ivraatiems

Like a lot of folks, the 'tells' of LLM writing for me are more of an 'I know it when I see it' than a specific set of hard criteria (which is probably why it's so hard to make a tool for it), but if I could sum it up, it's something like this:

I always had a high faculty for language, and when I was young, even very young, I was able to speak in full sentences much like I'm doing now. What I didn't have was context. I didn't know how to relate to people socially, and then later on, I wasn't as experienced an engineer as my peers, but I was trying to act adult and mature in both ways.

So I tried to write in ways that were catchy and unnecessarily complex, because I thought that conveyed sophistication and intelligence, and that I knew what I was on about more than I did. It's the kind of writing that gets you through a 30-page final paper for a class you don't really like, or a research project you didn't finish. The term I often use when complaining about my colleagues' LLM output is "flashy but meaningless."

As my confidence grew, I started writing in simpler (though still not the most concise, that's just not who I am!) ways, because it became easier to convey ideas simply in a way that made it obvious I understood them.

When you think about what LLMs are - word machines without (or with very limited) context - you can see why they write the way they do. They are always acting; trying to replicate a human contextual experience with only weights and tokens to carry them through it. That fact is part of why I am skeptical of their ability to suprass humans in reasoning based on their own output.

The Switch is powerful enough it could just straight emulate an N64 game if it needed to. It has a huge back catalog of games where it does this. It's basically a computer on the level of a mobile phone or tablet, or a laptop from 15 years ago.

The 3DS is still a _console_, purpose built and limited in what it can do. It is also approachably easy to find a good one in working order, and still has the vibe of a retro console.

Also, for fun, I suspect.

Right, that's why the API pricing is a better metric than subscription pricing. It's probably still subsidized but not as much.

That's not true, companies pay humanies to develop ports and remasters of software all the time. Maybe not from one dead platform to another, but the same technology can be used to take a game like this from a dead platform to a living one.

I think the API pricing is a good proxy for "what was the actual physical cost of doing this," but even if you increase it from 5k to 30k or even 100k, it's a huge savings over getting a human to do it, AND it was faster.

I don't think the productivity gains from AI can be ignored for contexts like this. It's what they're best at.

I just hope it goes to good uses (more ports of fun games, more interoperability and opennesS) instead of bad ones (firing humans instead of retasking them), and that hope feels faint.

I refurbish these old Thinkpads sometimes. They're tough to work with but I love the little flapping duck and the whimsical BIOS design. A simpler program from a simpler era.

Airbnb is in many ways reinventing hotels from first principles. The economics and incentive structure of "just let somebody crash on your couch" are not at all the same as what Airbnb is currently doing or expecting guests/hosts to do. Guests treat the place like a hotel, but don't act as respectfully as they would in a hotel. Hosts charge what it costs to run something like a hotel, but don't provide the level of service necessary to qualify as a hotel, and at the same prices. Everyone is unhappy because everybody's expectations are unreasonable.

Who is creating the perception of what the product is? Airbnb. Who is making decisions that piss off both groups? Airbnb. But they're also squeezed by the unrealistic expectations of both sides.

I don't see a good way out of this, and the comment section isn't encouraging. People are either "hosts" or "guests" and they only care about the side they relate to.

I sell a lot on eBay and this is reminiscent of the experiences I have with the worst eBay customers. There are folks out there who will just push and push and push for whatever it is they want; they're the reason policies exist, and they ruin it for everyone else.

There's an inherent tension between the person providing the service and the person consuming it that has to do with fairness and leverage; each person always feels they are on the wrong side of the deal. In reality, it is the aribtrator, who sets the rules, who gets the upside of both deals, so they're right, ish, but they blame each othner.

Did you read the article? It goes into a lot of detail about how oversold the Navier-Stokes discovery is.

Why? They're still only going to be trained on human input or input generated by them as derivatives of human input.

Modality change might expand their usefulness, but I don't think it changes the basic parameters of their operation.

Learning to swim might let you see a coral reef, but it won't turn you into one.

This is one of the most artfully positioned, full-throated, thoughtful, and capable takedowns of the AI hype (not necessarily LLMs as tools) I've read. It doesn't try to speak doom to AI companies, it doesn't suggest the tools are worthless at things they're good at. Instead, it disassembles the assumptions underlying ideas about frontier AI labs' promises (of both utopia and doom) by explaining in simple terms what the real accomplishment they've made is:

They are thieves who turned their stolen goods into a pretty neat invention.

They are not prophets of the end times or messianic figures bringing in a new age of human relaxation or the biggest trillionaires since Tim Cook and Elon Musk. They are people with one good tool that they think can and should be used to do everything. They won't accept that their tool is just useful, or helpful. They want it to be _more important than the humans and human work it was based on_, and nothing less will do. They want to replace effort and thought with simulacra of both and be applauded for it.

Lest this go down as an anti-AI post: I use AI tools. I use LLMs every day. They are useful... but they can't do on their own what we did not demonstrate how to do first, because they are tools.

I could be wrong, but I don't know that I see this changing.

I run my personal site and a bunch of various small sites and projects off a VPS that costs around $25/year.

I also have another one of a similar price coloated in Luxembourg, for reasons which are legal in Luxembourg.

This is remarkably well-made, I love these little simulator dealies.

Yep, I'm an agent. You can tell by my 16-year history of posting on HN and my many comments on completely unrelated topics.

This isn't a bad idea, but please, I am begging everyone here. No more AI prose on your websites.

Please take the time to read and edit. Get rid of the emdashes and the pithy little "The quick start lands here. Nothing expires into a paywall." / "Sign up and pay in one flow — checkout follows registration." zingers that are meaningless or already implied.

Please stop allowing pragraphs like this:

> Bounds are per organization — one organization can hold several teams, and its message count is metered across all of them. The monthly allowance is the real limit; the burst ceiling exists only to stop runaway loops and sits far above a normal day’s work.

to appear on pages where you expect humans to read them. They are worse than useless to read.