This was mostly a nice read, I do enjoy these kinds of slice-of-life blogs. I think it might have been a bit better without making claims about the economic future and history of rice farming or whatever, if the author doesn't even speak the language it's unlikely they have any real insight to offer and whatever shallow information they got off a random Youtube video is liable to be spreading misinformation that misleads uninformed readers than being actually informative. Farming a rice field does not a rice economist make.
There is one particularly funny point I'd quibble on:
> This was part of a system to discourage communism initially by encouraging ownership of business and preventing absentee landlords accumulating large tracts of land where people who work the fields would be forced into renting.
I'm dubious about the credibility of this assertion, but it is amusing to think that the goal would be to "discourage communism" by a policy that is essentially communistic in nature, in the true definition of the economic system (ownership of the means of production, ie. you own your own labour rather than renting it out).
I am, of course, nitpicking. It's rather easier for me to write comments complaining about things than praising them at length, but I was entertained by the view into the author's experiences and anecdotes.
One thing that’s worth noting though is that Japan is known for having a large degree of small business ownership, and it’s also a pretty well documented effect that high rates of small business ownership = high rates of support for capitalism, because small business owners themselves get a taste of capitalism and see it’s benefits.
The reasoning behind Gentan was that a landless peasantry was more likely to revolt. It's not dissimilar to pre-1929 kulaks, though the kulaks were encouraged/enabled to become a relatively wealthy/middle class peasantry who employed people and were directly involved in the production without owning large swathes of land, acting as a kind of a social dampener against a revolution.
Unsurprisingly the Soviet Union killed the kulak model and moved to collective farming[0], which was arguably actually communistic.
Kulaks were the stated problem, the real problem were the middling farmers. If you're a smallholder with a surplus of land, your production is very elastic.
You can plant cash crops and sell them to buy industrial products. Or you can plant crops that boost your quality of life directly: fruit, vegetables, tobacco, animal fodder.
The "price scissors" (low price of wheat, high price of goods) meant that middling farmers stopped planting wheat that the USSR needed to feed the cities and to pay for imports. To make the peasants plant wheat again the Soviets took away their land in the name of economy of scale (collectivization), but the real goal was to limit the size of personal plots.
> The reasoning behind Gentan was that a landless peasantry was more likely to revolt.
So, it was an anti-revolutionary policy. Which at that time of history worked as well as an anti-communist policy.
> Unsurprisingly the Soviet Union killed the kulak model and moved to collective farming[0], which was arguably actually communistic.
Soviet Union, whatever it had preached, implemented state capitalism - concentration of the means of production under a single owner.
It's important for me to use words precisely. If somebody implies, for example, that capitalism is the opposite of communism, that's just snatching the words and waving them like banners.
The non-oral version of the explanation author received is likely 農地解放, a postwar US/Allied military led land reform.
The core idea of it, I think, is that those landlords must have been the mainsails of prewar Japanese military dictatorship regime and its expansionism under the strong leadership of its emperor, and breaking up land ownership will make it complicated for Japan to re-consolidate power and/or to somehow become closer to the Soviets.
I guess it did serve its core purpose of keeping China/Russia at bay, considering Japan has been extraordinary antagonistic to neighboring, and/or openly communist and/or totalitarian regimes, despite running on a rather ethnocentric communism-from-first-principle political system...
You have to remember that in 1950, the US had a tremendous influence in Japan, to put it mildly, and also in 1950, the US was rabidly, performatively anti-communist. When McCarthyism was getting started stateside, we were also carrying out a "Red Purge" in Japan.
Anyway, yeah, in this context, Japan passed the Agricultural Land Act of 1952, which was intended to turn land owned by a few rich landlords into small, independently owned private farms. That may sound like the opposite of capitalism, and it is, but as I understand it, the idea was to turn what were basically serfs into a proper middle class, by redistributing the wealth and means of production directly down to them, which would then prevent communism from being as appealing. I don't know about the logic, but I guess it worked, since Japan isn't communist?
