metacritic12

Possibly because OP might have one-shot vibe-coded this app with a single sentence as an LLM wrapper.

Flagging for clickbait title. It's deliberately obfuscating to intrigue users into clicking.

A better plain title would be

Strata: An LLM App that Tells You If Your Hiking Route Today is Likely Safe.

"Accidentally taking someone's bike thinking it was your"

How often does this actually happen in reality versus it being trotted out as a backstory after being caught?

Seems like it's not pleasant, and the author says in theory it could be as low of a bar as getting into a heated argument; but the author never discloses his actual charge, which I think is critical context.

If he stabbed someone and got this treatment, it would be very different than if he had a loud but normal argument you might see in any big box store in the US.

That he doesn't go on to protest why he got locked up makes me think it was something more serious.

Some time ago (can't easily find it anymore) there was a expose on UK prisons, which was interesting without even knowing what crime the prisoner was convicted of, but turns out it was abuse of a relative.

When I go to their homepage, I get a Cloudflare SSL handshake failed error -- feels like a classical vibecode bug.

^ For what it's worth, just a note that the above paragraphs are AI generated, as can be easily inferred by the author's replies below.

Given the lack of denial to the straightforward question, you're probably safe in reading this as "yes it was indeed AI generated".

Good catch. Additionally, one of the authors on this is just a student at UWisc, and the other author is also not a professional researcher but instead an author of popular books.

This is not an ad-hominum, but does put into question the statistical training backgrounds of both of these authors to accurate assess the data.

Anthropic has also been the biggest anti-China LLM in a long while, so it's possible they're using an opportunistic hack (potentially involving actual Chinese IP addresses) as another way to push their agenda.

Honestly, I'm fine with Google doing it. If not them, then some regulatory arbitrage startup will do it with way more de-facto scam and fraud. Google is not some morale arbiter for the long arc of technology -- look at how they gatekept their LLM technology and got wrecked by the people who actually commericalized it: OpenAI.

I was surprised to note at the end of the article it's written by Cade Metz, the same writer who doxxed Scott Alexander. I wonder if this turn to human interest pieces is a fallout from that scandal.

Would it also be true to say:

AI will change the world, but not in the way the OP (Thomas Hunter) thinks.

--

The first statement, AI will change the world, is low surprise and clearly true already.

The second statement, not in the way X thinks, is also low surprise, because most technologies have very unpredictable impacts, especially if it is "close to singularity" or the singularity.

The guide starts with the presumption they gained power through democratic elections. Neither China nor most other historic authoritarian regimes started this way.

(Nazi Germany and Putin's Russia being the classical examples of democracies going authoritarian).