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broken-kebab 4 hours ago [-]
Speleology aside, just a few days ago in one of HN discussions I was told LLM-produced content is already indistinguishable from human-made. But I'm sure I would have pretty good chances to correctly guess even the exact brand which helped to write this sloppy text. And it's the same with many stories I read.
RamblingCTO 2 hours ago [-]
I know what you mean. Flowery and fluffy. I don't see any clear giveaways, but it feels like it and is a bit annoying to read because the information in there isn't very dense.
raptor111 2 hours ago [-]
the "why it matters" subtitle near the end seems very much like claude to me
springtimesun 3 hours ago [-]
Stake the claim then. I’ve also read a fair bit of LLM text and this didn’t trip anything for me.
Edit: after reading the author bio and the other articles, I agree with this assessment. Though I will admit, this particular article didn’t jump out as AI to me.
homeonthemtn 8 minutes ago [-]
It's Claude. I picked up on it too (I am also a heavy Claude user)
The title alone gives it away. Sentences like this also trigger my daily annoyance:
"Researchers found an elegant way to test it, and the timing was almost too convenient."
Me: "Almost too convenient is expressing an opinion. Rewrite this to be straight forward, succinct information"
Claude: "You're right, and I was wrong. That's the second time you've had to correct me this session. Let me update my memory to adjust for this"
Eye twitch
DannyBee 9 minutes ago [-]
Isn't this the opening to a few of those "virus destroys humanity" movies?
wpollock 11 hours ago [-]
Just because the cave is sealed now, does not mean it has been sealed for millions of years. Even for geology, 5.5M years is a long time. I don't understand how they can claim it never had connections to the outside, just because it doesn't have connections now.
defrost 10 hours ago [-]
Geology is most probably largely how the sealed claim has been made .. it was open to the world when the limestone was forming, formed (Speleogenesis) by sky water (rain) permeating down and eating out a limestone void, and "sealed" by thick and impermeable layers of clays and loess (windborne sediment) some 2.5 million years ago during the Quaternary.
There are also genetic drift estimates, which put the "last" outside species to enter at about that time (
One of the most recent animals recorded is the cave's only species of snail, Heleobia dobrogica, which has inhabited the cave for slightly more than 2 million years.
Mentioning the recent Chernobyl accident is weird too. Surely an accident from long ago that is expected to be detectable is far more helpful.
All they proved is that nothing had entered since the Chernobyl accident.
defrost 6 hours ago [-]
It's an AI article.
Looking for Chernobyl signature in cave during the late 1980s / early 1990s does seem daft - far more likely for them to be looking for residual "trace" from the atmospheric tests that doused the planet in "unnatural" residuals and odd isotopes.
fragmede 6 hours ago [-]
Have there been many nuclear reactor meltdowns prior to Chernobyl?
defrost 6 hours ago [-]
Before 1986 there have been twelve "public" core meltdowns, and at least six, likely more, incidents not public on nuclear subs, etc.
You should look up how many live armed nuclear bombs have been accidentally dropped on mainland US soil.
More significantly, there's been a lot of above ground and atmospheric tests that have draped residuals across the planet, and a bunch of dirty Russian / former USSR sites that drift trace across Europe.
inigyou 5 hours ago [-]
Isn't there a nuclear bomb sitting somewhere in a swamp in the USA that everybody lost?
defrost 4 hours ago [-]
"Yes"
- TBH I'd be surprised if it's still "lost" - not further reported on because [ XXXredactedXXX ] is more likely.
rbanffy 3 hours ago [-]
Also, if the finding is never recorded, it can be used to frame just about anyone who can be accused of finding it and smuggling it out of the US.
hvb2 6 hours ago [-]
You could just look for isotopes from the atmospheric nuclear tests that were conducted? Doesn't need to be a reactor I would assume?
nbernard 3 hours ago [-]
Indeed. That's one of the reasons why the "Before Present" time scale (that uses 1/1/1950 as the epoch) is sometimes called "Before Physics" (another one being that 1950 is less and less "present", of course)!
rbanffy 3 hours ago [-]
> that uses 1/1/1950 as the epoch
I guess we can say this is when humankind reached adulthood, became able to drink and got a driver’s license. And a gun.
bcraven 10 hours ago [-]
"Combined with the geology and the peculiar chemistry of the cave’s water and air, the evidence pointed to a system that had been closed off since roughly five and a half million years ago."
defrost 10 hours ago [-]
That quote, from the AI generated article, simply asserts the cave was sealed, it doesn't explain how the cave came to be sealed, nor how it is that modern humans infer the cave has been sealed and for how long.
