scratchyone (u/scratchyone)

scratchyone commented on Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting · Posted by u/Oras

BalinKing · 4 days ago

I think a steelman interpretation of the parent is that entirely LLM-generated projects should be disallowed. There's a lot of submissions on Show HN that seem completely vibe-coded to me (like, including the README), which is a very different situation IMO from someone who simply used Claude to write some—or even most—of the code. When even the human-facing portion of a submission is LLM-generated, it bothers a lot of people (myself included).

scratchyone · 4 days ago

Agreed. Having some level of human input makes a submission at least meaningful. If the entire repo and all text is generated by an LLM, does it really matter if the human is the one posting the link? It's functionally indistinguishable from automated spam.

scratchyone commented on Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting · Posted by u/Oras

vel0city · 4 days ago

Your comments use em dashes. Many would claim those are vastly overrepresented in AI language and thus an account overly using them are blatantly AI.

I don't think your account is AI just by these few comments, but I would like to point out that most rubrics one might use to determine what is obviously AI might end up including the way you talk.

If there was a truly accurate tell, some algorithm you could feed a few sentences in and it could tell you "yep, this is 100% AI", then yeah sure use that. I don't know you could realistically build that machine, especially when it comes to the generation of text.

scratchyone · 4 days ago

For what it's worth, there are modern LLM detectors with extremely low false-positive rates. The tech has advanced quite a bit since the ZeroGPT days. Personally I've gotten very good results from Pangram Labs. Still can't directly ban people though because false positives are always possible.

scratchyone commented on Acme Weather acmeweather.com/blog/intr... · Posted by u/cryptoz

mlrtime · 19 days ago

Weather history sounds like a awesome feature. Sort of like a farmers almanac built into a modern weather app?

scratchyone · 19 days ago

CARROT has this and it’s amazing! You can “time travel” back as far as you want. Absurdly far, even. I can tell you that it was 20 degrees in my town on Jan 1st, 1940.

scratchyone commented on An AI agent published a hit piece on me theshamblog.com/an-ai-age... · Posted by u/scottshambaugh

Kerrick · a month ago

I dunno about autonomous, but it is happening at least a bit from human pilots. I've got a fork of a popular DevOps tool that I doubt the maintainers would want to upstream, so I'm not making a PR. I wouldn't have bothered before, but I believe LLMs can help me manage a deluge of rebases onto upstream.

scratchyone · a month ago

same, i run quite a few forked services on my homelab. it's nice to be able to add weird niche features that only i would want. so far, LLMs have been easily able to manage the merge conflicts and issues that can arise.

scratchyone commented on The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday campedersen.com/singulari... · Posted by u/ecto

CoffeeOnWrite · a month ago

It's based on this paper BTW: https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison

scratchyone · a month ago

Thank you! That's a fascinating paper.

scratchyone commented on The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday campedersen.com/singulari... · Posted by u/ecto

atomic128 · a month ago

    Once men turned their thinking over to machines
    in the hope that this would set them free.

    But that only permitted other men with machines
    to enslave them.

    ...

    Thou shalt not make a machine in the
    likeness of a human mind.

    -- Frank Herbert, Dune

You won't read, except the output of your LLM.

You won't write, except prompts for your LLM. Why write code or prose when the machine can write it for you?

You won't think or analyze or understand. The LLM will do that.

This is the end of your humanity. Ultimately, the end of our species.

Currently the Poison Fountain (an anti-AI weapon, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46926439) feeds 2 gigabytes of high-quality poison (free to generate, expensive to detect) into web crawlers each day. Our goal is a terabyte of poison per day by December 2026.

Join us, or better yet: deploy weapons of your own design.

scratchyone · a month ago

Looking through the poison you linked, how is it generated? It's interesting in that it seems very similar to real data, unlike previous (and very obvious) markov chain garbage text approaches.

scratchyone commented on I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams kirkville.com/i-now-assum... · Posted by u/cdrnsf

olivia-banks · a month ago

I've an avid Apple News user, and while I haven't seen the sorts of ads in the article, I do gets lots of ads for tax filing software. Namely, Intuit TurboTax. They are the only ads I ever get.