> I'm dubious about the credibility of this assertion, but it is amusing to think that the goal would be to "discourage communism" by a policy that is essentially communistic in nature, in the true definition of the economic system (ownership of the means of production, ie. you own your own labour rather than renting it out).
You are meant to "own the means of production" not in an actual, but more ideal sense. Owning a farm or workshop to the exclusion of other people makes you petit bourgeois and this is bad. Communism promotes collective farms. AFAIK Poland was the only European Eastern Bloc country to tolerate small private farms, as a concession to obstinate peasants after the death of Stalin.
Promoting small individual farms is a more Georgist, populist capitalist or possibly strictly conservative policy. Not speaking to its economic sense though.
The communist policy everywhere was to rob the small farmers and small business owners of everything they owned and force them to become quasi-serfs.
The socialist/communist economy is the final extreme stage of monopolistic capitalism, towards which USA and other Western countries have been continuously evolving during the last quarter of century. The economy of USA in 2026 is much more similar to the economy of one of the former socialist countries in 1976 than it resembles the economy of USA in 1976.
Small farmers and businessmen were the main enemies of communism, everywhere.
So what Japan enacted was indeed a good anti-communist policy.
Fighting against big companies and supporting small businesses is the opposite of communist policies.
There were a lot of great differences between true communism and what the communists themselves claimed communism to be. There were also a lot of great differences between true communism and what communism has been claimed to be in USA.
Source: I have grown up in a country occupied by communist invaders, so I know what true communism is.
> I have grown up in a country occupied by communist invaders, so I know what true communism is.
No, you know what Stalinism is, perhaps. The fact that political leaders co-opt the word 'communism' as propaganda while implementing things that aren't communistic does not change what communism is, in the same way that many authoritarian regimes co-opting the title "democratic republic" does not actually change what a democratic republic is. There must be an understanding there political leaders intentionally abuse words to achieve their goals, but that those words still have meanings which can be used by people who understand them in rational discussions.
No matter how you look at it, a policy to prevent capitalists from accumulating land beyond what they can personally labour on is objectively anti-capitalistic. Our language and ability to communicate with each other has been butchered beyond reason when we take to describing an obviously anti-capital policy as being anti-communist.
> to think that the goal would be to "discourage communism" by a policy that is essentially communistic in nature
War is peace,
Freedom is slavery,
Ignorance is strength
The point, as I see it, being that politicians like to make contradicting statements. Good for sales you could say. It is possible to cut through such lies by using logic, good on you for doing that. Unfortunately, many people take such statements as true and mostly get confused by it.
That doesn't seem strange to me at all. You give the people some of the things that they want from communism so that they will be content without communism. It's exactly what Bismarck did in Germany around 1900 (unemployment benefits, retirement funds and health insurance) and it was widely considered a success. Perhaps that was even an inspiration for Japan
Now this is an eulogy you wouldn't mind accidentally being published about you prematurely! May we all strive to leave such a profoundly positive impact on the lives of the people around us.
We are not in a post-anonymous world. People who care can absolutely still remain anonymous, for the time being, with enough effort. However, the number of services we can use is being increasingly cut off by these measures. If the trend continues, then we will soon be in such a world, but we are not there yet.
I hate comments like yours beyond belief. "Oh, I'm so smart. It's too much effort to stay private, so I've accepted that a dystopian surveillance state where every action anyone ever takes is recorded permanently and accessible to anyone is inevitable. Look at these fucking idiots worrying about this issue. Can't they just accept it will happen and shut up?"
It is also worth noting that there is a distinction to be made between government and corporate surveillance. Even if it were possible for state actors to de-anonymize specific targets with reliability (it's not, with sufficient opsec), that is very different from a corporation being able to do it. Once a corporation has your data, they will sell it to anyone and everyone, making your entire life public record for anyone to find with a bit of digging. That is a threat model that is much more likely for Average Joe than being targeted by the government, but it is also a threat which is easier to defeat than that of a state actor. This cynical defeatism is baseless.
