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US Court of Appeals: TOS may be updated by email, use can imply consent [pdf]

https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/memoranda/2026/03/03/25-403.pdf
228•dryadin•5h ago•140 comments

Fontcrafter: Turn Your Handwriting into a Real Font

https://arcade.pirillo.com/fontcrafter.html
79•rendx•2h ago•33 comments

Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/06/20/ireland-coal-free-ends-coal-power-generation-moneypoint/
112•robin_reala•1h ago•17 comments

Unlocking Python's Cores:Energy Implications of Removing the GIL

https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.04782
23•runningmike•3d ago•16 comments

Agent Safehouse – macOS-native sandboxing for local agents

https://agent-safehouse.dev/
615•atombender•15h ago•150 comments

Microscopes can see video on a laserdisc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZuR-772cks
476•zdw•1d ago•61 comments

PCB devboard the size of a USB-C plug

https://github.com/Dieu-de-l-elec/AngstromIO-devboard
192•zachlatta•1d ago•40 comments

Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)

172•david927•11h ago•638 comments

Every single board computer I tested in 2025

https://bret.dk/every-single-board-computer-i-tested-in-2025/
177•speckx•3d ago•58 comments

FrameBook

https://fb.edoo.gg
448•todsacerdoti•20h ago•76 comments

My Homelab Setup

https://bryananthonio.com/blog/my-homelab-setup/
254•photon_collider•19h ago•166 comments

Linux Internals: How /proc/self/mem writes to unwritable memory (2021)

https://offlinemark.com/an-obscure-quirk-of-proc/
90•medbar•13h ago•19 comments

We should revisit literate programming in the agent era

https://silly.business/blog/we-should-revisit-literate-programming-in-the-agent-era/
254•horseradish•16h ago•169 comments

Artificial-life: A simple (300 lines of code) reproduction of Computational Life

https://github.com/Rabrg/artificial-life
122•tosh•15h ago•14 comments

How the Sriracha guys screwed over their supplier

https://old.reddit.com/r/KitchenConfidential/comments/1ro61g2/how_the_sriracha_guys_screwed_over_...
234•thunderbong•7h ago•77 comments

I made a programming language with M&Ms

https://mufeedvh.com/posts/i-made-a-programming-language-with-mnms/
91•tosh•17h ago•35 comments

Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2019/why-cant-you-tune-your-guitar/
220•digitallogic•4d ago•153 comments

My “grand vision” for Rust

https://blog.yoshuawuyts.com/a-grand-vision-for-rust/
208•todsacerdoti•4d ago•199 comments

Living human brain cells play DOOM on a CL1 [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRV8fSw6HaE
201•kevinak•20h ago•200 comments

Nvidia backs AI data center startup Nscale as it hits $14.6B valuation

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/09/nscale-ai-data-center-nvidia-raise.html
10•voxadam•1h ago•2 comments

WSL Manager

https://github.com/bostrot/wsl2-distro-manager
112•gballan•17h ago•59 comments

The death of social media is the renaissance of RSS (2025)

https://www.smartlab.at/rss-revival-life-after-social-media/
162•jruohonen•7h ago•104 comments

Ask HN: How to be alone?

509•sillysaurusx•1d ago•369 comments

I love email (2023)

https://blog.xoria.org/email/
35•surprisetalk•3d ago•15 comments

Show HN: Mcp2cli – One CLI for every API, 96-99% fewer tokens than native MCP

https://github.com/knowsuchagency/mcp2cli
94•knowsuchagency•6h ago•60 comments

Z80 Sans – a disassembler in a font (2024)

https://github.com/nevesnunes/z80-sans
124•pabs3•4d ago•12 comments

We Stopped Using the Mathematics That Works

https://gfrm.in/posts/why-decision-theory-lost/index.html
5•slygent•3h ago•1 comments

Show HN: I built a real-time OSINT dashboard pulling 15 live global feeds

https://github.com/BigBodyCobain/Shadowbroker
257•vancecookcobxin•16h ago•105 comments

Pushing and Pulling: Three reactivity algorithms

https://jonathan-frere.com/posts/reactivity-algorithms/
104•frogulis•1d ago•18 comments

The legendary Mojave Phone Booth is back (2013)

https://dailydot.com/mojave-phone-booth-back-number
35•1970-01-01•2d ago•8 comments
Open in hackernews

Grammarly is offering ‘expert’ AI reviews from famous dead and living writers

https://www.wired.com/story/grammarly-is-offering-expert-ai-reviews-from-your-favorite-authors-dead-or-alive/
45•jmsflknr•4d ago
See also:

Grammarly is using our identities without permission, https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/890921/g..., https://archive.ph/1w1oO

Comments

drbig•3h ago
The most interesting is the realization that if the LLM's input is only the output of a professional (human), then by definition the LLM cannot mimic the process the (human) professional applied to get from whatever input they had to produce the output.

