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How to get your AI company's blog to No. 1 on Hacker News: 1. Pick an author nerds like. 2. Tell Claude "Write an article about Terry Pratchett, in his style.
by rogual 4mo ago
How to get your AI company's blog to No. 1 on Hacker News:
1. Pick an author nerds like.
2. Tell Claude "Write an article about Terry Pratchett, in his style."
3. Don't even fix the faux-witty phrases that, upon closer inspection, make zero sense, like "Sir Terry Pratchett, who knew more about furniture than most", or "Most physics departments would settle for that." or "The Author, refusing to let the Narrator off the hook".
4. Bask in the praise for your wonderful writing.
- Quarrelsome 4mo agois this just slander or are you basing this on something? I feel like the only way to make an AI slop universe worse is to accuse people of using AI when they're not. So I worry we might be doing that is all...
- bradrn 4mo agoI found this comment pretty convincing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48247413 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48247413
- Quarrelsome 4mo agomaybe but its not like people don't also do these things (erroneous sentences, weird fluff). I mean editors exist specifically to slap that shit out of writers. That said, it's mildly compelling. I just fear that our future is gonna be full of this and the idea of the false positive is so brutal that I'd rather give the benefit of the doubt.
- antihipocrat 4mo agoPerhaps we end up demanding no doubt. Human only community meet ups to discuss and share ideas, music and art. No recording allowed. The Internet becomes primarily a passive stream of information vetted by government and Mega Corps, just like the TVs of old. Except for the nifty buy with one click button of course
- lanyard-textile 4mo agoDigital artists are expected now to have at least some recorded timelines of their creations. It's easy to do with digital tools today, like Procreate, so it is increasingly suspicious not to have any.
- doright 4mo agoWe will rue the day that image generation evolves beyond diffusion and AI is able to use digital brushes and blending directly on a canvas.
- Quarrelsome 4mo agoyou could probably already fake that to some extent with the latest video models.
- ThrowawayR2 4mo agoThere have been mail spam, link farming, non-AI slop content sites, and other forms of scamming looking to take advantage of people on the Internet for something like a quarter century by now. Even HN's /new submissions queue is filled with such rubbish. There is zero reason to give any benefit of the doubt on the Internet for anything and there hasn't been for years, absolutely zero.
- Quarrelsome 4mo ago> There is zero reason to give any benefit of the doubt on the Internet for anything and there hasn't been for years, absolutely zero. I feel like that's just an argument for cruelty. The issue is that generative content makes it hard to tell and people confidently call borderline issues now, more than they used to.
- mapontosevenths 4mo agoThis was not AI, or at least was only proofread/edited by AI. More importantly, both of those sentences make complete sense in context, and neither is phrased in a way that AI would. They are phrased in the way that Terry Pratchet would have. Have you never read him? This new trend of pointing out that everything you dont understand is AI has become a flashing warning sign about our declining literacy rates. Literacy is in serious trouble, and worse it has effected the way humans THINK. We are all poorer for it. Read more books people!
- booleandilemma 4mo agoI've never read any of Pratchett's books. Why does he know more about furniture than most people?
- celsius1414 4mo agoThe first paragraph, and the one directly above the one about knowing more about furniture: > There is a theory, popular among certain very old and very tired philosophers, that all memories take up a kind of furniture in the head. The good ones are armchairs. The painful ones are filing cabinets, usually full. And then there are the memories that are neither: the ones that arrive uninvited, settle in, and start terrorising the other occupants by kicking over the chairs.
- booleandilemma 4mo agoYeah I read that. It doesn't mean he knows more about furniture than most. I agree with rogual, it looks nonsensical.
- Scarblac 4mo agoI interpreted as saying he knows a lot about different kinds of ideas / memories / things in the head.
- spacedcowboy 4mo ago
- deadbabe 4mo agoWhat does it matter? The AI slop universe is only going to grow worse no matter what we do. Accusing stuff you don’t like as being AI is just a thing you do, not an actual serious observation.
- Quarrelsome 4mo ago> What does it matter? cause false positives are brutal to the victim.
- mpalmer 4mo agoThe book has to be small enough to disappear when a teacher looks up. Pocket editions, as their name suggests, were engineered for this. Pratchett’s were small, fat, slightly battered, and printed on a kind of paper that already looked guilty. Pratchett's Pocket editions were slightly battered? Pre-sale, even? Not only does the paper "look guilty", but it's doing so "already"? As if guilty paper is normal, but not on THIS time scale. It's nonsensical; even bad writers don't end up with stuff like this.
- petesergeant 4mo agoPresumably the ones from the library, which the author mentions was his source? Every Pratchett book I read as a kid matched this description, including being battered.
- mpalmer 4mo agoTell me more about this already-guilty-looking paper, and how this kid was "sliding" an entire paperback book into a math textbook with "a centimetre to spare".
- petesergeant 4mo agoI think I could slide this into a maths text book? https://www.facebook.com/groups/2174439579599449/posts/2364623657247706/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/2174439579599449/posts/23646...
- the_af 4mo agoYou wouldn't be able to open it and keep it open flat against the textbook though, not without the teacher noticing. It simply doesn't work, now that the author has acknowledged they used AI to spruce up their blog post, we can agree this part (hiding pocketbooks in open textbooks) was 100% slop.
- watwut 4mo agoI dont know what kind of pockets you have, but most Pratchetts book did not fit into mine. And yes there were whole series of books that fit. But, pratchetts ones did not.
- theusus 4mo agoYep, pangram says it is 100% AI generated.
- tasuki 4mo agoSo what? Surely they're just guessing and actually have no idea.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- eterm 4mo agoI spent ages trying to work out what "who knew more about furniture than most" meant, thinking it would be expanded upon or referenced later. It hadn't occurred to me that it's just slop.