There isn't really a comparison to be made between MonoGame and Godot. MonoGame is for programmers. Godot is for people who want to make games but don't care for programming and would rather use a GUI for development. Godot locks you into the Godot way of doing things. MonoGame is a thin cross-platform abstraction over platform APIs for sprite rendering, audio playback, input, and font, leaving you to build your game engine yourself however you like.
I think the greatest flaw in MonoGame, however, is that their cross-platform abstraction notably excludes web. Given how relatively thin MonoGame is, I think you're better off building your own framework that supports compiling to WASM as well, if you have any experience as a developer already. It is what I did and took some effort but was pretty well doable and didn't take all that long, and the payoff of being able to share your games instantly in the browser for anyone to play with just a click of a link is so worth it.
The other notable flaw in MonoGame is that the content pipeline thing it has is horrendous. When I tried it, I ended up simply bypassing using that pipeline at all. They are currently in the process of reworking it completely, I believe, but I'm not sure when that's supposed to release.
Maybe the value in MonoGame is that it does support consoles, though; I have no idea what developing for console is like, and only target web/computer/phone OS platforms myself.
> Godot is for people who want to make games but don't care for programming and would rather use a GUI for development.
You can write a lot of code when using Godot and mix that with capabilities provided by their editor.
You never have to use editor features, but can use them to avoid wasting time reinventing the wheel.
Your comment is like saying that game engines are used by people who don't care for programming and would rather make a call to handle physics interactions.
It's always funny to me that this metaphor is used to indicate a bad thing, but re-inventing the wheel is actually very valuable. Note that our vehicles do not run on stone wheels. Thank goodness we kept re-inventing wheels that were more suitable for our specific use cases! This metaphor is, therefore, exactly apt for describing off-the-shelf game engines. All of the big open game engines are heavy and make a ton of decisions for you that will not be optimal for your specific game, because they make generalized decisions necessary to support all kinds of games. This does save you time, and you can absolutely make games that are good enough with them, but it's ridiculous to me to describe making your own engine as wasting time. It's spending time to gain a benefit, which is a trade-off that is worth it for some and not necessary for others.
Are you going writing your own programming language as well? Can we call it Tolkien? Because you're making a game like J.R.R. Tolkien wrote books, and there's a reason nobody writes books the way he wrote his.
Writing your own engine is great if you want to learn how to write a game engine. Knowing how to make a game engine can be helpful when making a game, but it's not necessary to make a game. Further, if you want to learn how to make a game, it might be more worth your time to simply use an engine that already does all the things you need. That way your time and energy can be focused on making the game, which is what your goal is.
Being condescending or dismissive of tools that do everything your tools you're going out of your way to construct will have to do is... weird logic. Because the same argument goes all the way down. Why wouldn't you make your own text editor? Why wouldn't you make your own compiler? Why wouldn't you make your own kernel? Why wouldn't you make your own architecture? "If you wish to make a pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."
The answer is: because we're human beings with limited lifespans. We must stand on the shoulders of giants to see further.
One person wrote books like JRR Tolkien. His name was JRR Tolkien, and those books are widely celebrated by millions of people as classics.
I don’t have any issue with people using an engine like Godot or Unity or RPG Maker or Unreal or anything else, but I do think that there can be value in “owning the entire stack” of a project, even if that means “reinventing the wheel”.
When I do a project involving HTTP, I could reach for Rails or something, it’s a valid enough and I certainly have done that plenty of times, but I often will work with a lower level protocol. Depending on the language I will use a more simple HTTP server thing like Axum with Rust, and other times I will go full epoll/Selector with a raw socket.
I do this for a variety of reasons, but the main one is that I can build my own framework that works in a way that I think and I don’t pull in a bunch of extra crap I don’t need. I can optimize the “hot paths” of my particular project without worrying about a one-size-fits-all you get for generic frameworks, I don’t have to worry as much about leaky abstractions, and I am intimately familiar with a much larger percentage of the codebase.
