Let Me Ch...
blog.alxgsv.com
blog.alxgsv.com
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."
I suggest polite rebellion. Write well. Get better than the machines.
Literally none of these statements are true.
That said, maybe it's an artifact of being machine-translated from the original Russian.
> I still don't know why I remember it in such detail. I used to forget what I'd had for dinner the night before. And now I remember the whole morning minute by minute, as if someone had laid it out on a table and labeled every piece. Apparently I have a lot of free time now.
Then they set up the comparator to the past, "I used to forget what I'd had for dinner the night before" which is actually doing double work, because it also means that they were so busy that they used to forget what they had dinner.
This creates the character assumption that the person was / is a workaholic.
> And now I remember the whole morning minute by minute
> as if someone had laid it out on a table and labeled every piece
> Apparently I have a lot of free time now.
It's incredibly concise and well written story telling. I haven't seen LLMs do punchy writing like this since GPT-4o days.
This is subjective. Countless times in the history of human literature a piece of writing has been called garbage -- or at least, flawed -- by some authority, only to later become lauded as a great piece of writing. So not being able to tell (or in this case, to match your own taste) is simply par for the course.
Remember all that's been written about Shakespeare's Hamlet and his use of mixed metaphors, "[...] or to take arms against a sea of troubles [...]". What? How do you take arms against the sea? And why was it before "slings and arrows", what does that have to do with the sea? Mixed metaphors are a sin, etc, etc.
Of course Shakespeare made mistakes or made allusions that contemporary audiences struggle to understand, and he's not the be all and end all of writing in English. Saying judgement is subjective does not mean judgement is useless or impossible. He's pretty good though and you can tell when you read him, it's gripping, human, and tight; the antithesis of LLM writing.
Back to this particular text. From the start, it smells of AI:
> That morning I woke up at 6:58, two minutes before the alarm. I lay there and waited for it to ring. And it rang. We both did our jobs.
Short choppy sentences more suited to advertising than prose, ambiguity without purpose, pointless personification, melodrama and tension over the most mundane details. One para perhaps could be a bizarre stylistic choice, but it continues like this for the whole passage.
It's possible this was written by a human so steeped in the language generated by LLMs they don't know what is human and real any more, but it seems much more likely it's a translation which was translated by LLM and 'improved' by taking its style suggestions, or simply generated/written by the LLM based on a much shorter prompt.
However the most important thing is not who wrote it, but the quality of the writing, and I think the verdict of most people disagrees with you.
> However the most important thing is not who wrote it, but the quality of the writing, and I think the verdict of most people disagrees with you.
"Most people"? Please, show me where "most people" are saying this. Where's the verdict, are you keeping a tally? "Most people" don't agree on anything, either here in HN or elsewhere.
Are you the arbiter of what "most people" consider a good writing style?
I don't see the points that state people disagreed with me, I see 188 upvotes to this story and many comments saying they liked it.
If you meant downvotes to my own comment, they mean nothing. Before, I had +4. Now I don't. I also got downvoted for explaining to someone this is a piece of fiction (hopefully you'll agree with me there is something wrong with anyone who can't understand this), yet I ate some downvotes anyway.
The comment that you wrote that if someone cannot see this is bad writing there's something "deeply wrong" is simply absurd.
Maybe it could be a bit better like:
Gosha: It's not like anybody would take care of making cheese for me.
MC (confused by the word choice): "Take care"?
Gosha: Take care. (hangs up on MC)
The point though is that regardless of whether this was written by an LLM or not, the reason that I thought it might be, is that I found the writing really poor. Not to say that all poor writing is LLMs but I guess that doesn't rally matter. Bad writing is bad writing.
Yes. Waking up, or waiting for the alarm to ring. Also, "what is the human's job" is sort of the theme of the piece, so it's a very relevant question to ask and, in my opinion, doesn't demonstrate AI involvement if the story made you ask it.
> 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".