In other words an LLM can spit out a plausible "output of X", however it cannot encode the process that lead X to transform their inputs into their output.

Eddy_Viscosity2•3h ago
Is it not possible for the process of input to output be inferred by the llm and therefore applied to new inputs to create appropriate outputs.
whizzter•3h ago
Only if the LLM knows the inputs connected to particular outputs, pre-digital era or classified material might not be available, neither informal discussions with other experts.

Most importantly, negative but unused signals might not be available if the text does not mention it.

simianwords•2h ago
challenge: provide a single example where the LLM can only provide the output and not the steps? (in text scenario)
latexr•1h ago
An LLM can always output steps, but it doesn’t mean they are true, they are great at making up bullshit.

When the “how many ‘r’ in ‘strawberry’” question was all the rage, you could definitely get LLMs to explain the steps of counting, too. It was still wrong.

simianwords•1h ago
can you provide a single example now with gpt 5.4 thinking that makes up things in steps? lets try to reproduce it.
weird-eye-issue•3h ago
Replace "LLM" with "student" and read that again. You don't just blindly give students output, you teach them, like what you are supposed to do with an LLM.
shafyy•3h ago
Enough with this analgoy. It's flawed on so many levels. First and foremost, stop devaluing humanitiy and hyping up AI companies by parroting their party line. Second, LLMs don't learn. They can hold a very limited amount of context, as you know. And every time you need to start over. So fuck no, "teaching" and LLM is nothing like teaching an actual human.
KeplerBoy•2h ago
It all went south when we started to call it "learning" instead of "fitting parameters".
Imustaskforhelp•2h ago
I agree with ya so much. I have seen so many people even in hackernews somehow give human qualities to LLM's.

This Grammarly thing seems to be a bastardized form of that not even sparing the dead.

I'd say that there was some incentive by the AI companies to muddle up the water here.

fxtentacle•2h ago
„Fitting“ is still too nice of a word choice, because it implies that it’s easy to identify the best solution.

I suggest „randomly adjusting parameters while trying to make things better“ as that accurately reflects the „precision“ that goes into stuffing LLMs with more data.

bonoboTP•2h ago
It was called learning already back when the field was called cybernetics and foundational figures like Shannon worked on this kind of stuff. People tried to decipher learning in the nervous system and implement the extracted principles in machines. Such as Hebbian learning, the Perception algorithm etc. This stuff goes back to the 40s/50s/60s, so things must have gone south pretty early then.
simianwords•2h ago
absolutely they can learn. you are being emotional and the original point is correct.

i give the LLM my codebase and it indeed learns about it and can answer questions.

RichardLake•1h ago
That isn't learning, it can read things in its context, and generate materials to assist answering further prompts but that doesn't change the model weights. It is just updating the context.

Unless you are actually fine tuning models, in which case sure, learning is taking place.

simianwords•1h ago
i don't know why you think it matters how it works internally. whether it changes its weights or not is not important. does it behave like a person who learns a thing? yes.

if i showed a human a codebase and asked them questions with good answers - yes i would say the human learned it. the analogy breaks at a point because of limited context but learning is a good enough word.

RichardLake•8m ago
Maybe because I work on a legacy programming language with far less material in the training? For me it makes a difference because it partly needs to "learn" the language itself and have that in the context, along with codebase specific stuff. For something with the model already knowing the language and only needing codebase specific stuff it might feel different.
weird-eye-issue•1h ago
> very limited amount of context

This isn't 2023 anymore

ErroneousBosh•2h ago
You can't "teach" an LLM. It can't think. It's a simple pattern-matching algorithm, basically just an Eliza bot with a huge table of phrases.
DonHopkins•2h ago
You're not thinking, just regurgitating catch phrases that are factually incorrect hallucinations. So how are you any better than an LLM?
throwaway290•1h ago
Speak for yourself...
delaminator•49m ago
I can learn new catchphrases without boiling the ocean
dwb•2h ago
If you change the words in a sentence then it changes its meaning.
weird-eye-issue•2h ago
Yeah but obviously my point in this context is that it doesn't. Its not like I said to replace the word with "potato". Thanks for your genius comment.
simianwords•2h ago
i don't get what the point of what you are saying is? i can ask it to explain how to solve an integral right now with steps.

i can ask it to tell me how to write like a person X right now.

