To my knowledge there are only a handful of public transit systems in the world that operate at a profit, let alone that operate at enough of a profit to recover construction costs. As in, maybe 5 if you squint really hard. Who do you expect to fund new ones if not the government?
Regional or state is better than local government. Local governments would struggle to raise the required funds for the costs of modern transit and would have a mandate to really support transit within their municipal borders vs a regional solution that is agnostic to the byzantine municipal borders.
This seems likely to be worse. How do you screen out people who point an LLM at your values and ask it to answer your questions in a way likely to appeal to a recruiter using an LLM to score the responses?
I had read 80% of the post and loved it. Then I came to see few comments - Saw yours and now having difficulty reading further. That means:
1. AI has gotten better - or eventually most people would like reading AI generated content
2. Author is just using AI to post-process - content is original
I feel like the author wrote like the full plan/ substance himself, and gave to an AI the formatting. It's quite fine for me so actually, as long as the substance make sense/is logical.
Some of the headings are very AI-cliche: "Hospitality Is a Dialogue, Service Is a Monologue"; "AI Raises the Floor. Humans Raise the Ceiling"; "Your Employees Are the Moat. The Compounding Is Invisible."
The author didn't use headings like that in their 2024 blog posts.
I can only speak for myself here, but if I feel like I've read a whole paragraph that should have been half a sentence, that's my signal there's possibly AI generated content in there
> He called the restaurant. He was put on hold for thirty minutes. When someone finally answered, they were apologetic but firm — the restaurant was fully booked. No warmth. No conversation. Just a long wait and a closed door.
If that was written by a human, it's embarrassing.
I have definitely noticed other people using LLM-choice words, myself included, more frequently. It's a strange phenomenon to witness. Obviously the models got them from us first so there must've been some popularity there prior, but the boost is clear. Blast radius, load-bearing, shape, and so on. Or maybe they were always there and my confirmation bias is in high gear.
One I've started noticing is the "quotation marks around a phrase awkwardly trying to bundle a concept" thing. Like all LLM cliches it's something that has been used in writing for a long time, but I've seen it so much more recently. I think lots of people have picked this up from seeing LLMs use it. But like you said, who knows.
I do have a sneaking suspicion it's a mix of things, I'm at the point now that I do get a bit of an odd feeling whenever I'm reading AI produced content
I suspect over time it will get good enough that I'll need a larger sample size to identify it, however that won't solve what I think of as the "why does this need to exist" problem, I've noticed that a fair bit of AI content hits that mark, it can be fun, but I've not experienced that feeling of engaging with something that's been well thought out / executed, maybe we'll hit that point[0], but I suspect it will take a while
It read to me to be entirely generated. The lack of details that people would normally mention tripped my spidey-sense. ( Who wouldn't name-check the restaurant in the opening paragraph? )
A double check, the author appearing to take up blogging in 2023, mostly about data science, with all the tell-tale signs of generated posts.
How does Pangram detect this? How do we know this is any more reliable than just asking any HN user to judge a text for AI signs, i.e. how is this more authoritative than the comments you're responding to?
The downvotes are understandable. People really wish there is a reliable way to detect AI-gened content. If there is such a tool thew Show HN post will break the record of the post score.
But there isn't and won't be such a tool. As a fallback people defend Pangram etc. Posting Pangram scores in comments is fundamentally no difference than posting ChatGPT responses in comments, and it's quite hilarious that the former is normalized on HN.
Because I think that a world that is increasingly isolated by technology and divided by ideology is craving authentic personal interaction with real humans. And I think that’s something AI will not be able to duplicate because it requires real human beings.
Since I couldn't be bothered, I had AI read it and tell me the outcome: they did in fact go to online-only bookings, freeing the staff from the phones so they could help customers more.
I always wonder how people can tell. For this particular article, was it the thirty-four occurrences of em dashes with spaces on either side? Something else obvious?
It is the em dashes and the excessive wordiness as well as a lot of "not this, but that".
Eg:
"Not dramatically. Just quietly. " -- This is filler words. Whether it's dramatic or quiet has no relevance to the point they're making.
