Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by visarga 423 days ago
> "They’re not really about coffee anymore. They’re selling a lifestyle."

I like the emphatic style of GPT-4o lately. I can spot it from a mile.

1 comments

Bingo. OP is obviously LLM-written and is nothing but clickbait. (Did anything but that tweet even happen? Is any of it true?) And HN is falling for it hook, line, and sinker exactly as calculated.

Look at the author's previous blog posts: low effort, not even correctly spelled or written, like https://adelbordbari.github.io/album/2025-1-25-the-horror-an... (as expected from an Iranian ESL) - and then this one is suddenly boom: perfectly spelled, em-dashes all over, and where did all these <br> come from? Who writes a Github Pages Markdown Jekyll post with a bunch of <br>s in it...? An LLM, obviously.

https://adelbordbari.github.io/about/

> I’m studying artificial intelligence at university...I’m busy with my storybook that’s supposed to be published by June 2024 as well.

the <br>s come from Jekyll :) it turns the newline in md to <br>s in html.
so they used chatGPT to translate their blog post from farsi to english. who cares?

translation and transliteration is one of the things chatgpt is great at.

They obviously did not write OP and 'just' machine translate it, because no one writes like that (and if they were being honest, they would have disclosed that upfront). A LLM came up with most of that... and maybe all of that... and how much of that is true? (What do you know about coffee in the Safavid era, or tea in the Qajars? Is 'Ethiopian Yirgacheffe' even a thing? Is there a coffee culture in Iran at all? How would you know? Only 1 or 2 commenters on this page even seem to know anything about Iran to begin with.)

> Seems like the same tired take on third wave coffee, without much specific to Iran.

> This article is a bit whiny about the new, and doesn't talk enough about the qualities of the old.

> Funny how even a repressive theocracy can seem so familiar. I guess that's globalization for you.

> One thing the author fails to take note of here is that Iranians have historically been extremely precious about their bougie little drinks.

> This is a poor take on what's actually a rich cultural shift towards variety seeking.

:thinking_face:

Ok, maybe. They could definitely have prompted "Turn this tweet into a clickbait blog post"

Yes, they should have disclosed how much of it is pure LLM vs. prompt.

I don't know what the rest of your comment is talking about. Googling "Yirgacheffe" shows it's a real thing. The Safavid coffee/Qajar tea claims seem accurate as well. So you at least learned something from the article.

I was in Iran in 2008 and half of my family visits all the time. Copying Western consumptions habits was already a thing when I was there, and it makes sense that it's kept up. Probably as a way for young people to signal their alignment with Western culture and/or signal having disposable income in a time when the economy is in a tough spot.

So the actual content of the article is perfectly plausible. Which makes sense since it's based on a real tweet from an Iranian resident.

> I don't know what the rest of your comment is talking about. Googling "Yirgacheffe" shows it's a real thing. The Safavid coffee/Qajar tea claims seem accurate as well. So you at least learned something from the article.

No, I didn't learn anything from the article (except how susceptible HN has become to even 4o-level LLM outputs, of course). I learned something from your comment, and you learned that from a Google search. Do you see the difference?

> So the actual content of the article is perfectly plausible.

So in other words... it added nothing to even a superficial familiarity with the topic.

> I learned something from your comment, and you learned that from a Google search

But I wouldn't have thought to look into Qajar tea/Safavid coffee if it wasn't for the blog post (by the way, I find 4o to be pretty good at history).

What I can't figure out is why you seem so confident that the OP didn't verify the LLM output and/or would have published anything written by the model, whether it was faulty or not (which again, in this case it wasn't).

You're clearly allergic to basic LLM-style or at least the masquerading of LLM text as human, so I'm curious what you'd consider worse: 1. LLM-generated text reflecting an accurate prompt/input, or 2. genuine human BS wanting to be taken seriously? (e.g. The Areas of My Expertise by John Hodgman if it wasn't in jest)

Personally, I prefer #1 since I can still learn something from it.