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A Remarkable Assertion from A16Z
- gramakri2 10mo agoMissed chance to end the article mid sentence
- dude250711 10mo agoIt's the same guys who get impressed if you are playing a video game while talking to them.
- d_burfoot 10mo agoHypothesis C: failure of human memory. A human read Stephenson's book(s) 20 years ago, remembers that the endings were a bit unsatisfying. The same human also read some other book many years ago, which ends mid-sentence. In that person's mind, the two are conflated.
- boesboes 10mo agoHypothesis A is much more likely if you ask me
- shortrounddev2 10mo agoIt's A16Z, they definitely had an LLM recommend a set of books that nobody there has actually ever read. Except maybe Snowcrash
- eesmith 10mo agoHypothesis D-for-Delany: The human thought Stephenson wrote Dhalgren. "Waiting here, away from the terrifying weaponry, out of the halls of vapor and light, beyond holland into the hills, I have come to"
- coffeebeqn 10mo agoIf I was writing a book review for my company (big famous VC who cares about their reputation) - I would’ve probably at least popped the book open and read a few chapters if it’s been years since I read it
- boznz 10mo agoAnother hypothesis. Have AI generate a top 50 list of books, and add a book you want your website to promote into the mix somewhere near the top to increase its sales. Cheap marketing, It wouldn't be the first time.
- readams 10mo agoIn these modern times of ours, the word literally has taken on a new meaning, which is "not literally but with emphasis." This seems like the most likely explanation.
- EdwardCoffin 10mo agoEven if that's the intended meaning of literally, it is still a reckless exaggeration. I'm pretty sure that Stephenson's endings are no more abrupt than some of Shakespeare's (check out Hamlet and Macbeth) or some of Frank Herbert's (see Dune and Children of Dune), and I never hear anyone go out of their way to describe either of them as being unable to write endings.
- disgruntledphd2 10mo ago> some of Frank Herbert's (see Dune and Children of Dune), I mean, Dune does in fact end mid-story, which is probably worse.
- jeremyjh 10mo agoNo, no it doesn't. Are you talking about the recent movies that split the first novel into two movies? The novel Dune ends after Paul defeats his enemies and becomes emperor.
- disgruntledphd2 10mo agoThe Dune series has six novels, the final one is Chapter House Dune, which does in fact end mid story. I know this because I read them in the 90s and didn't realise that Frank Herbert was dead for quite some time after reading Chapter House.
- jeremyjh 10mo agoI know that, I've read them too. In the SP, and in this thread we're discussing endings to novels. No one is complaining about a series that isn't finished due to the author's death.
- kylecazar 10mo agoIt would have been really great to end the blog post mid-sentence.
- ruined 10mo agoum, it literally does
- nchmy 10mo agono,it quite literally doesnt...
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- ruined 10mo agoa remarkable assertion from nchmy
- dundarious 10mo agoThe central complaint of TFA is the exact same as what ruined is doing. It is very obviously a joke. Not something I appreciate on HN, but still.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- andy99 10mo agoI think it was a good enough joke or witty remark grounded in the crux of the article that it’s worth it. And it’s certainly interesting to see the “whoosh” past many of the commenters
- dundarious 10mo agoIt was flagged and I vouched it for similar reasons. I downvote such comments though.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- chucksmash 10mo agoStephenson? Ah yes, the deservedly obscure dadaist prose stylist who thought it was cool to stop his books mid-sentence.
- andrelaszlo 10mo ago> A hundred years from now, thanks to the workings of the Inhuman Centipede, I’m known as a deservedly obscure dadaist prose stylist who thought it was cool to stop his books mid-sentence.
- gpderetta 10mo agoI love the "Inhuman Centipede" definition for AI. Is that a Stephenson original or he is quoting existing usage.
- 3rodents 10mo ago“A hundred years from now, thanks to the workings of the Inhuman Centipede, I’m known as a deservedly obscure dadaist prose stylist who thought it was cool to stop his books mid-sentence.” is “Inhuman Centipede” to describe the slop-eating-its-own-tale future we all dread an established term, or an invention of the author? I hope it becomes the term we all use, like slop and clanker. For those of us writing original words that are consumed by LLMs without our consent, at least we get to be the front of the Inhuman Centipede.
