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| ▲ | kibwen 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | If you don't have root access to your machine, it's not your machine. If you don't have root access to the machine your data is on, it's not your data. | | |
| ▲ | 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | bobim 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Brillant, I'm stealing it. | | |
| ▲ | rvnx 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Even Meta approves. If it is not your data why should data protection laws apply ? |
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| ▲ | jama211 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | And Linus himself mostly just stores data on the cloud. At the end of the day, practicality matters. | | |
| ▲ | kibwen 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Sure, you can be as "practical" as you like, just as long as you don't come crying when Apple decides to revoke your access to their data. You accept the benefit, you accept the risk. | | |
| ▲ | _vertigo 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | That’s stupid. We can have a law that protects users from bullshit like this. Lacking technical savvy should not mean you forfeit the right to your data. |
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| ▲ | fragmede 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | If you're a scientist at an institution, why would you need root on the cephs or whatever storage system? | | |
| ▲ | amelius 2 days ago | parent [-] | | In that case it's the institution's data, not the scientist's personal data. |
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| ▲ | yreg 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | There's no reason to presume that the author 'thinks' that. | | |
| ▲ | haspok 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Then why did he mention it (their credentials)? It has literally zero relevance in this case. Maybe they were trying to show off? | | |
| ▲ | jeromegv 3 days ago | parent [-] | | It's relevant because it shows they are not newbie on the platform and are unlikely to have misbehave in some capacity to warrant a full deactivation. It adds credibility to their story. |
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| ▲ | AndrewKemendo 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | “This isn’t just an email address; it is my core digital identity” If he doesn’t think like that, then why does he act like it? | | |
| ▲ | evanelias 3 days ago | parent [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | lapcat 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > That sentence smells like AI writing, so who knows what the author actually thinks. The author has been a professional writer since long before LLMs were invented: https://hey.paris/books-and-events/books/ LLMs were trained on books like the ones written by the author, which is why AI writing "smells" like professional writing. The reason that AI is notorious for using em dashes, for example, is that professional authors use em dashes, whereas amateur writers tend not to use em dashes. It's becoming absurd that we're now accusing professional writers of being AI. | | |
| ▲ | evanelias 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I didn't mention em dashes anywhere in my comment! If this isn't AI writing, why say "The “New Account” Trap" with then further sub-headers "The Legal Catch", "The Technical Trap", "The Developer Risk"... I have done a lot of copyreading in my life and humans simply didn't write this way prior to recent years. | | |
| ▲ | cgriswald 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | You’re pointlessly derailing a conversation with a claim you can’t support that isn’t relevant even if true. Regardless of whether AI wrote that line he published it and we can safely assume it is what he thinks. | | |
| ▲ | evanelias 3 days ago | parent [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | cgriswald 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I don’t think you even know what you’re arguing about anymore. You claimed that what the author wrote wasn’t what the author thinks. As evidence you provided weak arguments about other parts of it being AI written and made an appeal to your own authority. It doesn’t matter if AI wrote that line, he wrote it, a ghost writer wrote it or a billion monkeys wrote it. He published it as his own work and you can act as if he thinks it even if you don’t otherwise trust him or the article. | | |
| ▲ | evanelias 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Ah, I see the confusion, you're still focusing entirely on this one "this isn't just x; it's y" line. I was mostly talking about the piece as a whole, for pretty much everything other than the first sentence of my first comment above. Sincere apologies if I didn't state that clearly. |
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| ▲ | dahart 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > humans simply didn’t write this way prior to recent years. Aren’t LLMs evidence that humans did write this way? They’re literally trained to copy humans on vast swaths of human written content. What evidence do you have to back up your claim? | | |
| ▲ | evanelias 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Decades of reading experience of blog posts and newspaper articles. They simply never contained this many section headers or bolded phrases after bullet points, and especially not of the "The [awkward noun phrase]" format heavily favored by LLMs. | | |
