This post wasn't written in English, it was written in AIglish. (For god's sake, please tell me you see it at this point and you don't need to punch the opening into Pangram to see '100% AI' to recognize it by now?)
So in a way it's proving its own point. Why painfully write out by hand in English when the LLM will do a better job by porting your English prompt to AIglish and get +235 points and #3 on HN?
> For god's sake, please tell me you see it at this point and you don't need to punch the opening into Pangram to see '100% AI' to recognize it by now?
I was not able to detect it's written by LLMs from the opening paragraphs. Can you please share some insights as to what gives it away. I didn't find any blatant stuff like em dashes or "it's not just x it's y".
Correct — and honestly? Not just correct, but perceptive. You didn't just read the post — you saw through it. That's not pattern matching — that's instinct.
Yes, I definitely take this as a kind of reductio of Grow-Speech, after having defined it rigorously enough to be enforceable, or as chatbots love to say now, 'auditable' (https://gwern.net/grow-speech).
The LLMs follow the rules rigorously (barring a handful of inessential remaining errors like 'wires'), but show that you can easily satisfy the letter and not the spirit of the exercise, and that Grow-Speech can be flimsy and arbitrary once you start trying to use it seriously for something much more ambitious than https://gwern.net/doc/cs/algorithm/1998-steele.pdf because you just start using phrases or obscure Anglo-Saxon words (even if you can't go full Anglish).
When I look back at it now, I realize that Steele spends a lot of the apparently impressive length on fluff or descriptive language, and trades heavily on the fact that we already know what a programming language is or what an integer or an object is. I do not think anyone who doesn't have at least a hazy grasp of 'object' is really going to grasp a definition like:
> An object is a datum the meanings of whose parts are laid down by a set of language
rules. In the Java programming language, these rules use types to make clear which parts
of an object may cite other objects. Objects may be grouped to form classes. Knowing the class of an object tells you most of what you need to know of how that object acts. Objects may have fields; each field of an object can hold a datum. Which datum it holds may change from time to time. Each field may have a type, which tells you what data can be in that field at run time (and, what is more, it tells you what data can not be in that field at run time).
But when you try to tell people about something genuinely unfamiliar like REINFORCE, the obscurity becomes clear. (I'm going to revise REINFORCE to "a rule that makes moves in runs that beat a base more apt, and moves in runs that fall short less apt"... but it's not that much better, honestly.)
Query strings break unpredictably, and that alone is enough to ban them by third parties, especially for something as minor as referral tracking.
Example: The Browser is a well known link aggregation paid periodical. I subscribe, and every 1 in 10 or 20 links I clicked, it'd just break outright and I'd have to tediously edit the URL to fix it (assuming the website didn't do a silent ninja URL edit and make it impossible for me to remember what URL I opened possibly days or weeks ago in a tab and potentially fix it). This was annoying enough to bother me regularly, but not enough to figure out a workaround.
Why? ...Because TB was injecting a '?referrer=The_Browser' or something, and the receiving website server got confused by an invalid query and errored out. 'Wow, how careless of The Browser! Are they really so incompetent as to not even check their URLs before mailing an issue out to paying subscribers?'
I wondered the same thing, and I eventually complained to them. It turns out, they did check all their URLs carefully before emailing them out... emphasis on 'before', which meant that they were checking the query-string-free versions, which of course worked fine. (This is a good example of a testing failure due to not testing end-to-end or integration testing: they should have been testing draft emails sent to a testing account, to check for all possible issues like MIME mangling, not just query string shenanigans.)
After that they fixed it by making sure they injected the query string before they checked the URLs. (I suggested not injecting it at all, but they said that for business reasons, it was too valuable to show receiving websites exactly how much traffic TB was driving to them on net, because referrers are typically stripped from emails and reshares and just in general - this, BTW, is why the OP suggestion of 'just set a HTTP referrer header!' is naive and limited to very narrow niches where you can be sure that you can, in fact, just set the referrer header.)
But this error was affecting them for god knows how long and how many readers and how many clicks, and they didn't know. Because why would they? The most important thing any programmer or web dev should know about users is that "they may never tell you": https://pointersgonewild.com/2019/11/02/they-might-never-tel... (excerpts & more examples: https://gwern.net/ref/chevalier-boisvert-2019 ). No matter how badly broken a feature or service or URL may be, the odds are good that no user will ever tell you that. Laziness, public goods, learned helplessness / low standards, I don't know what it is, but never assume that you are aware of severe breakage (or vice-versa, as a user, never assume the creator is aware of even the most extreme problem or error).
Even the biggest businesses.... I was watching a friend the other day try to set up a bank account in Central America, and clicking on one of the few banks' websites to download the forms on their main web page. None of the form PDF download links worked. "That's not a good sign", they said. No, but also not as surprising as you might think - the bank might have no idea that some server config tweak broke their form links. After all, at least while I was watching, my friend didn't tell them about their problem either!
