[scifi]

The writing is hard to engage with—possibly trying to be funny, but it comes off as overly antagonistic. Phrases like “—presumably in a conference room with aggressively modern furniture—” feel distracting and undermine the point.

[jemmyw]

I agree. I enjoy off the wall and humorous writing usually. This article is pretty bad. Somehow it made me want to like the subject they were trying to eviscerate. I wouldn't want to be too harsh though; at least they did write something! Perhaps I'll read another article by this same person in the future and find they've improved their tone.

[wakawaka28]

It IS overly antagonistic. Maybe this stuff is overpriced but I think there is a need in the market. Lots of medication is protected by patents and overpriced. Doctors also gatekeep a lot of basic medications like Viagra. Third world countries are not nearly as uptight about medication, and probably sell Viagra and such as OTC medications. Perhaps the prescription system in the US can detect drug interactions, but for something like that there is probably little benefit to having a doctor in the loop. As for the quality of the medication, that could be debated. But it is quite possibly made at the same factories as the prescription stuff.

[mingus88]

I had the opposite take, actually. I had to think about it for a sec and suddenly, “oh, right. Novo nordisk == Danish == Scandinavian design” cute.

This style of writing is a welcome change from all the AI slop or self promoting blogs out there.

It’s a personal touch without making it all about the author. Long form articles with some humor used to be all I wanted to read on the web.

[striking]

I think it is potentially still AI prose, perhaps just well-edited or working from a good prompt. Aside from using quite a few em dashes and being relentless in shoving cleverness in, there's a link to Wikipedia with a `?utm_source=chatgpt.com` in there.

To be clear, whether or not it is AI prose is beside the point in my opinion. I think this piece is informative and funny but could be edited down significantly, regardless of how it was produced.

[gwern]

> This style of writing is a welcome change from all the AI slop or self promoting blogs out there.

Dude. This is AI slop. And quite obviously so! You think all those EM DASHes are there naturally? Or the constant use of reversal? No one writes like that. (Even the people who love em-dashes and make a point of using the Unicode point will change it up more than that, rather than using it like a metronome.) Even if there wasn't that adrafinil referral URL giving it away (which incidentally tells you that OP wasn't doing all his own research but relying on the search plugin to compile a report he could spin), at this point you should recognize the 4o style.

This just doesn't sound like the normal ChatGPT because the author prompted ChatGPT to make it as invective and rhetoric and axgrinding as possible (or possibly, just went through and heavily edited a more neutral ChatGPT draft but I doubt that is responsible for the bizarre analogies or rhetoric like the hot dog thing).

So, a good example of the "don't worry about seeing AI slop on HN; worry about when you stop seeing AI slop on HN" evolution. Stripping referrers or avoiding EM DASHes is, after all, easy to do...

Also, top keks:

>> It is worth noting that the culture that produced Hims—Silicon Valley's peculiar blend of messianic self-regard and algorithmic thinking—has convinced itself that traditional gatekeepers are inherently suspect, that disruption is inherently virtuous, and that the phrase "move fast and break things" applies as beneficently to human bodies as it does to software systems.

[mdasen]

The link on "adrafinil" has a utm_source=chatgpt.com

[cole-k]

The constant use of metaphor and simile drove me crazy. I had suspected this might be AI due to the frequency as well as absurdity of some of the comparisons (Talmudic scholars? Renaissance cardinals??) but humans also write dumb things like this that make them feel smart more than they serve rhetorical purpose. Or so I think.

I mean just look at this. I didn't even need to look through more than a few paragraphs to find:

> But the subscription traps are where the real extraction occurs—and here we encounter the kind of business model innovation that would make a mobster tip his hat in professional admiration. Customers complain of being locked into year-long commitments they can't escape, like hotel California but with erectile dysfunction pills. Better Business Bureau complaints reveal the pattern with the reliability of a Swiss timepiece: ... Picture ordering a 3-month hair loss kit only to find Hims has shipped and charged for a fourth without consent, like a pharmaceutical version of that friend who keeps ordering shots when you've already said you're driving.

BTW, where's the referral URL you speak of? I didn't realize there was a smoking gun.