| ▲ | dahart 3 days ago | parent [-] | | So what would explain why AI writes a certain way, when there is no mechanism for it, and when the way AI works is to favor what humans do? LLM training includes many more writing samples than you’ve ever seen. Maybe you have a biased sample, or maybe you’re misremembering? The article’s style is called an outline, we were taught in school to write the way the author did. | | |
| ▲ | evanelias 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Why did LLMs add tons of emoji to everything for a while, and then dial back on it more recently? The problem is they were trained on everything, yet the common style for a blog post previously differed from the common style of a technical book, which differed from the common style of a throwaway Reddit post, etc. There's a weird baseline assumption of AI outputting "good" or "professional" style, but this simply isn't the case. Good writing doesn't repeat the same basic phrasing for every section header, and insert tons of unnecessary headers in the first place. | | |
| ▲ | dahart 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Yes, training data is a plausible answer to your own question there, as well as mine above. And that explanation does not support your claims that AI is writing differently than humans, it only suggests training sets vary. Repeating your thesis three times in slightly different words was taught in school. Using outline style and headings to make your points clear was taught in school. People have been writing like this for a long time. If your argument depends on your subjective idea of “good writing”, that may explain why you think AI & blog styles are changing; they are changing. That still doesn’t suggest that LLMs veer from what they see. All that aside, as other people have mentioned already, whether someone is using AI is irrelevant, and believing you can detect it and accusing people of using AI quickly becoming a lazy trope, and often incorrect to boot. |
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| ▲ | lapcat 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > I didn't mention em dashes anywhere in my comment! I know. I just mentioned them as another silly but common reason why people unjustly accuse professional writers of being AI. > I have done a lot of copyreading in my life and humans simply didn't write this way prior to recent years. What would you have written instead? | | |
| ▲ | evanelias 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Most of those section headers and bolded bullet-point summary phrases should simply be removed. That's why I described them as superfluous. In cases where it makes sense to divide an article into sections, the phrasing should be varied so that they aren't mostly of the same format ("The Blahbity Blah", in the case of what AI commonly spews out). This is fairly basic writing advice! To be clear, I'm not accusing his books as being written like this or using AI. I'm simply responding to the writing style of this article. For me, it reduces the trustworthiness of the claims in the article, especially combined with the key missing detail of why/how exactly such a large gift card was being purchased. | | |
| ▲ | lapcat 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > To be clear, I'm not accusing his books as being written like this or using AI. I'm simply responding to the writing style of this article. It's unlikely that the article had the benefit of professional, external editing, unlike the books. Moreover, it's likely that this article was written in a relatively short amount of time, so maybe give the author a break that it's not formatted the way you would prefer if you were copyediting? I think you're just nitpicking here. It's a blog post, not a book. Look at the last line of the article: "No permission granted to any AI/LLM/ML-powered system (or similar)." The author has also written several previous articles that appear to be anti-AI: https://hey.paris/posts/govai/ https://hey.paris/posts/cba/ https://hey.paris/posts/genai/ So again, I think it's ridiculous to claim that the article was written by AI. | | |
| ▲ | evanelias 3 days ago | parent [-] | | It's a difference of opinion and that's fine. But I'll just say, notice how those 3 previous articles you linked don't contain "The Blahbity Blah" style headers throughout, while this article has nine occurrences of them. | | |
| ▲ | lapcat 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > notice how those 3 previous articles you linked don't contain "The Blahbity Blah" style headers throughout, while this article has nine occurrences of them. The post https://hey.paris/posts/cba/ has five bold "And..." headers, which is even worse than "The..." headers. Would AI do that? The more plausible explanation is that the writer just has a somewhat annoying blogging style, or lack of style. | | |
| ▲ | evanelias 3 days ago | parent [-] | | To me those "And..." headers read as intentional repetition to drive home a point. That isn't bad writing in my opinion. Notice each header varies the syntax/phrasing there. They aren't like "And [adjective] [noun]". We're clearly not going to agree here, but I just ask that as you read various articles over the next few weeks, please pay attention to headers especially of the form "The ___ Trap", "The ___ Problem", "The ___ Solution". | | |
