Though I note it didn't say "read comments by other humans", only "read comments by humans", so confirmed AI.

I think the guidelines here work quite well, and expect a good-faith interpretation, which they mostly receive.

I think you're asking for some sort of empirical verification of "this is / is not LLM text" (which seems impossible), but there's no real reason to expect the existence of LLMs to change that this website is, generally, interacted with in a good-faith way. People are really good at calling others out on here -- I doubt that will change.

It's very funny to imagine people prompting: "Write a compelling comment, for me, to pass off as my thoughts, for this HN news thread, which will attract both upvotes and engagement.".

In good faith, per the guidelines: What losers!

When first trying 5.2, on a "Pro" plan, I was - and still am - able to trigger the shopping assistant via keyword-matching, even if the conversation context, or the prompt itself, is wildly inappropriate (suicide, racism, etc).

Keyword-matching seems a strange ad strategy for a (non-profit) company selling QKV. It's all very confusing!

Hopefully, for fans of personal super-assistants--and advertising--worldwide, this will improve now that ads have been formalised.

Given online is now bot-riddled, I half-finished something similar a while back, where the game was adopting and 'coaching' (a <500 character prompt was allowed every time the dealer chip passed, outside of play) an LLM player, as a kind of gambling-on-how-good-at-prompting-you-are game. Feature request! The rake could pay for the tokens, at least.

The hosts often focus on his Exegesis, mentioned in the article. It feels like a privilege to hear two very smart academics engage in longform discussion - in which they're unconstrained, and clearly having genuine fun - about Dick's work.

More broadly, the non-Dick episodes are also wonderful, and often cover the kind of art I typically see discussed here.

You can dip in for times they cover work you love already, to hear their interesting (and academically, often quite new) perspectives on your favourites, or listen from the start, chronologically, as a kind of curriculum in the weird. Which I found to be an incredibly useful thing.

I'm not associated in any way, just a fan, and think a lot of users here would enjoy it: https://www.weirdstudies.com/10

Personally, I do take 'ment' as a feminine ending there, or - more specifically - the T sound runs into the I sound when I read it, the way it would in the predominantly Italian stuff she's likely referencing.

I'm very much with Gordon Lish on Shakespeare's monosyllabic drift words - that he was educated in Latin, and integrating Germanic vocabulary into that structure relatively freely, and further analysis is almost impossibly complex. That said, there's a lot of moments in those where I'd kill to hear where the stress landed when first performed.

This specific area is really one of those "What if?" moments in literary criticism, I think - I believe it would be incredibly beneficial for the form if this was the dominant focus of critique, rather than thematic stuff. On the rare occasions I teach at universities, this is all completely new to students, which sucks - it's entirely possible to approach prose theory with the same rigour as music theory, and it seems (in the UK, at least) to be very quickly becoming a lost art!

Language architecture is really interesting, I think, for programmers who have bought into the LLM hype in any meaningful way. It's an important field to have a sense of.

Tokenizers, for example, generally have multi-syllabic tokens as their base-level, indivisible unit.

You rarely see this mentioned when LLM capability against non-coding tasks is discussed, despite it being deeply important for prose construction.

Not to mention, putting language models aside, that the vast majority of code is written in language with a logical grammar. The disciplines are highly linked.

"Elinor could sit it no longer. She almost ran out of the room, and as soon as the door was closed, burst into tears of joy, which at first she thought would never cease."

She 'tends towards Iambic' in literary criticism terminology. So it's not a strict Iambic, more like a 'soft Iambic' which is a term I can't remember if it's actually used in lit crit, or if I made it up.

You need to drop the "at" syllable, in that example (which you would do in vocal rhythms of English, then and now), for it to be a true Iambic.

There's lots of good writing on the King James Bible "tending towards" Iambic, which should be more Google-able, and her father was a preacher, so that's a likely influence there, I would speculate.

Some others I like that I remember:

"You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope." - Persuasion (I think?).

"Till this moment I never knew myself." - Sense and Sensibility again? I can't remember off the dome. That's a gorgeous strict Iambic.

There are much longer examples - whole paragraphs that close chapters of Sense and Sensibility specifically. I'll try and find the version I have notations on when I'm next around my books. She regularly slips into it to close moments of emotional crescendo - "Cursus" being the Latin term for an analogous technique, when it was more frequently used in a more stylised manner.

The opinion you replied to frustrates me when I encounter it.

She was only doing "magical thinking" in her narratives so much as her novels are marriage comedies, and this is required.

The reality of her life was that she was incredibly uncompromising. She had to publish her early work under an androgynous pseudonym to profit from it.

