[HN Gopher] A Remarkable Assertion from A16Z
___________________________________________________________________
A Remarkable Assertion from A16Z
Author : boplicity
Score : 301 points
Date : 2025-11-28 12:41 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nealstephenson.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (nealstephenson.substack.com)
| d_burfoot wrote:
| Hypothesis C: failure of human memory. A human read Stephenson's
| book(s) 20 years ago, remembers that the endings were a bit
| unsatisfying. The same human also read some other book many years
| ago, which ends mid-sentence. In that person's mind, the two are
| conflated.
| boesboes wrote:
| Hypothesis A is much more likely if you ask me
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| It's A16Z, they definitely had an LLM recommend a set of
| books that nobody there has actually ever read. Except
| _maybe_ Snowcrash
| eesmith wrote:
| Hypothesis D-for-Delany: The human thought Stephenson wrote
| Dhalgren.
|
| "Waiting here, away from the terrifying weaponry, out of the
| halls of vapor and light, beyond holland into the hills, I have
| come to"
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| If I was writing a book review for my company (big famous VC
| who cares about their reputation) - I would've probably at
| least popped the book open and read a few chapters if it's been
| years since I read it
| boznz wrote:
| Another hypothesis. Have AI generate a top 50 list of books,
| and add a book you want your website to promote into the mix
| somewhere near the top to increase its sales. Cheap marketing,
| It wouldn't be the first time.
| readams wrote:
| In these modern times of ours, the word literally has taken on a
| new meaning, which is "not literally but with emphasis." This
| seems like the most likely explanation.
| EdwardCoffin wrote:
| Even if that's the intended meaning of _literally_ , it is
| still a reckless exaggeration. I'm pretty sure that
| Stephenson's endings are no more abrupt than some of
| Shakespeare's (check out Hamlet and Macbeth) or some of Frank
| Herbert's (see Dune and Children of Dune), and I never hear
| anyone go out of their way to describe either of them as being
| unable to write endings.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| > some of Frank Herbert's (see Dune and Children of Dune),
|
| I mean, Dune does in fact end mid-story, which is probably
| worse.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| No, no it doesn't. Are you talking about the recent movies
| that split the first novel into two movies? The novel Dune
| ends after Paul defeats his enemies and becomes emperor.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| The Dune series has six novels, the final one is Chapter
| House Dune, which does in fact end mid story.
|
| I know this because I read them in the 90s and didn't
| realise that Frank Herbert was dead for quite some time
| after reading Chapter House.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| I know that, I've read them too. In the SP, and in this
| thread we're discussing endings to novels. No one is
| complaining about a series that isn't finished due to the
| author's death.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Hence my comment, "which is probably worse".
| hnmullany wrote:
| Everything from Stephenson after Anathem is an unremitting
| slog. He needs an editor who won't back down from telling him
| he needs to cut a third of his pages.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| Reamde and Fall are quite readable. But what does this have
| to do with endings?
| jonfromsf wrote:
| Remade was snappy but Fall went on forever.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| Hard to believe this when it's such a cut and dry claim about
| text. What does exaggeration even imply in that context?
| layer8 wrote:
| "Literally" is commonly used as emphasis, but not as hyperbole.
| So it's still a misleading misrepresentation just the same.
| howenterprisey wrote:
| I interpret the sense of "literally" here in the opposite way,
| i.e. without it the sentence may be taken to mean that the
| books metaphorically stop mid-sentence, but with it, they're
| saying that it's non-metaphorical and they really do. It would
| be bizarre wording otherwise.
| Bjartr wrote:
| The use of the word "literally" to be used as emphasis started
| in the 1700s, and people have been complaining about it since
| at least 1909
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literally#As_an_intensifier
| grahamlee wrote:
| These modern times that literally began in 1769. Oxford English
| Dictionary, "literally (adv.), sense I.1.c," June 2025,
| https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/9189024563.
| fnord77 wrote:
| literally
| kylecazar wrote:
| It would have been really great to end the blog post mid-
| sentence.
| ruined wrote:
| um, it literally does
| nchmy wrote:
| no,it quite literally doesnt...
| ruined wrote:
| a remarkable assertion from nchmy
| dundarious wrote:
| The central complaint of TFA is the exact same as what
| ruined is doing. It is very obviously a joke. Not something
| I appreciate on HN, but still.
