Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

> If you're going to fully vibe code a repo,

> I'm not the OP.

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/you

"In spoken English and informal written English, you is sometimes used to refer to people in general."

If you are going to repeatedly point out technicalities of a flagged post, please get your ducks in order first.

And yet the author does not seem to be forthright about their use of LLMs to write their "author website", blog posts, Vellum"P"roof website, and presumably Vellum"p"roof (capitalization stylized differently on the website and blog) itself.

> Your prose is never fed to an AI, never used to train a model, and never handed to anyone else.

And yet their is a distinct lack of a TOS/etc. codifying this promise. The site does accept payments via Stripe. This almost seems satirical.

This synthetic participation (LLM or otherwise) has catalyzed weakspots in HN's high-trust environment. The weight we give to the average HN comment is orders of magnitude higher than the average Reddit (& co.) comment, and this relationship probably goes both ways (much higher ROI on ads/propaganda). Due to the low volume & high trust, it seems to be a very different (easier) environment in which to achieve pervasive propaganda/advertising/etc with a disproportionate impact.

I remember when some new LLM version came out (maybe from Meta?) I saw something like 3 of the top 10 posts on the front page were all variations of "Foobar 2.1 New Model". Perhaps not explicit, deliberate manipulation, but the result was the same, and apparently allowed. How many of those generic LLM websites (https://letsbuyspiritair.com/ comes to mind) show up on the front page per day? Zero effort static front-ends for some unremarkable data. I'm not going to touch the politics minefield, but that is a weakspot too.

All of this, and yet I think HN has handled it relatively well. I really appreciate not seeing comments of the form "I asked Clog/Gemini/etc. here's 5 paragraphs". Places like Reddit do not have the agility or control, and have degraded accordingly.

It makes me sad to think that a short time ago, every forum was ~100% humans, and now it is some fraction of that. I wonder if I will ever see that again.