I was asking this in earnest and not to discredit anybody.
Like i said, I commented after reading the first couple of paragraphs, which to me sound like LLM-assisted fiction (it does not mean they are, I was hoping for someone to clear that up):
> During my recent journey to Berlin—a city where every street corner whispers secrets of a divided past—I uncovered the chilling reality of "Zersetzung."
> This was not just another research assignment; it was an immersive exploration into the dark art of psychological warfare.
> Amidst the solemn corridors of historic museums, I engaged with former STASI operatives and leading experts, drawing on my extensive background in human intelligence and interrogations.
> Their firsthand accounts and my rigorous investigation reveal how East Germany's covert strategy was designed to systematically dismantle not only dissent but the very essence of a person's identity
No first-hand account is referenced in detail later, the article goes on in a weirdly encyclopedic style, given the introduction. It also jumps to equating the Stasi with modern types of discourse silencing.
Which might have merit! Just seemed weird given the beginning of the article.
Berlin doesn't seem to have any special relevance later in the article, but the author says that this is based on "firsthand accounts" and that their "rigorous investigation reveal how East Germany's covert strategy was designed".
I have previously read things and watched films about the Stasi (an important and interesting subject).
Bur I'm not an expert in this subject and also have no first- or second-hand experience as victim, with regimes like the DDR.
My gripe was nothing about the article's content, it just seemed as if there was no original research and the article might have been a summary of other sources.
In my opinion, while this should not be claimed lightly, it is absolutely OK to say that a piece of writing sounds like AI-generated content and ask about it.
I'm deeply sorry if this reads like I wanted to discredit an honest creator (why would I want that?)
Maybe I sound like an LLM too, sure? Or maybe the author used one to write just one or two paragraphs? I don't know!
> Join me as we delve deep into the meticulously orchestrated tactics of the Stasi—a narrative that is as compelling as it is disturbing, and one that continues to resonate in today’s era of digital manipulation.
Adjective-heavy fluff like this screams "ChatGPT"/LLM to me, and I don't see why I would not comment that when it exceeds my personal threshold for perceiving it this way.
I put in a "disclaimer" because I anticipated this coming across as rude.
Claiming that my question (or questioning any online text source) would be in line of some political "Zersetzung" strategy seems like an insult to actual victims of the Stasi to me. Of which I am not one, but my question was also not some political slander or attempt to silence the author.
What about plainly avoiding such hard of disprove allegations as a matter of principle. Regardless of how many disclaimers you lace them with. You have plenty of other more salient and less inflammatory gripes than chatgpt generation anyway.
To me that intro seems like a standard american essay fluff, these were plenty before chatgpt.
You were right, it does sound LLM assisted at least. It's well-written but superficial, lacking sources and examples, typical of an LLM summary. Not that it's wrong or that info about ongoing secret operations is publicly available anyway
Did you find something incorrect in the two paragraphs that you read? Here they are:
During my recent journey to Berlin—a city where every street corner whispers secrets of a divided past—I uncovered the chilling reality of "Zersetzung."
This was not just another research assignment; it was an immersive exploration into the dark art of psychological warfare.
This is the personal website of a human being. The first two paragraphs described a human traveling to Berlin. Does ChatGPT travel often?
I was exclusively talking about the writing style. Assuming a text would have been written by an LLM would of course not preclude it from being a rewording /summarization of real events or other people's writing.
I see you posted another submission about this topic, and I can read that more easily, it sounds more natural to me.
Make of that what you will, can't engange deeper rn, have to go back to work.
Is the claim that the author is lying on their own web site about their travel, using ChatGPT to write fictional travel anecdotes?
Would you care to provide any evidence to support the assertion that this personal website was written by an LLM?
Data science project: index HN articles which trigger comments about AI/LLM/ChatGPT, with a combination of automated analysis and manual labeling to identify false positives, extract signal-to-noise ratio of HN comment detection of LLMs over time.
Many people here decry Wikipedia as biased, impossible to edit and other bad things.
But none of the comments point out the actual article that they wanted to edit.
Ironically, presumably to remain anonymous. Anonymity and pseudonymity are directly attacked in the letter this article is about.
Wikipedia sure isn't perfect, but so far, when commenters attack it with fundamental vitriol, I've always found these people to have a political agenda.
I suspect "politically neutral" is a meaningless phrase. It's just a way for people to tar their political opponents by inference.
The problem is: even if you report only facts, there is an editorial function in choosing which facts to report, because it is physically impossible to report all facts. So someone can always point to some sort of bias on choosing which facts to report.
There are no politically neutral humans but there can be politically neutral publications. All you have to do to be politically neutral is treat all legal political ideologies the same without favouring one over the others. Wikipedia does not achieve this goal, not by far.
What's the issue with naming the person if you think there should be an encyclopedic article about said person?
If it's about anonymity / not wanting to publicly link your HN and Wikipedia profiles, well fine, but the fact that there are two films about a person does not say much.
