Scored 100% on a Pangram of the first few paragraphs.
Things that alerted me. (Note that any one of these things could be fine and explainable, but so many in short order makes it obvious).
> And it rang. We both did our jobs.
What is the human's job here? Waking up?
> the whole morning minute by minute, as if someone had laid it out on a table and labeled every piece.
Labored metaphor that doesn't add anything. Laid out a minute? On a table? Even if we accept the non physical metaphor for style, how does that add anything on top of "minute by minute".
> I made two pieces of toast. The left one burned. The left one in my toaster always burns; my toaster has a favorite side.
This sort of short staccato phrasing is an LLM smell. It's hard to describe why precisely and how it varies from natural human text, but LLMs like to do this when writing fiction, especially when told to "write with a good style, don't write like an LLM."
But it's bad writing, as GP points out. The second paragraph is particularly confusing—its central metaphor is clumsy (in my experience LLMs struggle with metaphors).
That said, maybe it's an artifact of being machine-translated from the original Russian.
Having used Claude a fair bit, it reads like the very distinct style Claude settles on when it tries to write fiction. I mean it's hugely improved from the early attempts of LLMs to create fiction (remember the adverbs!), but it's still pretty awful.
> This is terrible writing, and if you can't tell, there is something deeply wrong.
This is subjective. Countless times in the history of human literature a piece of writing has been called garbage -- or at least, flawed -- by some authority, only to later become lauded as a great piece of writing. So not being able to tell (or in this case, to match your own taste) is simply par for the course.
Remember all that's been written about Shakespeare's Hamlet and his use of mixed metaphors, "[...] or to take arms against a sea of troubles [...]". What? How do you take arms against the sea? And why was it before "slings and arrows", what does that have to do with the sea? Mixed metaphors are a sin, etc, etc.
I agree that pangram is not infallible. It has a reported FP rate of like 1/10,000, which is decidedly not zero! Having used AI to write fiction before, and working with LLMs all day, I do feel pretty confident in my ability to detect them. Pangram is just a way to make sure I am not totally ungrounded. Moreover, I don't actually particularly care if someone uses an LLM in the process of writing their work. What I care about is how it sounds. This story reads like an LLM wrote it, optimizing towards what a novice writer would find appealing.
Is the joke that it took me like 3 minutes to write this? If so, I think that's a bit unfair to the author. I think this is something that was at least shaped. But I feel very confident its LLM written. If it isn't LLM written, then I also think it is bad writing, but that's a separate point.
I think they were supporting you -- you had free time because you carefully evaluated whether the random story you came across was AI. The 'author' did not have free time because they asked an AI to generate a story instead of writing one theirself.
The original appears to be written in Russian (there's a toggle in the heading).
In Russian, it sounds quite good, I coudn't detect any smell at all.
Sure, good writing style these days always raises suspicion. :-)
The text read to me like it was, first and foremost, a translation from Russian. It wasn't the names that gave it away to me. It was the text itself. Even in English, it had unmistakable Russianness all over it. I switched the blog language to Russian. Didn't feel like an LLM. Felt rather like written by someone who had read a lot of Viktor Pelevin or maybe Leonid Kaganov.
> "Forty percent chance of precipitation." I never understood what forty percent of rain meant.
You don't understand the world's most understandable statement?
> On Monday my manager wrote in the team chat: "On Friday we'll discuss roles." No emoji. For three days I wondered what my role was.
Three whole days with no contact with your manager at all? Zero opportunity to ask anything amongst all the other activities and communication?
> And now I remember the whole morning minute by minute
You have a perfect-as-if-traumatic memory of specifically the day that your manager sent a cryptic message in chat that you didn't follow up on for three days?
> With a shirt, at least, everything is defined: here's the collar, here are the sleeves, here's the crease that shouldn't be there.
Oh, you're going to love when you discover other objects. Just you wait.
The story itself is decent and competently written, see how it keeps track of the analogies and phrases by different characters (wrapping it all up in the end, tying the "no-man's minute" or how the ex wife told him he was always somewhere else than here). If an un-assisted LLM did this, I'd be surprised. I think there may have been LLM-assistance to polish it up (maybe) but there are some human ideas in here. I'd be interested in the author clarifying this.
The sad thing is that an LLM can't really polish a story. "Polishing" is the most important stylistic work. Even a rough hard to read story is superior to one polished by an LLM.