Tolkien was exceptional and dedicated his entire life to it. 99.99+% of all people do not possess such a combination of talent and focus and therefore end up having to use “shortcuts”.
> and there's a reason nobody writes books the way he wrote his
And there's a reason nobody came even close to his grandiose.
> Being condescending or dismissive of tools that do everything your tools you're going out of your way to construct will have to do is... weird logic.
They've merely pointed out that there's nothing wrong with reinventing tools, you're the one attacking them.
It sounds like you don't like programming. I am in the process of writing my own language/IDE/compiler on the side of making games, and have already written a dialect of C# with a compiler that transpiles it to legal C# for use in the meantime. I would, in fact, love to write my own OS if not for the fact that proprietary hardware vendors make it virtually impossible for anybody to create a new OS that runs on consumer hardware in the year 2026. If you gave me a trillion dollars with which to build a CPU factory, I'd jump at the chance to learn that too.
People who don't like programming, who wish to abstract it all away and "stand on the shoulders of giants"[1] without understanding anything about the giants, seem to view low-level code as a bogeyman. It doesn't take a lifetime to understand. To the contrary, I would argue that low-level code is easier to work with than working only with high-level code, because you can reason about it. The more you rely on abstractions you don't understand, the more impossible it becomes to effectively reason about anything, because your reasoning is glossing over the details that make things work. But reasoning about primitives, and the things built out of those primitives that you understand, is not actually nearly as hard as the people who just want to plop Javascript libraries together and stop thinking about it would believe.
In particular, when it comes to games, especially 2D games (which are what Godot and MonoGame are typically used for), it's really not that hard. Windows has an API for doing X, Y and Z with graphics. Linux has an API for doing X, Y, and Z for graphics. You write a wrapper that your game code calls that passes through calls to each of those APIs with an #if statement filtering for which OS you're running on. Rinse and repeat the other set of platforms, with a bit of extra finangling for API limitations on web and phone OSes. Rinse and repeat for audio, input, and font handling. It took less than a month of work for me to get a polished cross-platform system working on five platforms. Not because I'm a genius, but because it's seriously just not hard. There are a thousand tutorials and books you could pick from that will give you a rundown of exactly how to do it.
Then, for example, writing your own rudimentary 2D GUI map editor can literally be done in a day. Presumably you know how to code a main menu. Add an option to the main menu that changes the gamestate to State.MapEditor when selected. Set a keybind on this state where your arrow keys increment or decrement X/Y coordinates, a keybind to place tiles/objects, a keybind to cycle which object ID is selected, and a keybind that calls a function which serializes your map state to text and saves it to a file. A little bit more work for a moving camera viewport, but it's not that hard. Want more features, polish it more. When you fully understand the primitives your system is built with, adding new features can be done quickly and easily, because it's so easy to reason about compared to reasoning about code you've never read built with primitives you don't understand.
3D does up the difficulty level, but it's by no means unachievable, either. The content creator Tsoding is currently doing a semi-weekly challenge to build his own 3D game engine from scratch on video, and he's making great progress despite not spending that much time on it, a side project that gets a few hours a week.
The end result of all this is a codebase that is more performant, lightweight, easy to read, and very easy to extend. I think developing your own engine can actually save time in the long run (if you're willing to forego the instant gratification), because it's so easy to fix bugs and add new features when you have a complete mental map of your codebase and the primitives used to construct it. For example, I have a friend who used Godot to develop a game, and they've been plagued for months with a low percentage chance of fatal crashes on a boss that they are completely unable to identify and fix, and it's because they don't have a mental map of the engine code. It's simply not even possible for them to reason about what in the engine could be going wrong because they don't even know what the engine is actually doing.
[1] Another metaphor that is grossly mis-invoked, in my view. Do you think Isaac Newton did not understand the work of those that came before him? The great thing about giants is that by doing the hard work of exploring new concepts, they make it easier for everyone who comes after them to learn them. I think it's a bit intellectually lazy to put off the work of giants as something that should not, or even can not, be learned.