Oh, it was just because it didn't matter to the conversation. It was about Bernie Jordan who left his nursing home to attend a D-Day event. I created the article because both films imply the nursing home prevented him, but in actuality they went to great lengths to help him.
Reading the article about the movie, I can kind of see both sides here.
Probably a veteran Wikipedia contributor could draw the lines best, but it seems reasonable to say that the incident itself would not be relevant enough unless it had been made into a movie.
The article about the movie clearly states that it's a true story.
i mean, there are often "curiosity" stories reported by multiple newspapers that are still not really historical events warranting their own article.
I'd draw the line depending on the volume of coverage and publicity in such cases.
And this case doesn't appear to me as if it was a major cultural thing that everyone knew about when it happened (unless they were interested in the movie).
I'm not in the US though, so I can only tell what I see in search results and that the story hasn't really crossed the atlantic into any notable publicity here.
Maybe my intuition is wrong, but to me this sounds like a violation of the principle of least power.
"Soft deletes" is just a name for a regular write operation, with specific semantics.
Adding a layer of magic to the DB for this doesn't seem right to me.
And applications could have many different requirements for soft deletes, like the article points out. For example, the simplest version would be just a boolean "deleted" column, but it could also be "deleted_at", "deleted_by", etc.
All of these cases require an bunch of code changes anyway, and the more complex ones could interfere with an implementation of this feature at the database level: such a transparent implementation couldn't access app-specific concerns such as user data, for example.
Adding soft deletes to a legacy app that knows nothing about it would only work for a boolean flag and a maybe date-time value, unless the DBMS would also offer triggers for soft deletes etc?
Seems to me to that this capability would make a DBMS much more complicated.
I don't think it's all magic because you have to implement soft deletes in your application layer and it would be nice to have a little DB support for it. It doesn't have to be some big thing, just the ability for selects and such to work only on undeleted elements by default unless you ask for
them would be nice so it doesn't pollute your code and make you have to always remember to point the gun away from your foot.
I'd argue that what SQL needs is better facilities for code reuse, metaprogramming and such, it ought to give you the tools that you can make something that lets you add something to the language such that you can add
... WITH SOFT UPDATES
and it adds to the table definition as well as to the schema that will cause subsequent statements to be rewritten. There's a lot of interesting logic (in the literal sense) in SQL that is hidden by a strange, irregular syntax that is more obvious in other approaches to databases such as Datalog. I think it was little appreciated outside the hardcore semantic web community that you could compile SPARQL + OWL to SQL and get powerful inference facilities. SQL is a great target for metaprogramming precisely because it is not Turing complete and that a code generator doesn't have to think at all about the order that events are sequenced in. It's kinda sad that metaprogramming tools for SQL are almost all pre-Chomsky and pre-dragon book internal DSLs like JooQ and SQLAlchemy which have their charms (JooQ's excellent integration with Java IDEs) but fall short of what could be done with SQL-to-SQL and SQL-to-X transformations.
Stored procedures are great but many shops don't use them for various reasons. It doesn't help that they look like a mix of FORTRAN and COBOL and also come in a few variations from the (better) set-based PL/SQL of Oracle to the (worse) Transact-SQL based stored proc of Microsoft SQL and PostgresSQL. The other day I talked with Krisztián Szabó of
who developed a compiler that writes stored procs that do database synchronization.
On the other hand, if you've got access to the internals of the frickin' database I think you can do something better than the ordinary application level soft updates. For instance a "customer record" might very well be not just a row in one table but maybe 15 rows in four tables that are inserted in a transaction and you want to be able to undelete them as a unit.
As an aside, I've never found this to be worth it since you have to change too much and re-test everything for minimal user benefit and time savings. The effort is way worse if the code is not great in the first place. It can be a great decision to make before everything is written.
Maybe it's worth it for files which are hard to reproduce, but you can also rely on DB backups to get those back. If people are regularly deleting things they're not supposed to, you're better off removing the user-facing delete actions, limiting the action to specific users, etc.
Thanks for sharing this. I agree with others that this issue is primarily caused by the insurer (why does this need an app?) and dysfunctional healthcare governed by money and greed.
Still it's a good reminder of what you're getting into with walled gardens.
More broadly, it is a real shame how corporations have turned mobile internet into the complete opposite of what it could achieve.
Ideally, the only thing tied to a specific hardware or software provider should be your identity.
And imho, said provider should be controlled by state government, and be accessible from any device, given the proof of identity.
But one can still hope that the economic "warfare" won't become a literal one.
I'm not saying that I can tell how likely a real military conflict between any of China, Europe, India, Russia, the US actually is.
What I can tell is that even fellow agnostics should... pray (or hope) that this isn't the most likely scenario.
In this regard, I don't care about globalization, injustice + capitalism.
I truly just hope for the lesser evil.
Regardless of the continent, political system, leaders.
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