Just speaking english as a second language will cause your writing to trigger Pangram detectors, for whatever reason. Its a dumb platform meant to scam universities who think it works.
Yes. Waking up, or waiting for the alarm to ring. Also, "what is the human's job" is sort of the theme of the piece, so it's a very relevant question to ask and, in my opinion, doesn't demonstrate AI involvement if the story made you ask it.
> the whole morning minute by minute, as if someone had laid it out on a table and labeled every piece.
> Labored metaphor that doesn't add anything. Laid out a minute? On a table? Even if we accept the non physical metaphor for style, how does that add anything on top of "minute by minute".
You left out the first part, "And now I remember the whole morning minute by minute [...]". Remembering a stretch of time (the morning) "minute by minute" makes a lot of sense, it's not even a metaphor. The metaphor actually is laying it out "on a table" and labelling "every piece", which explains the situation: the main character can remember the morning extremely well, as if it was a physical object someone helpfully labeled for ease of remembering and identification.
> This sort of short staccato phrasing is an LLM smell
But also a very well-known style of human writing. Comedians like Dave Barry use it all the time. Also, of course, Hemingway.
Now, I'm not arguing this isn't written by AI (or translated with AI, or whatever); it could very well be! I just find your evidence of AI prose extremely unconvincing.
Living in a totally conceptual space all day has major downsides on your ability to enjoy your meat suit. Meat suit firmware can only apply updates when you are offline. A lot of us are walking around with severe security vulnerabilities and runtime bugs.
On the contrary -- AI would either replace you completely OR (more likely) allow you to produce more per unit time. There was never any thought or suggestion to reducing the total amount of time you would work.
The problem is that enjoyment has, oddly enough, been misallocated to all the liminal spaces and moments in life. So most optimization tends to elide enjoyment.
Enjoyment elision is the number one cause of meat suit user dissatisfaction. The engineers insist it's not a compiler design bug, stating that those moments of enjoyment are, in fact, unreachable. The UX team says it's not the user's fault either, as it's a fully intended UX choice. The current proposed solution is to push this issue upstream, requesting that all enjoyment be moved from the journey to the destination.
I don't think it's that bypassing enjoyment is trivial.
It's that enjoyment is a secondary function to contentment and the user is allowed to pursue this secondary function according to their own desires. It is just that we often aren't taught the value of or the techniques involved in finding enjoyment.
Consider a professional athlete, a recreational league player, someone who watches their favorite team, and a team manager.
They are all engaged in their activities, originally, because of some enjoyment derived from the game.
But how often does each of them enjoy playing the game?
The recreational player probably gets more fun out of playing the game than the ones who choose to watch, even if they played in highschool.
When was the last time the player enjoyed the ritual of watching a game they aren't involved in?
The one who goes to every game probably gets more enjoyment from watching the game than a player on the sideline.
How often does a player enjoy arm-chair calling another game as opposed to a manager?
But, what happens as we age or in the face of injury? We learn to adapt to enjoying other aspects of our favorite activities. We do so because we are forced to without realizing that we could have been enjoying watching the game just as much as we do now post-injury.
We see this in streaming and video games: People who watch endless hours of games they'll never play, and streamers who never watch others play.
We see this in labor. As the buddhists say, "Before enlightenment; carry water, chop wood. After enlightenment; carry water, chop wood." Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life, in other words.
The difference between a miserable manager and a jovial janitor is their ability to find enjoyment.
The _prose_ itself here is 100% LLM-generated, with the famous ticks present and all. You like it not because it's not Claude-prose (it is), but because it has a nice concept and some smart writing in human parts of it.
HN has a lot of people submitting/upvoting AI-generated content, and also a lot of people who work with AI extensively and therefore know how to identify it. It's not a big surprise.
A few pages of text can be produced by a human using exactly the same words as an LLM would. I don't think it's possible to know for sure if a text is AI-generated or not unless you either generated it yourself or wrote it yourself.
Edit: I found this piece interesting, if a bit bleak. The prose reminded me a little of William Gibson.
I had to skip lots of it. Funnily enough I didn’t think it was LLM made, just someone who wanted to practice their storytelling skills a bit eagerly. A bit of a /r/LinkedInLunatics feel to it.
Bottom bit was confusing. Did he actually get hit or was it just a story? I assume the later but you never know these days…
> Bottom bit was confusing. Did he actually get hit or was it just a story?