It also loves threes: "Well-modelled, properly sourced, beautifully visualised to requirements" - again, all irrelevant. The point they're making is that it's measuring the wrong thing, not that "beautifully visual things can be incorrect".
"There’s a piece of this conversation that most leaders miss, and it’s the part I care about most" - this hook of "most people miss" it is very common in AI writing.
Articles of this type suggest a fun game: "LLM or Marketroid?" Because either one could have written it, and both are capable of about equivalent levels of original thought. (whoops did i just say that out loud)
It was the content. So many very specific claims with no source, just stuff being made up. I don't know who Brené Brown is, perhaps she specifically researches trust, but how curious that her daughter can raise a problem with trust, specifically cite two named behaviours that build trust, and then Brown just happens to have a database of trust-building behaviours to hand, that she hasn't even analysed, ready to output a teachable moment.
In the article, she wasn't introduced as a researcher at all, but suddenly "She went back to her research data...". This totally smells like an LLM refactor where it re-emits surface level details, but completely misses the key beats that tie ideas together across a story.
What's your point? Yes, humans and AIs CAN make similar errors. However, continuity and context churn at this level is the sort of error that humans make rarely and AIs make constantly.
By itself it is not a sure sign of LLM output, but along with other signals it is highly suggestive.
Well, sometimes there's flat-out nonsense that seems to have been written purely to back into the author's thesis:
You cannot design an algorithm that eavesdrops on dinner conversation and dispatches someone to buy a street hot dog, because the person on the receiving end would immediately sense the machinery of it.
But usually there's also:
- Word count hovering between four and five thousand words
- Dramatic/narrative section titles
- "No X, no Y. Just Z"
Last but certainly not least, there's the Lists of Exactly Three Things. I counted literally thirty in this piece. Examples:
- "...the ritual of a human voice, the small exchange about an anniversary or a first date, the warmth of being recognised."
- "Who was celebrating a birthday? Who was on a first date? What had a regular not finished on their plate six months ago?"
- "You can’t purchase it, automate it, or accelerate it with a clever marketing campaign."
- "...forgive outages, laugh off a late delivery, stay through a price increase."
- "...the food arrives hot, the bill is accurate, the room is clean."
- "You notice, you adjust, you respond."
I personally thought to myself "written by AI" after this part:
... the restaurant was fully booked. No warmth. No conversation. Just a long wait and a closed door. In trying to humanise the process, he’d made it worse.
I'm sure some people write this way, but most don't. And AI writes this way.
And the llm witch hunt crowd are here. "I dont like the post so it must be AI."
This is getting really tiring. I keep getting downvoted but I will keep pointing out this sucks -- no criticism, no challenging of ideas, just shit post "This is AI" and move on.
It's very clearly written by AI, which means that the thoughts expressed are not novel and the story told cannot be trusted. How can you expect people to spend time digesting the content if the author did not spend time writing it? It would be more honest to show the prompt, or the unpolished draft.
I believe it’s still a single section, so probably around 250 (at least that’s about what it was when I was there a long time ago). Compared to the 1000+ who take 61A.
This is not correct. Here's Pfizer's 2025 annual report [1]. Total expenses for the year were $55.1 billion. Advertising expenses were $2.7 billion of that, or just under 5%. R&D expenses were $12.1 billion, or just under 22%. They do have a lot of SG&A, but the large majority of that is not going to marketing.
Advertising is only a subset of marketing. From that doc, look at operating costs: SGA was ~$11B and R&D ~$12B - basically 50/50. Pfizer is very international, so is pretty difficult to break out US operating costs and what marketing vs R&D is for just the US. But one can also assume US marketing is higher than any other nation as direct-to-consumer advertising is primarily only allowed in the US.
In addition to snmx999's point, you're also not specifying that you want to wash your car at the car wash (as opposed to washing it in your driveway or something, in which case the car wash is superfluous information). The article's prompt failed in Sonnet 4.6, but the one below works fine. I think more humans would get it right as well.
I want to wash my car at the car wash. The car wash is 50 meters away and my car is in my driveway. Should I walk or drive?
I don't think it is, though. Where is the car? Do you want to wash your car at the car wash? Both of those are rather important pieces of information. Everyone is relying on assumptions to answer the question, which is fine, but in my opinion not a great reasoning test.
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