| andy99 wrote:
| I think it was a good enough joke or witty remark
| grounded in the crux of the article that it's worth it.
| And it's certainly interesting to see the "whoosh" past
| many of the commenters
| dundarious wrote:
| It was flagged and I vouched it for similar reasons. I
| downvote such comments though.
| natch wrote:
| whoosh
| jeremyjh wrote:
| I'm really curious whats going on here. Is this a joke? Are
| you ok?
| ruined wrote:
| did you even read the article??
| dundarious wrote:
| I don't appreciate these kinds of simple one-line
| referential jokes on HN, but your joke was to emulate
| perfectly the central issue of TFA, so I do agree that it
| brings into question who did and who did not read the
| article -- I know _you_ read it.
| fainpul wrote:
| This is brilliant, but people don't get it :)
| fnord77 wrote:
| I don't have any original ideas
| pstoll wrote:
| Lol I was hoping for that too
| anotherevan wrote:
| About half-way through I had to resist the urge to skip to the
| end to see if he did that. An opportunity lost.
|
| I'll admit, of the few books of his I've read, I always felt
| like they ended a couple of chapters too soon or a couple of
| chapters too late -- which has put me off reading more of his
| books despite some interesting premises. I suspect some of the
| deeper themes are lost on me in my bedtime readings. Just not
| my cup of tea at the end of the day, literally.
| chucksmash wrote:
| Stephenson? Ah yes, the deservedly obscure dadaist prose stylist
| who thought it was cool to stop his books mid-sentence.
| andrelaszlo wrote:
| > A hundred years from now, thanks to the workings of the
| Inhuman Centipede, I'm known as a deservedly obscure dadaist
| prose stylist who thought it was cool to stop his books mid-
| sentence.
| gpderetta wrote:
| I love the "Inhuman Centipede" definition for AI. Is that a
| Stephenson original or he is quoting existing usage.
| 3rodents wrote:
| "A hundred years from now, thanks to the workings of the Inhuman
| Centipede, I'm known as a deservedly obscure dadaist prose
| stylist who thought it was cool to stop his books mid-sentence."
|
| is "Inhuman Centipede" to describe the slop-eating-its-own-tale
| future we all dread an established term, or an invention of the
| author? I hope it becomes the term we all use, like slop and
| clanker.
|
| For those of us writing original words that are consumed by LLMs
| without our consent, at least we get to be the front of the
| Inhuman Centipede.
| spuz wrote:
| The earliest use of this term I can find is here:
| https://andrewbrown.substack.com/p/the-inhuman-centipede
|
| It was also used as the title for this post by Cory Doctrow
| discussing the same problem:
| https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/14/inhuman-centipede/#enshit...
| cb321 wrote:
| There is also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HumancentiPad
| (which is almost surely an homage to the movie) which was
| 2011 and tied in all kinds of tech-aspects like licensing and
| iPads.
| doctorhandshake wrote:
| Not sure if the substitution of 'tale' for 'tail' was
| intentional but regardless it's apropos
| myrmidon wrote:
| I strongly suspect that the term alludes to "human centipede",
| which is a dutch horror film and involves the titular centipede
| literally eating his own shit.
| Noe2097 wrote:
| Another hypothesis: https://xkcd.com/725/.
| uxp100 wrote:
| Could be some very dry humor? Confused LLM seems most likely
| though.
| hoistbypetard wrote:
| All of the descriptions on that reading list give me strong LLM
| vibes. Which, given the source, seems like it should be expected.
| This post could have stopped after hypothesis 1.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| I agree it is not really controversial, I don't think any other
| explanation is credible. And it really calls into question
| their assertion that at least one person there has read every
| book on the list. They love these books, yet no one there cared
| enough to write a few sentences about them?
| zurfer wrote:
| well, maybe no one felt informed enough to write this, so it
| was outsourced to the llm (imposter syndrom) or it was pure
| laziness.
| roywiggins wrote:
| The trick is that this list of books amounts to nerd
| shibboleths. It's not important to have read them so much
| as be able to use them as a marker of being a smart person.
|
| (That isn't to say these aren't good books, I'm talking
| about their social function among a certain type of person,
| corporation or natural)
| jsheard wrote:
| Since the commit history is public, there's a much easier way to
| tell that AI had a hand in writing that list.