What do you mean? This is clearly fiction. The person in the story is dying, the author hasn't died.
Or do you mean whether the person in the story actually died? Yes, he did. He's not typing, these are meant to be his thoughts. He's "stretching" the minute of his death; the story makes an analogy with the no-man's minute of the bug he was trying to debug:
> Tanya used to say I was always somewhere other than here. Now it's true. Only I still don't know where. Sometimes I think it's in that very minute. The server thinks I've been sent. The warehouse thinks I haven't been received yet. And both are right, each by its own clock.
He's been "sent" (to the afterlife) by this plane of existence (the server), but the warehouse (the afterlife) still hasn't received the message, hence "the minute". He's living in that eternal minute, Owl Creek style.
> Will it rain over forty percent of the city? Will it rain for forty percent of the day? Or does the speaker just not know and is too shy to say so?
Unrelated, but to answer his question, it's the probability that a random spot in the covered area will get at least a smidge of rain at some point in the covered time period. A 10% chance of rain can mean either that the forecaster is 100% sure that exactly 10% of the area will get rain, or it can mean that the forecaster sees a large rainstorm nearby which would cover the whole area if it arrived, but which only has a 10% chance of arriving. Or anything in between. If there's a rain cloud meandering over the city, covering 1% of the city at a time, and over the whole day it randomly walks over 10% of the city, that's also a 10% chance.
I had wondered about this. What you're saying makes sense, but, living in Portland, I had come up with my own explanation. When I see 10% here, I usually take it to mean something like "it will rain for six minutes every hour", or for 10% of the day.
That's interesting. If you're usually rained on when there's a 10% chance of rain, that suggests that either you live in a particularly rain section of Portland, or that you move around to a large percentage of the Portland area each day, or that somebody's using a different definition for "chance of rain" than I do. I wonder which one is going on.
What year is this set in? 2027? 2028? A lot of it feels like present day.
About the future: I don't believe it's really necessary to mix traffic and pedestrians on the same road. Certainly not 3000 pound vehicles and pedestrians. I think at some point we will start new cities with completely different assumptions from what we have now.
I'm an extremely amateur coder, but a prolific fiction writer. I wasn't expecting this much “Is it real or is it m-AI-beline?” in the comments. (There's a tell for you, no AI would make that joke.) (For now.) What’s interesting is my thought process is probably one you can apply to someone who is a good coder looking at a post to some code.
My thought process:
Hmm, what's this post, a bit cryptic on info, not many comments but not none. Scroll.
[Come back in about an hour.]
Double the comments, probably not pure slop-or-shill. (Or even worse, slop-and-shill.) Click.
Works without javascript… Has the look of an old usenet post, slightly reformated. Ah, fiction/narrative tells… Perhaps one of those “tales from IT” things on reddit, those were decent in the Before Times.
Hmm, has some interesting one-liners. Like someone who writes enough to know you want to give a morsel of style, a clever aside here or there. The flourish an ice skater does with their hands after a triple axle. Probably why it's gaining in comments.
Hmm, seems like the person might be on the spectrum slightly. Not sure if I would think that if it weren't for the tech references. Or the fact that some of it resonates with my most analytical observations of life and human behavior.
[Now I'm not sure if I thought this, but I think I did on some level:]
So that could be a person who's “analytical” or it could be an AI. But it’s actually something I might think, so I’m going to assume human. Else, I’m going to have some uncomfortable thoughts. I don’t want to think that, and it’s pretty enjoyable.
[Back to thoughts.]
Ah, that’s the second Slavic and/or Europeanish name I’ve seen. Okay, likely a second language person. Probably not learned English as a second language late in life. Probably earlier. Maybe dual language even. The dual/second language explains the slight, unnatural feelings I'm getting.
Oh, now here's a metaphor/stylism that just doesn't work. They write: “For now” could mean “so far” or “goodbye.” As in “goodbye for now”. That does not work. I think they are going for something I’ve noticed though, expressions can be fluid to accommodate however the receiver wants. For decades I’ve liked, and told people I like, the expression “Alright” as a response to “How are you doing?” Because it is entirely up to the speaker how they want to interpret it.
