I didn't understand this part in the article. It seems advantageous to have an AI do manual mutation testing because it can actually introduce realistic bugs, like raising an exception or returning a different, known error code. Instead of the quite limited approach offered by automated frameworks that mostly just change binary operators. The whole issue with manual mutation testing is that it's slow and has to be done by hand, but with AI it's not by hand any longer and if it takes a few minutes in the background, who cares.
Casualty of HN title mangling again. Original title: Africa’s Wild Dogs Are the Most Hated Carnivores on the Continent. Here’s Why Some Conservationists Are Saving Them Anyway
We're in the era of 4k and 8k monitors. That character limit only occupies a tiny fraction of any modern screen.
So odd a site dedicated to future technology companies isn't even caught up with modern display techniques, let alone ones that existed some 2 decades ago.
I dislike the title really - I'm not sure where they pull the 'most hated' aspect from. A lot of what I've seen is that leopards generally fall into that category, mainly because they'll also happily kill people, dogs and livestock.
Another thing to consider is that LLMs have become a premier source of reading for the public. If more of what you read is AI generated, how you write is going to be significantly influenced by that.
One (slightly frightening) possibility is that many people write like LLMs even without assistance from LLMs. AI writing may have just become the norm for some. Maybe that's what's happening here.
LLM style is in many ways "The Atlantic from Temu". Nearly every article in The Atlantic sounds the same - I think we all know the cliches I am talking about. This doesn't mean that every author underwent a lobotomy (I hope). It just means there's a group of editors enforcing a common style.
Joining these editors used to take years of training in order to write like they do. Now we have their wisdom available on the command line.
To put it another way: LLMs write in what was considered pretty good style before their proliferation. There are all these examples of people finding "llm cliches" in well-respected authors' works pre-llm (somewhat obviously, if you think about it).
What made pretty good "taste" pretty good was its novelty. Now that pretty good is common it's no longer stylish.
Magazines’ style is generally good but affected, with some distinct quirks mixed in. These quirks have been also picked up in the training and their automated repetition at scale made it weird and "AI-style"
Yeah if you look back at earlier posts on the same blog, definitely not the same style. I'm guessing the author is either lying to save face or has spent so much time with Claude that they cannot distinguish Claude's voice from their own (we're all vulnerable to this).
Just because LLMs exist does not mean people stopped writing themselves. I mean, some people did, but not everyone. It's a kind of AI psychosis to think or suspect that everything is LLM generated.
I think they're trolling us. Their post-mortem is a very AI-sounding (and Pangram-triggering) claim that they're not using AI:
This post reads off as AI slop. You said it, I see it. I’m sincerely sorry for publishing something that has allowed you to feel this way. If my word means anything to you, I would like to assure you that this post was not authored by a LLM. Nor was it storyboarded, reviewed, checked, etc. by a LLM. Some readers have pointed out that people do not speak this way. That is correct. I do not speak, nor usually write, like this and this post will go down as my not-the-proudest, however, I take your criticism to heart—although not personally—and strive to improve.
I do write like this sometimes. The short sentences, the reversals, the one-word lines—all of it. It’s just the way it is. A LLM writes that way too, because it was trained on the same essays I grew up reading, so me doing it badly and a machine doing it look about the same to you on the page. That says something about my writing. It says nothing about who wrote it.
So let me be plain about it: Claude was not here. No LLM wrote this—not a sentence of it, nor was it outlined, drafted, reviewed, checked, etc. by one, and there is no prompt behind it either. It is just me, writing worse than usual. I will write the next one plainer. Next time, write to me. I too am a person behind this screen.
This is so very paranoid. Consider how hurtful your accusations may be.
The truth is that AI generated text is getting harder to detect, and while AI writing is still very lacking, more writing is getting the unwanted distinction of "plausibly written by AI." This was always going to be the natural course of events but plausible shouldn't mean guilty.
We should give more grace. To prosecute each and every mediocre writer in a witch trial with such weak evidence is entirely unnecessary.
Pangram is a complete scam. There is no durable way to detect whether something was written with AI. I've had folks say they ran pangram on my writing and it was "100% AI". Except I don't use AI to write or edit anything I post publicly.
