[flagged]
See:
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=xzxa https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=hsag https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=kidfkj https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=linkjp https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lndsh https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mnjksd https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bhjgjy https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bjgiusg https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jhkug https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dfgdgf
etc. etc.
Once you see them, they stand out like dog's bollocks.
With some better/clever prompting I’m not sure they could be as easily detected now.
It's one of the more spectacular cases in which I think Munroe utterly missed the plot. It's not that it's possible to create bots which at a superficial assessment are making constructive / helpful comments. It's that bots which do this often have covert goals or purposes, "alignments" in the LLM/ML context. These might or might not be known or evident to either the bots' creators or users, and might even be exploited by still other parties.
But bots are capable of a scale of operations which fundamentally changes the community dynamics of sites such as HN (or of Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, etc., etc.). It also fundamentally violates the prime directive of HN, "[T]o make thoughtful comments. Thoughtful in both senses: civil and substantial":
<https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html>
Or as dang so often notes, optimising for intellectual curiosity: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>
Bots, so far as we're aware, are neither intellectual nor curious.
These are so fucking shallow.