|
| https://github.com/a16z-infra/reading-list/commit/93bc3abb04...
|
| _> opus descriptions in cursor, raw_
| andy99 wrote:
| Stephenson doesn't just write sci-fi, he writes operating
| manuals for the future. His books predicted cryptocurrency, the
| metaverse, and distributed computing before most of us knew
| what TCP/IP stood for. Warning: his endings are notoriously
| abrupt, like a segfault in the middle of your favorite
| function.
|
| This really is a study in AI slop. At least they had the good
| sense to change it.
| nakamoto_damacy wrote:
| How did his books PREDICT crypto when we had eCash way before
| any of his books? SMH.
| agentultra wrote:
| Most of his books are also dystopias, not operating
| manuals.
| rainsford wrote:
| Can A16Z tell the difference? Insert that meme "At long
| last, we have created the Torment Nexus, from the classic
| sci-fi novel, Don't Create the Torment Nexus".
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| a16z and others like them never met a dystopian warning
| they didn't interpret as a titillating invitation to an
| uncomfortably exciting and inevitable future!
| ndiddy wrote:
| a16z seems to view turning society into a dystopia as a
| goal, so that makes sense. Their portfolio includes:
|
| - DoubleSpeed, a bot farm as a service provider, allowing
| customers to orchestrate social media activity across
| thousands of fake accounts to create artificial consensus
| on the topic of their choice. Never pay a human again!
|
| - Cheddr, the TikTok of sports gambling, whose
| differentiating feature is allowing users under 21. Place
| live in-game bets with just a swipe!
|
| - Coverd, a new type of credit card where you can wipe
| off bills by betting on your favorite gambling games in
| their app. No VPN required!
| jsheard wrote:
| > Cheddr
|
| > Coverd
|
| Even worse, they're bringing Web 2.0 startup names
| back...
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| Wow, I just checked the doublespeed website and it is
| comically evil. The footer says -- verbatim, and in huge
| letters -- "never pay a human again." (I'm not
| selectively quoting; it's a full sentence, despite their
| weird capitalization.)
|
| If Neal Stephenson tried to write a villain this on-the-
| nose, his editor would tell him to tone it down.
| efnx wrote:
| Yeah, which book are we talking about? Reamde features
| crypto heavily, but I remember having bitcoins at the time
| it came out.
| simonw wrote:
| I imagine this is intended (though if it's AI-generated
| "intended" doesn't really apply) as a reference 1999's
| Cryptonomicon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon
|
| From that Wikipedia summary:
|
| > Their goal is to facilitate anonymous Internet banking
| using electronic money and (later) digital gold currency
| abecedarius wrote:
| When they changed it is also when they misspelled his name.
| Opus got it right. I was surprised Stephenson took the
| misspelling as an AI tell.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| To a version that managed to typo his name.
| netsharc wrote:
| Man... "Write a book recommendation for people who like The
| Big Bang Theory".
| binary132 wrote:
| I'm gonna start thinking "Bazinga!" every time someone says
| something borderline ai-sloppy
| mtlynch wrote:
| That version is more sensible. Opus generated:
|
| > _Warning: his endings are notoriously abrupt, like a segfault
| in the middle of your favorite function._
|
| In commit e4d022[0], the wording changed to:
|
| > _Fair warning: most of these books famously don 't have
| endings (they literally stop mid-sentence during a normal plot
| arc)._
|
| It's unclear what led to that change, as the commit message is
| just "stephenson".
|
| It went through a few more minor edits to get to what's
| currently published.
|
| https://github.com/a16z-infra/reading-list/commit/e4d022d592...
| ilikehurdles wrote:
| matt-bornstein's commits in that repo do often start off with
| ai-generated descriptions which he then edits down. there are
| notes on some commits that say things like "AI GENERATED NEED
| TO EDIT". the other contributors' changes don't have these
| tells.
|
| while it should come as no surprise to have software written
| by llms, if these books are in fact just picked by llms then
| what's the point of this list?
| cowsandmilk wrote:
| I don't see any evidence the LLM picked the list of books,
| it instead was used to update/add descriptions of the books
| and series.
| thwarted wrote:
| That's almost more damning. The list was created by
| humans, who presumably read the books, but then couldn't
| be bothered to summarize the very books they read? Either
| the human is really lazy ("read" the book but can't be
| bothered to write a short summary) or really really lazy
| (didn't read the book but felt a summary was necessary).