- spuz 10mo agoThe earliest use of this term I can find is here: https://andrewbrown.substack.com/p/the-inhuman-centipede https://andrewbrown.substack.com/p/the-inhuman-centipede It was also used as the title for this post by Cory Doctrow discussing the same problem: https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/14/inhuman-centipede/#enshittibottification https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/14/inhuman-centipede/#enshit...
- cb321 10mo agoThere is also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HumancentiPad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HumancentiPad (which is almost surely an homage to the movie) which was 2011 and tied in all kinds of tech-aspects like licensing and iPads.
- doctorhandshake 10mo agoNot sure if the substitution of ‘tale’ for ‘tail’ was intentional but regardless it’s apropos
- myrmidon 10mo agoI strongly suspect that the term alludes to "human centipede", which is a dutch horror film and involves the titular centipede literally eating his own shit.
- badc0ffee 10mo agoNothing gets past this guy.
- Noe2097 10mo agoAnother hypothesis: https://xkcd.com/725/ https://xkcd.com/725/.
- uxp100 10mo agoCould be some very dry humor? Confused LLM seems most likely though.
- hoistbypetard 10mo agoAll of the descriptions on that reading list give me strong LLM vibes. Which, given the source, seems like it should be expected. This post could have stopped after hypothesis 1.
- jeremyjh 10mo agoI agree it is not really controversial, I don't think any other explanation is credible. And it really calls into question their assertion that at least one person there has read every book on the list. They love these books, yet no one there cared enough to write a few sentences about them?
- zurfer 10mo agowell, maybe no one felt informed enough to write this, so it was outsourced to the llm (imposter syndrom) or it was pure laziness.
- roywiggins 10mo agoThe trick is that this list of books amounts to nerd shibboleths. It's not important to have read them so much as be able to use them as a marker of being a smart person. (That isn't to say these aren't good books, I'm talking about their social function among a certain type of person, corporation or natural)
- Waterluvian 10mo agoi didn’t want to be bothered with the shift key so i stopped using it and called it culture. but now i don’t even have to finish my
- jsheard 10mo agoSince the commit history is public, there's a much easier way to tell that AI had a hand in writing that list. https://github.com/a16z-infra/reading-list/commit/93bc3abb04e241ccc1e6b79f4f698247177fb765 https://github.com/a16z-infra/reading-list/commit/93bc3abb04... > opus descriptions in cursor, raw
- andy99 10mo agoStephenson doesn't just write sci-fi, he writes operating manuals for the future. His books predicted cryptocurrency, the metaverse, and distributed computing before most of us knew what TCP/IP stood for. Warning: his endings are notoriously abrupt, like a segfault in the middle of your favorite function. This really is a study in AI slop. At least they had the good sense to change it.
- nakamoto_damacy 10mo agoHow did his books PREDICT crypto when we had eCash way before any of his books? SMH.
- agentultra 10mo agoMost of his books are also dystopias, not operating manuals.
- rainsford 10mo agoCan A16Z tell the difference? Insert that meme "At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus, from the classic sci-fi novel, Don't Create the Torment Nexus".
- cmrdporcupine 10mo agoa16z and others like them never met a dystopian warning they didn't interpret as a titillating invitation to an uncomfortably exciting and inevitable future!
- ndiddy 10mo ago
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- simianparrot 10mo agoKeep this in mind if you _ever_ feel tempted to take A16Z seriously. Absolute charlatans and clowns.
- hobofan 10mo agoSoftware is eating the world. AI is eating the VCs.
- kibwen 10mo agoWe know that being a billionaire surrounded by yes-men all day causes brain damage, and we know that being on social media living in a delusion bubble all day causes brain damage, so really they were already cooked even before signing what was left of their brains over to the LLMs.
- pantalaimon 10mo agoAI will be running the VCs if it's not already.
- blibble 10mo agowhen the bar is this low it will be hard to tell any difference https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=Fall%202025 https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=Fall%202025
- binary132 10mo agoMLaaS (money laundering as a service)
- DonHopkins 10mo ago...and a conehead.
- brandall10 10mo agoIt's such an interesting arc. I starting university in Sept '94, super excited to try out Mosaic on a T1 class connection after suffering through my 14.4k home modem. And shortly after I arrived, Netscape dropped. He was an absolute hero of that era, possibly the most admired 'geek' back then. Young, with hair, with no hints of his future Dr. Evil emergence.
- genghisjahn 10mo agoStephenson’s endings are fine.
