Comment by xnorswap
7 hours ago
The real question is whether it was Mythos or Opus that wrote this post.
> "Why it matters"
It doesn't, it's a corporate blog, they were rarely written in one-author's voice anyway, but it's interesting to see that even large organisations are outsourcing their blogs to LLMs.
Sentence constructions like this definitely scream AI: "That's a reasonable bias for an exploratory tool. It's a ruinous one for a triage queue..."
I will upgrade the "why it matters" to "and now AI output is part of the training data". A day is coming when the punched-up AI verbiage will be the norm and hard to distinguish unless you're from the previous generation. Sort of in the way that I miss some aspects of Usenet.
I had a dude in a conversation non-ironically use "load-bearing."
I could only follow up with, "that is a genuine insight."
Not a single person visibly flinched in pain.
Careful, you might have been talking to a Real Engineer. Perhaps even a structural variant that use this phrase pretty much daily.
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I use load-bearing all the time, mostly in jokes about something
yeah? it’s not that weird of a term
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Let's double-click on that. It's important to keep top of mind that using disruptive words and patterns in conversation isn't always driven by LLMs — reasoning from first principles tells us that problematic usages like this existed beforehand. One of my load-bearing career learnings is that people used this shape of language as a shibboleth long before game-changing tools like ChatGPT started slopping so much of what people read. It's a performant way of categorizing people into a very specific tech culture in-group based on vibes.
That's a scary thought, llm's training on llm output. People trained by default of ubiquity to think and read llm output produce their own llm-esque writing.
Seems stifling. We'll need someway to reward human creativity and out-of-bounds thinking before our greatest corpus of human intellect is a bounded by whenever and whatever was trained on.
Writing and later the printing press have already considerably stifled human expressiveness. Language used to be noch more fragmented and diverse before mass media (or the Bible in every household). In my grandmother’s time you would have difficulty understanding people from three villages down the road.
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I don't understand this mindset, why is it people on here think humans have some kind of magical ability machines don't or can't? Five years ago I would never have predicted this kind of human chauvinism here. It's some kind of weird romanticism almost.
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So is it that humans are inherently creative, machines could never do what we do? Or is it that humans will only replicate our training data, and so we have to ensure that machines don't bound our training data? Or are you going meta and gently pointing out the absurdity? (I hope it's this one!)
Human creativity is not only not being rewarded, but people are increasingly talking like consuming too few tokens is something that's actively used against them.
It's fascinating seeing people think that if you're snarky enough about something, the substance of that thing actually ceases to be substantive.
It's like staring down the barrel of a gun and taking the time to make quips about the type of paper the gun advertisement was printed on.
How do you know we haven't looked for substance, found none, and then decided to be snarky?
I can agree that snark probably isn't the type of comment that we generally value or encourage here on Hacker News, but neither is posting blatant advertisements and press releases, but here we are discussing one, so shrug ?
When writing is too heavily LLM-assisted, it does actually cease to be substantive, because it becomes impossible to know which parts of it represent actual claims which the author believes as stated and which are interpolations.
No no, it the LLM-assistance makes it hard to know what is substantive. That means it puts more work on the reader, which is a totally valid thing to complain about, but which is totally different from "the poor writing is actually the whole point"
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All of them represent claims which the author believes as stated, otherwise the author wouldn't put their name on them.
Eh, I still read all of it, but it grates that everything everywhere all the time now is written by one person.
I agree with the complaint, I just disagree with this somehow obviating the need to engage with the underlying substance (where it exists)
And obviously it's a problem that it's so much cheaper to produce writing without underlying substance, but I think when one of the leading Internet security/infrastructure companies is writing about the leading cybersecurity model, it's excessively flippant to say the writing on top is "the real question"
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This is not just any large organization, it's Anthropic. Their entire shtick is that AIs can do Real Work now and it'd be weird if they didn't behave accordingly themselves.
This is also why Claude Code is full of weird bugs and why their support says that it did refunds when it didn't and so on and so forth.
Cloudflare blogs have been excellent for many years, long before transformers arrived.
Oh those Decepticons…
This looks more like it was edited by AI rather than fully written by it. Or they are using a really good humaniser for the second pass.
Should that be surprising? Larger orgs are the ones more naturally associated with mediocrity and are most likely to want to reduce human labor hours.
Disappointing really.