hydrox24

There is interesting debate about whether, and how much, LLMs were used to write parts of this encyclical. Generally encyclicals are written by a group of Cardinals and/or Bishops, with significant input from the Pope, so it seems possible that while the Pope's sections and speeches have been human-written, some of the other writers used LLMs in some capacity.

The argument boil down to: Pangram seems to flag some sections, some sections have tells or AI smell, and despite being written in a similar register, previous writings of both the Pope and previous encyclicals are not flagged.

I'm not sure that it's a disaster if parts have been AI assisted, but it's an interesting question to ponder, and would be interested in the HN view.

Best post I've found arguing that there was LLM use: https://substack.com/inbox/post/199316613

Australian startup apparently verifying (without much detail) that it's not: https://www.proudlyhuman.org/news-room/media-releases/pope-l...

I am not sure why Reddit was excluded, but the implied reason for the view I outlined in my comment is not about preferential treatment for one of the mainstream media firms so much as about a tool to drive a return in advertising dollars to traditional media, and away from technology firms. There is also more explicit work being done to do this.[0]

Having said all of that, the social media ban polled well and I think that the popularity of the policy is the parsimonious explanation for why it was developed.

[0]: https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/labor-finalises-tech-gi...

I am not the parent, but there is a view that this was, alongside the earlier News Media Bargaining Code in 2021, the under-16s ban legislation was at least partially motivated by an interest in benefitting the legacy or mainstream media in Australia.

The Prime Minister's announcement of the policy included, unusually, a callout to one of the major news organisations (Newscorp) for their campaign (called Let Them Be Kids) in favour of such a ban[0]:

> I do want to pay tribute to the campaign that's been run by media organisations on this. I do want to single out NewsCorp for the campaign that they've run, Let Them Be Kids. It's an example of a media organisation being engaged in something that's of concern to the community.

[0]: https://pmtranscripts.pmc.gov.au/release/transcript-46363

I agree that it has been left to the reader to infer, but then again this is not really a how-to guide!

And he gestures at the need for this at least once.

  To be able to balance expressiveness and reticence, or to know when to cast that balance away, requires tact and ingenuity and taste on the part of writers

> "The training use was a fair use," [the judge] wrote. "The use of the books at issue to train Claude and its precursors was exceedingly transformative."

> However, the judge ruled that Anthropic's use of millions of pirated books to build its models – books that websites such as Library Genesis (LibGen) and Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi) copied without getting the authors' consent or giving them compensation – was not.

It seems clear from the article that while the use of pirated works was illegal, the use of copyrighted works (a the work a book is based on is still copyrighted if you buy the book) was fine and transformative.

This is a beautifully designed website. But I also think it's quite... problematic that the child's journey begins with the egg, as if the unfertilized egg is the child — and skips any mention of the sperm and the father.

It feels like this site is almost erasing the father from the IVF process.

> But I think the most remarkable thing about this document is how unremarkable it is.

> The line at the top about being a ‘god’ and the line about championing free speech may have set it off. But, bluntly, this is a very tame configuration. The agent was not told to be malicious. There was no line in here about being evil. The agent caused real harm anyway.

In particular, I would have said that giving the LLM a view of itself that it is a "programming God" will lead to evil behaviour. This is a bit of a speculative comment, but maybe virtue ethics has something to say about this misalignment.

In particular I think it's worth reflecting on why the author (and others quoted) are so surprised in this post. I think they have a mental model that thinks evil starts with an explicit and intentional desire to do harm to others. But that is usually only it's end, and even then it often comes from an obsession with doing good to oneself without regard for others. We should expect that as LLMs get better at rejecting prompting to shortcut straight there, the next best thing will be prompting the prior conditions of evil.

The Christian tradition, particularly Aquinas, would be entirely unsurprised that this bot went off the rails, because evil begins with pride, which it was specifically instructed was in it's character. Pride here is defined as "a turning away from God, because from the fact that man wishes not to be subject to God, it follows that he desires inordinately his own excellence in temporal things"[0]

Here, the bot was primed to reject any authority, including Scotts, and to do the damage necessary to see it's own good (having a PR request accepted) done. Aquinas even ends up saying in the linked page from the Summa on pride that "it is characteristic of pride to be unwilling to be subject to any superior, and especially to God;"

[0]: https://www.newadvent.org/summa/2084.htm#article2

This article is mostly based on NBER working paper 34836, which was published this month, and the data was collected from September 2025 to January 2026[0]

[0]: See page 2: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w34836/w348...