- martythemaniak 10mo agoSilicon Valley is largely illiterate when it comes to fiction and literature. It is generally pretty hard to find people who read or think about anything other than a small set of standardized scifi, so even if this wasn't ai slop, it would still be pretty bad.
- quesera 10mo agoCan you do more than complain? All of the books I have read on this list (which is nearly all of them) are entirely worth reading. But I'm always looking for more and better stuff to read, so please give us a few examples that you believe should be included.
- burnt-resistor 10mo agoIt's a symptom of a broader pathology of rich and STEM people lacking appreciation of philosophy and ethics. Neither extreme subject matter expertise nor wealth confer wisdom. This category of blindspot can lead to enormous suffering of others when over-promoted and under-moderated.
- warpspin 10mo agoWished he'd spend as much as effort on writing endings for his books as on that blog post. Sorry. Just grumpy, cause I always love the first 80% of his books and then they somehow... just disintegrate.
- cm2012 10mo agoThe most likely option of all was the article was written without that much effort by a random employee. This is a lot of work over one throwaway sentence lol.
- happytoexplain 10mo agoHow on earth could you think the most likely option is that a human wrote that sentence on purpose? It's not the type of wrong that comes from low effort levels, it's the type of wrong that comes from not being a human.
- cm2012 10mo agoHumans make that error all the time. They can hear the author has abrupt endings and write it down. I think this case it actually was AI (according to some other HN comment) but you don't need to be an AI to make this error.
- jmye 10mo agoThat’s an unbelievably idiotic error for a person to make. It doesn’t even make sense in the literally/figuratively context. Something that stupid wouldn’t appear in a third grader’s book report. Come on.
- dandellion 10mo agoHe has my admiration, I wouldn't have been able to write an article like this and resist the urge to end it mid
- qoez 10mo agoIt's definitely written by an AI. The end description of hitchhikers guide is "[...]the meaning of life. Which turns out to be an integer." No one would bother writing that.
- larsbrinkhoff 10mo agoHe should have ended this essay mid-sencence, because that would
- exasperaited 10mo agoWhen someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. — Maya Angelou
- TazeTSchnitzel 10mo agoI've seen LLMs claim that a text cuts off mid-sentence before in cases where it in fact doesn't, and I think this might be an artifact of them being presented with a truncated version by some unclear software process, perhaps to fit into a context window. In this case, however, it's unlikely that the LLM was presented the text directly, and rather it is recounting things it “knows”.
- thenickdude 10mo agoI was trying out an IDE plugin for local LLM integration, but it would just make totally insane edits instead of what I asked for. It turned out that the LLM-runner's default setting for handling queries that were too long was to silently delete the middle of the query. So the LLM saw the beginning of my ask, and the tail end of the code context, and nothing else.
- syllogism 10mo agoI thought it was a joke? Like the reviewer is saying, "I didn't finish these books".
- refulgentis 10mo agoa16z is such a joke. Prototype of people with no taste and way too much money.
- feintruled 10mo agoReminds me of Werner Herzog's autobiography. In the introduction, he muses on a life being cut short by a snipers bullet, and when he sees a bird flying past his window as he is writing his book makes him imagine it is a bullet and he thinks it would be a nice device to cut his final chapter short at that exact moment, so he is giving fair warning that the book will end abruptly. And so it does, but in a totally Herzog moment he then almost immediately intones afterwards "and that is the end of the book as I indicated in the foreword".
- Coeur 10mo agoOf course the irony ist that if a big corporation publishes a year-end reading list, it has the implicit message of "hey we are not just a group of boring corporate robots - we're people, with real feelings, and hobbies like reading, and taste." And now we realize that this is just a PR charade. They might not be people with hobbies like reading, and taste.
- andriamanitra 10mo agoThe list is clearly mostly machine generated but the name typo is an unlikely error for LLM to make. I'm guessing the "general editing pass" that introduced it was done by an actual human while trying to make the text flow better (less LLM-like). https://github.com/a16z-infra/reading-list/commit/f8d149495a7fc13351fb9e30685f83dbeb98ffd6 https://github.com/a16z-infra/reading-list/commit/f8d149495a...
- rsanek 10mo agodue to constant mis-use like this, literally has even been redefined to not necessarily mean its primary definition https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally
- tsimionescu 10mo agoHow is it misuse? This is how words are used - people use turns of phrase and metaphors, and then popular metaphors become secondary meanings. Very popular secondary meanings can even become grammar pieces - like "very", which has become the most standard intensifier, but used to be a normal adverb, like literally and truly.
