the US Midwest and have been to Putnam Park, NCM, mid-Ohio, Pitt Race (private now...sad), and Ozark's.
Reading this story after staring at Claude-prose for weeks is a breath of fresh air, honestly.
Thank you for sharing.
The _prose_ itself here is 100% LLM-generated, with the famous ticks present and all. You like it not because it's not Claude-prose (it is), but because it has a nice concept and some smart writing in human parts of it.
I had to skip lots of it. Funnily enough I didn’t think it was LLM made, just someone who wanted to practice their storytelling skills a bit eagerly. A bit of a /r/LinkedInLunatics feel to it.
Bottom bit was confusing. Did he actually get hit or was it just a story? I assume the later but you never know these days…
> Bottom bit was confusing. Did he actually get hit or was it just a story?
What do you mean? This is clearly fiction. The person in the story is dying, the author hasn't died.
Or do you mean whether the person in the story actually died? Yes, he did. He's not typing, these are meant to be his thoughts. He's "stretching" the minute of his death; the story makes an analogy with the no-man's minute of the bug he was trying to debug:
> Tanya used to say I was always somewhere other than here. Now it's true. Only I still don't know where. Sometimes I think it's in that very minute. The server thinks I've been sent. The warehouse thinks I haven't been received yet. And both are right, each by its own clock.
He's been "sent" (to the afterlife) by this plane of existence (the server), but the warehouse (the afterlife) still hasn't received the message, hence "the minute". He's living in that eternal minute, Owl Creek style.
It's clearly a work of fiction. Perhaps you should skip less and you'll retain more.
It wouldn't be an HN comment thread without a 100% confident, no-room-for-doubt assertion of AI-generated writing.
HN has a lot of people submitting/upvoting AI-generated content, and also a lot of people who work with AI extensively and therefore know how to identify it. It's not a big surprise.
I was vaguely annoyed at the prose throughout but I attributed it to human clumsiness. I'm getting less good at noticing it. Does not bode well.
This is like a checklist of bad writing cliches
> Will it rain over forty percent of the city?
Yes! x forecaster confidence
That was very good, thank you!
I am very amused that the agent speaks exactly like an agent in this world too
Very well written, bravo