Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by JumpCrisscross 169 days ago
> I do think it’s believable

My believability is stretched by them disclosing they "put in my two weeks yesterday." That's highly identifiable and incongruent with "posting...from a library Wi-Fi on a burner laptop."

3 comments

There are two datapoints in the text. One is the 2 weeks notice, the other is that they knew of this since 8 months ago. If this were me, I would give random made up information of this kind to throw off anyone trying to investigate this. Also, this is not that far from what we already know from whistleblowers of similar gig economy companies so my believability is not stretched at all.
Other comments pointed out the semi-obvious use of AI due to em dashes.

I'm honestly at a point where every suspicious aspect of that post could as well be counted as a countermeasure to getting caught. Said engineer could still be working at the company or could've left years ago. In my opinion the mentioned financial adjustments could've been a discussion topic for higher ups far far earlier than 2025.

Considering how ruthless Uber has acted thorough the years[0] I am almost 100% sure other startups with similar opportunities have at the very least committed crimes on a similar scale to the linked Reddit confession.

Bonus option: The Reddit account starts astroturfing in a few weeks and this was just a run-of-the-mill bot automation to gain karma which happened to overlap with HN interests.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_Uber

Counterpoint: I've been using em dashes and bulleted lists in my writing (especially in work emails) since around 2015. There are dozens of us! Or maybe I'm just an LLM in a meat suit — who knows at this point.
Em dashes are also historically a useful writing tool in English going back 100+ years, and plenty of real people use them.
I love em dashes — they're the greatest — it makes me very sad that LLMs have tarnished their reputation.

Back in the days before LLMs, I went out of my way to set up the Compose key on Linux, just so I could do cool things like —, ®, ™, and ¹ quickly!

Where did AIs learn those em dashes from?
Yeah ... If true, that's almost enough to identify them. Probably 5 people max at each food delivery company that could be, and their supposed role would be enough to single them out if the company can correctly guess it's talking about them
Doesn’t mean it’s real fact. Deceit is almost required if you’re posting something like this.