Can you give some examples of your writing that trigger "100% AI" on pangram? I'm very interested in studying pangram's false positives. Especially if it's something published before ~2024
I agree Pangram's UI is awful and often misleading. Their underlying classifier model is pretty accurate in my experience, though, at least in the sense that it has very few natural false positives. If you disagree, please send me some long-form verifiable false positives that were not explicitly written to trick Pangram. I love to learn.
I just sent you a long article which you could not have read in the time it took you to reply. I would suggest you start there and read that article, which outlines several cases where the author was able to create contrived false positives and negatives.
Contrived false positives and negatives could (and should!) always be possible. That doesn't tell us anything about the natural false positive and negative rates, and a lot of people who have actively tried to use voice instruction to get models to consistently fool the detector without iterating against it directly have failed.
Those people should just try posting a big quote from the article to HN, and then see their comment get instantly flagged due to HN's AI detection (which might as well be Pangram)
It's baffling to me how people are so dismissive of Pangram despite never using it, extrapolating their experience from GPTZero or something else.
Saying "more" seems generous. I don't trust Pangram at all, and I also don't trust the author at all. Both can be trustless charletans simultaneously, and I feel this speaks volumes about the state of digital media today.
So you would trust a known writers word over non deterministic software ? I read New Orleans will soon let AI handle 911 calls, Hope the AI believes the calls are from humans :)
All ML classifiers (and algorithms) have a non-zero false positive rate. Having an error rate is baked into every ML classifier and algorithm. And its always non-zero in practice. In fact, hitting every test in some sort of test suite is likely a sign of a less accurate classifier, not a more accurate one.
Can you give some examples of Pangram false positives? Ideally ones from before 2024, or otherwise ones from notable writers who started writing before 2024.
The author is lying. Pangram is no panacea, but every time I have tested my own prose, it says it is 100% human written. Every single passage I tested from this post was evaluated as 100% AI written. The author should just confess; lying about having written something with AI both reveals the author as a liar and confirms that the author knows that it is wrong to pass off AI slop as one's own work.
Can’t you do split screen navigation via the home screen (Dashboard View)? At least on cars I’ve rented I could have navigation on one side and music on the other in CarPlay.
For anyone who wants to see clear examples of these defects from an inspectors point of view… For a while I was completely addicted to watching inspection videos of brand new homes where the inspector shows poor craftsmanship and sometimes even dangerous defects - the best in the genre IMO is Cy https://youtube.com/@cyfyhomeinspections?si=zldoP3BpzK6mUzDc check out his YT shorts. Example after example of terrible defects in brand new homes in Arizona
It's shocking how poorly built these houses are. No insulation, broken roof trusses, gas leaks, concrete property walls falling over.
It's not like houses were always perfect in the past though. My 1953 house has construction debris mixed in to the concrete foundation in the corner of the garage, where I assume they ran out of concrete, and knots in the roof planks patched with garbage as well.
Sure maybe they weren't perfect in the past but were they this expensive (compared to income)? In the Cy videos I can't believe how much some of the homes cost and the things he finds wrong.
When I was kid, I was playing Nintendo games with my cousin, and my very straight-laced Mormon mom kept calling for me to come upstairs for dinner. I kept replying, "Just a sec!" as we tried to finish the stage. After a few times through this loop, she yelled "NO MORE SECS!" It's been a running joke in my family ever since.
Yes, that was intentional. Originally it was just called "secrets-manager", I decided to shorten it only because it was (not really) too long to type, and a friend of mine had the realization that you can abbreviate it to something that sounds funny!
This is cool. I could see myself downloading the articles behind the first couple pages of hacker news with this, for viewing on a flight or long distance train ride with spotty internet
Does this current approach succeed for many sites? I see that this repo was clearly vibe coded or at least heavily used AI to write it. That can be fine, it just makes it more difficult to follow how much was done already and how much is left to get this properly working. As for email verification, a stopgap solution could be to just tell me to click confirm on the emails and which senders to look out for. Properly reading the actual inbox on record across providers could be difficult, it requires an actual email client. Also, forgive me if I'm off base on this one, but your comment appears to be AI generated. If so, that violates site guidelines.
> Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans.
The mention of states is because (besides the author likely being located in the States) many of the opt out forms are US only and filter on US state. You could probably just use an uncommon state or territory like Guam and try it, it would still submit opt outs for matching records on sites that are international. For example https://www.familytreenow.com/optout is listed in the broker list, and that seems to work for international profiles.
reply