- CoastalCoder 4mo ago> I spent ages trying to work out what "who knew more about furniture than most" meant, thinking it would be expanded upon or referenced later. Assuming it was an intentional, it could be a reference to one particularly violent piece of furniture. (I forget what kind exactly, it's been a while.)
- johnh-hn 4mo agoI'm not sure I'd call it furniture, but are you maybe referring to the luggage?
- nine_k 4mo agoIt's furniture when standing, and luggage when walking.
- pdpi 4mo agoGiven it comes immediately after the bit about philosophers comparing memories to furniture, I simply assumed that was meant to be read as “Pratchett, who knew more about the goings on inside people’s heads than most”.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- nephihaha 4mo agoMony Python - "One: people aren’t wearing enough hats." Two: Terry Pratchett "Hold my beer." Clearly as an appreciator of hats, and arguably furniture, Sir Terry was echoing Monty Python.
- 4mo ago
- jrm4 4mo ago[dead]
- upmostly 4mo agoFinished reading the article, having really enjoyed it (I grew up with Terry's books), came back to the HN comments and the top comment is someone ranting "dIS iS aye-EyE sLoP" What a terrible, terrible timeline we live in now. Seriously. I genuinely hate it.
- ThrowawayR2 4mo agoThe author acknowledges that LLM assistance and turns of phrase were used in the creation of the article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48248070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48248070
- upmostly 4mo agoThat's fine. That's not what I dislike. What I dislike is "AI SLOP" seems to be the default response to anything remotely creative anymore.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- rogual 4mo agoI must concede that when you take what I said and spell it wrong, it does indeed look very silly. It's a good point, and one I hadn't considered.
- Garlef 4mo agoIt seems reading comprehension is also declining: Furniture is established as an image for memories just a few lines earlier. And the quote directly afterwards is framed precisely in this image.
- simonw 4mo agoIt's confirmed that Claude was involved: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48247127#48248070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48247127#48248070
- ajmurmann 4mo agoIs this (ironically) the new ad hominem?
- bee_rider 4mo agoI guess it would be something like an “ad inhominem,” but that something was AI generated is a legitimate gripe so I hope we don’t start using that phrase.
- boston_clone 4mo agodefinitively, no. it’s not against the person for their characteristics, but the composition of the content they’re sharing. i think it’s more like accurately pointing out a logical fallacy, i.e., an assertion that thought was not properly applied which results in nonsense.
- ajmurmann 4mo agoThe reason why ad hominems are a fallacy is because it fails to engage with the actual argument being made. The same seems likely to happen when arguments are dismissed because of their AI origin. While that dismissal is somewhat reasonable now, at least as a heuristic, I expect it to become increasingly less valid.
- 4mo ago
- gavmor 4mo ago> He was the perfect protagonist for a teenage boy: a coward, an underachiever, technically a wizard but only on a technicality, and frequently the most powerful spell in the universe was lodged in his head against his will. This will be familiar to anyone who has been sixteen. s/frequently/initially Also, how is a cowardly underachiever "the perfect protagonist for a teenage boy"? "technically a wizard but only on a technicality" is obviously redundant And what part of any of this is supposed to be familiar? It's just a strange essay.
- bluefirebrand 4mo ago> Also, how is a cowardly underachiever "the perfect protagonist for a teenage boy"? It seems to have resonated a lot with male millennials at least. Many of my friends growing up loved Terry Pratchett. I loved those guys but calling them "cowardly underachievers" is probably fairly accurate, if a little mean. All of the ones I kept in touch with have settled for a lot less than they probably could have done if they had been a bit braver. Few of them were even willing to move even an hour drive away from our hometown for better opportunities
- majormajor 4mo agoThey loved Terry Pratchett or they loved Rincewind? The amount of ways to do the former without the latter are high, and you seem to be jumping from a point about the latter to one about the former...
- bluefirebrand 4mo agoThey loved his writing at least, I don't really know if they knew much about the man himself beyond that. I think it's fair to assume that the loved his protagonist. They certainly loved how Pratchett played with tropes and often inverted them unexpectedly. It's probably safe to assume that they loved Rincewind, since he represents a pretty big inversion of typical protagonist tropes.
- gregman1 4mo agoWorks rather well indeed
- majormajor 4mo agoThe furniture line is clearly tied to the direct quote that follows it ("Rincewind tried to force the memory out of his mind, but it was rather enjoying itself there, terrorizing the other occupants and kicking over the furniture.") as well as the introduction sentence that preceeds it. As a sentence it works since it's part of a metaphor that is even tied to a line of Pratchett's own. However, I don't think the rest of the post supports the Pratchett-as-expert-on-memories bit of that little aside, so it could be critiqued for not being followed up on or further supported. It's not a "make an argument for Pratchett as an expert on memory" post, it's a "tell a story of his writing connecting with me" post, in which case, meh. But apparently the post was edited again, and "The Author, refusing to let the Narrator off the hook" is gone (along with some other things), which is a bummer as it seems like one of the most Pratchett-like of the attempts. In context I don't think it works, but generally it fits well with Pratchett's writing style and his relationship with his protagonists.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- pajtai 4mo ago"Sir Terry Pratchett, who knew more about furniture than most," makes perfect sense if you look at the previous paragraph, which contains: "... all memories are a kind of furniture in the head ..."
- simonw 4mo agoHow does that sentence support the idea that he knew "more about furniture than most"? The bit you quote isn't even something he said! In the original post[1] it was assigned to "certain very old and very tired philosophers", but that's now been edited to just being credited as "a theory, not necessarily a really good theory". [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20260523124615/https://www.mahl.me/blog/the-spell-that-wouldnt-leave/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260523124615/https://www.mahl....
- sph 4mo agoFlagged, 227 upvotes. The internet is truly dead