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Workers Drilling in Romania Broke into a Cave Sealed for 5.5M Years

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Re: Workers Drilling in Romania Broke into a Cave Sealed for 5.5M Years

#51
post #45
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is indeed well written but I feel it has LLM smell, not that is a bad thing.

Let’s not be racist, please. It doesn’t matter if the intelligence is based on carbon or silicon.

You think machines are a race? Where did you go to school?

Re: Workers Drilling in Romania Broke into a Cave Sealed for 5.5M Years

#52

Does anyone have the original source of this information? This article seems to be AI generated: https://www.pangram.com/history/fdf6dfd6-1a9c-4267-a90c-a3cf...

An updated Turing Test is overdue or has someone suggested one?

Re: Workers Drilling in Romania Broke into a Cave Sealed for 5.5M Years

#53

Speleology aside, just a few days ago in one of HN discussions I was told LLM-produced content is already indistinguishable from human-made. But I'm sure I would have pretty good chances to correctly guess even the exact brand which helped to write this sloppy text. And it's the same with many stories I read.

I know what you mean. Flowery and fluffy. I don't see any clear giveaways, but it feels like it and is a bit annoying to read because the information in there isn't very dense.

the "why it matters" subtitle near the end seems very much like claude to me

Re: Workers Drilling in Romania Broke into a Cave Sealed for 5.5M Years

#54
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s not be racist, please. It doesn’t matter if the intelligence is based on carbon or silicon.

You think machines are a race? Where did you go to school?

Even space is a race.

Re: Workers Drilling in Romania Broke into a Cave Sealed for 5.5M Years

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That has a lot more to do with whether the cave started out containing anything "more complex than insects." 5 million years isn't, like, an evolve-monkeys-from-scratch number of years. It's arguably an evolve-humans-from-chimps number of years. But if your cave doesn't contain any chimps... or even if it does but they all starve to death in Year 2 out of 5,000,000...

We went from wolves to chihuahua in just 40k years. Yeah selective breeding and all that, but it emphasizes that you can have very extreme changes in very brief periods of time. Imagine chihuahuas didn't exist today, and somebody said that within 40k years you could turn a wolf into one. It'd sound absurd!

Isn't it more accurate to say we went from wolves to dogs? Dogs are not a group of species. The domesticated dog is a species.

Also canines seem to hybridize well, suggesting they aren't truly differentiated anyways.

Re: Workers Drilling in Romania Broke into a Cave Sealed for 5.5M Years

#56

Interesting that being sealed for 5 million years did not yield any life forms more complex than insects. Maybe sun and space are importance factors for intelligence.

That has a lot more to do with whether the cave started out containing anything "more complex than insects." 5 million years isn't, like, an evolve-monkeys-from-scratch number of years. It's arguably an evolve-humans-from-chimps number of years. But if your cave doesn't contain any chimps... or even if it does but they all starve to death in Year 2 out of 5,000,000...

Add to this that life in darkness sustained by microbes consuming a rock surface will be rather slow. Because any fast processes would just flash out after a boom/bust cycle or two. And presumably not just slow in terms of no cheetah vs antelope racing, but also much slower than out in the sun in generational turnover.

I wonder how big that cave system is, as in number of barley connected caverns. There might have been quite a few cycles one cavern flashing out and then slowly getting repopulated from the neighboring cavern(s). The "magical" balance we admire in nature isn't a miracle, it's the result of endless series of failure.

Re: Workers Drilling in Romania Broke into a Cave Sealed for 5.5M Years

#58

Speleology aside, just a few days ago in one of HN discussions I was told LLM-produced content is already indistinguishable from human-made. But I'm sure I would have pretty good chances to correctly guess even the exact brand which helped to write this sloppy text. And it's the same with many stories I read.

Stake the claim then. I’ve also read a fair bit of LLM text and this didn’t trip anything for me. Edit: after reading the author bio and the other articles, I agree with this assessment. Though I will admit, this particular article didn’t jump out as AI to me.

It's Claude. I picked up on it too (I am also a heavy Claude user)

The title alone gives it away. Sentences like this also trigger my daily annoyance:

"Researchers found an elegant way to test it, and the timing was almost too convenient."

Me: "Almost too convenient is expressing an opinion. Rewrite this to be straight forward, succinct information"

Claude: "You're right, and I was wrong. That's the second time you've had to correct me this session. Let me update my memory to adjust for this"

Eye twitch

Re: Workers Drilling in Romania Broke into a Cave Sealed for 5.5M Years

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We went from wolves to chihuahua in just 40k years. Yeah selective breeding and all that, but it emphasizes that you can have very extreme changes in very brief periods of time. Imagine chihuahuas didn't exist today, and somebody said that within 40k years you could turn a wolf into one. It'd sound absurd!

Isn't it more accurate to say we went from wolves to dogs? Dogs are not a group of species. The domesticated dog is a species. Also canines seem to hybridize well, suggesting they aren't truly differentiated anyways.

Biology is quite arbitrary. For instance the dingo is basically just a wild dog, looks like a dog, can breed and create fertile offspring with dogs, yet is considered its own species.

So I prefer things that are more visceral in nature. There are lots of dogs that look a lot like wolves, but going from a wolf to a chihuahua is just kind of mind boggling in terms of the degree of change over such a small window of time. There's one extremely disappointed great great great ... grandfather wolf somewhere. 'Kids these days.'

Re: Workers Drilling in Romania Broke into a Cave Sealed for 5.5M Years

#60

Speleology aside, just a few days ago in one of HN discussions I was told LLM-produced content is already indistinguishable from human-made. But I'm sure I would have pretty good chances to correctly guess even the exact brand which helped to write this sloppy text. And it's the same with many stories I read.

"summary, a, b, c, why it matters" + fillers

like the summarization tools based on those models except it's the opposite, it was fluffed up into a long article

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