Peritract•2h ago
"Explain how to solve" and "write like X" are crucially different tasks. One of them is about going through the steps of a process, and the other is about mimicking the result of a process.
simianwords•2h ago
but llm can do both. so what's the point?

can you give a specific example of what an llm can't do? be specific so we can test it.

plewd•2h ago
like OP originally said, the LLM doesn't have access to the actual process of the author, only the completed/refined output.

Not sure why you need a concrete example to "test", but just think about the fact that the LLM has no idea how a writer brainstorms, re-iterates on their work, or even comes up with the ideas in the first place.

simianwords•2h ago
i don't buy this logic. if i have studied an author greatly i will be able to recognise patterns and be able to write like them.

ex: i read a lot of shakespeare, understand patterns, understand where he came from, his biography and i will be able to write like him. why is it different for an LLM?

i again don't get what the point is?

TimorousBestie•1h ago
This is the plot of a short story of Borges’ called “Pierre Menard, the Author of Don Quixote.”
tovej•1h ago
You can understand his biography and analyses about how shakespeare might have written. You can apply this knowledge to modify your writing process.

The LLM does not model text at this meta-level. It can only use those texts as examples, it cannot apply what is written there to it's generation process.

simianwords•1h ago
no it does and what you said is easily falsifiable.

can you provide a _single_ example where LLM might fail? lets test this now.

wongarsu•1h ago
You will produce output that emulates the patters of Shakespeare's works, but you won't arrive at them by the same process Shakespeare did. You are subject to similar limitations as the llm in this case, just to a lesser degree (you share some 'human experience' with the author, and might be able to reason about their though process from biographies and such)

As another example, I can write a story about hobbits and elves in a LotR world with a style that approximates Tolkien. But it won't be colored by my first-hand WW1 experiences, and won't be written with the intention of creating a world that gives my conlangs cultural context, or the intention of making a bedtime story for my kids. I will never be able to write what Tolkien would have written because I'm not Tolkien, and do not see the world as Tolkien saw it. I don't even like designing languages

simianwords•1h ago
that's fair and you have highlighted a good limitation. but we do this all the time - we try to understand the author, learn from them and mimic them and we succeed to good extent.

that's why we have really good fake van gogh's for which a person can't tell the difference.

of course you can't do the same as the original person but you get close enough many times and as humans we do this frequently.

in the context of this post i think it is for sure possible to mimic a dead author and give steps to achieve writing that would sound like them using an LLM - just like a human.

z2•2h ago
Neural networks most certainly go through a process to transform input into output (even to mimic the results of another process) but it's a very different one from human neutral networks. But I think this is the crucial point of the debate, essentially unchanged from Searle's "Chinese Room" argument from decades ago.

The person in that room, looking up a dictionary with Chinese phrases and patterns, certainly follows a process, but it's easy to dismiss the notion that the person understands Chinese. But the question is if you zoom out, is the room itself intelligent because it is following a process, even if it's just a bunch of pattern recognition?

mysterydip•1h ago
Is the reason it can show steps for solving an integral because the training set contained webpages or books showing how to do it?
simianwords•57m ago
if we have steps for understanding any author's english and creative process (generally not specific to an author) would you agree then it is possible for an llm to do it?
mysterydip•8m ago
Repeating a process, yes for sure, even (pseudorandom?) variations on a process. Understanding a process is a different question, and I’m not sure how you would measure that.

In school we would have a test with various questions to show you understand the concept of addition, for example. But while my calculator can perfectly add any numbers up to its memory limit, it has no understanding of addition.

kome•3h ago
that's so scummy. why they even needs "names"? it's a rhetorical question...
bayindirh•3h ago
Moreover, they don't even apologize:

"The work is public, hence the name. It's well known, it's in the data. Who cares".

What will they do next? Create similar publications with domainsquatting and write all-AI articles with the "public" names?

Is it still fair use, then?

kome•3h ago
yes i hate that. they still have the chutzpah of keeping doing it. and i am sure it's illegal in multiple legislation. because they are not writing articles where you can cite people, they are selling a product.
bayindirh•2h ago
I think we can thank the current times and developments as a whole for unearthing the greediest of the greedy among us.

It's very enlightening, if you ask me.