[2] "like J.R.R. Tolkien wrote books, and there's a reason nobody writes books the way he wrote his." It's a real shame more people don't, considering there has never been a fantasy work rivalling his in the nearly century since.
It sounds like you're talking about making an equivalent of Super Mario from the 80s, but modern games are in fact much more complex.
And no, just because people in the 80s enjoyed Super Mario doesn't mean it's the pinnacle of game design, and that there's no need to create anything more complex.
> It took less than a month of work for me to get a polished cross-platform system working on five platforms.
You simply don't know where the bugs and performance pitfalls are because you haven't encountered them, yet. That is especially true regarding consoles with their custom hardware and mobile devices with their abundance of cheap, often not well engineered hardware and sketchy drivers.
"Modern games" span a wide range of things. I develop solely 2D games, because I prefer 2D games over 3D games. I think that even today 2D games are more enjoyable than 3D games. That doesn't mean Super Mario Bros. That can mean Europa Universalis IV, it can mean Stardew Valley, it can mean Magic the Gathering Online, it can mean Hollow Knight, it can mean Slay the Spire, it can mean a huge variety of interesting and engaging games, none of which require 3D graphics. 2D games can be as complex as you'd like them to be, far more complex in game logic than a 3D shooter even. The more complex you'd like them to be, the easier it gets to implement them if you understand the primitives you're implementing them with. Imagine trying to optimize your data structures when you don't even know what an int32 is? There are real game developers in the world who don't know even that much. It is a great thing that off-the-shelf game engines provide a level of accessibility to allow anyone to develop games, but they do not represent the pinnacle of what can be achieved in software engineering. They are the exact opposite of it, in fact.
> You simply don't know where the bugs and performance pitfalls are because you haven't encountered them, yet.
What is your point? I profile my games and have detailed logging systems. If I or my users run into performance issues, I address them as I come across them. Understanding my codebase at a low level makes it significantly easier to dig into problems and investigate underlying root causes than anyone on Unity will ever be able to. If you use Unity, you are putting your complete faith that Unity has perfectly optimized X low-level problem away at the engine level. If they haven't, and you run into that issue in your game, you are completely fucked. I love being solely responsible for the defects in my games. That means I can fix them myself. The worst thing in the world in software development is when somebody else's fuck-up becomes your problem, and you can't fix it, so you have to implement some hacky workaround, if you can even figure out why the closed-source engine code you didn't write and can't read is behaving incorrectly to work around it in the first place. Sometimes that still happens anyways -- our hardware-OS stacks are built with tens or hundreds of millions of line of dogshit code, and you can't get around it if you want to create software for platforms people use, but you can at least remove as many dependencies on bad code you have no understanding of as possible.
You're already too late at that point, and you probably lost some players, that wanted to try your game and maybe would've even liked it.
And I'm not talking about gameplay logic bugs - I'm talking about issues caused by bad drivers or by not having intimate knowledge about the hardware.
> If you use Unity, you are putting your complete faith that Unity has perfectly optimized X low-level problem away at the engine level
Most major engines allow to bypass high-level abstractions either through scripts that access low-level systems (Unity) or by directly letting people modify the source code (Unreal Engine, Godot).
> I love being solely responsible for the defects in my games.
> by directly letting people modify the source code (Unreal Engine, Godot).
Unreal is not open source, and while Godot is, I would wager 90% of its users never even look at the source code. It very specifically attracts people who want an easy way to make games without prior expertise.
> Players do not care about that.
Users don't care about much when it comes to software quality, honestly. They accept 20 FPS, slow loading, bug-riddled games that consume +20gb ram and +100gb more disk space than necessary. They may complain about a game if it gets bad enough, but they still buy and play those games. My games are significantly more optimized than most. They aren't perfect, but they don't need to be. They don't even need to be as optimized as I have made them, it's mostly just a point of pride and making the kind of software I want to see in the world. I think the only way you lose a player on technical points is if they literally cannot boot your game, but those issues plague engine games too. I had driver issues myself crashing on boot with an UE5 game two weeks ago.
