Pangram[0] thinks the closing part is AI generated but the opening paragraphs are human. Certainly the closing paragraphs have a bit of an LLM flavor (a header titled "The Pattern", eg)
There are no automated AI detectors that work. False positives and false negatives are both common, and the false positives particularly render them incredibly dangerous to use. Just like LLMs have not actually replaced competent engineers working on real software despite all the hysteria about them doing so, they also can't automate detection, and it is possible to build up stronger heuristics as a human. I am fully confident and would place a large sum of money on this article being LLM-generated if we could verify the bet, but we can't, so you'll just have to take my word for it, or not.
Here's another thing: I think spending too much time with generative AI makes your taste worse, by habituating you to stuff that's pretty bad.
I think it's a sort of slot machine effect, you get used to losing and when something goes slightly well you wildly overestimate how good it is. You see this with visual artists who got way too into image generation. Because they have to spin the wheel a thousand times to get one good output, they have totally habituated themselves to a lower standard by the time they emerge from the AI mines clutching their one good output, because that output is not all that great.
It looks good compared to all the failed generations though!
Also, spending all your time cranking the slot machine handle and occasionally winning convinces your brain that you have a magic ability at cranking the slot machine handle, when actually you were at best slightly lucky. So you get people who convince themselves they are geniuses at using AI when they are actually average or slightly above average.
> You see this with visual artists who got way too into image generation, and because they have to spin the wheel a thousand times to get one good output, they have totally habituated themselves to a lower standard by the time they emerge from the AI mines clutching their one good output
Is this actually true? I know of no artists nor programmers who used to have strict requirements, careful eyes and "good taste" who after playing around with AI suddenly dropped those things, that'd be very against basically their personality.
Do you have any concrete and practical examples of any currently public artists you've seen be affected by this?
> Generally speaking people don't use a service/library for the author's ability to write excellent proses.
I think this is incredibly wrong. I'd even go as far to say that a well presented README/website is the second most important factor, only behind network effect.
Presentation matters. Good documentation is evidence of a library that has been carefully thought through. Slop in the readme suggests slop in the code.
I've seen developers who genuinely like to write code, but never met one who likes to write documents. I know they exist somewhere, but I'd not judge someone's programming ability/willingness by their English writing ability/willingness.
I like to write documents. It helps me understand the code much better, as I'm forced to write down what's happening at each stage. Yes, code itself can be self documenting, but writing it in English can elucidate any hidden assumptions.
I could vibe code the hell out of something but write a good README for it by hand, doesn't mean that something is actually good. But yes, A -> B != B -> A, as your last sentence says.
From my point of view, if I wanted an AI summary of a project I could generate one myself. An unlabeled AI readme is almost worse than nothing! I've generated AI readmes myself- they can be useful- but they aren't something to show off.
I'll read a badly-formatted readme written by a human with far more interest than a formulaic LLM summary of a project. But it seems like nobody even notices a readme is slop because it has nice Markdown, and my best guess as to why is that people have become habituated to this stuff.
It used to require some real elbow grease to write blogspam, now it's much easier.
I hardly ever go through a post fisking it for AI tells, they leap out at me now whether I want them to or not. As the density of them increases my odds of closing the tab approach one.
It's not a pleasant time to read Show HNs but it just seems to be what's happening now.
I think the security/liberty tradeoff is actually often a false promise. You can end up trading away liberty for nothing at all. I don't like buying into this, even to say "liberty is better, we should do that instead" because it implicitly concedes that you would really get the security on the other side of the bargain.
And if you don't get the security you were promised, it's too late to do anything about it.
> "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety" -- Benjamin Franklin
The key phrase is "a little temporary safety". 250 years ago people understood that the "security" gains were small and fleeting, but the loss of liberty was massive and permanent.
FWIW, the context of the Franklin quote is him defending the ability of the legislature to tax a family that was trying to bribe/lobby the governor to do otherwise.
The quote is in defense of the government: WITTES: It is a quotation that defends the authority of a legislature to govern in the interests of collective security. It means, in context, not quite the opposite of what it's almost always quoted as saying but much closer to the opposite than to the thing that people think it means.
That context didn't change the meaning at all for me.
Probably because Franklin most certainly thought himself to be writing on behalf of the people and was making a direct appeal that they assert their right to govern themselves rather than letting powerful private interests do as they wished.
That's not equally relevant everywhere the quote gets used, but it seems pretty relevant here, no?
the phrase fits the modern usage, even if it's been decontextualized. kinda like "who watches the watchmen?" originally being about cheating wives bribing the folks keeping her locked up in the house.
This dynamic always happens with quotes and attempts to deploy the founding fathers in arguments. Most of the founding fathers (except Thomas Paine) were terrible, horrible, no good people. I’d have been a loyalist in that era.
Maybe I'm just America Pilled but I'll support almost anyone against a hereditary monarchy. The idea should be fundamentally disgusting to any self-respecting human being.
There's no government as effective at instituting necessary changes as a benevolent autocracy, nor any so effective at destruction as a malevolent one.
If our democracy is sufficiently broken, if supermajority voter policy preferences continue to be dismissed by both parties, it might be that we just cannot survive under the old Constitutional order. The Right's open move towards a post-democratic future, and the proceduralist Center's continued failure to fully utilize their popular mandate to fix things that need fixing, implicitly authorizes a Left to develop that is more obsessed with expression of the popular will and with good governance, than it is with a 250 year old bureaucratic structure and "norms". Norms of restraint are a consensual exercise, and cannot persist unilaterally.