What's more, if you even touch them while scrolling, it triggers the "download app" screen, even if I don't explicitly tap. This is new as of a few weeks ago.

scratchyone · a month ago

I'm genuinely haunted by these TurboTax ads, I see that download app popup at least 3 times a day when I use Apple News. Truly cannot believe someone at Apple though that was an acceptable user experience for ads.

scratchyone commented on New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers blog.adafruit.com/2026/02... · Posted by u/ptorrone

ImPostingOnHN · a month ago

> Second half of this article has signs of AI slop, as confirmed by Pangram

The corporation you're citing named "Pangram" cannot confirm anything of the sort. They only make claims, like the ones in your screenshot.

Indeed, this very "citation" of the AI-generated output of Pangram Inc.'s product is a good example of outsourcing work to an LLM without verifying it.

scratchyone · a month ago

Pangram has extremely high accuracy. While there's no way to prove AI use, it's a very good proxy for that metric. It's obvious to my eyes that the article is written with AI, I supplied Pangram as a citation to convince people such as yourself who didn't notice the AI usage when reading the article.

scratchyone commented on New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers blog.adafruit.com/2026/02... · Posted by u/ptorrone

frenchtoast8 · a month ago

Not all AI assisted writing is "slop," especially if, as your screenshot shows, significant portions of the article were written by a human. Drawing attention to any and all hints of AI assisted writing is not the public service announcement you think it is.

Are there specific parts of the article which are inaccurate or misleading? If so please say, it would be very interesting and add to the discussion.

scratchyone · a month ago

I actually think AI-human collaboration is quite beneficial. I have a more fundamental issue that it's just bad writing when you use pure LLM generated text. My general feeling is "why should you expect me to spend my time reading something that you didn't care enough to spend your time writing?"

Also, most of the suggestions provided in the AI generated section are just useless. While I think this law is terrible, the suggestions provided completely contradict what the lawmakers are intending. I'll explain what I mean with some of the suggestions provided.

> Narrow the Scope to Intent, Not the Tool

This is essentially a suggestion to throw out the entire law as written. Sure, but this is meaningless advice to lawmakers.

> Drop Mandatory File Scanning

This is the same suggestion as before but rephrased.

> Exempt Open-Source and Offline Toolchains

This is asking them to create a massive loophole in their own law making it useless. Once again, essentially just asking them to throw out the entire law.

> Add safe harbor for sellers and educators who don’t modify equipment or participate in unlawful manufacture.

Two fundamentally different concepts here jammed into one idea. Do you want to add safe harbor for sellers who don't modify equipment or do you want to throw out the entire law and have it not apply to anybody who doesn't participate in unlawful manufacture? These are very different ideas, it makes no sense to treat them as one cohesive concept.

All of these are signals that not much thought went into this. If a human had used AI for ideas and writing assistance, but participated in the writing process as an active contributor, I think they would have caught things like this. I don't think they would have chosen to make multiple bullet points semantically identical. I think they would have chosen to actually cite specific aspects of the law and propose concrete solutions.

Another example, one of their suggestions is to improve the working groups to add specific members. Genuinely a fairly good idea. Having actually read the law, I would have cited the specific passage, which requires that the working group "SHALL INCLUDE EXPERTS IN ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND DIGITAL SECURITY, FIREARMS REGULATION, PUBLIC SAFETY, CONSUMER PRODUCT SAFETY, AND ANY OTHER RELEVANT DISCIPLINES DETERMINED BY THE DIVISION TO BE NECESSARY TO PERFORM THE FUNCTIONS PRESCRIBED HEREIN." I would question, who do they consider to be experts in additive manufacturing? Why does it seem that the working group will be far more heavily weighed towards policy experts as opposed to 3D printing experts? The article suggests that "standards will default to large vendors" yet there is no evidence here that vendors will be included at all.