[Not thought at the time:]
Ascending in pitch: Doing well. Descending in pitch: Getting by, but could be better. If pitch is needed to be truthful, then woe to the tonedeaf. And if the receiver wants a different pitch bad enough, they will assume I am simply a poor vocalist, which I’d rather, than have them deal with uncomfortable truth. 99% of the time when I’m asked this, it is by the cashier / retail worker for whom, like this writer, all I may remember from my last encounter is their name tag. Though, actually, not really. If I remember their name, I likely also remember if they are pleasant/chatty. And I likely remember that more than names. For Europeans, this can be different, as they say my locale is more pleasant/chatty with strangers, so that might be why this writer only remembers names.
[Back to thoughts.]
But this doesn't work. “Goodbye for now” is not the same as “goodbye goodbye.” If anything, it’s the same thing as “goodbye so far.” Meaning only one meaning for “for now.” “For now” does not work on its own as a salutation. “Well, thanks for checking me out, cashier.” “You’re welcome.” “Have a good day.” “For now.” That would be a very interesting response from the cashier, but it would not mean “goodbye.”
So, what's happening? Why this assumed double meaning that I am not getting? Hmm, perhaps this is a story originally written in another language and was translated to English. They had an idiom that works in, say, a Slavic language but there's no English analog.
[Not thought at the time:]
What the writer should have said is “for now” has multiple meanings: “at this moment, then not, and then again in another moment,” or “at this moment, then not, and never again,” or “at this moment and forever.” Thus, “I am here, for now” only states that I am at this location at this moment. Whether I will leave, whether I will come back, is unknown. But it at least says what is likely important, that I am here now.
[Back to thoughts.]
If so, clearly we are tool assisted. What of those previous clever phrases? Well, they weren't exactly “fun with English” clever. They were things that could have been written first in a Slavic language and still translate into something clever.
[Not thought then:]
In fact it's more like something in Guy De Maupasant's (however it's spelled) The Necklace. Lots of clever lines that presumably came from the original French and translated fine. I was directed to The Necklace from a news.ycombinator.com comment actually. Hmm, a prompt of “write me in the style of Guy De Maupasant”...
[Back to thoughts]
Well, I'm pretty deep, might as well finish it.
[Not 100% sure I thought this. Oh, and SPOILER ALERT:]
Uh oh, cross walk. Possibility of being hit by a car.
[Back to thoughts.]
Hit by a car. Yep. Not my favorite story development. Distracted from his phone, got it. And shows the futility of his tech work. Ug, can relate. Probably written by someone who'd much rather write for a living.
Still, I probably would have preferred something “larger” for a climax that makes me think in a unique way. E.g. Instead, the robot delivery bot gets raptured, and some clever thing about just-in-time programming is revealed that I wouldn't get immediately as an amateur, but I can at least appreciate, if it's explained well.
Honestly, though, getting hit by a car works if it is done slightly differently. It was a bit on the nose, still, not a huge detractor. Again, the other “hand flourishes” make up for it.
Bio. Written by some CTO of some typical-startup sounding company. Impressive or at least unique for a large-company CTO. For a five person startup, though, hell, even I could be a CTO. And this is a bit like something I’d write.
What’s this thing also in the bio… Wikipedia says its some Greek philosopher who was a prolific writer. Indeed, some good parts in here suggest a prolific author wrote it. Other parts suggest tool assist, if nothing else, to translate or help with something they want to say that works primarily in another language. And then the “casual” mention of the company name. Slight slop / slight shill if anything.
Will I come back and read another? On my own? Probably not. I'm not going to bookmark it. Let’s check the comments.
[not thought:]
If a new one by this poster was posted on news.ycombinator.com . Maybe… But only with enough comments. Assuming comment number/rate on news.ycombinator.com stays a useful metric of being worth my time.
[Back to thoughts.]
Oh, man, so many “is it AI” comments…
Interestingly, I bet if I posted some code here, someone who writes code much better than I would say similar things.
Oh, this bit is kind of clever, but that could be because they had a clever idea, but it seems tool assisted. I do like the flourish, but it’s not the flourish of a master of this (programming) language. Some good stuff, but probably not going to bookmark this site. I prefer programming from people who are as native in the language(s) as me. Still has moments. Ultimately, looks like the work of someone who'd rather be coding their own projects rather than doing their current job.
Not gonna get into the "is this LLM speak or not" debate, but this nevertheless reads like someone who read a modern fiction book once, and is (badly) trying to impersonate it.
Things that alerted me. (Note that any one of these things could be fine and explainable, but so many in short order makes it obvious).