The way things are going, the trajectory, make even most 20th century hereditary monarchies look pretty decent. Especially ones that devolve most power to parliamentary bodies.
> There's no government as effective at instituting necessary changes as a benevolent autocracy
Autocracies have lots of issues around eg building a sufficiently capable bureaucracy that isn't too corrupt to do things. It can make it harder, not easier. Democracy can lean on democratic legitimacy, constitutional traditions, and a history of allowing power transitions without anyone losing their heads or launching a civil war over it. Those are all really useful things that autocracies have to cope without. It's not like it's easy mode.
All of those can be mooted by the sort of dysfunction currently on offer.
Almost every bill for the past 15 years has been filibustered. More than half the Supreme Court is part of an organized partisan conspiracy, and a third has worked specifically fighting election laws to advantage their guy. The DHS stands as a rogue paramilitary that can be deployed when politically convenient as de facto martial law, the DOJ openly persecuting ethnically defined political opponents and daring Congress to do anything about it, when they're not trying to charge Congresspeople with crimes. People are being disappeared into concentration camps. We are unilaterally withdrawing from the military and economic empire that has served us since the 1940's, in the name of ethnic hatreds and Hitlerian brinksmanship. The economy now has more to do with the Fed chair than any pathetic exchange of goods and services we can string together.
This doesn't end well, and it's broken enough already that a return to Biden/Obama/Clinton type leadership couldn't possibly hope to fix it unless they can lock down leadership for the next couple generations; More damage can be done in a month than they can fix in four years. "Just win every election from now until the end of time" isn't a real strategy.
I don't know what comes next, but if we choose to burn the house down today rather than practice good maintenance, the next homeowner cannot succeed by employing good maintenance.
Similarly, if the neighbor burns your house down deliberately because he hates you, and you start the rebuild process without doing anything about your neighbor's existence, you shouldn't be surprised if you end up with more ashes.
> There's no government as effective at instituting necessary changes as a benevolent autocracy
This is untrue.
The world is so complex that a single person or group can adapt and develop fast enough. We've seen what happens to planned economies. Their ineffectiveness is not due to malevolence.
Distribution of power not only serves as a protection to autocratic takeover but allows the system to be more flexible. The concentration of power can make some things more efficient but you trade flexibility.
Aside, the original meaning of Franklin's words are less-inspiring but perhaps more-interesting.
He's saying the local democratic legislature must not give up its "freedom" to pass laws taxing the powerful Penn dynasty which almost owns Pennsylvania.
He wants to reject a deal offered by the Penns: A big lump of money for temporary military security now, in exchange for an agreement that they can never be taxed ever again.
That's not an aside. The quote is pernicious because of its attribution to Ben. People invoke it without ever asking themselves if its true because they think of it as the hard won wisdom of a great man.
> The quote is pernicious because of its attribution to Ben.
It's not pernicious for any reason because it's absolutely true in general, Franklin was simply using a general piece of wisdom to justify particular government actions.
Yes, using it that way was an improvisation and a bit of a stretch, but the real issue here is why he needed to resort to it - that's a rabbit hole that pretty much goes to the bottom of today's problems which we're handling in a much worse manner than him back then.
If you assume that the security side of the equation is a false promise, then you are not making a decision at all: choosing between liberty with no security, or no liberty plus no security (because it's fake).
And for me, it seems somewhat disingenuous to imply that a decision is being made when your premise belies that.
It's not that security is fake, it's that giving up liberty doesn't naturally produce more security, and pursuing greater liberty doesn't necessarily erode security either.
It's not like pre-Revolutionary America was a notably secure place that inevitably see-sawed into a freer but insecure place afterwards.
Equally, the idea that there is a tradeoff in some particular situation is frequently asserted without evidence. The quote from the article is "It is always the case that there are benefits available from relinquishing core civil liberties."
That is 1) presented without evidence and 2) almost certainly false. It is not always the case.
Number 4 is completely possible. It's just that people in power don't like it because it means they have less power. They want to pretend that only options 1 and 3 are available and ignore that they are actually offering option 2.
Your argument is with GP who proposed that the security might be false.
But I will say I don't think you should say "options," but rather "possibilities." "Options" implies that all four are actually available. I don't think you get to assume that 4 is possible without offering evidence.
It depends on context for sure. Without a specific case study you can't really say.
However, in general, they are not exclusive. This has been demonstrated fairly often. In fact, it is often the case that maximizing liberty leads to more security.
Star Trek looked much better. They couldn’t do the numbers that B5 could do, at least not until the later parts of DS9. But what they were able to show actually looked realistic. B5’s effects were very, very clearly done on consumer-level computers. They were quite good considering, but didn’t look real. Star Trek was doing things with large physical models and it showed. Ships and stations looked like real objects (since they were!) rather than the smooth curves of everything in B5.
As a young SF devourer at the time, the cheap effects were a major turnoff and one reason I never got into B5.
Star Trek at the time had better effects (including DS9, even though I prefer B5!).
The trick with effects is to make whatever you have look good. There are a few ways of doing that. 2001's effects are genius and still look pretty good nearly sixty years later. They look better than 2010's from the 1980s. In fact, I'm even impressed with Forbidden Planet — yes, there are a lot of painted backgrounds but it does very well with what it has.
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