SoKamil•2h ago
Authority washing.
dryadin•3h ago
Frankly, I am surprised this was not shut down by their legal counsel (assuming they have one and they actually asked). The legal exposure here is significant. This could be defamation, there are publicity rights issues, copyright, and maybe even criminal liability.
beernet•3h ago
This feels like a desperate attempt to stay relevant in a post-LLM world. They’re basically wrapping an LLM in a "professional" skin and calling it an expert review. The problem is that once you start letting an AI "expert" dictate tone and logic, you effectively lobotomize the writer’s original intent. We’re reaching a point where AI is just reviewing other AI-generated text, creating a feedback loop of pure mediocrity. Copium for middle management, if you ask me.
Aerroon•2h ago
I disagree. You write when you have something to say. A service like Grammarly tries to help you convey what you want to say, but better. What you want to say is still up to you.

Words paint the picture, but the meaning of the picture is what matters.

ibejoeb•2h ago
That's a tiny fraction. Most people write because they're told to write.
NewsaHackO•2h ago
Are you talking about children or students? I think most people write because they want to communicate.
ibejoeb•1h ago
Children and young students, certainly. Adult students: almost 100%. If writing is your job, then by definition, and your problem is more often finding something to say, not writing it.
latexr•1h ago
You’re not counting all the office workers who have to write reports or emails, or all the scammers who write those websites to manipulate SEO or show you ads.
bonoboTP•2h ago
It's great. Now that fancy writing is cheap and infinite, fields whose entire scholarship value was in obscurantist jargon bending have to actually start to turn on their brains and care about making more sense than an LLM can.
jagged-chisel•1h ago
> … have to actually start to …

Or do they?

bonoboTP•55m ago
Maybe not. But academia is going to change. Status will still have to be allocated by some mechanism but the classic journals and reviews based system will crumble under the weight of LLMs. Of course this will upset a great many of people who enjoy the current state of things.
misir•2h ago
Grammarly even from the start was very distracting to me even as a someone using english as a second language to communicate. I have developed my own taste and way of articulating thoughts, but grammarly (and LLMs today) forced me to remove that layer of personality from my texts which I didn't wanted to let go. Sure I sounded less professional, but that was the image I wanted to project anyways.

Unrelated but surprising to me that I've found built-in grammar checking within JetBrains IDEs far more useful at catching grammar mistakes while not forcing me to rewrite entire sentences.

himata4113•2h ago
Grammarly seemed pretty dead on arrival the moment they added AI features. They would have said a lot more relevant and kept the costs down if they were strictly no-ai imo.
bayindirh•2h ago
The funny thing is, their core "grammar" engine has to work on a language model + some hard heuristics anyway. So they were on a path to utilize this thing for real good, with concrete benefits.

Generative AI is a plague at this point. Everybody is adding to their wares to see what happens. It's almost like ricing a car. All noise, no go.

Applejinx•2h ago
I would be surprised if the living writers can't sue over this.
Imustaskforhelp•2h ago
Man I really don't like this at all.

It really feels so wrong to spare nobody, not even dead writer/people.

All it's gonna do is something similar to em-dashes where people who use it are now getting called LLM when it was their writing which would've trained LLM (the irony)

If this takes off, hypothetically, we will associate slop with the writing qualities similar to how Ghibli art is so good but it felt so sloppy afterwards and made us less appreciate the Ghibli artstyle seeing just about anyone make it.

The sad part is that most/some of these dead writers/artists were never appreciated by the people of their time and they struggled with so many feelings and writing/art was their way of expressing that. Van Gogh is an example which comes to my mind.[0] Many struggled from depression and other feelings too. To take that and expression of it and turn it into yet another product feels quite depressing for a company to do

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_of_Vincent_van_Gogh

bayindirh•2h ago
> It really feels so wrong to spare nobody, not even dead writer/people.

That train left at full steam when companies scraped the whole internet and claimed it was fair use. Now it's a slippery slope covered with slime.

I believe there'll be no slowing down from now on.

They are doing something amazing, will they ask for permission? /s.

senaevren•2h ago
A few things worth flagging: On GDPR: Using a named individual's identity to generate commercial AI output isn't obviously covered by "legitimate interest." Affected EU-based individuals likely have real grounds to object or request erasure. On IP/publicity rights: You can't copyright an editing style — but you absolutely can have a right of publicity claim when a company profits from your name and simulated judgment without consent. The Lanham Act's false endorsement provisions could also be in play here. The kicker: The "sources" cited by the feature were broken, spammy, or pointed to completely unrelated content. So the defense that suggestions are inspired by someone's actual work may not even hold up technically.