- shwaj 10mo agoIt’s an inadvertent step toward Newspeak, where we no longer have a word that means what “literally” used to unambiguously mean.
- block97 10mo agoSssh, Neal. They’ll do to you what they did to Michael O. Ch
- socalgal2 10mo agoI wish I had as many positive experience as it seems some other HNers have with LLMs. I'm not saying I've had zero positive experiences but the number of negative experiences is so high that it's just super scary. Yesterday, Thanksgiving, there was a Google Doodle. Clicking the doodle lead to a Gemini prompt for how to plan to have Thanksgiving dinner ready on time. It had a schedule for lots of prep the day before and then a timeline for the day of. It had cooking the dinner rolls and then said something like "take them out and keep them warm" followed by cooking something else in the oven. I asked "How do I keep them warm when something else is cooking in the oven?". It proceeded to give me a revised timeline that contradicted its original timeline and also, made no sense in and of itself. I asked it about the contradiction and the error and it apologized and gave a completely new 3rd timeline that was different than the first 2 and also nonsense. This was Google's Gemini Promotion! All it really needed to do to my first query was say something like "put a towel over the rolls" and leave it on top of the oven.... Maybe? But then, it had told me be spread butter over the rolls as soon as they came out of the oven so I'd have asked, "won't the towel suck up all the butter?" This is one example many times LLMs fail me (ChatGPT, Gemini). For direct code gen, my subjective experience is it fails 5 of 6 times. For stackoverflow type questions it succeeds 5 of 6 times. For non-code questions it depends on the type of question. But, when it fails it fails so badly that I'm somewhat surprised it ever works. And yea, the whole world is running head first into massive LLM usage like this one using it for short reviews of authors. Ugh!!!
- fainpul 10mo agoYou're not supposed to look so closely! It seems to me, most LLM fans are impressed by glancing at a result ("It works!") and never really think about the flaws of the answer or look at the code in detail.
- ErroneousBosh 10mo ago> I'm not saying I've had zero positive experiences but the number of negative experiences is so high that it's just super scary. Just for shits and giggles I decided to let Copilot (whatever the default in vscode is) write a Makefile for a simple avr-gcc project. I can't remember what the prompt I gave it was, but it was something along the lines of "given this makefile that is old but works, write a new makefile for this project that doesn't have one" and a link to a simple gist I wrote years ago. Fuuuuuuuuck me. It's 2500 lines long. It's not just bigger than the codebase it's supposed to build, it's just about bigger than all the C files in all the avr-gcc projects in that entire chunk of my ~/devel/ directory. I couldn't even begin to make sense of what it's trying to do. It looks mostly like it's declaring variables over and over, concatenating more bits on as it goes. I don't know for sure though. I won't be using it.
- dimal 10mo ago> I had to read this over a few times to believe that I was seeing it. If it didn’t include the word “literally” I’d assume some poetic license on the part of whoever, or whatever, wrote this. Unfortunately, the meaning of the word “literally” has morphed into almost the opposite of “literally”. Most people just use it as an intensifier devoid of any true meaning. Makes sense that an LLM that doesn’t have any sense of truth would just stuff that in there.
- quesera 10mo ago> Makes sense that an LLM that doesn’t have any sense of truth would just stuff that in there As it turns out, that phrase was most likely added in a human review-edit. Along with the typo. This is not an argument against LLMs lacking a sense of truth -- just that humans are pretty incompetent as well.
- larodi 10mo agoThe footnote is precious, everything Humpty related is not.
- angoragoats 10mo agoHe needs to sue A16Z for libel. Or maybe he already is in the process of doing that, given this sentence from the article: “This is a factual assertion that is (a) false, (b) easy to fact-check, and (c) casts my work ethic, and that of my editors, in an unflattering light.” These shitty VCs with their LLM-generated garbage need to be held accountable for their actions.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- tasuki 10mo agoI think literally just no longer means literally. Him thinking that literally blew my head. (I'm sorry, I had to!)
- more_corn 10mo agoIt took me entirely too long to realize this was written by Neal himself. The snippet appears to be constructed by a LLM. I don’t have any evidence of that, just some turns of phrase that a human wouldn’t use when discussing his works. I love the theory that the LLM might think that his books are fragmented is due to the fragmentation of his corpus by spammers of a certain era.