| ▲ | lapcat 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > I just ask that as you read various articles over the next few weeks, please pay attention to headers especially of the form "The ___ Trap", "The ___ Problem", "The ___ Solution". No, I'm going to try very hard to forget that I ever engaged in this discussion. I think your evidence is minimal at best, your argument self-contradictory at worst. The issue is not even whether you and I agree but whether it's justifiable to make a public accusation of AI authorship. Unless there's an open-and-shut case—which is definitely not the case here—it's best to err on the side of not making such accusations, and I think this approach is recommended by the HN guidelines. I would also note that your empirical claim is inaccurate. A number of the headers are just "The [noun]". In fact, there's a correspondence between the headers and subheaders, where the subheaders follow the pattern of the main header: > The Situation • The Trigger • The Consequence • The Damage > The "New Account" Trap • The Legal Catch • The Technical Trap • The Developer Risk This correspondence could be considered evidence of intention, a human mind behind the words, perhaps even a clever mind. By the way, the liberal use of headers and subheaders may feel superfluous to you, but it's reminiscent of textbook writing, which is the author's specialty. | | |
| ▲ | evanelias 3 days ago | parent [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | lapcat 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > please don't make it out like a throwaway "AI bad" argument. The issue isn't whether AI is good or bad or neither or both. The issue is whether the author used AI or not. And you were actually the one who suggested that the author's alleged use of AI made the article less trustworthy. The only reason you mentioned it was to malign the author; you would never say, for example, "The author obviously used a spellchecker, which affects how trustworthy I find the article." > If you think this is good writing then you're welcome to your opinion I didn't say it's good writing. To the contrary, I said, "the writer just has a somewhat annoying blogging style, or lack of style." The debate was never about the author's style but rather about the author's identity, i.e., human or machine. > Textbooks don't contain section headers every few paragraphs. Of course they do. I just pulled some off my shelves to look. Not all textbooks do, but some definitely do. | | |
| ▲ | evanelias 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I said it affects how trustworthy I find the article, when considered in combination with other aspects of this situation that don't add up to me. After going through my technical bookshelf I can't find a single example that follows this header/bullet style. And meanwhile I have seen countless posts that are known to be AI-assisted which do. Apparently we exist in different realities, and are never going to agree on this, so there is no point in discussing further. |
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| ▲ | dahart 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Textbooks don’t contain section headers every few paragraphs. Yes they absolutely do. What are you even talking about? | | |
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| ▲ | 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | xigoi 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > I know. I just mentioned them as another silly but common reason why people unjustly accuse professional writers of being AI. The difference is that using em dashes is good, whereas the cringe headings should die in a fire whether they’re written by an LLM or a human. |
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| ▲ | the_af 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Heuristics are nice but must be reviewed when confronted with actual counterexamples. If this is a published author known to write books before LLMs, why automatically decide "humans don't write like this". He's human and he does write like this! | |
| ▲ | rafabulsing 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | LLMs learned from human writing. They might amplify the frequency of some particular affectations, but they didn't come up with those affectations themselves. They write like that because some people write like that. | | |
| ▲ | evanelias 3 days ago | parent [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | rafabulsing 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Those are different levels of abstraction. LLMs can say false things, but the overall structure and style is, at this point, generally correct (if repetitive/boring at times). Same with image gen. They can get the general structure and vibe pretty well, but inspecting the individual "facts" like number of fingers may reveal problems. | |
| ▲ | dahart 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That seems like straw man. Image generation matches style quite well. LLM hallucination conjures untrue statements while still matching the training data style and word choices. | | |
