Because your physical ID isn't scanned every time you access your bank account, and your bank (hopefully) doesn't check with some central database the government controls before issuing you an account. With a digital ID controlled by your government, that is required for accessing your account on the other hand...
We're not talking about just governments, we're talking about the private sector having to verify a digital identity tied to your biometrics before allowing you to participate in commerce. This is a whole different ball game than having to present a physical ID before being granted access to government services.
The latter is quite normal and the former is extremely dystopian.
What about when obtaining a SIM card or internet access? What about when purchasing a bus or train or plane ticket? Do you think you should have to identify yourself with a digital ID to withdraw your own money from your own bank account? Your average citizen isn't on a sanction list or a politically exposed persons list. In a national digital ID system they will be on a list regardless of whether or not they've done anything wrong, and the government can easily block their access if they don't like what they've been doing. Governments should not have this kind of control over the lives of ordinary citizens.
Not to mention the fact that NGOs like the World Bank and the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation are funding this. It's proof that it's more than just nation states that want to implement these digital ID systems. Why should the world bank or Bill Gates have any influence on who can and cannot withdraw their own money?
Get someone you know to try it, and then see why they would or wouldn't tell their friends about your product. Interview the users you already have and ask what they like and dont like about the product.
For getting new users, traditional outbound motions like cold email, and cold calling work. But only if you know the problem youre trying to solve really well.
Yes, I keep sharing with my friends and friends of friends, and they have been my loyal customers ever since.
All the feedback and new iterations are based on their feedback and new users. But the growth of the users is still very slow, and I am trying to see if I can do something that can accelerate the growth process
I would add these motions only really make sense in a few cases:
1. its apart of an enterprise sales motion, eg you want to get ~1000$ per user per month out of it.
2. Its apart of some well subscribed newsletter, this looks more like an ad than a cold email.
If your business is trying an outbound sales motion, then these methods might work. If you're going down a Product lead growth motion because of the nature of the problem/product/customer, then I would try getting some influencers who your prospective users like to use your product.
I know a lot less about PLG motions, so take that with a grain of salt. Feel free to email me directly if you want feedback or anything. Email is in my profile.
I think the sentiment here is about management's tie of bonuses to near-term stock performance. Maybe not about the market itself, I agree with your view on investors want long term gains over short term fluctuations mostly.
Ugh - yes. I’m seriously close to writing a chrome extension just to warn me or block pages that have that phrase…it’s irrational because there are so many legitimate uses, but they are dead to me.
I don't know man, I feel emboldened to keep using emdash exactly because I want to protest against people equating emdash with "AI reply" even though there are very legitimate uses for emdash.
Another common tell nowadays is the apostrophe type (’ vs ').
I don't know personally how to even type ’ on my keyboard. According to find in chrome, they are both considered the same character, which is interesting.
I suspect some word processors default to one or the other, but it's becoming all too common in places like Reddit and emails.
If you work with macOS or iOS users, you won’t be super surprised to see lots of “curly quotes”. They’re part of base macOS, no extra software required (I cannot remember if they need to be switched on or they’re on by default), and of course mass-market software like Word will create “smart” quotes on Mac and Windows.
I ended up implementing smart quotes on an internal blogging platform because I couldn’t bear "straight quotes". It’s just a few lines of code and makes my inner typography nerd twitch less.
Word (you know, the most popular word processor out there) will do that substitution. And on macOS & iOS, it's baked into the standard text input widgets so it'll do that basically everywhere that is a rich text editor.
> According to find in chrome, they are both considered the same character, which is interesting.
Browsers do a form of normalization in search. It's really useful, since it means "resume" will match résumé, unless of course you disable it (in Firefox, this is the "Match Diacritics" checkbox). (Also: itʼs, it's; if you want to see it in action on those two words.)
I’ve been using em-dashes since high school — publishing the school paper and everything. I remain slightly bemused by people discovering em-dashes for the first time thanks to LLMs.
Also, “em-dashes are something only LLMs use” comes perilously close to “huh, proper grammar, must’ve run this by a grammar checker”.
Is there a chance you could ask Ryan if he had an LLM write/rewrite large parts of this blog post? I don't mind at all if he did or didn't in itself, it's a good and informative post, but I strongly assumed the same while reading the article and if it's truly not LLM writing then it would serve as a super useful indicator about how often I'm wrongly making that assumption.
