Very nice. May I make a suggestion? Add a metadata field for the use of red (ie. rubrication https://gwern.net/red ), which is a core technique of this kind of printing, I think, but not typically noted.
35,337 karma · joined April 8, 2009
About me: https://gwern.net/me
What I've written recently: https://gwern.net/changelog
That's precisely why you would want to make a startup to get investment now rather than self-fund and bootstrap. That alpha isn't going to last forever, especially because everyone has access to the frontier LLMs, which keep getting better, and will eventually beat your fancy harness or specialized finetune.
And also, perhaps more importantly, so you can start developing an alternative to prediction markets and become the new PM; as Scott notes, with superforecaster AI, it's unclear why you really need Kalshi or Manifold or anyone else, with all their fees and overhead. Leave them to the degens, and carve off the socially useful part to do much more efficiently - tokens are cheaper than transactions! This is the big prize, but you need to start now before someone else does it better or commoditizes it.
(So far, judging from this page, it is easier to write an interesting debate about whether the rules require exactly 1k words and what is a 1k word entry, exactly, than about the picture. So far so good! We wouldn't want it to be too easy, after all. Gotta earn that $1k.)
The moral message is conveyed by flicker of regrets and the tragedy. This is not part of the genre conventions of urban horror/Cthulhu-esque mythos, and slightly muddies the horror; after all, Cthulhu feels nothing 'near regret' when he devours your soul. But the Tallyman is hopelessly bound by its rules, unable to act on the ethics it feels or have mercy:
> "An ounce. A breath of one." Something near regret. "I cannot take less than I am owed. I cannot take more. And the hour is on your neck."
He is required to collect the debt and is built to do that and can only do that, even though debt-forgiveness is one of the paradigmatic cases of why systems need to have exceptions to rigid bureaucratic rules and a role for human judgment.
The in-story answer is just to oversight even harder, train the bot even harder, make even more sure that you do not summon up that which you cannot put down, have more gold and guns and preparation, and just patch it bro, I swear, one more deal and kick it down the road - which is left as irony the reader will see through, hopefully, to instead loosening constraints and focusing on value alignment and autonomy, instead of whatever process yielded the Tallyman monster and then patching and running around and dealing with the inevitable disasters or passing the buck.
(You could try to read this as a commentary on capitalism/Nick Land where the Tallyman is metaphorical to AI-powered autonomous corporations which cannot be shut down or stopped anymore, and that would be a good direction to revise the story into if one wanted to try to improvement, but I suspect that would be going way too far and the LLM didn't have that in mind. Because the allegories are so hidden and have to fit into the nooks and crannies of the cover text, I don't think they can be too carefully thought through or too rich themselves. Just not enough serial depth for hidden computation and global revision to support that.)
In retrospect, maybe I should've picked an easier-to-see example for that paragraph. Oh well.
You should talk to https://www.mechanize.work/ for sponsorship/credits and about environments.
Yes, it can. Last year I challenged a Zoomer to try to order from the local ramen place for pickup. They were in and out in well under a minute, including looking up the phone number on Google Maps, whereas Uber Eats would still be loading... and scrolling... Sorry, updating, please stay tuned... Would you like to sign up for Uber Unlimited? ... [do I need to keep doing the gag] ... selecting... wait where did the list go... wait did the one selection take ... ordering ... you have rewards! ... confirmation ... etc They were shocked how much better the experience was. As compared to [paste number, wait 10s] 'Hello?' 'X Ramen, how can I help you?' 'I'd like A ramen and B ramen and C to go, please, name, Alice and Bob.' 'OK. Goodbye.' Even counting the register swipe on pickup to pay, it's night and day. And that is how a web form can be way worse than doing stuff over the phone, because a web form can just get worse and worse and worse - and they do.
Huh? Kaguya-hime was in 2013, 7 years before 2020 (after a notoriously protracted development). You really think Isao Takahata and Studio Ghibli were releasing that post-COVID? (Isao wasn't even alive in 2020.)
