https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016
It turns out stylometry is actually a pretty well-developed field. It makes me wanna write an AI browser assistant that can take my comments and stylize them randomly to make it harder to use these sorts of forensics against me
even when people deliberately try to feign some aspects (e.g. switching writing styles for different pseudonyms), they will almost always slip up and revert to their most comfortable style over time. which is great, because if they aren't also regularly changing pseudonyms (which are also subject to limited stylometry, so pseudonym creation should be somewhat randomized in name, location, etc.), you only need to catch them slipping once to get the whole history of that pseudonym (and potentially others, once that one is confirmed).
But on a serious note, what did "la" mean in your context? I've never seen this.
but, those changes are usually pretty gradual and relatively small. thats why when attempting to identify someone via writing, you look at several aspects of the writing and not just word choice (grammar, use of specific slang, sentence length, paragraph structure, punctuation, etc.). it is highly unlikely that all aspects of someones writing changes at the same time. simply removing "ha" is inconsequential to identification if not much else changed.
additionally, this data is typically combined with other data/patterns (posting times, username (themes, length, etc.), writing that displays certain types of expertise, and more) to increase the confidence level of correct identification.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016
You can also unironically spot most types of AI writing this way. The approaches based on training another transformer to spot "AI generated" content are wrong.
I have no idea if specialized tools can reliably detect AI writing but, as someone whose writing on forums like HN has been accused a couple of times of being AI, I can say that humans aren't very good at it. So far, my limited experience with being falsely accused is it seems to partly just be a bias against being a decent writer with a good vocabulary who sometimes writes longer posts.
As for the reliability of specialized tools in detecting AI writing, I'm skeptical at a conceptual level because an LLM can be reinforcement trained with feedback from such a tool (RLTF instead of RLHF). While they may be somewhat reliable at the moment, it seems unlikely they'll stay that way.
Unfortunately, since there are already companies marketing 'AI detectors' to academic institutions, they won't stop marketing them as their reliability continues to get worse. Which will probably result in an increasing shit show of false accusations against students.
- moot was fundraising for his VC backed startup during the years the emails are in, and he was likely connected via mutuals in USV or other firms. These meetings were clearly around him trying to solicit investment in his canv.as project.
- /pol/ was /new/ being returned; the ethos of the board had already existed for a long time and the decision to undo the deletion of /new/ was entirely unsurprising for denizens at the time, and was consistent with a concerted push moot was making for more transparency in the enforcement of rules on the site and fairness towards users who followed the rules. /pol/ didn't start a culture war at this time any more than /new/ had previously - it just existed as a relatively content-unmoderated platform for people to discuss earnestly what would get them banned elsewhere.
Who can say what effect it had on the world, but a presidential candidate reposting himself personified as Pepe the frog was still weird back then, and at least a nod to the trolls doing so much work on his behalf
https://medium.com/tryangle-magazine/meme-magic-is-real-you-... (dismissable login wall)
Summary: Trump used memes not in the sense of pepes but in the original (Dawkins') sense of "earworm" soundbites, along with a torrent of scandals, each making the previous seem like old news, to exploit a public tired of the "status quo" into voting for a zany wildcard pushing for reactionary policy
Looking back on it, I wonder if this was priming.
I didn't fall for it. They are still losers, but the encyclopedia dramatica with swastikas looks way way way less funny in 2026 than it did in 2008.
I'm just saying, it's a symptom. The crazy found critical mass, broke containment. From there it was laundered in millions of Facebook groups and here we are.
If you radicalise the 0.01% of people who are prolific meme creators, you radicalise the masses.
* I did say old...
We're just not going to talk about that one I suppose?
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2010/EFTA01992...
The reason I don’t agree is that moot banned any Gamergate discussion and those people then went to 8chan, a site which moot had no control over.
And it was Gamergate that put some fuel on the fire which (IMHO) increased support for Trump. The 8chan site grew a great deal from it, then continued from that first initial “win”.