You left out the first part, "And now I remember the whole morning minute by minute [...]". Remembering a stretch of time (the morning) "minute by minute" makes a lot of sense, it's not even a metaphor. The metaphor actually is laying it out "on a table" and labelling "every piece", which explains the situation: the main character can remember the morning extremely well, as if it was a physical object someone helpfully labeled for ease of remembering and identification.
> This sort of short staccato phrasing is an LLM smell
But also a very well-known style of human writing. Comedians like Dave Barry use it all the time. Also, of course, Hemingway.
Now, I'm not arguing this isn't written by AI (or translated with AI, or whatever); it could very well be! I just find your evidence of AI prose extremely unconvincing.
Is this because it's slop? Or because it's a (possibly bad) translation? I can't really say, but regardless this piece was not resonating.
It's always been considered bad writing, and strongly reminds me of a elementary student trying to hit their word quota for an essay.
No, it hasn't. It's a distinctive style that some writers use. Like everything in life, it can be used wrongly, but staccato phrasing isn't "always considered bad writing". Consider this:
---
“What’s yours?” George asked them.
“I don’t know,” one of the men said. “What do you want to eat, Al?”
“I don’t know,” said Al. “I don’t know what I want to eat.”
Outside it was getting dark. The street-light came on outside the window. The two men at the counter read the menu. From the other end of the counter Nick Adams watched them. He had been talking to George when they came in.
“I’ll have a roast pork tenderloin with apple sauce and mashed potato,” the first man said.
“It isn’t ready yet.”
“What the hell do you put it on the card for?”
“That’s the dinner,” George explained. “You can get that at six o’clock.”
George looked at the clock on the wall behind the counter.
“It’s five o’clock.”
“The clock says twenty minutes past five,” the second man said.
“It’s twenty minutes fast.”
“Oh, to hell with the clock,” the first man said. “What have you got to eat?”
---
As an aside, I link badly written student homework with purple prose and elaborate sentences that lead nowhere, rather than with punchy staccato style.
I agree that short staccato phrasing is not inherently bad. I think it's just how it is used, and that when AI chooses to write in that style it is often "bad" in some sort of way I have trouble defining precisely.
My point is this style of bursts of short sentences, without flowery language, is a style some acknowledged writers do use in real life. It's not, by itself, a mark of bad quality or AI writing. In fact, ChatGPT uses way more elaborate sentences in its replies to my queries (and it drives me nuts).
> "Forty percent chance of precipitation." I never understood what forty percent of rain meant.
You don't understand the world's most understandable statement?
> On Monday my manager wrote in the team chat: "On Friday we'll discuss roles." No emoji. For three days I wondered what my role was.
Three whole days with no contact with your manager at all? Zero opportunity to ask anything amongst all the other activities and communication?
> And now I remember the whole morning minute by minute
You have a perfect-as-if-traumatic memory of specifically the day that your manager sent a cryptic message in chat that you didn't follow up on for three days?
> With a shirt, at least, everything is defined: here's the collar, here are the sleeves, here's the crease that shouldn't be there.
Oh, you're going to love when you discover other objects. Just you wait.
Three whole days with no contact with your manager, while not a good sign, is not that unlikely. I've gone with weeks. Again, not usually a good sign, but this person is describing a bad time, with a hint of "AI made us redundant".
As for why this person is remembering their morning minute-by-minute, did you get they are dying? It's a final minute kind of thing, an Owl Creek moment. I wonder if you undertood the whole story happens within this minute, the main character telling us how it all came to this.
One often wonders why bypassing enjoyment is so trivial, would you say this is a feature or a bug?
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 are good logs or signals a meat suit user could monitor in order to watch for misallocation and allow the program to recover?
I guess a meat suit user best system is to ensure its peer network has stable connections and to care for those.
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.
We can use evidence for the ability to change what we find enjoyment in in the progression from soccer player to soccer manager to soccer fan. The individual who used to love playing the game is injured, ages, or isn't competitive enough to compete and so must turn to either management or being a fan if they are still to find joy in soccer. They are physically unable to enjoy it the way they used to and so adapt.
