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kgarten

2,134 karma · joined November 25, 2010

mad scientist
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kgarten··on The revolt of the reader
I enjoyed the piece. Yet, what I don't understand is the author's endorsement of Pangram ... I don't like that without interacting with authors they just labeled texts (articles, novels etc.) as AI generated (they got a lot of publicity with it). Yet, given that the work is probabilistic and there's never 100 %, I find that irresponsible. I would have expected that they would have had at least the decency to tell the authors before they published their "accusations" publicly.

Also, there are relatively easy ways to prevent being recognized and I assume as now the use of LLMs changes our way of writing and speaking, it will get harder and harder for these detection tools. We will see more false positives (as for the future there will be no text 100 % authored by humans to train on).

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hrpQxfYvF6CBGWfJX/pangram-ai...

As English is my second language, I find the help of an LLM in editing text very useful. Yet, I agree with others that I don't want to read completely LLM generated texts.

kgarten··on Poetry book that Anthropic tried to censor
The discussion and this reminds me on the problems with Xerox Scanners:

https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres...

We have to trust our tech ...

kgarten··on Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing
I’m frustrated since August with the results from Claude for English text editing … I didn’t look for that. It’s just a fact.

This is not about em dashes …

kgarten··on Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing
That’s my point of the post … I had the feeling that the English text editing skills of Claude went significantly down in August.

I was frustrated at first not knowing what they are doing.

After I read this post, (seeing they introduced it in August) I think it has to do with the watermarking.

Try it on a paragraph … the connections between sentences feel clunky now.

I will play with it more and see if that’s really the case (the watermarking making the text edits worse).

kgarten··on Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing
One could also use butterflies to write ;) https://xkcd.com/378/

The problem is, that LLMs worked very well for me to improve my writing. Especially as I'm not a native speaker, it was a great way to improve the legibility of my work.

I want a tool that helps me improve my writing. A tool I can learn from. Not a tool that switches out "bananas" to "airplanes."

I'm was using Claude Opus and now Fabel extensively for editing my texts and I find the recent updates abysmal. Not sure if it's due to the Text Watermark.

Before Claude was great in sharpening the meaning in my writing, it's now close to unusable.

kgarten··on Ask HN: What Is the State of App Development in 2026?
Looks nice. Funny, I also made a dictation app using claude ... yet just for iOS. https://kaikunze.de/aimemo/
kgarten··on Map of Metal
Reminded me a bit on the design space of Metal logos: https://renecutura.eu/metalvis/
kgarten··on Meta’s AI smart glasses and data privacy concerns
I think this coverage feels very similar to the way Google Glass was treated back in the early 2010s ... there’s a grain of legitimate concern, but the article oversells what these glasses actually do and stokes alarm in a way that goes beyond the available facts.

Workers annotating data for AI might see sensitive content captured by smart glasses. But the leap from that to “we see everything” and framing it like some dystopian panopticon mirrors the early Google Glass panic, where the concerns often outran what the device actually could do.

Legitimate concerns shouldn’t be dismissed, but neither should they be inflated to create a new “Glass-forked-into-Big-Brother” narrative unless the evidence genuinely supports that level of risk ...

kgarten··on Show HN: CranKen – A Math Puzzle Game for the Play.date
btw, source code is here: https://github.com/kkai/CranKen
kgarten··on A macOS app that blurs your screen when you slouch
Quite a while back, a former student of mine built Nekoze :D

https://nekoze.app Nekoze warns you when you are hunched over.

Years back, we did a couple of whimsical prototypes along those lines (using J!NS MEME, smart glasses): https://youtu.be/LXIY2g-twOA

kgarten··on Ask HN: Share your personal website
https://kaikunze.de/

Source is here: https://github.com/kkai/web-source

kgarten··on Scott Adams has died
I'm also not saying that the parent is AI generated. Just, that the text triggered for me my "Might be AI" alert. It's not only the em dash but the combination of em dash and rules of three (plus a couple of other hints).
kgarten··on Scott Adams has died
“His peaks—the biting humor about corporate absurdity, the writing on systems thinking and compounding habits, the clarity about the gap between what organizations say and what they do—unquestionably made me healthier, happier, and wealthier.”