I don't see how your example, The Browser (thebrowser.com), supports your argument that ad-hoc query-string additions are so prone-to-breaking that 3rd parties should ban them.
In fact, the example seems to suggest the opposite: a 17+ year successful paid subscription business – to which you appear to be a generally-satisfied customer! – receives enough "business value" from the practice, despite its failure modes, they don't want to stop. Improving their probe of the risk-of-failure was enough.
Seemingly, the practice works often enough, pleasing more destination sites than it angers, that "referral tracking" is not something "so minor".
> Improving their probe of the risk-of-failure was enough.
The point was it was dangerous in a way they didn't even realize was an issue, for a thin business rationale. Unless you are going to do thorough tests and understand the risk you are taking (which they did not, as evidenced by screwing it up systematically at scale for years), you should not be doing it.
And it's not obvious that they are correct in their tightened-up testing, because even if a link is correct at the time they test it, it could break at any time thereafter.
> to which you appear to be a generally-satisfied customer!
No matter what _X_ is, _X_ would have to be a pretty epic screwup to make a customer unsubscribe solely over that! I never claimed it was such a major epic screwup that it could do that. So that is an unreasonable criterion: "well, you didn't outright quit, so I guess it can't be that bad." Indeed, but I never said it was, and somewhat bad is still bad; I was in fact fairly annoyed by the random breakage, and at the margin, everything matters. If TB did a few other things, in sum, they could potentially convince me to let my subscription lapse. An annoyance here, a papercut here, and pretty soon a generally-satisfied customer is no longer so satisfied...
But doesn't that make it bad? It doesn't say anything new. Unlike the software in question, which is personalized, so it's not even symbolically reflecting the topic. It's a sheer waste of pixels and time spent looking at it or scrolling past the cognitive junk food.
I didn't enjoy it. It flunks my criteria for good AI images, because there is no there there: https://gwern.net/blog/2025/good-ai-samples It wasted my thoughts as I stared at it, trying to learn about the author and 'X uses this' and thinking about how moleskin notebooks related to personal computing etc... only to realize I had been lied to and my time wasted, as he took advantage of my good faith - the good faith I extend to a fellow hacker, that their images will be meaningful and worth reading.
Just as their words are presumed to be meaningful and worth reading... but slightly less so every day, I fear.
tldr: do a standard img2img workflow where you lay out a skeleton or skeleton or low-res version, and then turn it into the final high-quality photorealistic version, instead of trying to zeroshot it purely from a text prompt.
> Clearly if it was able to be leaked it already was being preserved
Preserved by whom? Many leaks are done by old or ex-employees who quietly kept a shall we say 'backup' of their work. More than one 'official' re-release has been rumored to be an embarrassed company quietly filing the serial numbers off a rogue leak because they realized way too late that their archival practices were inadequate.
What this article is about is that Nintendo used a format standard in the emulation community for the ROM, it's possible they downloaded it but it's not like there's some "downloaded from ROMZ-ZONE.RU" watermark in there. It has been revealed in leaks that Nintendo has an internal ROM vault of pretty much everything ever released on their systems.
Also how WarioWare: Smooth Moves shows their in-house developers using third-party emulators to source graphics for their first-party nostalgia bait: https://tcrf.net/WarioWare:_Smooth_Moves#Punch-Out (not said derisively; I love WarioWare!)
A correct ROM packaged using the emulation community's standard file format will exactly match a pirated copy. There is no story here. After the article came out, Nintendo even created their own incompatible ROM packaging format just to spite that article.
They were only "caught" using the .NES header which is a public standard that many NES emulators implement. There is no evidence that they used a pirated ROM.
If someone breaks into a warehouse and makes off with a pallet of cartridges, and then those carts are recovered, would it be strange if Nintendo resold those carts? It's their property at the end of the day.
Aside from that thought exercise, like many "internet facts" this one also might not be true, and repeating it doesn't really help either "side."
It also, unsurprisingly, tells a slightly different and less startling story: it's not that glycerine crystallized in one lab and suddenly others around the world had the same problem, it's that glycerine hadn't been crystallizing in one lab but once the lab was sent a sample of crystallized glycerine the stuff always did crystallize there, presumably (assuming the story's true) because of some sort of tiny particles (whether of glycerine or of something else) that float about in the air or adhere to glassware and encourage glycerine to crystallize.
No, it's a lie. I researched it a bunch back in September 2024 (I was curious what the oldest possible edible food was*), and the Smithsonian knows it's BS (because I emailed them about this to get it corrected). I was able to correct Wikipedia, but I see Smithsonian hasn't gotten around to bothering, so this keeps making the social media echo chamber rounds...
To be clear: no edible honey has ever been discovered in Egyptian tombs. Every single anecdote is either unverifiable, or a garbled telephone-game description of some decayed residue which might have been honey thousands of years ago (and often on further chemical testing, proves to not have been).
So in a way it's proving its own point. Why painfully write out by hand in English when the LLM will do a better job by porting your English prompt to AIglish and get +235 points and #3 on HN?
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