But, if one can adapt to being a manager after an injury, one can adapt to being a manager before an injury.
Outside of sport, we see the same in labor. Someone working a physically demanding job may find that they cannot compete in the market as their body ages. They must either adapt to become a manager or find some other job that is not as physically demanding. This too is a physically forced transition, but it shows that it is possible and could have been done before the aging.
In both, we find evidence that it is possible to find enjoyment in things that we do not already enjoy. The buddhists say "before enlightenment chop wood carry water after enlightenment chop wood carry water" because you change who you are/what you enjoy rather than what you do. The recognition being that there are things that must always be done: hygiene, food, water, shelter maintainence etc and that it is silly to waste our time hating or finding no joy in these things if it is possible for us to enjoy them.
We know we've got to pump water to drink and chop wood to keep the house warm, why be upset about it?
How would you say what you are trying to tell me without those? Or is that the whole point of it lol
I'm just using injury and aging as examples for events that help us to see that changing what we find joy in is possible.
Another example could be the first time you play a game in a genre you don't typically play and find it so completely compelling that you don't understand why you ever avoided the genre. Same with genres of writing, a single auto-bio/history/fantasy/sci-fi could open your eyes to the entire genre. But that's just more evidence for finding joy in things you previously did not find joy in.
So, the idea is that if it is possible to change what we find joy in, if there are things we must do that we typically view as burdens, it is possible that we could come to enjoy those things in the same way that we've come to enjoy all the things we've ever come to enjoy and will ever come to enjoy.
Thank you for sharing.
How can you be so sure, 100%? What are the famous ticks that you see in the story?
Edit: I found this piece interesting, if a bit bleak. The prose reminded me a little of William Gibson.
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…
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.
And I'm not afraid to say that I'm one of them. I upvoted it because I liked it. I don't see what difference it makes who or what wrote it.
It feels like everyone has been forcibly converted to some anti-AI religion. You're no longer allowed to enjoy text on its own merit. You have to like the human writing, even the hard to read, and loudly espouse hatred of everything that comes out of an LLM. Do not ever say, or even imply, that an LLM can help a blogger write something that is readable. That's blasphemy.
The old blue dress / white dress meme in text form?
To be fair, the Claude prose I stare at is the programming-oriented kind, not fiction-writing kind, so it's certainly possible I just didn't recognize it as such because I haven't been exposed to it.
That said, well, I enjoyed it. Props to the author for inciting violent argumentation on HN, at least (not that it takes much :)
Unrelated, but to answer his question, it's the probability that a random spot in the covered area will get at least a smidge of rain at some point in the covered time period. A 10% chance of rain can mean either that the forecaster is 100% sure that exactly 10% of the area will get rain, or it can mean that the forecaster sees a large rainstorm nearby which would cover the whole area if it arrived, but which only has a 10% chance of arriving. Or anything in between. If there's a rain cloud meandering over the city, covering 1% of the city at a time, and over the whole day it randomly walks over 10% of the city, that's also a 10% chance.
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.
Yes! x forecaster confidence
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 dialog with the cheese-maker would convey the mood better (consider that so far = so long in the original): - Why cheese? - So far no one is doing this for me. - So far? - So long.
The story is "about" more things though, for example alienation due to AI replacing people at work.
I had excitedly clicked to see what 72 people thought about the perspective of the story. I was looking forward to learning other’s ideas on how mechanical boundaries contrast physical or human boundaries of life (as time reveals.)
Instead I opened to dozens of accusatory declarations of the story being LLM produced (or not).
Ok, but what a bummer.
I appreciate this story’s focus on time’s relationship to culture. I found the language reminiscent of other translations. That quality of translation drew my attention to turns-of-phrase that don’t mean the same thing in English, while wielding meaning anyway - perhaps by being fulcrums in the story that they are contextualized around. I appreciate how it makes language feel new.