> Over the past year, we’ve seen a shift in what Deno Deploy customers are building: platforms where users generate code with LLMs and that code runs immediately without review
This isn't a canonical use of a colon (and the dependent clause isn't even grammatical)!
> This isn’t the traditional “run untrusted plugins” problem. It’s deeper: LLM-generated code, calling external APIs with real credentials, without human review.
Another colon-offset dependent paired with the classic, "This isn't X. It's Y," that we've all grown to recognize.
> Sandboxing the compute isn’t enough. You need to control network egress and protect secrets from exfiltration.
More of the latter—this sort of thing was quite rare outside of a specific rhetorical goal of getting your reader excited about what's to come. LLMs (mis)use it everywhere.
> Deno Sandbox provides both. And when the code is ready, you can deploy it directly to Deno Deploy without rebuilding.
Good writers vary sentence length, but it's also a rhetorical strategy that LLMs use indiscriminately with no dramatic goal or tension to relieve.
'And' at the beginning of sentences is another LLM-tell.
Yeah, I feel like this is really the smoking gun. Because it's not actually deeper? An LLM running untrusted code is not some additional level of security violation above a plugin running untrusted code. I feel like the most annoying part of "It's not X, it's Y" is that agents often say "It's not X, it's (slightly rephrased X)", lol, but it takes like 30 seconds to work that out.
Can it be that after reading so many LLM texts we will just subconciously follow the style, because that's what we are used to?
No idea how this works for native English speakers, but I know that I lack my own writing style and it is just a pseudo-llm mix of Reddit/irc/technical documentation, as those were the places where I learned written English
Yes, I think you're right—I have a hard time imagining how we avoid such an outcome. If it matters to you, my suggestion is to read as widely as you're able to. That way you can at least recognize which constructions are more/less associated with an LLM.
When I was first working toward this, I found the LA Review of Books and the London Review of Books to be helpful examples of longform, erudite writing. (edit - also recommend the old standards of The New Yorker and The Atlantic; I just wanted to highlight options with free articles).
I also recommend reading George Orwell's essay Politics and the English Language.
Given that a lot of us actively try to avoid this style, and immediately disregard text that uses it as not worth reading (a very useful heuristic given the vast amount of LLM-generated garbage), I don't think that would make us more prone to write in this manner. In fact I've actively caught myself editing text I've written to avoid certain LLMisms.
It's unfortunate that, given the entire corpus of human writing, LLMs have seemingly been fine-tuned to reproduce terrible ad copy from old editions of National Geographic.
(Yes, I split the infinitive there, but I hate that rule.)
As someone that has a habit of maybe overusing em dashes to my detriment, often times, and just something that I try to be mindful of in general. This whole thing of assuming that it's AI generated now is a huge blow. It feels like a personal attack.
"—" has always seemed like an particularly weak/unreliable signal to me, if it makes you feel any better. Triply so in any content one would expect smart quotes or formatted lists, but even in general.
RIP anyone who had a penchant for "not just x, but y" though. It's not even a go-to wording for me and I feel the need to rewrite it any time I type it out of fear it'll sound like LLMs.
It’s about more than the emdash. The LLM writing falls into very specific repeated patterns that become extremely obvious tells. The first few paragraphs of this blog post could be used in a textbook as it exhibits most of them at once.
We I 787 I 879-0215 I I I ui 87⁸⁸78⁸877777777 I 77 I⁸7 I 87888887788 I 7788 I I 8 I 8 I 788 I 7⁷88 I 8⁸I 7788 I 787888877788888787 7pm I 87 I⁸77 I ui 77887 I 87787 I 7777888787788787887787877777⁷777⁷879-0215 7777 I 7pm⁷I⁷879-0215 777⁷IIRC 7 7pm 87787777877 I I I⁷⁷7 ui ui 7⁷879-0215 I IIRC 77 ui 777 I 77777 I7777 ui I 7877777778 I7 I 77887 I 87⁷8777⁸8⁷⁷⁸⁸7⁸⁸⁸87⁸⁸⁸⁸8⁷87⁸⁸87888⁷878⁷878887⁸⁸⁸88⁸878888888888888888888887878778788888888787788888888888888888888888888887 ui is 888888888887 7
One of the things I find interesting as well, is that among many of my friends outside the western world, they typically see: "knowing how something is made" as a western cultural thing. Many of them adopt a "why do you care how it's made, you are a not a manufacturer" type of response. Which i find very interesting.