| ▲ | evanelias 3 days ago | parent [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | dahart 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > AI may output certain things at a vastly different rate than it appears in the training data That’s a subjective statement, but generally speaking, not true. If it were, LLMs would produce unintelligible text & images. The way neural networks function is fundamentally to produce data that is statistically similar to the training data. Context, prompts, and training data are what drive the style. Whatever trends you believe you’re seeing in AI can be explained by context, prompts, and training data, and isn’t an inherent part of AI. Extra fingers are known as hallucination, so if it’s a different phenomenon, then nobody knows what you’re talking about, and you are saying your analogy to fingers doesn’t work. In the case of images, the tokens are pixels, while in the case of LLMs, the tokens are approximately syllables. Finger hallucinations are lack of larger structural understanding, but they statistically mimic the inputs and are not examples of frequency differences. |
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| ▲ | wpm 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | This is a bad faith argument and you know it. | | |
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| ▲ | amelius 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | The author is reputable, just look at the rest of their website. Your accusation on the other hand is based on far-fetched speculation. |
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| ▲ | heavyset_go 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | My writing from 5+ years ago was accused of being AI generated by laymen because I used Markdown, emojis and dared to use headers for different sections in my articles. It's kind of weird realizing you write like generic ChatGPT. I've felt the need to put human errors, less markup, etc into stuff I write now. | | |
| ▲ | lapcat 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > I've felt the need to put human errors, less markup, etc into stuff I write now. Don't give in to the nitwits! |
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| ▲ | xuki 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The author lives in Australia. You get points from supermarket for purchasing some gift cards during some promotion, it's around 10% of the card value. | | |
| ▲ | SoftTalker 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Gift cards are associated with money laundering and many online scams. I would guess any usage of them (especially in larger denominations) would attract increased attention and additional risk. That's nonsensical of course, why does Apple sell them if they are also suspicious of them, but I would guess if he had paid with a credit card there would have been no issue. If you receive them as a gift, use them only in a situation unconnected with your cloud ID, such as to pay for new hardware at an Apple store. |
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| ▲ | Gabrys1 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > I'm more curious how/why the author ended up with a $500 gift card. That's a large amount, and the author never shares how this was obtained, which seems like a key missing detail. Did the author buy the gift card for himself (why?) or did someone give him a very large gift (why not mention that?) The author mentions a big store (names it similar to Walmart for US based readers). I would assume this was an accepted form of "return a product without a receipt" or "we want to accept your complain about this product we sold going crazy 1 day after it's warranty but we cannot give you cash back" etc | | |
| ▲ | evanelias 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I don't understand. Gift cards typically cannot be returned, at least in the US. And the author said the gift card was redeemed "to pay for my 6TB iCloud+ storage plan", which also cannot be returned I'd imagine. | | |
| ▲ | Gabrys1 2 days ago | parent [-] | | But gift cards aren't supposed to work that, right? If it wasn't "legal" or "okay" to have a 500 dollar card, they shouldn't be sold. They are available, therefore they should be perfectly usable. I don't want to speculate more, but one of the use cases for them is for people that choose to not use cards online (or even don't have credit cards at all) to be able to buy digital goods with cash. Either way, if we're questioning buying/using the gift card, we're blaming the victim | | |
| ▲ | evanelias 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I'm not blaming anyone; I just find it surprising that this detail wasn't mentioned or explained. Its omission makes the article less trustworthy to me. People are fast to pull out pitchforks in response to outrage-bait posts like this, but (generally speaking) a nontrivial percentage of such posts are intentionally omitting details which can help explain the other side's actions. Also I genuinely wasn't familiar with this specific use-case for gift cards. At least in the US, you can buy general-purpose prepaid debit cards for this type of thing instead, or use various services which generate virtual cards e.g. privacy.com. To me that seems infinitely more normal than buying a large-value "gift card" for yourself, but I'm admittedly not familiar with the options in other countries. | | |
| ▲ | Gabrys1 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | 1. The prepaid Visa or Mastercard come with an extra fee (like 5-6 dollars per card if I recall correctly?) 2. I didn't see the prepaid cards in stores outside the US, so they are probably not that popular outside. Sometimes you also want to shift your spending, like if you spend 500 USD this month at this store, you'll get some good % cashback. So you end up buying a gift card that you know you'll definitely use next month. I think this is irrelevant, TBH. | |