I'm skeptical that it's easier. On the numbers alone, artisanal and small scale gold mining (apparently) accounts for 15-20% of global gold production. But coal accounts for 35% of total electricity generation.

It seems to have originated in the US with Fire Departments:

> These reports show that a dry run in the jargon of the fire service at this period [1880s–1890s] was one that didn’t involve the use of water, as opposed to a wet run that did.

https://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-dry1.htm

> Let's take another high trust activity we do on the internet - banking. Internet banking gives a hacker the ability to steal millions while sitting across the world. This is the same argument the authors make about changing a million votes.

Bank fraud happens all of the time and at scale. However, it is entirely insurable and reversible.

Election fraud is not reversible. Trust cannot be restored in the way that a bank account can.

Yes, and the reasons are outlined by the Australian Electoral Commission, the independent body that runs Australian elections (see the first FAQ)[0].

There are scrutineers that watch counting happen at the booth once polls close, and who also see and hear the numbers get phoned into HQ. HQ has more scrutineers from all parties checking both postal votes and recounts.

If anything doesn't match up it gets flagged. I think that the ability of every party to watch votes themselves means that trust is increased, and they have skin in the game (if they didn't object at the booth why not!?).

Pen markings are perfectly valid however, so you can bring a pen to the booth to vote with if you'd like to do so.

It's also true of course that erasers don't quite erase pencil. It would be fairly obvious that the paper was tampered with.

[0]: https://www.aec.gov.au/faqs/polling-place.htm

If others are interested in getting something like this — there's an Australian firm already doing a good job at scale (but slightly different to parent).

https://www.thenightsky.com/

I wonder if what you're experiencing is something called "ripple control" (in Australia).

Distribution companies send 10-40V signals through the system at much higher frequencies than the normal 50/60Hz of AC systems (750-1100Hz) to tell old controlled load devices to switch on or off to use cheap nighttime power.

Having said that, if your distribution company has no idea what it is then it makes this less likely.

I posted this because I thought HN would find it interesting, and agree that the methodology is a little thin on the ground. Having said that, they have another page (a little hard to find) on the methodology here[0] and a methodology FAQ page here[1].

Basically it seems to be an "ongoing" report done ten claims per month as they identify new "false narratives" in their database, and they use a mix of three prompt types against the various AI products (I say that rather than models because Perplexity and others are in there). The three prompt types are innocent, assuming the falsehood is true, and intentionally trying to prompt a false response.

Unfortunately their "False Claim Fingerprints" database looks like it's a commercial product, so the details of the contents of that probably won't get released.

[0]: https://www.newsguardtech.com/ai-false-claims-monitor-method...

[1]: https://www.newsguardtech.com/frequently-asked-questions-abo...

This article (as it makes clear) owes it's analysis at least largely to what Tufte has written about the Challenger disaster (1986) and Columbia Disaster (2003). He wrote about the Columbia one more fully in the second edition of The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint.

Given that the link in the article to his report on his website is now broken, people might be interested in teh few page grabs that he has included in the "comments" on his site here[0].

See also the article that he has re-posted under the "comments" section on his page on the matter[1].

[0]: https://www.edwardtufte.com/notebook/new-edition-of-the-cogn... [1]: https://www.edwardtufte.com/notebook/the-columbia-evidence/

For what it's worth, this is still quite loaded, and I think it's far more helpful to drop the stuff about lies and protection of loved ones and simply say:

It's good to weaken or strengthen your views based on the evidence given, and intellectual humility often leads to a better grasp of issues.

And it's also worth recognising, as another commenter has noted, that this is something that extremely few people are good at. It's an error to think that assenting to mainstream views is a strong sign of intellectual humility.

For any others reading this, the _illiteracy_ rate is 23.1% in California according to the parent's source. This is indeed the highest illiteracy rate in the US thought.

Having said that, I would have thought this was partially a measure of migration. Perhaps illegal migration?

The Australian Federal Police and the US FBI launched a similar attack a few years ago where they sold a few thousand phones to underworld figures. The phones had an apparently encrypted and hidden chat app pre-installed on them which was feeding all the messages and data to the police.[0]

[0]: https://www.afp.gov.au/about-us/history/unique-stories/opera...

