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Comment by kayo_20211030 | Hacker News Reader

kayo_20211030

Easy now. This is a good joke. It's all pretty funny. In fact, the whole oliviali.me site is pretty funny. We've got fusion in an apartment in NYC, Martian number sensibility, some microbial voodoo, etc. But, the effort, the immense effort to put this together is impressive - just look at the bibliographies and reference. Well done!

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Eh, not so impressive. The text reads like LLM output, so low effort. References (the ones that I checked) appear to be real links, so there's that effort.

But, it's so bloody plausible on a superficial level. Somebody went to a bit of effort to make sure that this nonsense got into the world, and onto HN. Well played, I say. I honestly believe that someone I know will tell me within 3 months that the AEC is training raccoons to eliminate nuclear fusion's waste using some fantastic microbial electrolysis. They'll swear it's true.

> But, it's so bloody plausible on a superficial level

No, it isn't. It's just that you are easily plaused.

Idk, maybe my LLM detention isn’t good enough, but this doesn’t read like LLM writing to me. The jokes are just-subtle enough to land, and the points are unexpected-yet-slightly-convincing. From LLM’s I often get info that’s overly obvious, or just wrong. I could believe an LLM was used for editing / flushing out an initial draft, but that really doesn’t bother me.

Would be very interested to hear from the author whether it is LLM writing or not.

> The jokes are just-subtle enough to land

"Jokes" ? So now people are being trained to write like LLMS? Joy.

Hi I'm the author of this article. Yes I wrote this from scratch. I actually read two books on this topic + many papers to do research for this article over a period of many months.

I got Claude to rephrase certain sections that I thought didn't flow properly but majority of it is my writing. Yes I wrote those jokes.

Awesome, thanks for the reply!

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