Brazilian frog might be the first pollinating amphibian known to science • Hacker News Board

Re: Brazilian frog might be the first pollinating amphibian known to science

#41

Post by berlinmarzahn » Wed, May 03, 2023, 9:32 PM UTC

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #39

InitialLastName wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the moment it's a few brand new accounts posting essentially the same content-less statement that covers the big points in the headline {novelty, pollination, frog}. Example: That's amazing! It's incredible that we are still discovering new species, and that some of them can even have special abilities like pollinating. I'm looking forward to reading more about this frog.

Kind of concerning that "hey that's pretty neat" comments are immediately suspected (probably accurately) of being bots. A comment like that example isn't useful to the other comment readers, but it's probably pretty motivating to the author, and it makes forums more positive places. Removing the organic versions of those will make forums a more negative place, and that's a shame.

[dead]

Re: Brazilian frog might be the first pollinating amphibian known to science

#42

Post by gweinberg » Wed, May 03, 2023, 9:44 PM UTC

dvt wrote: post #7

Awesome discovery, and I absolutely love this alliteration: > planet’s pantheon of pollinators

Yeah, except it really isn't a pantheon. "Pandemonium" might work better.

Re: Brazilian frog might be the first pollinating amphibian known to science

#43

Post by hackernj » Wed, May 03, 2023, 9:45 PM UTC

That’s the bee’s knees!

Re: Brazilian frog might be the first pollinating amphibian known to science

#44

Post by cubefox » Wed, May 03, 2023, 9:59 PM UTC

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #30

LegitShady wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

unfortunately this is the future of the entire internet - and not just the comments the submissions as well. the search for authenticity and actual human material will become the most valuable thing. This isn't that different from what we have now as people have abandoned corporate messaging for communities and podcasts/youtube/etc to try to find authentic human voices. The difference will be how much harder it will…

If it ever become impossible to spot a human from a bit, then bots become valuable contributors to online discussion with interesting insights so I don't see the problem.

> We can thus imagine a technologically highly advanced society, containing many sorts of complex structures, some of which are much smarter and more intricate than anything that exists today, in which there would nevertheless be a complete absence of any type of being whose welfare has moral significance. In a sense, this would be an uninhabited society. All the kinds of being that we care even remotely about would have vanished.

https://nickbostrom.com/fut/evolution

Re: Brazilian frog might be the first pollinating amphibian known to science

#45

Post by NoZebra120vClip » Wed, May 03, 2023, 10:07 PM UTC

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #30

LegitShady wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

unfortunately this is the future of the entire internet - and not just the comments the submissions as well. the search for authenticity and actual human material will become the most valuable thing. This isn't that different from what we have now as people have abandoned corporate messaging for communities and podcasts/youtube/etc to try to find authentic human voices. The difference will be how much harder it will…

If it ever become impossible to spot a human from a bit, then bots become valuable contributors to online discussion with interesting insights so I don't see the problem.

https://xkcd.com/810/

Re: Brazilian frog might be the first pollinating amphibian known to science

#46

Post by cubefox » Wed, May 03, 2023, 10:08 PM UTC

LegitShady wrote: post #14

jdthedisciple wrote: post #8

What's up all these GPT bot comments here on HN lately? Seems like a fairly new phenomenon.

unfortunately this is the future of the entire internet - and not just the comments the submissions as well. the search for authenticity and actual human material will become the most valuable thing. This isn't that different from what we have now as people have abandoned corporate messaging for communities and podcasts/youtube/etc to try to find authentic human voices. The difference will be how much harder it will…

I actually think some major commercial use cases of the OpenAI API are a) fake reviews on Amazon etc and b) SEO spam.

Re: Brazilian frog might be the first pollinating amphibian known to science

#47

Post by throwawayadvsec » Wed, May 03, 2023, 10:19 PM UTC

InitialLastName wrote: post #25

skullone wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any examples before they were deleted? I wonder if I'd even recognize a fancy bot comment

At the moment it's a few brand new accounts posting essentially the same content-less statement that covers the big points in the headline {novelty, pollination, frog}. Example: That's amazing! It's incredible that we are still discovering new species, and that some of them can even have special abilities like pollinating. I'm looking forward to reading more about this frog.

I don't see the point of making bots on HN to post about some damn frogs

those are probably just boring people

Re: Brazilian frog might be the first pollinating amphibian known to science

#48

Post by detaro » Wed, May 03, 2023, 10:22 PM UTC

throwawayadvsec wrote: post #47

InitialLastName wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the moment it's a few brand new accounts posting essentially the same content-less statement that covers the big points in the headline {novelty, pollination, frog}. Example: That's amazing! It's incredible that we are still discovering new species, and that some of them can even have special abilities like pollinating. I'm looking forward to reading more about this frog.

I don't see the point of making bots on HN to post about some damn frogs those are probably just boring people

the point of the bots isn't posting about frogs, they are posting about frogs to (badly) look like users that have normal activity when they do start spamming or mass-upvoting.

Re: Brazilian frog might be the first pollinating amphibian known to science

#49

Post by TeMPOraL » Wed, May 03, 2023, 10:42 PM UTC

hombre_fatal wrote: post #10

jdthedisciple wrote: post #8

What's up all these GPT bot comments here on HN lately? Seems like a fairly new phenomenon.

Bots seem to be seasonal creatures. Some months you won't see any. And then some months you'll see four per submission. I'd just downvote and reconvene when it seems to be a substantial issue. As for GPT, the bots you usually see on HN are just as easily written by humans. GPT makes sense for scale, but it's not very interesting when bots are posting at such low volume, so it doesn't necessarily have to be the case n…

Yeah, bots - sure. GPT? No way. My rapid-classification pattern matcher, honed on two decades of running blogs and web bulletin boards, recognizes the shape, cadence and sound of these comments as indicative of the usual kind of spam comment, common in the last 15+ years.

I.e. they came out of some boring, old-school script.

(Though I do wonder, how much of the spam comments on random, long-forgotten wordpress blogs, ended up in the GPT-{3,4} training data.)

Re: Brazilian frog might be the first pollinating amphibian known to science

#50

Post by TeMPOraL » Wed, May 03, 2023, 10:48 PM UTC

cubefox wrote: post #46

LegitShady wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

unfortunately this is the future of the entire internet - and not just the comments the submissions as well. the search for authenticity and actual human material will become the most valuable thing. This isn't that different from what we have now as people have abandoned corporate messaging for communities and podcasts/youtube/etc to try to find authentic human voices. The difference will be how much harder it will…

I actually think some major commercial use cases of the OpenAI API are a) fake reviews on Amazon etc and b) SEO spam.

Without naming names - the other day, I sat on a presentation related to a commercial offering of some SOTA LLM APIs; there was a slide listing a dozen use cases claimed to have been piloted or already tested. I distinctly remember being a bit disgusted by how all, excepting one or two, were highly morally questionable, as they boiled down to improving or scaling all the usual ugly kinds of marketing and marketing-related surveillance schemes.

The last time I felt this kind of disappointment was when those Bluetooth Low Energy beacons ("iBeacon") became a hot topic - a lot of startups popped up, and quite quickly, they've mostly settled on the same primary use case: retail. That is, tracking and spamming unsuspecting users as they move about shopping malls.