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Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by magnio on Sunday January 18, 2026 @01:08AM (#46665235)
Pity that HN's ability to detect sarcasm is as robust as that of a sentiment analysis model using keyword-matching.
Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by furyofantares on Sunday January 18, 2026 @01:45AM (#46665384)
The problem is more that it's an LLM-generated comment that's about 20x as long as it needed to be to get the point across.
Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by cubefox on Sunday January 18, 2026 @02:33AM (#46665602)
It's obviously not LLM-generated.
Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by kleene_op on Sunday January 18, 2026 @02:39AM (#46665640)
Phew. This is a relief, honestly!
Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by threethirtytwo on Sunday January 18, 2026 @01:55AM (#46665425)
It's not.

Evidence shows otherwise: Despite the "20x" length, many people actually missed the point.

Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by eru on Sunday January 18, 2026 @02:04AM (#46665465)
Despite or because?
Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by _diyar on Sunday January 18, 2026 @02:20AM (#46665536)
I definitely missed the point because of the length, and only realized after I read replies to your comment.
Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by threethirtytwo on Sunday January 18, 2026 @02:31AM (#46665593)
Next time I'll write something shorter, or if you don't believe I wrote it... then I'll tell the AI to write something shorter.
Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by quinnjh on Sunday January 18, 2026 @02:39AM (#46665643)
Its not just verbose—it's almost a novel. Parent either cooked and capped, or has managed to perfectly emulate the patterns this parrot is stochastically known best for. I liked the pro human vibe if anything.
Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by furyofantares on Sunday January 18, 2026 @02:38PM (#46671359)
Oh yeah, there is also a problem with people not noticing they're reading LLM output, AND with people missing sarcasm on here. Actually, I'm OK with people missing sarcasm on here - I have plenty of places to go for sarcasm and wit and it's actually kind of nice to have a place where most posts are sincere, even if that sets people up to miss it when posts are sarcastic.

Which is also what makes it problematic that you're lying about your LLM use. I would honestly love to know your prompt and how you iterated on the post, how much you put into it and how much you edited or iterated. Although pretending there was no LLM involved at all is rather disappointing.

Unfortunately I think you might feel backed into a corner now that you've insisted otherwise but it's a genuinely interesting thing here that I wish you'd elaborate on.

Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by catlifeonmars on Sunday January 18, 2026 @02:25AM (#46665565)
That’s just the internet. Detecting sarcasm requires a lot of context external to the content of any text. In person some of that is mitigated by intonation, facial expressions, etc. Typically it also requires that the the reader is a native speaker of the language or at least extremely proficient.
Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by dang on Sunday January 18, 2026 @11:32PM (#46675080)
I'm more worried that the best LLMs aren't yet good enough to classify satire reliably.
Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by catoc on Sunday January 18, 2026 @02:41AM (#46665652)
I firmly believe @threethirtytwo’s reply was not produced by an LLM
Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by mkarliner on Sunday January 18, 2026 @03:28AM (#46665887)
regardless of if this text was written by an LLM or a human, it is still slop,with a human behind it just trying to wind people up . If there is a valid point to be made , it should be made, briefly.
Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by catoc on Sunday January 18, 2026 @04:07AM (#46666145)
If the point was triggering a reply, the length and sarcasm certainly worked.

I agree brevity is always preferred. Making a good point while keeping it brief is much harder than rambling on.

But length is just a measure, quality determines if I keep reading. If a comment is too long, I won’t finish reading it. If I kept reading, it wasn’t too long.

Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by rixed on Sunday January 18, 2026 @02:43AM (#46665657)
Are you expecting people who can't detect self-dellusions to be able to detect sarcasm, or are you just being cruel?
Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by eru on Sunday January 18, 2026 @02:04AM (#46665461)
> This is a relief, honestly. A prior solution exists now, which means the model didn’t solve anything at all. It just regurgitated it from the internet, which we can retroactively assume contained the solution in spirit, if not in any searchable or known form. Mystery resolved.

Vs

> Interesting that in Terrance Tao's words: "though the new proof is still rather different from the literature proof)"

Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by johnfn on Sunday January 18, 2026 @01:06AM (#46665219)
I suspect this is AI generated, but it’s quite high quality, and doesn’t have any of the telltale signs that most AI generated content does. How did you generate this? It’s great.
Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by AstroBen on Sunday January 18, 2026 @01:52AM (#46665407)
Their comments are full of "it's not x, it's y" over and over. Short pithy sentences. I'm quite confident it's AI written, maybe with a more detailed prompt than the average

I guess this is the end of the human internet

Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by prussia on Sunday January 18, 2026 @02:45AM (#46665672)
To give them the benefit of the doubt, people who talk to AI too much probably start mimicking its style.
Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by 4k93n2 on Sunday January 18, 2026 @02:12AM (#46665495)
yea, i was suspicious by the second paragraph but was sure once i got to "that’s not engineering, it’s cosplay"
Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by AstroBen on Sunday January 18, 2026 @02:23AM (#46665548)
It's also the wording. The weird phrases

"Glorified Google search with worse footnotes" what on earth does that mean?

AI has a distinct feel to it

Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by lxgr on Sunday January 18, 2026 @02:44AM (#46665662)
And with enough motivated reasoning, you can find AI vibes in almost every comment you don’t agree with.

For better or worse, I think we might have to settle on “human-written until proven otherwise”, if we don’t want to throw “assume positive intent” out the window entirely on this site.

Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by testdelacc1 on Sunday January 18, 2026 @02:52AM (#46665704)
Dude is swearing up and down that they came up with the text on their own. I agree with you though, it reeks of LLMs. The only alternative explanation is that they use LLMs so much that they’ve copied the writing style.
Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by plaguuuuuu on Sunday January 18, 2026 @02:20AM (#46665534)
I've had that exact phrase pop up from an LLM when I asked it for a more negative code review
Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by threethirtytwo on Sunday January 18, 2026 @01:25AM (#46665303)
Your intuition on AI is out of date by about 6 months. Those telltale signs no longer exist.