She didn't marry cynically despite having opportunities to. She was a realist, and a strain of that runs through her work. There are many moments where she anticipates the great Russian realists. She managed to turn a good profit on her art in spite of her period's circumstances. She genuinely advanced the idea of who is allowed to make art, and who is allowed to profit from it.

Generally the novels have nuanced but happy endings. She was writing for an audience. She was a shrewd businessman at a time when there weren't businesswomen. In her personal life, she was genuinely uncompromising. She's a GOATed artist. You can't ask much more of a human!

I was visiting Jane Austen's House Museum last year and it always gives me pleasure to see how wildly popular her work remains. There always seem to be tourists there visiting from all over the world. That is really heartening.

She was very innovative. Maybe even underrated as a craftsperson at the sentence level. My favourite trick that I believe she invented is slipping from prose into a soft Iambic pentameter, essentially unnoticed. Lots of people have copied that from her.

And class-pressure narratives will never not be relevant to people's lives. She's a very very humane storyteller in that respect.

I am slightly biased - she's my great aunt (x 6). Used to find that embarrassing but now I feel quite proud.

The natural extension seemed like taking this extremely seriously, so this was a fun & quick Saturday morning project. I'm having a lot of fun clicking around and thought I'd share, in case anyone wants to know what is going on in Port Augusta.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46173017

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

In terms of cinema tech, it took us arguably until the early 1940s to achieve "deep focus in artificial light". About 50 years!

The last couple of years of development in generative video looks, to me, like the tech is improving more quickly than the tech it is mimicking did. This seems unsurprising - one was definitely a hardware problem, and the other is most likely a mixture of hardware and software problems.

Your complaints (or analogous technical complaints) would have been acceptable issues - things one had to work around - for a good deal of cinema history.

We've already reached people complaining about "these book spines are illegible", which feels very close to "it's difficult to shoot in focus, indoors". Will that take four or five decades to achieve, based on the last 3 - 5 years of development?

The tech certainly isn't there yet, nor am I pretending like it is, and nor was the comment you replied to. To call it close is not laughable, though, in the historical context.

The much more interesting question is: At what point is there an audience for the output? That's the one that will actually matter - not whether it's possible to replicate Citizen Kane.

This blows Sonnet 4.5 (64.8%), GPT5.1 (58.7%) and Opus 4.1 (66.3%) away.

An example output:

'''

The cabin was cold. It smelled of pine needles and old dust. Bryan sat on the porch with a glass of scotch balanced on his knee. It was cheap scotch. He missed the good stuff, but he wasn't in Paris anymore, and he certainly wasn't in Beverly Hills.

He checked his watch. It was a bulky thing, black rubber. He checked the Glock on the table next to him. That was black, too.

"I told you," Bryan said. He wasn't talking to anyone. "I told you not to go into the woods."

He was thinking about Kim. He was always thinking about Kim. She was safe, probably. At a mall in Santa Monica. Or maybe a library. But it felt like she was gone. It always felt like she was gone.

The trees at the edge of the clearing shifted. There wasn't any wind. The air was heavy and humid, unusual for October. A bird stopped singing. Then the crickets stopped. It got very quiet.

Bryan took a sip of the scotch. It burned his throat. He liked the burn. It reminded him he was still there.

Three red dots appeared on his chest. They made a small triangle.

Bryan didn't look at them. He set the glass down on the railing. He picked up the phone. It was an old flip phone. He pressed a button.

"I don't know who you are," Bryan said into the phone. "I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money."

The leaves rustled. A shape began to form out of the empty air. It looked like heat rising off the highway in August. It was tall. Much taller than a man.

"But what I do have," Bryan said, "are a very particular set of skills."

The shape solidified. It was ugly. It had skin like a lizard and dreadlocks that looked like heavy black cables. It wore a metal mask. It made a clicking sound. Click-click-click. Like a Geiger counter.

"Skills I have acquired over a very long career," Bryan said. He stood up. His knees popped. He felt the ache in his lower back. He was getting too old for this.

The thing roared. It wasn't a human sound. It was a wet, guttural noise.

"I will look for you," Bryan said. He put the phone in his pocket. "I will find you."

The creature raised a metal gauntlet. Two jagged blades slid out. They caught the moonlight.

"And I will kill you," Bryan said.

He raised the Glock and fired twice. Pop-pop.

The creature didn't fall. It took a step forward. Green blood, thick and glowing, leaked from its shoulder. It looked like antifreeze. The creature touched the wound, then looked at its hand. It seemed surprised.

Bryan didn't wait. He moved off the porch. He moved fast for a man his age. He went left, toward the woodpile. The creature fired a blast of blue light from its shoulder. It hit the porch swing. The swing exploded. Wood splinters rained down like confetti.

