[rogual]

How to get your AI company's blog to No. 1 on Hacker News:

1. Pick an author nerds like.

2. Tell Claude "Write an article about Terry Pratchett, in his style."

3. Don't even fix the faux-witty phrases that, upon closer inspection, make zero sense, like "Sir Terry Pratchett, who knew more about furniture than most", or "Most physics departments would settle for that." or "The Author, refusing to let the Narrator off the hook".

4. Bask in the praise for your wonderful writing.

[gavmor]

> He was the perfect protagonist for a teenage boy: a coward, an underachiever, technically a wizard but only on a technicality, and frequently the most powerful spell in the universe was lodged in his head against his will. This will be familiar to anyone who has been sixteen.

s/frequently/initially

Also, how is a cowardly underachiever "the perfect protagonist for a teenage boy"?

"technically a wizard but only on a technicality" is obviously redundant

And what part of any of this is supposed to be familiar?

It's just a strange essay.

[bluefirebrand]

> Also, how is a cowardly underachiever "the perfect protagonist for a teenage boy"?

It seems to have resonated a lot with male millennials at least. Many of my friends growing up loved Terry Pratchett. I loved those guys but calling them "cowardly underachievers" is probably fairly accurate, if a little mean.

All of the ones I kept in touch with have settled for a lot less than they probably could have done if they had been a bit braver. Few of them were even willing to move even an hour drive away from our hometown for better opportunities

[majormajor]

They loved Terry Pratchett or they loved Rincewind? The amount of ways to do the former without the latter are high, and you seem to be jumping from a point about the latter to one about the former...

[bluefirebrand]

They loved his writing at least, I don't really know if they knew much about the man himself beyond that.

I think it's fair to assume that the loved his protagonist. They certainly loved how Pratchett played with tropes and often inverted them unexpectedly.

It's probably safe to assume that they loved Rincewind, since he represents a pretty big inversion of typical protagonist tropes.

[pajtai]

"Sir Terry Pratchett, who knew more about furniture than most," makes perfect sense if you look at the previous paragraph, which contains:

"... all memories are a kind of furniture in the head ..."

[simonw]

How does that sentence support the idea that he knew "more about furniture than most"?

The bit you quote isn't even something he said! In the original post[1] it was assigned to "certain very old and very tired philosophers", but that's now been edited to just being credited as "a theory, not necessarily a really good theory".

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20260523124615/https://www.mahl....

[majormajor]

The furniture line is clearly tied to the direct quote that follows it ("Rincewind tried to force the memory out of his mind, but it was rather enjoying itself there, terrorizing the other occupants and kicking over the furniture.") as well as the introduction sentence that preceeds it. As a sentence it works since it's part of a metaphor that is even tied to a line of Pratchett's own.

However, I don't think the rest of the post supports the Pratchett-as-expert-on-memories bit of that little aside, so it could be critiqued for not being followed up on or further supported. It's not a "make an argument for Pratchett as an expert on memory" post, it's a "tell a story of his writing connecting with me" post, in which case, meh.

But apparently the post was edited again, and "The Author, refusing to let the Narrator off the hook" is gone (along with some other things), which is a bummer as it seems like one of the most Pratchett-like of the attempts. In context I don't think it works, but generally it fits well with Pratchett's writing style and his relationship with his protagonists.

[eterm]

I spent ages trying to work out what "who knew more about furniture than most" meant, thinking it would be expanded upon or referenced later. It hadn't occurred to me that it's just slop.

[CoastalCoder]

> I spent ages trying to work out what "who knew more about furniture than most" meant, thinking it would be expanded upon or referenced later.

Assuming it was an intentional, it could be a reference to one particularly violent piece of furniture. (I forget what kind exactly, it's been a while.)

[pdpi]

Given it comes immediately after the bit about philosophers comparing memories to furniture, I simply assumed that was meant to be read as “Pratchett, who knew more about the goings on inside people’s heads than most”.

[johnh-hn]

I'm not sure I'd call it furniture, but are you maybe referring to the luggage?