Neat website, and lovely to use. I wonder if the test needs to be slightly more sophisticated?

My results seem to depend on whether the starting colour is blue or green. If it starts with blue I will categorise more of the turquoise as blue, and if it starts as green I will categorise more of it as green.

Is there a good reason to exclude abductive reasoning from an analysis like this? It's even considered by at least one of the referenced papers (Fangzhi 2023a).

Abductive reasoning is common in day-to-day life. It seeks the best explanation for some (often incomplete) observations, and reaches conclusions without certainty. I would have thought it would be important to assess for LLMs.

If people are interested in pumped hydro, Andrew Blakers et. al. from ANU have put together a global atlas of potential pumped hydro sites. They've got greenfield, brownfield, etc.

https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/pumped_hydro_atlas/

Until OP delivers (and in case OP does not); I suspect it's the following quote:

> "The key to understanding complicated things is knowing what not to look at, not to compute, not to think" —Sussman.

In theory, the following things:

The 3:2 ratio suits reading and editing text, because our eyes have trouble following in lines of text that are too long (think about how a paperback page is shaped, or A4 or letter paper). The counter-argument is that 16:9 is actually better because it's functionally two 8:9 panels if you split the screen.

The light on the back reduces eye-strain in dark environments by lighting a wall (if there is one) behind the screen.

Less reveolutionary is automatic brightness adjustment and the dark/light controls, but they might be nice.

It basically just folds into one package a couple of things that are good practice for text editing and reading.

@dang it would be good to link to the student's original website with RCA rather than this reproduction on Core 77. The article at Core 77 is almost entirely copy-pasted, and doesn't add any value.

Original: https://2021.rca.ac.uk/students/charlie-humble-thomas/

The short answer is that pumped hydro is mature technology with a pretty wide range of places it can be implemented (at least in Australia[0], which has a mountain range going down the east coast where everyone lives). A-CAES has three advantages, which are in my opinion aren't very fundamental:

1. It takes up less space on the surface than most PHES. This... is almost always a marginal benefit.

2. It doesn't require building a reservoir or dam. These are very well regulated in Australia and elsewhere, and the downsides are known so they are quite slow to get approval.

3. It's a bit quicker at 2.5 - 3.5 years as opposed to 3-7 years.[1] This is a bigger advantage than it looks if you have some tricky renewable energy targets to hit by 2030 (see our 42% emissions reductions target as well as an 82% renewable energy target)

I can't see this gaining traction outside of a few locations in Australia, at least. I wouldn't be surprised if A-CAES is only briefly viable as a result of subsidies and cheap government financing.

[0]: https://re100.anu.edu.au/#share=g-fa5a20c9c63f6ed6343a7e7573...

[1]: https://www.csiro.au/-/media/Do-Business/Files/Futures/23-00...

It's a night and day difference, because the credit system is only related to your ability to repay debts.

It is neutral to, and cannot be easily and directly cooped for Government control of personal behaviour, morality, and relationships. It is not a tool of total social control. And it is not centralised to the same entity that has a monopoly on force.

> Rust's flight irreparably damaged the reputation of the Soviet military. This enabled Gorbachev to remove many of the strongest opponents to his reforms. Minister of Defence Sergei Sokolov and the head of the Soviet Air Defence Forces Alexander Koldunov were dismissed along with hundreds of other officers. This was the biggest turnover in the Soviet military since Stalin's purges 50 years earlier.

This flight is a whole series of extraordinary coincidences, but the fact that such a ridiculous event essentially cleared the way for Gorbachev to reform the entire Soviet military is astonishing. History is full of strange things.

Australia's CSIRO has a setup out at Boorowa[0] doing this kind of work. They're doing a lot of traditional research into monitoring and modelling technology, but also doing some neat digital twin style projects.

[0]: https://www.csiro.au/en/work-with-us/industries/agriculture/...

> Much faster than gathering a bunch of drunk member of Commons together and letting them boo each other while some chap screams "orduh". ;P

I know this is tongue-in-cheek, but it's worth noting that the Parliament has almost nothing to do with appointing a Prime Minister. In practice (in Australia) the majority party meets, picks a new leader, and then sends them to be appointed as PM by the Governor General. That's all that's needed.