| Either way, it makes this list less interesting, at the
| very least because it doesn't need to exist at all if
| someone can just ask an LLM "list and describe books that
| A16Z might think are valuable to read" and get the same
| quality output.
| pyrale wrote:
| > if these books are in fact just picked by llms then
| what's the point of this list?
|
| How do you do, fellow nerds?
| tshaddox wrote:
| I'd be curious what the point is even if it were written by
| humans with some evidence of non-zero effort, but posting
| something with no point _and_ no effort is really puzzling.
| simonw wrote:
| https://github.com/a16z-infra/reading-list/commit/717b3d64d6...
|
| > [THIS IS AI GENERATED, NEED TO EDIT] The manga that asked
| [...]
|
| They do at least have "NEED TO EDIT" in there, but this prose
| was openly generated by AI as a starting point.
| skybrian wrote:
| I don't see any pull request fixing this yet.
| dude250711 wrote:
| It's the same guys who get impressed if you are playing a video
| game while talking to them.
| simianparrot wrote:
| Keep this in mind if you _ever_ feel tempted to take A16Z
| seriously. Absolute charlatans and clowns.
| hobofan wrote:
| Software is eating the world.
|
| AI is eating the VCs.
| kibwen wrote:
| We know that being a billionaire surrounded by yes-men all
| day causes brain damage, and we know that being on social
| media living in a delusion bubble all day causes brain
| damage, so really they were already cooked even before
| signing what was left of their brains over to the LLMs.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| AI will be running the VCs if it's not already.
| blibble wrote:
| when the bar is this low it will be hard to tell any
| difference
|
| https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=Fall%202025
| binary132 wrote:
| MLaaS (money laundering as a service)
| DonHopkins wrote:
| ...and a conehead.
| brandall10 wrote:
| It's such an interesting arc. I starting university in Sept
| '94, super excited to try out Mosaic on a T1 class connection
| after suffering through my 14.4k home modem. And shortly
| after I arrived, Netscape dropped.
|
| He was an absolute hero of that era, possibly the most
| admired 'geek' back then. Young, with hair, with no hints of
| his future Dr. Evil emergence.
| neilv wrote:
| I don't recall that fame at the time (from Mcom/Netscape,
| JWZ was more visible, in my circles), but I knew his name.
|
| When he was first coding NCSA Mosaic, we were both pretty
| young, and doing workstation development, which took more
| of what HN would consider hacker spirit than the bulk of
| contemporary software development does. And we were also
| presumably Internet people, so I assumed he was like me.
|
| In my mind, there was a default Internet person culture,
| which was very different than the tech industry culture of
| today. Curious, optimistic and wanting to bring Internet
| tech and culture to people, and a sense of responsibility
| for it. (Not affected platitudes, but innate and genuine;
| but also not tested by the potential of wealth, so you
| didn't really know how firmly held it was.)
|
| Culturally, today, I seem to be closer than him to my early
| impression of early Internet people. (Though I changed my
| mind about trying to first become a professor and then do
| research commercial spinouts, rather than to grab the
| initial dotcom boom money right away. So I'd like a do-
| over.)
|
| I don't know why he culturally seemed to go into the
| direction of libertarian manifestos and questionable crypto
| pumping.
|
| Maybe he has in mind a version of OG Internet values, or
| some other vision, and he's trying to amass more wealth and
| power to make it happen?
|
| There have been a few OG hackers in the VC space who you
| might have assumed would go one way if they had money, but
| then went a different way. Were they actually always like
| that? Did they learn something that changed how they think
| about the world? Were they changed by money/power circles,
| sycophants, or drugs? Did their business take on a life of
| its own, naturally maximizing profit, and they were just
| along for the ride?
| Waterluvian wrote:
| i didn't want to be bothered with the shift key so i stopped
| using it and called it culture. but now i don't even have to
| finish my
| genghisjahn wrote:
| Stephenson's endings are fine.
| martythemaniak wrote:
| Silicon Valley is largely illiterate when it comes to fiction and
| literature. It is generally pretty hard to find people who read
| or think about anything other than a small set of standardized
| scifi, so even if this wasn't ai slop, it would still be pretty
| bad.
| quesera wrote:
| Can you do more than complain?
|
| All of the books I have read on this list (which is nearly all
| of them) are entirely worth reading.