> And it rang. We both did our jobs.
What is the human's job here? Waking up?
> the whole morning minute by minute, as if someone had laid it out on a table and labeled every piece.
Labored metaphor that doesn't add anything. Laid out a minute? On a table? Even if we accept the non physical metaphor for style, how does that add anything on top of "minute by minute".
> I made two pieces of toast. The left one burned. The left one in my toaster always burns; my toaster has a favorite side.
This sort of short staccato phrasing is an LLM smell. It's hard to describe why precisely and how it varies from natural human text, but LLMs like to do this when writing fiction, especially when told to "write with a good style, don't write like an LLM."
I suggest polite rebellion. Write well. Get better than the machines.
Literally none of these statements are true.
That said, maybe it's an artifact of being machine-translated from the original Russian.
This is subjective. Countless times in the history of human literature a piece of writing has been called garbage -- or at least, flawed -- by some authority, only to later become lauded as a great piece of writing. So not being able to tell (or in this case, to match your own taste) is simply par for the course.
Remember all that's been written about Shakespeare's Hamlet and his use of mixed metaphors, "[...] or to take arms against a sea of troubles [...]". What? How do you take arms against the sea? And why was it before "slings and arrows", what does that have to do with the sea? Mixed metaphors are a sin, etc, etc.
> "Forty percent chance of precipitation." I never understood what forty percent of rain meant.
You don't understand the world's most understandable statement?
> On Monday my manager wrote in the team chat: "On Friday we'll discuss roles." No emoji. For three days I wondered what my role was.
Three whole days with no contact with your manager at all? Zero opportunity to ask anything amongst all the other activities and communication?
> And now I remember the whole morning minute by minute
You have a perfect-as-if-traumatic memory of specifically the day that your manager sent a cryptic message in chat that you didn't follow up on for three days?
> With a shirt, at least, everything is defined: here's the collar, here are the sleeves, here's the crease that shouldn't be there.
Oh, you're going to love when you discover other objects. Just you wait.
Yes. Waking up, or waiting for the alarm to ring. Also, "what is the human's job" is sort of the theme of the piece, so it's a very relevant question to ask and, in my opinion, doesn't demonstrate AI involvement if the story made you ask it.
> the whole morning minute by minute, as if someone had laid it out on a table and labeled every piece.
> Labored metaphor that doesn't add anything. Laid out a minute? On a table? Even if we accept the non physical metaphor for style, how does that add anything on top of "minute by minute".
You left out the first part, "And now I remember the whole morning minute by minute [...]". Remembering a stretch of time (the morning) "minute by minute" makes a lot of sense, it's not even a metaphor. The metaphor actually is laying it out "on a table" and labelling "every piece", which explains the situation: the main character can remember the morning extremely well, as if it was a physical object someone helpfully labeled for ease of remembering and identification.
> This sort of short staccato phrasing is an LLM smell
But also a very well-known style of human writing. Comedians like Dave Barry use it all the time. Also, of course, Hemingway.
Now, I'm not arguing this isn't written by AI (or translated with AI, or whatever); it could very well be! I just find your evidence of AI prose extremely unconvincing.
One often wonders why bypassing enjoyment is so trivial, would you say this is a feature or a bug?
Enjoyment elision is the number one cause of meat suit user dissatisfaction. The engineers insist it's not a compiler design bug, stating that those moments of enjoyment are, in fact, unreachable. The UX team says it's not the user's fault either, as it's a fully intended UX choice. The current proposed solution is to push this issue upstream, requesting that all enjoyment be moved from the journey to the destination.
What are good logs or signals a meat suit user could monitor in order to watch for misallocation and allow the program to recover?
I guess a meat suit user best system is to ensure its peer network has stable connections and to care for those.
It's that enjoyment is a secondary function to contentment and the user is allowed to pursue this secondary function according to their own desires. It is just that we often aren't taught the value of or the techniques involved in finding enjoyment.
Consider a professional athlete, a recreational league player, someone who watches their favorite team, and a team manager.
They are all engaged in their activities, originally, because of some enjoyment derived from the game.
But how often does each of them enjoy playing the game?
The recreational player probably gets more fun out of playing the game than the ones who choose to watch, even if they played in highschool.
When was the last time the player enjoyed the ritual of watching a game they aren't involved in?
