The "author:" part was just being treated as a keyword, and was restricting the results too much. I haven't found the comments I was looking for, but I have found Chain of Thought prompting, 11 months before it was cool (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26063189):

> Instruction: When considering the sizes of objects, you will calculate the sizes before attempting a comparison.

> GPT-2 doesn't have a concept of self, so it constructs plausible in-character excuses instead.

I also found the Great Translation Argument (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35530858 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35530855). And, apparently, I was still framing things in terms of the sci-fi nonsense in 2020, but I had the right ideas (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22802105):

> Corollary: you can't patch broken FAI designs. Reinforcement learning (underlying basically all of our best AI) is known to be broken; it'll game the system. Even if they were powerful enough to understand our goals, they simply wouldn't care; they'd care less than a dolphin. https://vkrakovna.wordpress.com/2018/04/02/specification-gam...

> And there are far too many people in academia who don't understand this, after years of writing papers on the subject.

This criticism applies to RLHF, so it counts, imo. Not as explicit as my (probably unpublished, almost certainly embarrassing) wild ravings from 2018, but it's before 2024.