[nine_k]

It's furniture when standing, and luggage when walking.

[nephihaha]

Mony Python - "One: people aren’t wearing enough hats."

Two: Terry Pratchett "Hold my beer."

Clearly as an appreciator of hats, and arguably furniture, Sir Terry was echoing Monty Python.

[eterm]

I'm sorry, I don't understand what you're trying to say by this either.

Monty Python was deliberately absurdist humour and nonsensical. Prachett however was much more grounded and observational, with a satirical rather than fully absurdist bent, although of course sometimes he would find the absurd in the everyday.

Coming in and kicking over the furniture, to paraphrase, is a wonderful image of an idea causing chaos in the mind, it isn't Monthy Pythonesque random absurdism.

[gregman1]

Works rather well indeed

[sph]

Flagged, 227 upvotes. The internet is truly dead

[Quarrelsome]

is this just slander or are you basing this on something?

I feel like the only way to make an AI slop universe worse is to accuse people of using AI when they're not. So I worry we might be doing that is all...

[bradrn]

I found this comment pretty convincing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48247413

[Quarrelsome]

maybe but its not like people don't also do these things (erroneous sentences, weird fluff). I mean editors exist specifically to slap that shit out of writers.

That said, it's mildly compelling. I just fear that our future is gonna be full of this and the idea of the false positive is so brutal that I'd rather give the benefit of the doubt.

[antihipocrat]

Perhaps we end up demanding no doubt. Human only community meet ups to discuss and share ideas, music and art. No recording allowed.

The Internet becomes primarily a passive stream of information vetted by government and Mega Corps, just like the TVs of old. Except for the nifty buy with one click button of course

[lanyard-textile]

Digital artists are expected now to have at least some recorded timelines of their creations.

It's easy to do with digital tools today, like Procreate, so it is increasingly suspicious not to have any.

[doright]

We will rue the day that image generation evolves beyond diffusion and AI is able to use digital brushes and blending directly on a canvas.

[ThrowawayR2]

There have been mail spam, link farming, non-AI slop content sites, and other forms of scamming looking to take advantage of people on the Internet for something like a quarter century by now. Even HN's /new submissions queue is filled with such rubbish. There is zero reason to give any benefit of the doubt on the Internet for anything and there hasn't been for years, absolutely zero.

[Quarrelsome]

> There is zero reason to give any benefit of the doubt on the Internet for anything and there hasn't been for years, absolutely zero.

I feel like that's just an argument for cruelty. The issue is that generative content makes it hard to tell and people confidently call borderline issues now, more than they used to.

[mpalmer]

    The book has to be small enough to disappear when a teacher looks up. Pocket editions, as their name suggests, were engineered for this. Pratchett’s were small, fat, slightly battered, and printed on a kind of paper that already looked guilty.

Pratchett's Pocket editions were slightly battered? Pre-sale, even?

Not only does the paper "look guilty", but it's doing so "already"? As if guilty paper is normal, but not on THIS time scale.

It's nonsensical; even bad writers don't end up with stuff like this.

[petesergeant]

Presumably the ones from the library, which the author mentions was his source? Every Pratchett book I read as a kid matched this description, including being battered.

[mpalmer]

Tell me more about this already-guilty-looking paper, and how this kid was "sliding" an entire paperback book into a math textbook with "a centimetre to spare".

[petesergeant]

I think I could slide this into a maths text book?

https://www.facebook.com/groups/2174439579599449/posts/23646...

[the_af]

You wouldn't be able to open it and keep it open flat against the textbook though, not without the teacher noticing. It simply doesn't work, now that the author has acknowledged they used AI to spruce up their blog post, we can agree this part (hiding pocketbooks in open textbooks) was 100% slop.

[watwut]

I dont know what kind of pockets you have, but most Pratchetts book did not fit into mine. And yes there were whole series of books that fit. But, pratchetts ones did not.