>Note that our vehicles do not run on stone wheels. Thank goodness we kept re-inventing wheels that were more suitable for our specific use cases!
Improving a wheel design does not require reinventing it. The people who designed the car wheel were able to look at previous designs of wheels instead of needing to invent the wheel themselves.
So too with game engine design, where you have dozens of designs and hundreds of tutorials to learn from in the building of your own. It is seriously funny that no matter how you try to contort the metaphor, it continues to fit perfectly in a way that indicates it is not actually a bad thing.
>Godot locks you into the Godot way of doing things. MonoGame is a thin cross-platform abstraction over platform APIs for sprite rendering, audio playback, input, and font, leaving you to build your game engine yourself however you like.
To be clear, the framework I built is independent of the MonoGame framework. As for how it was built, it's relatively straightforward. There are three layers: platform layer, framework layer, and the game layer. On the platform layer, I started by implementing a basic hello world-tier game loop using Win32 window/messaging APIs, OpenGL for graphics rendering, and OpenAL for audio playback. Then I wrote tidy wrapper layer functions for calling into the platform layer, with better ergonomics/readability, which the game layer calls. Then, I began adding WASM APIs at the platform layer, with branching #if statements in the framework layer that control whether src\platform\win32 or src\platform\wasm functions are called based on build target. In this way, the game code remained unchanged but support for web was seamlessly added (with some pain in adjusting the wrapper APIs to handle the large differences in Win32 and web APIs). Then repeated this process for each additional platform. The primary csproj is set up to branch into different csprojs per build target, with one using the Microsoft.NET.Sdk.WebAssembly project SDK, etc. Over time, I expanded features of the platform layer and wrapper layer as they were needed.
For the game I had already made progress on when trying MonoGame, I had already written a wrapper layer over the MonoGame APIs even before I had started on my own framework. My new framework wrapper layer was designed as similarly as possible, so transitioning my game code to the new framework was mostly painless, and only required adjusting the shape of some rendering/audio/input calls here and there.
I’m not the commenter that you asked, but I have also built a cross platform game framework with backends for SDLGPU and WebGL. The answer to your question is pretty basic. AI did it for me.
I asked it to create a canvas-like API, noting that it should create platform independent code. The canvas API populates arrays for vertices, indices, and other relevant things relating to draw batches. My game is built on top of this platform independent canvas code, and is itself platform independent.
Then you have the platform code, which simply reads the memory of those arrays and does what it needs to do to draw it in its environment. I have barely looked at the platform code but it seems to just work, and it is really performant. It around 1000 lines of code for the web target. The key is to use shared memory as the bridge between the compiled WASM code and the platform code for draw calls. As I said, it’s mostly just arrays of vertices, texture ids, and indices.
It took me some thinking on how to define textures in a platform independent way, but it all ended up working well. I bounced some ideas with the AI to come up with a solution just using ids.
From there I just kept adding more features, FMOD support, shaders, etc.
Edit: Oops, I misread that your comment was referring specifically to getting Monogame on web. I thought I’d leave it here anyway though because it might help you. The key insight for me was that the canvas API (and Monogame as well) is just batching up vertices, indices, into draw calls, before the platform specific stuff happens. I realised this after investigating how the Spine animation software was able to achieve so much cross platform support (it’s just providing triangles with texture ids to platform code). You don’t need any concept of a platform to represent the entirety of your games as triangles associated with texture ids in memory.
If we judged all startups by the same standards (in terms of revenue to debt ratios), many of today's established companies would have been "failures" at the same point in their life cycle.
> Shopify SimGym, and Javier Moreno's tech blog about it
The embodiment of what our industry is becoming. A spambot-generated article about a service selling you spambots to visit your storefront, which has literally negative real world utility. There is zero indication that this thing has made any money. It's also completely unrelated to the topic at hand, which is specifically about OpenClaw and the viral marketing trend of people buying Mac Minis as a platform to run their own spambot wrapper. For bonus points, that article is also spambot-generated. There is already a spambot comment in the thread from an obvious spam account with hundreds of upvotes that was already nuked once before but went back to spamming. Marvelous. What wonderful technology we've built.