The one who goes to every game probably gets more enjoyment from watching the game than a player on the sideline.
How often does a player enjoy arm-chair calling another game as opposed to a manager?
But, what happens as we age or in the face of injury? We learn to adapt to enjoying other aspects of our favorite activities. We do so because we are forced to without realizing that we could have been enjoying watching the game just as much as we do now post-injury.
We see this in streaming and video games: People who watch endless hours of games they'll never play, and streamers who never watch others play.
We see this in labor. As the buddhists say, "Before enlightenment; carry water, chop wood. After enlightenment; carry water, chop wood." Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life, in other words.
The difference between a miserable manager and a jovial janitor is their ability to find enjoyment.
Thank you for sharing.
Edit: I found this piece interesting, if a bit bleak. The prose reminded me a little of William Gibson.
Bottom bit was confusing. Did he actually get hit or was it just a story? I assume the later but you never know these days…
What do you mean? This is clearly fiction. The person in the story is dying, the author hasn't died.
Or do you mean whether the person in the story actually died? Yes, he did. He's not typing, these are meant to be his thoughts. He's "stretching" the minute of his death; the story makes an analogy with the no-man's minute of the bug he was trying to debug:
> Tanya used to say I was always somewhere other than here. Now it's true. Only I still don't know where. Sometimes I think it's in that very minute. The server thinks I've been sent. The warehouse thinks I haven't been received yet. And both are right, each by its own clock.
He's been "sent" (to the afterlife) by this plane of existence (the server), but the warehouse (the afterlife) still hasn't received the message, hence "the minute". He's living in that eternal minute, Owl Creek style.
How can you be so sure, 100%? What are the famous ticks that you see in the story?
Unrelated, but to answer his question, it's the probability that a random spot in the covered area will get at least a smidge of rain at some point in the covered time period. A 10% chance of rain can mean either that the forecaster is 100% sure that exactly 10% of the area will get rain, or it can mean that the forecaster sees a large rainstorm nearby which would cover the whole area if it arrived, but which only has a 10% chance of arriving. Or anything in between. If there's a rain cloud meandering over the city, covering 1% of the city at a time, and over the whole day it randomly walks over 10% of the city, that's also a 10% chance.
Anyone else here interested in road course tracking (HPDE) or racing? If so, where do you go?
I'm in the US Midwest and have been to Putnam Park, NCM, mid-Ohio, Pitt Race (private now...sad), and Ozark's.
About the future: I don't believe it's really necessary to mix traffic and pedestrians on the same road. Certainly not 3000 pound vehicles and pedestrians. I think at some point we will start new cities with completely different assumptions from what we have now.
Yes! x forecaster confidence
My thought process:
Hmm, what's this post, a bit cryptic on info, not many comments but not none. Scroll.
[Come back in about an hour.]
Double the comments, probably not pure slop-or-shill. (Or even worse, slop-and-shill.) Click.
Works without javascript… Has the look of an old usenet post, slightly reformated. Ah, fiction/narrative tells… Perhaps one of those “tales from IT” things on reddit, those were decent in the Before Times.
Hmm, has some interesting one-liners. Like someone who writes enough to know you want to give a morsel of style, a clever aside here or there. The flourish an ice skater does with their hands after a triple axle. Probably why it's gaining in comments.
Hmm, seems like the person might be on the spectrum slightly. Not sure if I would think that if it weren't for the tech references. Or the fact that some of it resonates with my most analytical observations of life and human behavior.
[Now I'm not sure if I thought this, but I think I did on some level:]
So that could be a person who's “analytical” or it could be an AI. But it’s actually something I might think, so I’m going to assume human. Else, I’m going to have some uncomfortable thoughts. I don’t want to think that, and it’s pretty enjoyable.
[Back to thoughts.]
Ah, that’s the second Slavic and/or Europeanish name I’ve seen. Okay, likely a second language person. Probably not learned English as a second language late in life. Probably earlier. Maybe dual language even. The dual/second language explains the slight, unnatural feelings I'm getting.
Oh, now here's a metaphor/stylism that just doesn't work. They write: “For now” could mean “so far” or “goodbye.” As in “goodbye for now”. That does not work. I think they are going for something I’ve noticed though, expressions can be fluid to accommodate however the receiver wants. For decades I’ve liked, and told people I like, the expression “Alright” as a response to “How are you doing?” Because it is entirely up to the speaker how they want to interpret it.