[the_af]

I found this odd too. And the notion you could hide a Pratchett pocket book inside an open textbook. Anyone who has read Pratchett, or knows pocketbooks, knows this wouldn't work. They are voluminous (regardless of their name) and won't stay open on their own.

In fact, it seems a uniquely AI mistake to make to believe pocketbooks go in pockets. Anyone knows they don't fit, unless you have really big pockets and don't mind the weight and bulge.

[Quarrelsome]

they battered if you put it in your pocket. The idea of paper looking guilty chimes with the idea that you're reading it in the back of the classroom when you're not supposed to be.

I mean seriously? We're so cooked if this is the "red flag".

[simonw]

I have never seen a printed Discworld book that would fit in a pocket. Have you?

EDIT: I stand corrected, turns out they DID have pocket sized editions in France: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48247127#48248586

[gorgmah]

In france, there was an edition of the discworld series literally called "pocket", and yes it sometimes fit in pockets (which had to be on the bigger end of pockets though), especially if you bended the book a little. Looked like this: https://www.babelio.com/livres/Pratchett-Les-annales-du-Disq...

The first books of the discworld were thin too.

[simonw]

Thanks, I didn't know that! Definitely smaller than the paperbacks we had in the UK, and pocket-sized.

[scubbo]

Not to say that the article doesn't have plenty of other flaws, but - yes, my original paperbacks certainly did.

[onraglanroad]

Yes. The original small ones would fit in my jacket pockets or the back pocket of my jeans.

[mpalmer]

There's like nine red flags. You are holding the English language to an incredibly low standard.

[Quarrelsome]

we can talk about the others if you like, but we were discussing this one and I am a little disappointed about us just moving elsewhere. Are you yielding, or do you still think guilty paper is somehow sus?

> You are holding the English language to an incredibly low standard.

I'm holding humans to a low standard. That's why editors exist.

[deadbabe]

What does it matter? The AI slop universe is only going to grow worse no matter what we do. Accusing stuff you don’t like as being AI is just a thing you do, not an actual serious observation.

[Quarrelsome]

> What does it matter?

cause false positives are brutal to the victim.

[mapontosevenths]

This was not AI, or at least was only proofread/edited by AI.

More importantly, both of those sentences make complete sense in context, and neither is phrased in a way that AI would. They are phrased in the way that Terry Pratchet would have. Have you never read him?

This new trend of pointing out that everything you dont understand is AI has become a flashing warning sign about our declining literacy rates.

Literacy is in serious trouble, and worse it has effected the way humans THINK. We are all poorer for it.

Read more books people!

[simonw]

"They are phrased in the way that Terry Pratchet would have."

Right. That's one of the suspicious things here. They're phrased in the way that an LLM might write if you told it to imitate Pratchett.

Edit: that's effectively what happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48247127#48248070

> I wanted the sentences to feel a bit more Terry Pratchetty and thought a lot of Claude's suggestions were really better than what I had made.

[mpalmer]

Do not bring literacy into this; because the sufficiently careful reading of the post surfaces multiple ridiculous (worse, witless) passages no person would write. How closely did you read it?

    There is a theory, popular among certain very old and very tired philosophers, that all memories take up a kind of furniture in the head. The good ones are armchairs. The painful ones are filing cabinets, usually full. And then there are the memories that are neither: the ones that arrive uninvited, settle in, and start terrorising the other occupants by kicking over the chairs.

Pratchett would not have mixed the metaphors of memories being furniture and also people who kick over furniture. An LLM would/did absolutely make this mistake, given that Pratchett quote as a prompt.

    The City Watch came later, the way reading the Watch books always comes a little later than reading the Rincewind ones, on the same shelf but a little further up.

Ah yes, that familiar old way the Watch books always occupy a shelf that is simultaneously the same and also higher up. And never mind that the Watch books are newer...

[Ekaros]

Feels weird. There is not that much books between The Colour of Magic and Guards! Guards!. So as engineer I would fully expect them to be on same shelf. Or the later book being on lower one due to the usual western sorting of left to right top to bottom... Unless you go for alphabetical sort I suppose...