The question of time made me think of the film Unrest, and it feels pertinent that we can accept each others idiosyncratic time, (people who run late or early), but experience mechanical time that is unforgiving and ruthlessly precise, regardless of the outcome- or anti-vital consequence (flower disappearing/ forgetting) potential, one to which we increasingly we design the world as beholden to.
It seems many of us, in this political and cultural moment, are facing (watching, seeing, witnessing) the untimely demises of vital things we know and love, and consider core to living - our careers, our hopes, our jobs, our climate, our people - the cause of this loss is almost always attributable to that compelling mechanical potential being wielded carelessly, it mechanic zeal what we are also so coerced to pay attention. This experience of negotiating our attention and technical relentlessness -is the relationship that increasingly determine the flavor of our time in the material worlds.
And yet, even in the HN comments, the debate about the artificiality or potential use of LLM dominates - only highlighting the very wound being written about.
Even if the story was written by a human, the fact that we feel we have to ask about the use of LLMs already illustrates a distance that has been placed, a widening gap between ourselves and creative expression.
We question everything, lest we be fooled - or be seen being fooled.
I find the felt necessity of the inquiry itself the most devastating aspect of generative LLMs. We deserve to experience creative expression and then deconstruct it - but the use of LLMs has increasingly constrained us to deconstruct all creative expression - towards ensuring we can allow ourselves to experience it.
We have been robbed of culture twice, once by the training of LLMs, and now again in our attempt to shield ourselves from their presence.
It’s all so exhausting, and I’m angry we can’t just enjoy critiquing interesting and unforgivably clichéd writing, without first modeling an LLMs version in our heads to compare it to before assigning it value.
AI has some value as a tool, but the outright robbery of creative culture by current tech giants is an unforgivable and cruel theft that is plowing down huge swaths of what gives vital meaning to our lives - for so many of us.
My thought process:
Hmm, what's this post, a bit cryptic on info, not many comments but not none. Scroll.
[Come back in about an hour.]
Double the comments, probably not pure slop-or-shill. (Or even worse, slop-and-shill.) Click.
Works without javascript… Has the look of an old usenet post, slightly reformated. Ah, fiction/narrative tells… Perhaps one of those “tales from IT” things on reddit, those were decent in the Before Times.
Hmm, has some interesting one-liners. Like someone who writes enough to know you want to give a morsel of style, a clever aside here or there. The flourish an ice skater does with their hands after a triple axle. Probably why it's gaining in comments.
Hmm, seems like the person might be on the spectrum slightly. Not sure if I would think that if it weren't for the tech references. Or the fact that some of it resonates with my most analytical observations of life and human behavior.
[Now I'm not sure if I thought this, but I think I did on some level:]
So that could be a person who's “analytical” or it could be an AI. But it’s actually something I might think, so I’m going to assume human. Else, I’m going to have some uncomfortable thoughts. I don’t want to think that, and it’s pretty enjoyable.
[Back to thoughts.]
Ah, that’s the second Slavic and/or Europeanish name I’ve seen. Okay, likely a second language person. Probably not learned English as a second language late in life. Probably earlier. Maybe dual language even. The dual/second language explains the slight, unnatural feelings I'm getting.
Oh, now here's a metaphor/stylism that just doesn't work. They write: “For now” could mean “so far” or “goodbye.” As in “goodbye for now”. That does not work. I think they are going for something I’ve noticed though, expressions can be fluid to accommodate however the receiver wants. For decades I’ve liked, and told people I like, the expression “Alright” as a response to “How are you doing?” Because it is entirely up to the speaker how they want to interpret it.
[Not thought at the time:] Ascending in pitch: Doing well. Descending in pitch: Getting by, but could be better. If pitch is needed to be truthful, then woe to the tonedeaf. And if the receiver wants a different pitch bad enough, they will assume I am simply a poor vocalist, which I’d rather, than have them deal with uncomfortable truth. 99% of the time when I’m asked this, it is by the cashier / retail worker for whom, like this writer, all I may remember from my last encounter is their name tag. Though, actually, not really. If I remember their name, I likely also remember if they are pleasant/chatty. And I likely remember that more than names. For Europeans, this can be different, as they say my locale is more pleasant/chatty with strangers, so that might be why this writer only remembers names.