|
| But I'm always looking for more and better stuff to read, so
| please give us a few examples that you believe should be
| included.
| warpspin wrote:
| Wished he'd spend as much as effort on writing endings for his
| books as on that blog post.
|
| Sorry. Just grumpy, cause I always love the first 80% of his
| books and then they somehow... just disintegrate.
| cm2012 wrote:
| The most likely option of all was the article was written without
| that much effort by a random employee. This is a lot of work over
| one throwaway sentence lol.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| How on earth could you think the _most likely_ option is that a
| human wrote that sentence on purpose? It 's not the type of
| wrong that comes from low effort levels, it's the type of wrong
| that comes from not being a human.
| cm2012 wrote:
| Humans make that error all the time. They can hear the author
| has abrupt endings and write it down. I think this case it
| actually was AI (according to some other HN comment) but you
| don't need to be an AI to make this error.
| dandellion wrote:
| He has my admiration, I wouldn't have been able to write an
| article like this and resist the urge to end it mid
| airstrike wrote:
| Maybe he decided to up the ante and name his upcoming novel
| Candlejack, just to sp
| qoez wrote:
| It's definitely written by an AI. The end description of
| hitchhikers guide is "[...]the meaning of life. Which turns out
| to be an integer." No one would bother writing that.
| larsbrinkhoff wrote:
| He should have ended this essay mid-sencence, because that would
| exasperaited wrote:
| When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.
|
| -- Maya Angelou
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| I've seen LLMs claim that a text cuts off mid-sentence before in
| cases where it in fact doesn't, and I think this might be an
| artifact of them being presented with a truncated version by some
| unclear software process, perhaps to fit into a context window.
| In this case, however, it's unlikely that the LLM was presented
| the text directly, and rather it is recounting things it "knows".
| thenickdude wrote:
| I was trying out an IDE plugin for local LLM integration, but
| it would just make totally insane edits instead of what I asked
| for.
|
| It turned out that the LLM-runner's default setting for
| handling queries that were too long was to silently delete the
| middle of the query. So the LLM saw the beginning of my ask,
| and the tail end of the code context, and nothing else.
| syllogism wrote:
| I thought it was a joke? Like the reviewer is saying, "I didn't
| finish these books".
| refulgentis wrote:
| a16z is such a joke. Prototype of people with no taste and way
| too much money.
| gramakri2 wrote:
| Missed chance to end the article mid sentence
| feintruled wrote:
| Reminds me of Werner Herzog's autobiography. In the introduction,
| he muses on a life being cut short by a snipers bullet, and when
| he sees a bird flying past his window as he is writing his book
| makes him imagine it is a bullet and he thinks it would be a nice
| device to cut his final chapter short at that exact moment, so he
| is giving fair warning that the book will end abruptly.
|
| And so it does, but in a totally Herzog moment he then almost
| immediately intones afterwards "and that is the end of the book
| as I indicated in the foreword".
| Coeur wrote:
| Of course the irony ist that if a big corporation publishes a
| year-end reading list, it has the implicit message of "hey we are
| not just a group of boring corporate robots - we're people, with
| real feelings, and hobbies like reading, and taste."
|
| And now we realize that this is just a PR charade. They might not
| be people with hobbies like reading, and taste.
| andriamanitra wrote:
| The list is clearly mostly machine generated but the name typo is
| an unlikely error for LLM to make. I'm guessing the "general
| editing pass" that introduced it was done by an actual human
| while trying to make the text flow better (less LLM-like).
|
| https://github.com/a16z-infra/reading-list/commit/f8d149495a...
| rsanek wrote:
| due to constant mis-use like this, literally has even been
| redefined to not necessarily mean its primary definition
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally
| tsimionescu wrote:
| How is it misuse? This is how words are used - people use turns
| of phrase and metaphors, and then popular metaphors become
| secondary meanings. Very popular secondary meanings can even
| become grammar pieces - like "very", which has become the most
| standard intensifier, but used to be a normal adverb, like
| literally and truly.
| shwaj wrote:
| It's an inadvertent step toward Newspeak, where we no longer
| have a word that means what "literally" used to unambiguously
| mean.