[simonw]

Yeah, the more attention you pay to this piece the more obvious the slop becomes. I'm quite upset it caught me out at first.

[booleandilemma]

I've never read any of Pratchett's books. Why does he know more about furniture than most people?

[celsius1414]

The first paragraph, and the one directly above the one about knowing more about furniture:

> There is a theory, popular among certain very old and very tired philosophers, that all memories take up a kind of furniture in the head. The good ones are armchairs. The painful ones are filing cabinets, usually full. And then there are the memories that are neither: the ones that arrive uninvited, settle in, and start terrorising the other occupants by kicking over the chairs.

[dfxm12]

Interesting. Which philosophers have this theory?

[booleandilemma]

Yeah I read that. It doesn't mean he knows more about furniture than most. I agree with rogual, it looks nonsensical.

[Scarblac]

I interpreted as saying he knows a lot about different kinds of ideas / memories / things in the head.

[spacedcowboy]

Look up the definition of metaphor in a dictionary. Hint: nothing here is referring to furniture.

[Garlef]

It seems reading comprehension is also declining:

Furniture is established as an image for memories just a few lines earlier. And the quote directly afterwards is framed precisely in this image.

[simonw]

It's confirmed that Claude was involved: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48247127#48248070

[Garlef]

True. And the article is not great anyways.

But the claim was that it "makes zero sense".

[simonw]

Convince me that "Sir Terry Pratchett, who knew more about furniture than most" makes sense.

The fact that he used the word "furniture" in a quoted sentence from one of his books does not convince me.

[Garlef]

I don't really want to defend the article.

My initial reading was that the author intended to imply that philisophizing about memories was a repeated thing in Pratchetts writings. Which - given my limited exposure - seemed plausible to me.

Good article? Definitely not. But I've also read similar try-hard / pseudo literary blog posts pre AI.

[simonw]

That's the exact problem: you wasted mental energy thinking about whether the author was implying that Pratchett was known for philosophizing on the role or memories and their similarity to furniture, when actually it was Claude spitting out a sentence that looked like the kind of thing Pratchett might have written.

Wasting time and mental energy is why this kind of thing upsets me so much.

[Cpoll]

It's more that:

1. The previous paragraph establishes a metaphor between furniture and memories. So you can take that sentence to also be metaphor, not literally about furniture.

2. A sentient animated luggage is a main character in the first two Discworld novels.

[simonw]

But neither of those things come close to justifying the claim that Pratchett knew "more about furniture than most".

[ajmurmann]

Is this (ironically) the new ad hominem?

[bee_rider]

I guess it would be something like an “ad inhominem,” but that something was AI generated is a legitimate gripe so I hope we don’t start using that phrase.

[boston_clone]

definitively, no. it’s not against the person for their characteristics, but the composition of the content they’re sharing.

i think it’s more like accurately pointing out a logical fallacy, i.e., an assertion that thought was not properly applied which results in nonsense.

[ajmurmann]

The reason why ad hominems are a fallacy is because it fails to engage with the actual argument being made. The same seems likely to happen when arguments are dismissed because of their AI origin. While that dismissal is somewhat reasonable now, at least as a heuristic, I expect it to become increasingly less valid.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

An ad-LLM-em?

[upmostly]

Finished reading the article, having really enjoyed it (I grew up with Terry's books), came back to the HN comments and the top comment is someone ranting "dIS iS aye-EyE sLoP"

What a terrible, terrible timeline we live in now. Seriously. I genuinely hate it.

[ThrowawayR2]

The author acknowledges that LLM assistance and turns of phrase were used in the creation of the article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48248070

[upmostly]

That's fine. That's not what I dislike.

What I dislike is "AI SLOP" seems to be the default response to anything remotely creative anymore.

[rogual]

I must concede that when you take what I said and spell it wrong, it does indeed look very silly.

It's a good point, and one I hadn't considered.

[theusus]

Yep, pangram says it is 100% AI generated.

[tasuki]

So what? Surely they're just guessing and actually have no idea.