[Not thought at the time:] Ascending in pitch: Doing well. Descending in pitch: Getting by, but could be better. If pitch is needed to be truthful, then woe to the tonedeaf. And if the receiver wants a different pitch bad enough, they will assume I am simply a poor vocalist, which I’d rather, than have them deal with uncomfortable truth. 99% of the time when I’m asked this, it is by the cashier / retail worker for whom, like this writer, all I may remember from my last encounter is their name tag. Though, actually, not really. If I remember their name, I likely also remember if they are pleasant/chatty. And I likely remember that more than names. For Europeans, this can be different, as they say my locale is more pleasant/chatty with strangers, so that might be why this writer only remembers names.
[Back to thoughts.]
But this doesn't work. “Goodbye for now” is not the same as “goodbye goodbye.” If anything, it’s the same thing as “goodbye so far.” Meaning only one meaning for “for now.” “For now” does not work on its own as a salutation. “Well, thanks for checking me out, cashier.” “You’re welcome.” “Have a good day.” “For now.” That would be a very interesting response from the cashier, but it would not mean “goodbye.”
So, what's happening? Why this assumed double meaning that I am not getting? Hmm, perhaps this is a story originally written in another language and was translated to English. They had an idiom that works in, say, a Slavic language but there's no English analog.
[Not thought at the time:]
What the writer should have said is “for now” has multiple meanings: “at this moment, then not, and then again in another moment,” or “at this moment, then not, and never again,” or “at this moment and forever.” Thus, “I am here, for now” only states that I am at this location at this moment. Whether I will leave, whether I will come back, is unknown. But it at least says what is likely important, that I am here now.
[Back to thoughts.]
If so, clearly we are tool assisted. What of those previous clever phrases? Well, they weren't exactly “fun with English” clever. They were things that could have been written first in a Slavic language and still translate into something clever.
[Not thought then:]
In fact it's more like something in Guy De Maupasant's (however it's spelled) The Necklace. Lots of clever lines that presumably came from the original French and translated fine. I was directed to The Necklace from a news.ycombinator.com comment actually. Hmm, a prompt of “write me in the style of Guy De Maupasant”...
[Back to thoughts]
Well, I'm pretty deep, might as well finish it.
[Not 100% sure I thought this. Oh, and SPOILER ALERT:]
Uh oh, cross walk. Possibility of being hit by a car.
[Back to thoughts.]
Hit by a car. Yep. Not my favorite story development. Distracted from his phone, got it. And shows the futility of his tech work. Ug, can relate. Probably written by someone who'd much rather write for a living.
Still, I probably would have preferred something “larger” for a climax that makes me think in a unique way. E.g. Instead, the robot delivery bot gets raptured, and some clever thing about just-in-time programming is revealed that I wouldn't get immediately as an amateur, but I can at least appreciate, if it's explained well.
Honestly, though, getting hit by a car works if it is done slightly differently. It was a bit on the nose, still, not a huge detractor. Again, the other “hand flourishes” make up for it.
Bio. Written by some CTO of some typical-startup sounding company. Impressive or at least unique for a large-company CTO. For a five person startup, though, hell, even I could be a CTO. And this is a bit like something I’d write.
What’s this thing also in the bio… Wikipedia says its some Greek philosopher who was a prolific writer. Indeed, some good parts in here suggest a prolific author wrote it. Other parts suggest tool assist, if nothing else, to translate or help with something they want to say that works primarily in another language. And then the “casual” mention of the company name. Slight slop / slight shill if anything.
Will I come back and read another? On my own? Probably not. I'm not going to bookmark it. Let’s check the comments.
[not thought:]
If a new one by this poster was posted on news.ycombinator.com . Maybe… But only with enough comments. Assuming comment number/rate on news.ycombinator.com stays a useful metric of being worth my time.
[Back to thoughts.]
Oh, man, so many “is it AI” comments…
Interestingly, I bet if I posted some code here, someone who writes code much better than I would say similar things.
Oh, this bit is kind of clever, but that could be because they had a clever idea, but it seems tool assisted. I do like the flourish, but it’s not the flourish of a master of this (programming) language. Some good stuff, but probably not going to bookmark this site. I prefer programming from people who are as native in the language(s) as me. Still has moments. Ultimately, looks like the work of someone who'd rather be coding their own projects rather than doing their current job.