[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.

[booleandilemma]

Why are you being mean? Honest question. Why? What's the point?

Furthermore, and more importantly, why are you defending slop?

Look up the definition of kindness in a dictionary sometime.

[threethirtytwo]

Because the objective truth is that what the LLM or author outputted was CLEARLY only using furniture as a metaphor. The metaphor wasn't good but HNers are taking it completely out of context. There's nothing mean here. Just objective facts.

[mapontosevenths]

This is exactly what I was trying to say, but kindly. The metaphor wasn't great, and I dodnt want to he unkind to the author. Enough people were doing that.

I found the fact that people couldn't identify it as a metaphor was much more alarming.

[krisoft]

> Why are you being mean?

They are not. They are blunt.

> why are you defending slop?

Because they don’t believe it is slop. They believe you are unable to comprehend a not too advanced literary device and based on that accusing that the text is slop.

On the topic of kindness: You might be right and it is AI generated slop. You might be wrong. If you are wrong what you are doing is deeply and utterly unkind. Not calling out the other commenter, but calling the writing slop.

It has happened with me before. I wrote a comment on reddit with my own hands and own mind and commenters accused me of being a bot. There is nothing more rage inducing. How can one respond to that? Have you thought that maybe that is what you just did? Are you 100% sure that it is slop?

[simonw]

It's confirmed as AI-assisted writing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48247127#48248070

[spacedcowboy]

The thing is that whether it's AI-assisted or not doesn't really matter. It's still clearly a metaphor.

Maybe I was being mean - I don't know if the person I replied to has English as their first language, and if not, then perhaps I'm railing against the wrong comment. If so, I guess I should apologise.

If English is their first language, though, well I would expect my 13-year-old son to be able to tell me that was a metaphor instantly, and I tend to expect better-than-teenager-level reading comprehension from people in general. It's kind of disconcerting just how many people on HN seemed to be flummoxed by the prose.