| ▲ | throwaway290 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | privacy.com even if it was available in some country just means you give transactions of your identity to some other company. Cash (and so gift cards if they don't accept cash) is the most private way. |
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| ▲ | nullfield 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Re: AI writing: AI tends to (and might be getting better) use commas for such claims, in the form of, “it’s not just X, but [optional:also] Y”. Even if it feels sus, remember that AI is trained on what it sees: even the posts here will make it more and more effective at “writing like a human”. As for the OP, the claims to exist and have published books, etc. are relatively easily publicly verifiable. No, $500 isn’t a large amount, doubly so anymore. I consistently have to try to re-anchor, but $100 is the new $20 (sadly). | | |
| ▲ | evanelias 2 days ago | parent [-] | | AI used em-dashes initially in that type of sentence structure, but more recently moved to a mix of semicolons and commas, at least from what I've been seeing. I never claimed the author doesn't exist. $500 is objectively a large amount for a gift card. Off-the-shelf gift cards with predetermined amounts are almost always substantially less than this. |
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| ▲ | flatter 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Did you even read the article? "The only recent activity on my account was a recent attempt to redeem a $500 Apple Gift Card to pay for my 6TB iCloud+ storage plan" a 6TB plan is $29.99 monthly.. It's not farfetched to assume he purchased a $500 gift card so he could keep the subscription without worrying about it! "The card was purchased from a major brick-and-mortar retailer (Australians, think Woolworths scale; Americans, think Walmart scale)" There's not much of a reason to assume someone else unaffiliated with the author bought this card, he mentions talking to the vendor and getting a replacement which means he has the receipt | | |
| ▲ | evanelias 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Yes, I read the article and it simply does not directly address who purchased the card. It certainly implies the author bought the card for himself, yes; but that seems rather unusual to me, especially in such a high amount. Why would you purchase a $500 gift card for yourself to "keep a subscription without worrying about it" as opposed to just paying the small monthly amount? Honest question, I literally don't understand that motivation at all. In my mind a gift card is more problematic than a normal credit card in this scenario since it eventually runs out. Second question: why did you create an HN account just to write this comment? | | |
| ▲ | Marsymars 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > Why would you purchase a $500 gift card for yourself to "keep a subscription without worrying about it" as opposed to just paying the small monthly amount? Honest question, I literally don't understand that motivation at all. In my mind a gift card is more problematic than a normal credit card in this scenario since it eventually runs out. Asides from the promotional bonuses that other users have mentioned, if you have an Apple Family Sharing group you can only use a single credit card tied to the main account for any payments to Apple, but individual accounts will draw down from their Apple Account balance before using that credit card - so gift cards let individuals pay for their own Apple things (subscriptions or otherwise). | |
| ▲ | rvnx 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I wonder if you can prepay using a card ? But otherwise to answer your potential question, I understand OP as I like to prepay things like my phone operator. I put 500 USD there, and come back one year later. This way it can free-up my limit of 10 virtual cards I have, and most of all, can keep their limits as close as possible to the minimum. If you have a mix of services on the same card it is much more difficult and more risky. If you have 100 USD + 50 USD + 25 USD + 75 USD + 60 USD in monthly spend. Then you have 310 USD at risk, when your risk could be way lower. | |
| ▲ | tguvot 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | there are people who don't like to spread credit card numbers/their identity around. there is a number of services that I pay for with either their gift cards or generic gift cards |
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| ▲ | hamdingers 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Did you read the comment you're responding to? Where in the article does it explain why an adult is buying a $500 gift card to pay their apple subscription instead of just paying for it directly? | |
| ▲ | cwillu 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | “Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that". ” --https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html |
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| ▲ | venturecruelty 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | There is if you want to blame the victim and/or work for Apple. |
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