Maybe I’m getting cynical, yet every time I see an mdash and rules of 3, it triggers the feeling of “This sounds like AI” …

Here’s another example:

“ I can avoid the ugliness—the racism, the grievance, the need to be right at any cost.”

kgarten··on Liberating Bluetooth on the ESP32
Why not link to the official recording ?

https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-liberating-bluetooth-on-the-esp3...

kgarten··on 40 percent of fMRI signals do not correspond to actual brain activity
wondering why you are downvoted. You are right, though it's kind of inferred that the author means fMRI as the title focuses on brain activity only.
kgarten··on The Nerd Reich – Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy
My heart goes out to you.
kgarten··on DSP 101 Part 1: An Introductory Course in DSP System Design
thanks!
kgarten··on DSP 101 Part 1: An Introductory Course in DSP System Design
Great content, yet why are the figures so horrible in terms of resolution. I’m reading it on my smart phone and have a hard time deciphering anything on these images.
kgarten··on CS234: Reinforcement Learning Winter 2025
Which podcast?
kgarten··on CS234: Reinforcement Learning Winter 2025
Are the videos available somewhere?

spring course is on YouTube https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoROMvodv4rN4wG6Nk6sNpT...

kgarten··on I built a faster Notion in Rust
Logseq? (Though it uses md)
kgarten··on Claudeskills.cc – Share, Discover, and Reuse Claude/OpenAI Agent Skills
Is this all vibe coded? (mdashes ;) ... I cannot see how one can publish agent skills /task capabilities on the site. It seems to be just a list of open resources (most likely also found using claude or ChatGPT ?).
kgarten··on Glasses-free 3D using webcam head tracking
It works for me, just needs a time to load.
kgarten··on Blinkenlights
My first thought went to Project Blinkenlights https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Blinkenlights
kgarten··on NotebookLM launches feature to customize and guide audio overviews
NotebookLM is great to get an overview of a publication. I created a short podcast focusing on HCI publications using NotebookLM https://www.deep-hci.org/

Just posted some ISWC, MobileHCI and UbiComp papers, UIST is up next.

kgarten··on Awesome-totally-open-ChatGPT: A list of open alternatives to ChatGPT
https://aisnakeoil.substack.com/p/gpt-4-and-professional-ben...

"GPT-4 and professional benchmarks: the wrong answer to the wrong question OpenAI may have tested on the training data. Besides, human benchmarks are meaningless for bots."

kgarten··on The False Promise of Chomskyism
lol .. then don't claim you have:

"His claims are simply false, easily refuted by empirical data."

he underlines his claims with examples showing what he means. I recommend you to read the original article by Chomsky, as you seem to have a problem understanding his arguments.

kgarten··on The False Promise of Chomskyism
ok, you didn't answer my first questions. I try a couple of more.

your first argument is useless, as anything might be a path to AGI ... first order logic / expert systems are ...

regarding empirical data, you are bringing up anecdotes that don't hold up. Humans can often learn a concept from 1-2 instances (take the face of Albert Einstein) (even your kids can do that in grammar :) , maybe check how language models are trained in comparison.

do you have any references for your claims? How much data does a human need to learn grammar? do you have any estimate?

you say you can refute Chomsky's claims by empirical data. please show me that data/studies, don't talk about anecdotes from your kids.

kgarten··on The False Promise of Chomskyism
ha ha ... every human is a fool in that case (as every human holds some unreasonable believes and opinions some point in time).

"He has discredited his mind?" This sentence does not make sense to me. Explain what you mean by this statement. I found his NYT piece well argued. How can you fix any language model similar to ChatGPT to prevent the mistakes shown in the article? (I don't think you can).

kgarten··on Learnings from employing ChatGPT as a ML Engineer for a day
to make my point easier: for my definition of to read, to understand and comprehend you need a body, an embodied mind. you need agency and consciousness. ChatGPT has none of those, it's an implementation of several matrix functions.

the specific model you are referring to does nothing, it's not acting (it's not reading anything). you have to press enter for it to work. so it's not reading, you (and OpenAi engineers) are doing its actions for it.

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