| block97 wrote:
| Sssh, Neal. They'll do to you what they did to Michael O. Ch
| socalgal2 wrote:
| I wish I had as many positive experience as it seems some other
| HNers have with LLMs. I'm not saying I've had zero positive
| experiences but the number of negative experiences is so high
| that it's just super scary.
|
| Yesterday, Thanksgiving, there was a Google Doodle. Clicking the
| doodle lead to a Gemini prompt for how to plan to have
| Thanksgiving dinner ready on time. It had a schedule for lots of
| prep the day before and then a timeline for the day of. It had
| cooking the dinner rolls and then said something like "take them
| out and keep them warm" followed by cooking something else in the
| oven. I asked "How do I keep them warm when something else is
| cooking in the oven?". It proceeded to give me a revised timeline
| that contradicted its original timeline and also, made no sense
| in and of itself. I asked it about the contradiction and the
| error and it apologized and gave a completely new 3rd timeline
| that was different than the first 2 and also nonsense. This was
| Google's Gemini Promotion!
|
| All it really needed to do to my first query was say something
| like "put a towel over the rolls" and leave it on top of the
| oven.... Maybe? But then, it had told me be spread butter over
| the rolls as soon as they came out of the oven so I'd have asked,
| "won't the towel suck up all the butter?"
|
| This is one example many times LLMs fail me (ChatGPT, Gemini).
| For direct code gen, my subjective experience is it fails 5 of 6
| times. For stackoverflow type questions it succeeds 5 of 6 times.
| For non-code questions it depends on the type of question. But,
| when it fails it fails so badly that I'm somewhat surprised it
| ever works.
|
| And yea, the whole world is running head first into massive LLM
| usage like this one using it for short reviews of authors. Ugh!!!
| fainpul wrote:
| You're not supposed to look so closely!
|
| It seems to me, most LLM fans are impressed by glancing at a
| result ("It works!") and never really think about the flaws of
| the answer or look at the code in detail.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| > I'm not saying I've had zero positive experiences but the
| number of negative experiences is so high that it's just super
| scary.
|
| Just for shits and giggles I decided to let Copilot (whatever
| the default in vscode is) write a Makefile for a simple avr-gcc
| project. I can't remember what the prompt I gave it was, but it
| was something along the lines of "given this makefile that is
| old but works, write a new makefile for this project that
| doesn't have one" and a link to a simple gist I wrote years
| ago.
|
| Fuuuuuuuuck me.
|
| It's 2500 lines long. It's not just bigger than the codebase
| it's supposed to build, it's just about bigger than all the C
| files in all the avr-gcc projects in that entire chunk of my
| ~/devel/ directory. I couldn't even begin to make sense of what
| it's trying to do.
|
| It looks mostly like it's declaring variables over and over,
| concatenating more bits on as it goes. I don't know for sure
| though.
|
| I won't be using it.
| evanelias wrote:
| It's truly remarkable that Google put an absurd Wrong Answers
| Only generator in front of their primary cash cow 18 months
| ago, and in that time their share price has nearly doubled.
|
| It's wrong nearly every time I search for anything. Ironically,
| in writing this comment, I tried asking it for the GOOG share
| price the day before AI Overviews launched, and it got that
| wrong too.
| dimal wrote:
| > I had to read this over a few times to believe that I was
| seeing it. If it didn't include the word "literally" I'd assume
| some poetic license on the part of whoever, or whatever, wrote
| this.
|
| Unfortunately, the meaning of the word "literally" has morphed
| into almost the opposite of "literally". Most people just use it
| as an intensifier devoid of any true meaning. Makes sense that an
| LLM that doesn't have any sense of truth would just stuff that in
| there.
| quesera wrote:
| > _Makes sense that an LLM that doesn't have any sense of truth
| would just stuff that in there_
|
| As it turns out, that phrase was most likely added in a human
| review-edit. Along with the typo.
|
| This is not an argument against LLMs lacking a sense of truth
| -- just that humans are pretty incompetent as well.
| larodi wrote:
| The footnote is precious, everything Humpty related is not.
| angoragoats wrote:
| He needs to sue A16Z for libel. Or maybe he already is in the
| process of doing that, given this sentence from the article:
| "This is a factual assertion that is (a) false, (b) easy to fact-
| check, and (c) casts my work ethic, and that of my editors, in an
| unflattering light."
|
| These shitty VCs with their LLM-generated garbage need to be held
| accountable for their actions.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-11-28 23:01 UTC)