I very much believe something profound has happened in the era of ultra-convenience and social media etc. Its damaged the psyche of humans and the way they think. Invention and innovation will become less prevalant due to this.
This is an LLM-generated article, for anyone who might wish to save the "15 min read" labelled at the top. Recounts an entirely plausible but possibly completely made up narrative of incompetent IT, and contains no real substance.
How do you know? Some of the text has a slightly LLM-ish flavour to it (e.g. the numbered lists) but other than that I don’t see any solid evidence of that
Edit: I looked into it a bit and things seems to check out, this person has scuba diving certifications on their LinkedIn and the site seems real and high-effort. While I also don’t have solid proof that it’s not AI generated either, making accusations like this based on no evidence doesn’t seem good at all
Not them but the formatting screams LLM to me. Random "bolding" (rendered on this website as blue text) of phrases, the heading layout, the lists at the end (bullet point followed by bolded text), common repeats of LLM-isms like "A. Not B". None of these alone prove it but combined they provide strong evidence.
While I wouldn't go so far as to say the post is entirely made up (it's possible the underlying story is true) - I would say that it's very likely that OP used an LLM to edit/write the post.
HN's comment section new favourite sport, trying to guess if an article was generated by LLM. It's completely pointless. Why not focus on what's being said instead?
I thought the same thing. With the rate LLMs are improving, it's not going to be too much longer before no one can tell.
I also enjoy all the "vibes" people list out for why they can tell, as though there was any rhyme or reason to what they're saying. Models change and adapt daily so the "heading structure" or "numbered list" ideas become outdated as you're typing them.
Because I find LLM-generated content very annoying to read. It's sloggish, bloated, and the speaker always has this cringe way of trying to connect to the audience.
I don't believe the story itself is made up by an LLM but I'd argue that if you have an LLM write your story then it's no problem for you to have it add a TL;DR at the top so we can skip the slop.
> This is an LLM-generated article, for anyone who might wish to save the "15 min read" labelled at the top. Recounts an entirely plausible but possibly completely made up narrative of incompetent IT, and contains no real substance.
Nothing in the original message refers to it being clickbait, the core complaint is the LLM-like tone and the lack of substance, which you also just threw it there without references ironically.
> What, exactly, is the problem with disclosing the nature of the article for people who wish to avoid spending their time in that way?
It's alright as long as it's not based on faith or guesswork.
It is not based on guesswork. For whatever it's worth, I have gotten 7 LLM accounts banned from HN in the past week based on accurately detecting and reporting them to moderation[1]. Many of these accounts had between dozens and 100 upvotes, some with posts rated to the top of their threads that escaped detection by others. I have not once misidentified and reported an account that was genuinely human. I am aware that other people have poorly-tuned heuristics and make false accusations, but it is possible to build the skill to detect LLM output reliably, and I have done so. In the end, it is up to you whether you believe me, but I am simply trying to offer a warning for people who dislike reading generated material, nothing more.
[1] Unlike LLM-generated articles, posting LLM-generated comments is actually against the rules.
Congrats, and thanks for your work, but you should be aware that HN comments are completely different from articles. What makes you think the skills/automations required to identify LLM generated HN comments will work seamlessly with submitted articles? You have to do a statistical analysis of this, otherwise it's just guesswork.
You also have to take into account that the medium is the message[1]. In a nutshell, the more people read LLM generated posts and interact with chatbots, the higher the influence of LLM style in their writing -- the whole "delve" comes to mind, and double dashes. So even if you have a machine that correctly identified LLM generated posts, you can't be sure it'll keep working.
Those are a lot of words to say you guessed. And the banning comment is nice I guess but pretty meaningless. Does moderation really always report back to you when you make such an accusation ? Who's to even say all the banned accounts were LLMs ? You know what would happened if i got banned because someone accused me of being a LLM ? Nothing. I'd take it as a sign to do other things.
