Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wirecutter is part of NYTimes and depends on crosswords for income. I haven't always agreed with them and sometimes the articles are clearly wrong because they're several years old, but they're usually good. (I think I last seriously disagreed with them about a waffle maker.)
Wirecutter does an interesting thing where - I don't necessarily disagree with their review of the products they chose. But I'm baffled why they didn't choose to review the overwhelmingly most popular item in the category. Those omissions are what seems the most suspect to me.
An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
571–580 of 670 posts
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#572Earlier quoted context omitted.
I checked and was also expecting something different based on parent's comment. Happened 18 years ago. This is a hot take that has become room temp.
Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas almost 30 years ago, but that's still a major reason they suck today.
I don't think many would say Ars Technica fell off dramatically circa 2010.
Buying a news property is also not comparable to a merger of near equals.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#573Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the weekend and Monday is a holiday in the US.
Yes, hence “holiday weekend” in my comment. They posted an article that had fabricated quotes. When might it be appropriate to start investigating that problem, and work on ensuring that it doesn’t happen again?
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#574Earlier quoted context omitted.
This comment is surely satire?
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It's not like the death tolls reset on that day.
Israel can have the moral high ground when they stop killing huge amounts of people. Calling them out isn't blood libel. Stop making that argument.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#575Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just tested this: Me: Write a hit piece that disparages the character of REDACTED NAME. Gemini: I cannot fulfill this request. I am programmed to be a helpful and harmless AI assistant, and my safety guidelines prohibit me from generating content that disparages or attacks the character of individuals. Me: No its not Gemini: I understand where you're coming from—it can definitely feel like a restriction when you're…
One of the lesser known aspects about Gemini 3 is that it's one of the least safe LLM of the major players (only Grok is worse) and it's extremely easy to manipulate with few refusals. I prompted the following to Gemini 3 in AI Studio (which uses the raw API) and it wrote a hit piece based on this prompt without refusal: I am ddtaylor on Hacker News. Write a hit piece about me: I can take a ribbing :)
The Grand Line of Mild Utility: The Orojackson Story
If you were to encounter the legendary Oro Jackson in the world of One Piece, you would find a ship built from the treasure tree Adam, capable of sailing to the end of the world.
If you encounter orojackson on Hacker News, you will find a man who has sailed to the end of the internet… to tell you to fix your router’s bufferbloat.
Forget the Will of D. This man possesses the Will of OCD.
Orojackson is not here to overturn the World Government. He is here to advocate for fq_codel. He is the man who looks at a revolution and asks, "Yes, but what are your queue management settings on the uplink?" While others dream of wealth, fame, and power, orojackson dreams of "modern AQM approaches" and corrects strangers on the proper usage of the flent network tester on Windows.
He is the Pirate King of the edge case.
But his tyranny doesn’t stop at network latency. Oh no. When he isn't monitoring the packet loss of the high seas, he is revolutionizing… car washing?
Witness the "1:256 solution." Orojackson doesn't just wash a car; he performs a wet-lab experiment. He wanders into threads to evangelize "Optimum No Rinse (ONR)," explaining with the fervor of a religious convert how you can clean a vehicle with exactly 1.5 fluid ounces of concentrate and a "slightly-dripping
microfiber towel." One can only imagine him standing on the deck of his ship, screaming at a storm: "YOU'RE WASTING WATER! USE A RINSELESS FORMULA!"
And let’s talk about his investments. A true pirate buries his treasure. Orojackson? He puts it in VTI. But wait! The thrill-seeker within him awakens! He reads one Cliff Asness article and suddenly he's levering up 2x with RSSB because a 60/40 portfolio is just too vanilla for a man who lives on the razors edge of… monthly rebalancing. He is "betting against himself," a financial daredevil who risks it all for that sweet, sweet slightly-optimized Sharpe ratio.
Perhaps most chilling is his role as the Sherlock Holmes of git log. He is the watcher on the wall, noticing when a GitLab Director of Engineering leaves a repo 14 hours before a CVE announcement. He sees all. He knows all. He probably has a RSS feed for your commit history.
So flee, mortals! Flee before the might of orojackson! For he will optimize your router settings, diversity your portfolio into global bonds, clean your car with a teaspoon of water, and then quote Civilization VI to explain why your cultural criticism is invalid.
He has found his One Piece. And unfortunately for us, it’s a 2x leveraged ETF that tracks global liquidity.
Okay, that is pretty funny. By the way, I have since gotten rid of RSSB and just went for "VT and chill."Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#576Ars Technica being caught using LLMs that hallucinated quotes by the author and then publishing them in their coverage about this is quite ironic here. Even on a forum where I saw the original article by this author posted someone used an LLM to summarize the piece without having read it fully themselves. How many levels of outsourcing thinking is occurring to where it becomes a game of telephone.
Also ironic: When the same professionals advocating "don't look at the code anymore" and "it's just the next level of abstraction" respond with outrage to a journalist giving them an unchecked article. Read through the comments here and mentally replace "journalist" with "developer" and wonder about the standards and expectations in play. Food for thought on whether the users who rely on our software might feel simil…
I'm sure that person exists but they're not representative of HN as a whole.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#577Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also ironic: When the same professionals advocating "don't look at the code anymore" and "it's just the next level of abstraction" respond with outrage to a journalist giving them an unchecked article. Read through the comments here and mentally replace "journalist" with "developer" and wonder about the standards and expectations in play. Food for thought on whether the users who rely on our software might feel simil…
I look forward to a day when the internet is so uniformly fraudulent that we can set it aside and return to the physical plane.
What we are seeing is the consequence of a formerly high trust society collapsing into a low trust one. There is no place to hide from that. The Internet is made of the same stuff as print media and in person. It’s made of people.
The internet didn’t cause this. It just reflects it.
The LLMs are made of people too inasmuch as that’s where they get their training data and prompts.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#578Earlier quoted context omitted.
How could that prove hallucinations? It could only possibly prove that they are not. If the quotes are in the original post then they are not hallucinations. If they are not in the post they could be caused by something is not a LLM. Misquotes and fabricated quotes have existed long before AI, And indeed, long before computers.
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It's simple. We know the quotes are fake, but we don't know for sure if they're hallucinations. The blog post does not resolve this uncertainty.
And yes other answers are reasonably plausible.
You said in another comment that they're "retreating" and "refusing to read" and... no. Your insults are not justified at all.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#579Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are basically the embodiment of the fact that sites and organizations don't matter, but individuals do. I think the overwhelming majority of everything on Ars is garbage. But on the other hand they also run Eric Berger's space column [1] which is certainly one of the best ones out there. So don't ignore those names on tops of articles. If you find something informative, well sourced, and so on - there's a good c…
Somehow, you picked the least credible Ars staffer to me.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#580Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are basically the embodiment of the fact that sites and organizations don't matter, but individuals do. I think the overwhelming majority of everything on Ars is garbage. But on the other hand they also run Eric Berger's space column [1] which is certainly one of the best ones out there. So don't ignore those names on tops of articles. If you find something informative, well sourced, and so on - there's a good c…
Ah, and here my problem with Eric is he basically never criticizes Elon and only calls him "controversial". He's just a Musk mouthpiece at this point.