Bryan rolled behind the logs. He breathed in. He breathed out. He could hear the heavy footsteps crunching the dry leaves. Crunch. Crunch.

"You're big," Bryan whispered. "That makes you slow."

He grabbed a splitting maul from the stump. It was heavy. The handle was smooth hickory.

The creature came around the woodpile. It was scanning the trees. It didn't see Bryan down low. Bryan swung the maul. He put his hips into it. He swung it like he was chopping a cord of oak.

The blade hit the creature in the knee. There was a snap. A loud, wet snap.

The thing howled. It fell onto one knee.

Bryan dropped the maul. He stepped inside the creature’s reach. He knew exactly where to hit. The throat. The armpit. The soft spot under the ribs. He hit the creature three times, hard chops with the side of his hand. It was like hitting a brick wall, but he felt something give.

The creature swung its arm back. It hit Bryan in the chest.

Bryan flew backward. He hit the dirt. The wind went out of him. He lay there for a second, staring up at the stars. They looked very far away. He wondered if Lenore was looking at the same stars. Probably not. She was probably sleeping.

He sat up. His ribs hurt. Maybe broken.

The creature was trying to stand. It was clicking again. It tapped something on its wrist. A series of red symbols started flashing. They counted down.

Bryan knew a bomb when he saw one.

"No," Bryan said.

He tackled the thing. He didn't think about it. He just did it. He grabbed the creature’s arm. He twisted the wrist mechanism. He’d seen something like it in Baghdad once. Or maybe Istanbul. The memories ran together now.

He ripped the gauntlet loose. Wires sparked. He threw it as hard as he could into the darkness of the woods.

Three seconds later, there was a flash. A boom. A shockwave that shook the pine needles from the trees.

Silence came back.

The creature lay on the ground. It was breathing shallowly. The green blood was pooling under it. It took off its mask.

The face was hideous. Mandibles. Beady eyes. It looked at Bryan. It said something, a garbled copy of Bryan's own voice.

"...good luck..."

Then it died. It just stopped.

Bryan stood up. He dusted off his pants. He walked back to the porch. The swing was gone. The railing was scorched.

His glass of scotch was still sitting there, untouched. The ice hadn't even melted.

He picked it up. He took a drink. It still tasted cheap.

He took his phone out and looked at it. No service.

"Well," he said.

He went inside the cabin and locked the door. He sat on the couch and waited for the sun to come up. He hoped Kim would call. He really hoped she would call.

'''

The punchline, which I can't remember, is something about the two holes being, according to the two consultants, an MVP of a tunnel: "Just stand at either end of it."

The grotto is unpleasant - absolutely, in my opinion, a Victorian (give or take) rich man's folly, per the Wiki.

The imagery is all faux-Mediaeval - mostly the standard utter nonsense Rosicrucian 'interpretation' of Kabbalistic symbols. It's very bullshit, edgy, Hot-Topic-Victorian silly stuff.

Except for where, at the Malkuth mark, IIRC, it opens up into a sort of temple-and-altar situation, where it is actually somewhat frightening, in the way that any secret Bacchanalian temple is, because nobody builds that sort of thing for a good reason.

Remote: Sure

Willing to relocate: Actively

Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/10xS4vaI8Vp1pN9lNpu8d2kSQ...

Email: henrygabrielsmith@gmail.com

My last full-time role was being in charge of product at a marketplace company. Since then I've been doing ML research full-time, funded by two novels I wrote that Penguin have published or are publishing. I'm really good at testing and shipping new ideas quickly, with a specific focus on the efficacy of new architectures.

I miss being on a team, and having project-specific focus, so if my portfolio (in the linked resume) is aligned with what you're working on, I'd love to hear from you.

The earlier stage and smaller, the better - I get the most joy from projects where I can see the impact of my research, and where I can take on genuine responsibility for my work's success or failure.

My learning so far, to your point on memory being a limiting factor, is that the system is able to build on ideas over time. I'm not sure you'd classify that as 'self-learning', and I haven't really pushed it in the direction of 'introspection' at all.

Memory itself (in this form) does not seem to be a silver bullet, though, by any means. However, as I add more 'tools', or 'agents', its ability to make 'leaps of discovery' does improve.

For example, I've been (very cautiously) allowing cron jobs to review a day's conversation, then spawn headless Claude Code instances to explore ideas or produce research on topics that I've been thinking about in the chat history.

That's not much different from the 'regular tasks' that Perplexity (and I think OpenAI) offer, but it definitely feels more like a singular entity. It's absolutely limited by how smart the conversation history is, at this time, though.

The Memento analogy you used does feel quite apt - there is a distinct sense of personhood available to something with memory that is inherently unavailable to a fresh context window.