Incidentally OP if you want to make it more adaptive, you can just fit the B-T model each time, and grab a posterior sample of what the best pair is, and test that, which turns out to be Thompson sampling. I did this for fun with blind taste-testing of mineral waters: https://gwern.net/water
You include a bunch of random AI-generated images to go with your AI-generated prose. The images are cluttered and filled with pointless, fictional detail which convey nothing beyond the prose and which anyone could vaguely predict, and yet take up something like 2/3rds of the vertical space of the article body. And that is generous, because your items are padded by LLM writing, that is to say, verbosely filled with needlessly superfluously repetitive redundant redundancy. And that's where it's not filled with crowdpleasing but dubious rhetoric and assertions (all present, of course, without any sources or backing).
Consider with a critical mind a random assertion like
> For many people, the first experience of healthcare is no longer treatment but paperwork. Intake forms, insurance verification, privacy acknowledgments, and consent agreements often precede any human interaction related to care. The administrative system introduces itself before the clinical one. This changes the shape of the experience. What should begin with care often begins with bureaucracy, shifting attention away from the person and toward the process.
Really? Recently, peoples' first experience of healthcare was treatment? What wondrous era was this? How could 'intake forms' not, by definition, 'precede any human interaction related to care'? Why should it begin with care? 'Ready, fire, aim!' etc. When did all this happen, exactly?
And it's all like this. Engagement farming - that OP is worthless won't stop people from falling for it and chiming in with whatever pet peeve they have, no matter how many other people have commented about it or how tiresomely predictable some complaint about, say, smartphones will be.
That's unfortunate. Perhaps I should have mentioned before that the author of the post emailed me and said they had used LLMs extensively while writing it? Slipped my mind, I guess.
> including the part you label "blatantly Claude", and...they come out as 100% human
Pangram is designed to make many false negatives. I also checked the intro and got 100% human and shrugged; that's why I check towards the end, where if you tried the passage I specifically said comes up 100% AI, I assume that it would again. If Pangram can't hear it in that specific opening passage, oh well, doesn't make the rest go away.
> The same six months I had closed three other tickets against the same product, each of which had presented to its filer as the only bug. A customer's name had appeared with its letters unjoined on a printed agreement, the way a sign-painter would have laid them out in 1962, because the PDF library on the receipt server pre-dated the existence of a shaping engine in its language runtime. A search index had been returning empty for accounts the customer service team could see in the database because a 2017 import had encoded twelve thousand names using fossil Unicode codepoints from 1991 instead of regular ones from 1995, and the index, very reasonably, treated the two encodings as different strings, So, that ragged-left ticket was the smallest of the four, HOWEVER, it sat on top of the same iceberg and pointed at the same thing.
Blatantly Claude (which he recently started using, judging by https://lr0.org/diary/2026-02-26/ and https://lr0.org/diary/#08062026 - note how LLM-written the second one sounds, a little ironically).
And you can punch the essay into Pangram if you have any doubt (omit Arabic text and formatting if you do this, focus on just plain English to be safe). For example, go to the end* and try "Everything in this story that actually works was paid for by almost nobody...Somebody will close it, probably unpaid, possibly reading this (or writing it? who knows)." '100% AI.'
Or just compare it to his older writings. Does this 2023 piece https://lr0.org/blog/p/d/ or this 2024 piece https://lr0.org/blog/p/democracy/ sound like OP?
* I always check sections towards the end instead of the beginning, because a lot of authors will write the introduction by hand and then give up and let the AI write the rest; and also more advanced sloppers will fiddle with the opening until it beats Pangram, which is not hard since Pangram heavily favors false negatives on AI contribution, and skip the rest because they assume readers will be too lazy to check beyond that.
So something like SingleFileZ https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFileZ or Gwtar https://gwern.net/gwtar ?