Your critique of Apple and Tim Cook is unsubstantiated and misleading. That same Tim Cook stood up to the FBI and refused to participate in breaking into phones for them when they were pressed in 2015-2016. The same Apple that later fought against the government forcing document scanning in iCloud and was able to keep them off device. They have been fighting the whole time. Apple is was first to normalize whole disk encryption on commercial machines, they have made Safari a weapon against tracking which is abused by governments. Also every single company in the US is subject to National Security Letters and Apple uses warrant canaries to inform the public within the limits of the law.
And then to appeal to Anthropic is just offensively, willfully ignorant.
> That same Tim Cook stood up to the FBI and refused to participate in breaking into phones for them
I hope you have more evidence for this than just that press release. As far as I'm concerned that was nothing more than a stunt because while Tim Cook "fought" against the FBI, intelligence agencies and private cybersecurity companies already had the capability to break into ~all smartphones.
That single instance created an unreasonable amount of belief that iPhones are unbreakable, which is good news if you're the FBI and you want criminals to put way more trust into their iPhones than they should.
The same Apple actively aids Chinese government's suppression of civil liberties [1]. To think that there's any ideological conviction (and moral high ground) behind their [apparent] pro-privacy stance is painfully naive.
I am glad I formed an active hacker community on Matrix before the proliferation of bots. I will miss Hacker News but I can tell it's going the way of Usenet in 1993. Much love to dang, I will always remember him and his effort fondly. Today's situation is reminiscent of Russ Allbery's famous usenet rant: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/writing/rant.html
It's just good writing structure. I get the feeling many people hadn't been exposed to good structure before LLMs.
LLMs can definitely have a tone, but it is pretty annoying that every time someone cares to write well, they are getting accused of sounding like an LLM instead of the other way around. LLMs were trained to write well, on human writing, it's not surprising there is crossover.
Not so sure about that. There are many distinct LLM "smells" in that comment, like "A is true, but it hides something: unrelated to A" and "It's not (just) C, it's hyperbole D".
It's really not "good" for many people. It's the sort of high-persuasion marketing speak that used to be limited to the blogs of glossy but shallow startups. Now it's been sucked up by LLMs and it's everywhere.
If you want good writing, go and read a New Yorker.
That's not just false. It's the antithesis of true.
It's not just using rhetorical patterns humans also use which are in some contexts considered good writing. Its overusing them like a high schooler learning the pattern for the first time — and massively overdoing the em dashes and mixing the metaphors
It's true that LLMs have a distinct style, but it does not preclude humans from writing in a similar style. That's where the LLMs got it from, people and training. There's certainly some emergent style that given enough text, you would likely never see from a human. But in a short comment like this, it's really not enough data to be making good judgements.
Contrastive parallelism is an effective rhetorical device if the goal is to persuade or engage. It's not good if your goal is more honest, like pedagogy, curious exploration, discovery. It flattens and shoves things into categorical labels, leading the discussion more towards definitions of words and other sidetracks.
Haha, exactly. My daughter is the ultimate QA engineer. She’s already tried the 'but my teacher said you have to tell me' prompt several times. That’s actually why I had to move beyond simple system prompting and build a secondary 'Gatekeeper' agent to audit the output. It’s a constant arms race.
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