Good idea - sort of remind me of YikYak. That was really fun & actually a great way to get local tips if you were new into an area with a good community. Towns it was dead, but if I was in a city that I'd never been to before, put a question out and you would get some real good insights.
It faced a fair few controversies & got taken offline and not sure what became of it...
Always wanted something with that... casual fence... to think of a better word again
This particular excerpt is reeking of it with pretty much every line. I'll point out the patterns in the English translation, but all of these patterns apply cross-language.
"Classic/typical "x + y"", particularly when diagnosing an issue. This one is a really easy tell because humans, on aggregate, do not use quotation marks like this. There is absolutely no reason to quote these words here, and yet LLMs will do a combined quoted "x + y" where a human would simply write something natural like "hidden assumptions and configuration chains" without extraneous quotes.
> The configuration system requires “bad → reject, keep last-known-good” logic.
Another pattern with overeager usage of quotes is this ""x → y, z"" construct with very terse wording.
> This wasn't an attack, but a classic chain reaction
LLMs aggressively use "Not X, but Y". This is also a construct commonly used by humans, of course, but aside from often being paired with an em-dash, another tell is whether it actually contributes anything to the sentence. "Not X, but Y" is strongly contrasting and can add a dramatic flair to the thing being constrasted, but LLMs overuse it on things that really really don't need to be dramatised or contrasted.
> Rust mitigates certain errors, but the complexity in boundary layers, data flows, and configuration pipelines remains beyond the language's scope. The real challenge lies in designing robust system contracts, isolation layers, and fail-safe mechanisms.
Two lists of three concepts back-to-back. LLMs enjoy, love, and adore this construct.
> Hats off to Cloudflare's engineers—those on the front lines putting out fires bear the brunt of such incidents.
This kind of completely vapid, feel-good word soup utilising a heroic analogy for something relatively mundane is another tell.
And more broadly speaking, there's a sort of verbosity and emptiness of actual meaning that permeates through most LLM writing. This reads absolutely nothing like what an engineer breaking down an outage looks like. Like, the aforementioned line of... "Rust mitigates certain errors, but the complexity in boundary layers, data flows, and configuration pipelines remains beyond the language's scope. The real challenge lies in designing robust system contracts, isolation layers, and fail-safe mechanisms.". What is that actually communicating to you? It piles on technical lingo and high-level concepts in a way that is grammatically correct but contains no useful information for the reader.
Bad writing exists, of course. There's plenty of bad writing out there on the internet, and some of it will suffer from flaws like these even when written by a human, and some humans do like their em-dashes. But it's generally pretty obvious when the writing is taken on aggregate and you see recognisable pattern after pattern combined with em-dashes combined with shallowness of meaning combined with unnecessary overdramatisations.
I've just installed solar & batteries (not 2 weeks ago we turned them on!). Be interesting to see how things will unfold and I love reading stories on how people have got on with theirs. It was roughly ~£12,900 installed (in the UK) and we pay 32.596p/kWh & 42.290p/day standing charge...
Will either pay off well or be an expensive lesson
I'll give this a go as it took me far too long to work this out - and some might disagree with me.
Taking every single ounce of advice people give to you.
I've found that everyone has a pathway in life, a way they are able to unlock and achieve their full potential. I found that what works for one person, may not always work for another. When I was starting out I would listen without question to anyones advice, peers, managers, business owners and attempt to shape myself to accommodate that advice & guidance - to only find that it would stifle me. Everyone has an opinion on how to do things best, but sometimes you just need to believe in yourself and your own capabilities.
Now I'm not saying don't ever listen to anyone, just be selective on who you listen to.
The thing which always irks me about the "I have nothing to hide" comment is would you behave the same if you were being observed. The conversations we all have in the pub, in the car and even in the privacy of our home - would they be the same knowing there is a camera or audio device listening.
May just be my tin foil hat speaking, but I believe a lot of things would change knowing you're always being listened to even when you think it's just two people in the room
My standard response to "I have nothing to hide" is "then why are you wearing clothes?". It seems to work relatively well to put things into the exact perspective you describe.
My response is to "I have nothing to hide", is that isn't what you're giving up when you give away your privacy. You should be comfortable with "never needing to hide anything in your past, present, or future". The future is impossible to predict and actions that could be innocuous today may cause a great deal of trouble for you in the future. You give up that right forever when you lose privacy.
I disagree. A lot of what people would "hide" are in fact equivalent to "clothes" worn because of social norms or taboos.
A comment I make to a friend sitting next to me would be inappropriate to make to the policeman in the corner, or to my boss. Inappropriate to the point of there being consequences.
100%. I have group chats with friends where we express views that would be viewed askance, to put it lightly, by those that don't share the same opinions. Something to hide? Not particularly, but its private discussion so fuck off thank you kindly.
> but for the negative social consequences of the alternative
You mean like hiding your bank balance because the social consequences of people seeing it? Or hiding your medical records because of the social consequences of people seeing it?
Social taboo is a reason we hide things. We know there are social taboos against many things that are harmless, like nudity, so we conceal them. I feel it's a pretty good analogy.
I believe there is a much more powerful control mechanism than recording devices. It's in your own brain created by years of socialization and there is no way to hide form it, no thought without it. Some may call it conscience but I think may of its parts are simply surveillance software. It's why most people unconsciously signal it to others when they lie or have done some socially unacceptable things. It can even lower your own self-esteem. That is to say that it has real power.
As a Brit who's never really "followed" the Royals - I gotta say this makes me sad. The Queen stood for so much, in such a dignified way. May she rest in peace
As a former Hong Konger from before the handover but has long ago become American, the news also made me sad. I've always maintained a degree of affection for her throughout the years. I think the dignity you mentioned really helped in that.
Was she? Did she? I couldn't place a single example she set for the country, or moral she espoused other than aloofness and politeness. I'm not sure I would count either of those as a moral.
Her behind doors effects on laws and how they would effect her interests may have set an example[0], but not a positive one.
Have fun