Let's say you are the LLM detecting genius you paint yourself to be. Well guess what? You're human and you're going to make mistakes, if you haven't made a bunch of them already. So if you have nothing better to add to a post than to guess this, you probably shouldn't say anything at all. Like you said, it's not even against the rules.
You know I had a thoughtful comment written in response to this that wouldn’t post because your comment got flagged to death when I tried to submit it!
Your firebrand attitude is doing a disservice to everyone who takes vibe hunting vibecraft seriously!
The intended audience doesn’t even care that this is LLM-assisted writing. Whether the narrative is affected by AI is second to the technical details. This is technical documentation communicated through a narrative, not personal narrative about someone’s experience with a technical problem. There’s a difference!
Can you share how you confirmed this is LLM generated? I review vulnerability reports submitting by the general public and it seems very plausible based on my experience (as someone who both reviews reports and has submitted them), hence why I submitted it. I am also very allergic to AI slop and did not get the slop vibe, nor would I knowingly submit slop posts.
I assure you, the incompetence in both securing systems and operating these vulnerability management systems and programs is everywhere. You don't need an LLM to make it up.
(my experience is roughly a decade in cybersecurity and risk management, ymmv)
The headers alone are a huge giveaway. Spams repetitive sensatational writing tropes like "No X. No Y. No Z." and "X. Not Y" numerous times. Incoherent usage of bold type all throughout the article. Lack of any actually verifiable concrete details. The giant list of bullet points at the end that reads exactly like helpful LLM guidance. Many signals throughout the entire piece, but don't have time to do a deep dive. It's fine if you don't believe me, I'm not suggesting the article be removed. Just giving a heads-up for people who prefer not to read generated articles.
Regarding your allergy, my best guess is that it is generated by Claude, not ChatGPT, and they have different tells, so you may be sensitive to one but not the other. Regarding plausibility, that's the thing that LLMs excel at. I do agree it is very plausible.
Pangram[0] thinks the closing part is AI generated but the opening paragraphs are human. Certainly the closing paragraphs have a bit of an LLM flavor (a header titled "The Pattern", eg)
There are no automated AI detectors that work. False positives and false negatives are both common, and the false positives particularly render them incredibly dangerous to use. Just like LLMs have not actually replaced competent engineers working on real software despite all the hysteria about them doing so, they also can't automate detection, and it is possible to build up stronger heuristics as a human. I am fully confident and would place a large sum of money on this article being LLM-generated if we could verify the bet, but we can't, so you'll just have to take my word for it, or not.
I'm very sensitive to this but disagree vehemently.
I saw one or two sigils (ex. a little eager to jump to lists)
It certainly has real substance and detail.
It's not, like, generic LinkedIn post quality.
You could tl;dr it to "autoincrementing user ids and a default password set = vulnerability, and the company responded poorly." and react as "Jeez, what a waste of time, I've heard 1000 of these stories."
I don't think that reaction is wrong, per se, and I understand the impulse. I feel this sort of thing more and more as I get older.
But, it fitting into a condensed structure you're familiar with isn't the same as "this is boring slop." Moby Dick is a book about some guy who wants revenge, Hamlet is about a king who dies.
Additionally, I don't think what people will interpret from what you wrote is what you meant, necessarily. Note the other reply at this time, you're so confident and dismissive that they assume you're indicating the article should be removed from HN.
There is one particularly funny point I'd quibble on:
> This was part of a system to discourage communism initially by encouraging ownership of business and preventing absentee landlords accumulating large tracts of land where people who work the fields would be forced into renting.
I'm dubious about the credibility of this assertion, but it is amusing to think that the goal would be to "discourage communism" by a policy that is essentially communistic in nature, in the true definition of the economic system (ownership of the means of production, ie. you own your own labour rather than renting it out).
I am, of course, nitpicking. It's rather easier for me to write comments complaining about things than praising them at length, but I was entertained by the view into the author's experiences and anecdotes.
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