Hacker News: cratermoon

New comment by cratermoon in "We Can't Agree on What Counts as "AI-Written""

cratermoon — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 01:46:51 +0000

"assisted by Grammarly"

Yeah, it doesn’t take AI to recognize throngs like passive voice, excessive wordiness, cliché phrases, and run-on sentences. But the writer was free to reject those suggestions.

New comment by cratermoon in "FCC abolishes gigabit speed goal, suggesting it is unfair to slower technologies"

cratermoon — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 20:23:17 +0000

Putting a gigantic thumb on the Free Market™ scale.

New comment by cratermoon in "We Can't Agree on What Counts as "AI-Written""

cratermoon — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 20:21:33 +0000

It's going to get nearly impossible to avoid the taint of some AI, at least for a while. The article first mentions Grammarly, a tool that up until was a normal English language grammar and style checker, widely used and appreciated by many writers. In 2025, they added something nobody asked for. Now it's a vector for AI taint, and given how widely it's used, there's untold numbers of tainted documents out there now.

The article doesn't mention, however, the incorporation of AI into the writing tools themselves. Copilot in Word means that everything written with it is suspect. Google has shoved Gemini into everything it can. Do we believe everyone when they say they didn't use AI assistance? Probably not, because even the spell and grammar check is suspect now.

New comment by cratermoon in "'Buy now, pay later' lenders pitch loans for needs like electricity and rent"

cratermoon — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 16:56:07 +0000

I'm sure the BNPL platforms are ensuring the information about who is borrowing money to buy what is kept private and not shared with every data broker on the planet. /s

New comment by cratermoon in "The AI Slop Spiral"

cratermoon — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 16:47:24 +0000

Also called the AI bobsled https://dustycloud.org/blog/faulty-towers-vibe-sickness-and-...

New comment by cratermoon in "Colorado River plummets as lakes Powell and Mead drop to record lows"

cratermoon — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 15:45:40 +0000

What about golf courses?

New comment by cratermoon in "Colorado River plummets as lakes Powell and Mead drop to record lows"

cratermoon — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 15:44:51 +0000

In part, yes.

New comment by cratermoon in "Ask HN: What's a Dirty Secret No One Wants to Admit in the Tech Industry?"

cratermoon — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 15:43:20 +0000

The average programmer is an illusion. Most programmers working in software, and I’m including not just the tech industry specifically, but all companies that employ or contact for programming are not very good. The relatively few who are outstanding skew the average. You know the joke about Bill Gates walks into a bar?

Most programmers were already doing what vibe programmers do with AI now, just more manually.

New comment by cratermoon in "'Buy Now, Pay Later' Lenders Pitch Loans for Needs Like Electricity and Rent"

cratermoon — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 22:18:24 +0000

Payday loan places already do this. It's pure exploitation of the poor.

New comment by cratermoon in "Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing"

cratermoon — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 16:45:47 +0000

And if you lowercase everything, you're e e cummings.

New comment by cratermoon in "Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing"

cratermoon — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 16:44:54 +0000

I realize that short attention spans are pervasive now, but the link to the explanation is only eight paragraphs in https://declaude.org/watermarking/

New comment by cratermoon in "Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing"

cratermoon — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 16:42:05 +0000

He's complaining that a coin-flipping synthetic text extruder is using an unfair coin. The text generated by an LLM is already adulterated. His objections are so much titling at windmills.

New comment by cratermoon in "Why Claude's Watermarking Won't Fix Anything"

cratermoon — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 16:11:20 +0000

"others were concerned that the watermarks would expose their previously-hidden AI usage and some expressed concerns about human-created works being edited by AI having the watermarks added."

Yes, that's the point of watermarks. To demonstrate the text was created or adapted by an LLM.

Taylor Farms' connections to Trump admin spurs probe into Cyclospora response

cratermoon — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 15:43:06 +0000

Article URL: https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/08/taylor-farms-connections-to-trump-admin-spurs-probe-into-cyclospora-response/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49300312

Points: 7

# Comments: 0

New comment by cratermoon in "Trump Orders Navy to Restore [Steam Catapults] in Aircraft Carriers"

cratermoon — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 23:51:54 +0000

But also this: the White House said in a statement. “It will also reactivate portions of the maritime industrial base that are easier to scale.”

Sounds remarkably similar to the justifications for re-activating coal-fired power plants.

New comment by cratermoon in "Trump Orders Navy to Restore [Steam Catapults] in Aircraft Carriers"

cratermoon — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 21:33:42 +0000

Did the company that makes steam catapult technology grease the orange palms?

New comment by cratermoon in "The poverty of anti-tech thought"

cratermoon — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 04:44:53 +0000

“Progressives have been howling about tech company surveillance for over a decade, but they all still have The iPhone in their pockets”

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

New comment by cratermoon in "Feds Continue with Plan to Save Spotted Owls by Killing Nearly 500k Other Owls"

cratermoon — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 23:39:47 +0000

Barred owls are invasive.

New comment by cratermoon in ""Clean" Code, Horrible Performance (2023)"

cratermoon — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 20:34:17 +0000

This is Muratori showing he's a solo programmer who has only ever worked on relative small, simple software that runs on a single machine.

New comment by cratermoon in "Starship Launch 13 Exposed Fatal Achilles Heel: potential mission-ending delays"

cratermoon — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 17:20:28 +0000

There’s a reason why every nearly spacecraft intended to operate more than a couple of days and be able to maneuver and make trajectory or orbit changes has used hypergolic fuels. They don’t have burn off issues and they don’t need ignition systems. The only exceptions now are the electric propulsion systems like Hall-effect thrusters.