They still care about the quality of the product, just not the process as much. Not sure if this the case for all people or a generalization. Just something I noticed.
Didn't actually check out the app, but some aspects of application state are hard to serialize, some operations are not reversible by the application. EG: sending an email. It doesn't seem naively trivial to accomplish this, for all apps.
So maybe on some apps, but "all" is a difficult thing.
Generating pictures of a real child naked is assault. Imagine finding child photos of yourself online naked being passed around. Its extremely unpleasant and its assault.
If you're arguing that generating a "fake child" is somehow significantly different and that you want to split hairs over the CSAM/CP term in that specific case. Its not a great take to be honest, people understand CSAM, actually verifying if its a "real" child or not, is not really relevant.
>actually verifying if its a "real" child or not, is not really relevant.
It's entirely relevant. Is the law protecting victims or banning depictions?
If you try to do the latter, you'll run head first into the decades long debate that is the obscenity test in the US. The former, meanwhile, is made as a way to make sure people aren't hurt. It's not too dissimilar to freedom of speech vs slander.
> Is the law protecting victims or banning depictions?
Both. When there's plausible deniability, it slows down all investigations.
> If you try to do the latter, you'll run head first into the decades long debate that is the obscenity test in the US. The former, meanwhile, is made as a way to make sure people aren't hurt. It's not too dissimilar to freedom of speech vs slander.
There's a world outside the US, a world of various nations which don't care about US legal rulings, and which are various degrees of willing-to-happy to ban US services.
It, the difference between calling child pornographic content cp vs CSAM, is splitting hairs. Call it CSAM its the modern term. Don't try to create a divide on terminology due to an edge case on some legal code interpretations. It doesn't really help in my opinion and is not a worthwhile argument. I understand where you are coming from on a technicality. But the current definition does "fit" well enough. So why make it an issue. As an example consider the following theoretical case:
a lawyer and judge are discussing a case and using the terminology CSAM in the case and needs to argue between the legality or issue between the child being real or not. What help is it in this situation to use CP vs CSAM in that moment. I dont really think it changes things at all. In both cases the lawyer and judge would need to still clarify for everyone that "presumably" the person is not real. So an acronym change on this point to me is still not a great take. Its regressive, not progressive.
>It, the difference between calling child pornographic content cp vs CSAM, is splitting hairs.
Yes, and it's a lawyer's job to split hairs. Up thread was talking about legal action so being able distinguish the term changes how you'd attack the issue.
> What help is it in this situation to use CP vs CSAM in that moment. I dont really think it changes things at all.
I just explaied it.
You're free to have your own colloquial opinion on the matter. But if you want to discuss law you need to understand the history on the topic. Especially one as controversial as this. These are probably all tired talking points from before we were born, so while it's novel and insignificant to us, it's language that has made or broken cases in the past. Cases that will be used for precedent.
>So an acronym change on this point to me is still not a great take. Its regressive, not progressive.
I don't really care about the acronym. I'm not a lawyer. A duck is a duck to me.
I'm just explaining why in this legal context the wording does matter. Maybe it shouldn't, but that's not my call.
It's also irrelevant to some extent: manipulating someone's likeness without their consent is also antisocial, in many jurisdictions illegal, and doing so in a sexualized way making it even more illegal.
The children aspect just makes a bad thing even worse and seems to thankfully get some (though enough IMO) people to realize it.
to be frank though, I think this a better way than all people's thoughts all of the time.
I think the "crowd" of information makes the end output of an LLM worse rather than better. Specifically in our inability to know really what kind of Bias we're dealing with.
Currently to me it feels really muddy knowing how information is biased, beyond just the hallucination and factual incosistencies.
But as far as I can tell, "correctness of the content aside", sometimes frontier LLMs respond like freshman college students, other times they respond with the rigor of a mathematics PHD canidate, and sometimes like a marketing hit piece.
This dataset has a consistency which I think is actually a really useful feature. I agree that having many perspectives in the dataset is good, but as an end user being able to rely on some level of consistency with an AI model is something I really think is missing.
Maybe more succinctly I want frontier LLM's to have a known and specific response style and bias which I can rely on, because there already is a lot of noise.
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