[Back to thoughts.]
But this doesn't work. “Goodbye for now” is not the same as “goodbye goodbye.” If anything, it’s the same thing as “goodbye so far.” Meaning only one meaning for “for now.” “For now” does not work on its own as a salutation. “Well, thanks for checking me out, cashier.” “You’re welcome.” “Have a good day.” “For now.” That would be a very interesting response from the cashier, but it would not mean “goodbye.”
So, what's happening? Why this assumed double meaning that I am not getting? Hmm, perhaps this is a story originally written in another language and was translated to English. They had an idiom that works in, say, a Slavic language but there's no English analog.
[Not thought at the time:]
What the writer should have said is “for now” has multiple meanings: “at this moment, then not, and then again in another moment,” or “at this moment, then not, and never again,” or “at this moment and forever.” Thus, “I am here, for now” only states that I am at this location at this moment. Whether I will leave, whether I will come back, is unknown. But it at least says what is likely important, that I am here now.
[Back to thoughts.]
If so, clearly we are tool assisted. What of those previous clever phrases? Well, they weren't exactly “fun with English” clever. They were things that could have been written first in a Slavic language and still translate into something clever.
[Not thought then:]
In fact it's more like something in Guy De Maupasant's (however it's spelled) The Necklace. Lots of clever lines that presumably came from the original French and translated fine. I was directed to The Necklace from a news.ycombinator.com comment actually. Hmm, a prompt of “write me in the style of Guy De Maupasant”...
[Back to thoughts]
Well, I'm pretty deep, might as well finish it.
[Not 100% sure I thought this. Oh, and SPOILER ALERT:]
Uh oh, cross walk. Possibility of being hit by a car.
[Back to thoughts.]
Hit by a car. Yep. Not my favorite story development. Distracted from his phone, got it. And shows the futility of his tech work. Ug, can relate. Probably written by someone who'd much rather write for a living.
Still, I probably would have preferred something “larger” for a climax that makes me think in a unique way. E.g. Instead, the robot delivery bot gets raptured, and some clever thing about just-in-time programming is revealed that I wouldn't get immediately as an amateur, but I can at least appreciate, if it's explained well.
Honestly, though, getting hit by a car works if it is done slightly differently. It was a bit on the nose, still, not a huge detractor. Again, the other “hand flourishes” make up for it.
Bio. Written by some CTO of some typical-startup sounding company. Impressive or at least unique for a large-company CTO. For a five person startup, though, hell, even I could be a CTO. And this is a bit like something I’d write.
What’s this thing also in the bio… Wikipedia says its some Greek philosopher who was a prolific writer. Indeed, some good parts in here suggest a prolific author wrote it. Other parts suggest tool assist, if nothing else, to translate or help with something they want to say that works primarily in another language. And then the “casual” mention of the company name. Slight slop / slight shill if anything.
Will I come back and read another? On my own? Probably not. I'm not going to bookmark it. Let’s check the comments.
[not thought:]
If a new one by this poster was posted on news.ycombinator.com . Maybe… But only with enough comments. Assuming comment number/rate on news.ycombinator.com stays a useful metric of being worth my time.
[Back to thoughts.]
Oh, man, so many “is it AI” comments…
Interestingly, I bet if I posted some code here, someone who writes code much better than I would say similar things.
Oh, this bit is kind of clever, but that could be because they had a clever idea, but it seems tool assisted. I do like the flourish, but it’s not the flourish of a master of this (programming) language. Some good stuff, but probably not going to bookmark this site. I prefer programming from people who are as native in the language(s) as me. Still has moments. Ultimately, looks like the work of someone who'd rather be coding their own projects rather than doing their current job.