It wasn't AI generated. But if it was, there is currently no way for anyone to tell the difference.

Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by catlifeonmars on Sunday January 18, 2026 @02:32AM (#46665598)
I’m confused by this. I still see this kind of phrasing in LLM generated content, even as recent as last week (using Gemini, if that matters). Are you saying that LLMs do not generate text like this, or that it’s now possible to get text that doesn’t contain the telltale “its not X, it’s Y”?
Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by comp_throw7 on Sunday January 18, 2026 @01:34AM (#46665337)
> But if it was there is currently no way for anyone to tell the difference.

This is false. There are many human-legible signs, and there do exist fairly reliable AI detection services (like Pangram).

Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by threethirtytwo on Sunday January 18, 2026 @01:43AM (#46665373)
I've tested some of those services and they weren't very reliable.
Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by CamperBob2 on Sunday January 18, 2026 @10:29AM (#46668571)
If such a thing did exist, it would exist only until people started training models to hide from it.

Negative feedback is the original "all you need."

Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by int_19h on Monday January 19, 2026 @05:36PM (#46685465)
There are no reliable AI detection services. At best they can reliably detect output from popular chatbots running with their default prompts. Beyond that reliability deteriorates rapidly so they either err on the side of many false positives, or on the side of many false negatives.

There's already been several scandals where students were accused of AI use on the basis of these services and successfully fought back.

Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by velox_neb on Sunday January 18, 2026 @01:43AM (#46665372)
> It wasn't AI generated.

You're lying: https://www.pangram.com/history/94678f26-4898-496f-9559-8c4c...

Not that I needed pangram to tell me that, it's obvious slop.

Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by threethirtytwo on Sunday January 18, 2026 @01:50AM (#46665402)
I wouldn't know how to prove to you otherwise other then to tell you that I have seen these tools show incorrect results for both AI generated text and human written text.
Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by lxgr on Sunday January 18, 2026 @02:52AM (#46665707)
Good thing you had a stochastic model backing up (with “low confidence”, no less) your vague intuition of a comment you didn’t like being AI-written.
Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by XenophileJKO on Sunday January 18, 2026 @01:54AM (#46665415)
I must be a bot because I love existential dread, that's a great phrase. I feel like they trigger a lot on literate prose.
Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by lxgr on Sunday January 18, 2026 @02:54AM (#46665726)
Sad times when the only remaining way to convince LLM luddites of somebody’s humanity is bad writing.
Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by CamperBob2 on Sunday January 18, 2026 @01:11AM (#46665246)
(edit: removed duplicate comment from above, not sure how that happened)
Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by undeveloper on Sunday January 18, 2026 @01:21AM (#46665280)
the poster is in fact being very sarcastic. arguing in favor of emergent reasoning does in fact make sense
Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by threethirtytwo on Sunday January 18, 2026 @01:19AM (#46665270)
It's a formal sarcasm piece.
Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by CamperBob2 on Sunday January 18, 2026 @01:11AM (#46665244)
It's bizarre. The same account was previously arguing in favor of emergent reasoning abilities in another thread ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46453084 ) -- I voted it up, in fact! Turing test failed, I guess.

(edit: fixed link)

Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by threethirtytwo on Sunday January 18, 2026 @01:20AM (#46665275)
I thought the mockery and sarcasm in my piece was rather obvious.
Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by CamperBob2 on Sunday January 18, 2026 @01:27AM (#46665312)
Poe's Law is the real Bitter Lesson.
Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by habinero on Sunday January 18, 2026 @01:19AM (#46665269)
We need a name for the much more trivial version of the Turing test that replaces "human" with "weird dude with rambling ideas he clearly thinks are very deep"

I'm pretty sure it's like "can it run DOOM" and someone could make an LLM that passes this that runs on an pregnancy test

Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by nurettin on Sunday January 18, 2026 @01:00AM (#46665192)
Why not plan for a future where a lot of non-trivial tasks are automated instead of living on the edge with all this anxiety?
Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by threethirtytwo on Sunday January 18, 2026 @01:06AM (#46665223)
Well it's a bit of an identity crisis. As a developer on HN my entire identity is wrapped around my skill as a programmer. It's a badge of honor I wear and it's a career and I get paid a lot of money to do this.

All of that is going away so the best way to deal with it is to call it a stochastic parrot and deny reality.

Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by jorvi on Sunday January 18, 2026 @03:24AM (#46665864)
I mean.. LLMs have hit a pretty hard wall a while ago, with the only solution being throwing monstrous compute at eking out the remaining few percent improvement (real world, not benchmarks). That's not to mention hallucinations / false paths being a foundational problem.

LLMs will continue to get slightly better in the next few years, but mainly a lot more efficient. Which will also mean better and better local models. And grounding might get better, but that just means less wrong answers, not better right answers.

So no need for doomerism. The people saying LLMs are a few years away from eating the world are either in on the con or unaware.

Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by undeveloper on Sunday January 18, 2026 @01:22AM (#46665292)
come out of the irony layer for a second -- what do you believe about LLMs?
Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by 7777332215 on Sunday January 18, 2026 @01:10AM (#46665240)
If all of it is going away and you should deny reality, what does everything else you wrote even mean?
Re:Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro by habinero on Sunday January 18, 2026 @01:12AM (#46665250)
Yes, it is simply impossible that anyone could look at things and do your own evaluations and come to a different, much more skeptical conclusion.

The only possible explanation is people say things they don't believe out of FUD. Literally the only one.