Rebelgecko 7 hours ago [-]
On the flip side, the wiki article for the cave mentions that new species arrived as recently as 2 million years ago...
shdwslrkr 11 hours ago [-]
[dead]
gregoriol 3 hours ago [-]
The wikipedia article says "While animals have lived in the cave for 5.5 million years, not all of them arrived simultaneously. One of the most recent animals recorded is the cave's only species of snail, Heleobia dobrogica, which has inhabited the cave for slightly more than 2 million years."
franze 2 hours ago [-]
> this was not an ordinary cave. It was something far rarer
Pangram isn't useful for single documents. Too many false positives. It only gives something approaching actionable results if you use it on an entire corpus.
vixen99 2 hours ago [-]
An updated Turing Test is overdue or has someone suggested one?
croes 5 hours ago [-]
Pangram isn’t a reliable detector
BlackRabbit1 5 hours ago [-]
Still the linked article reads like slop
croes 2 hours ago [-]
Doesn’t mean it is.
I bet you can find pre-AI articles that sound like slop too.
lelanthran 2 hours ago [-]
I keep requesting this here, but so far I haven't been given any links.
There's probably a good reason for that.
statictype 11 hours ago [-]
Interesting that being sealed for 5 million years did not yield any life forms more complex than insects.
Maybe sun and space are importance factors for intelligence.
quuxplusone 9 hours ago [-]
That has a lot more to do with whether the cave started out containing anything "more complex than insects." 5 million years isn't, like, an evolve-monkeys-from-scratch number of years. It's arguably an evolve-humans-from-chimps number of years. But if your cave doesn't contain any chimps... or even if it does but they all starve to death in Year 2 out of 5,000,000...
usrusr 1 hours ago [-]
Add to this that life in darkness sustained by microbes consuming a rock surface will be rather slow. Because any fast processes would just flash out after a boom/bust cycle or two. And presumably not just slow in terms of no cheetah vs antelope racing, but also much slower than out in the sun in generational turnover.
I wonder how big that cave system is, as in number of barley connected caverns. There might have been quite a few cycles one cavern flashing out and then slowly getting repopulated from the neighboring cavern(s). The "magical" balance we admire in nature isn't a miracle, it's the result of endless series of failure.
somenameforme 2 hours ago [-]
We went from wolves to chihuahua in just 40k years. Yeah selective breeding and all that, but it emphasizes that you can have very extreme changes in very brief periods of time. Imagine chihuahuas didn't exist today, and somebody said that within 40k years you could turn a wolf into one. It'd sound absurd!
sidewndr46 1 hours ago [-]
Isn't it more accurate to say we went from wolves to dogs? Dogs are not a group of species. The domesticated dog is a species.
Also canines seem to hybridize well, suggesting they aren't truly differentiated anyways.
j13n 6 hours ago [-]
Humans didn’t evolve from chimps.
0-_-0 5 hours ago [-]
No but they could over 5 million years
weaksauce 11 hours ago [-]
the sun is energy so i’d expect there to be a correlation there.
rbanffy 2 hours ago [-]
There’s residual and radioactive heating from the Earth itself that can provide energy for an ecosystem. We expect Jupiter’s moons to provide similar environments because of tidal deformations (which provide enough energy for Io’s vulcanism).
TacticalCoder 2 hours ago [-]
This already happened in the past: they found a cave totally sealed since so long that spiders still had eyes, but non-functioning ones (for they were totally in the dark for generations and generations, eyes didn't make sense anymore).
Just as the holy books predicted. Oops, sorry, just as Darwin predicted.
andrewstuart 11 hours ago [-]
Great first line for a story.
visarga 4 hours ago [-]
It is indeed well written but I feel it has LLM smell, not that is a bad thing.
rbanffy 2 hours ago [-]
Let’s not be racist, please. It doesn’t matter if the intelligence is based on carbon or silicon.
lelanthran 2 hours ago [-]
You think machines are a race? Where did you go to school?
layer8 1 hours ago [-]
Even space is a race.
cyberax 11 hours ago [-]
> Oxygen levels run at roughly half of what our lungs expect. Carbon dioxide is present at concentrations enormously higher than in the outside atmosphere. The air is laced with hydrogen sulfide, the compound responsible for the smell of rotten eggs, and with methane and ammonia.
So it was not truly sealed. A truly sealed cave would have had no oxygen, it would have all been consumed in reactions with methane.
dyauspitr 11 hours ago [-]
Yeah it has significant groundwater inflow (like 5L/s). Nothing about this is sealed.
john_strinlai 11 hours ago [-]
>Yeah it has significant groundwater inflow (like 5L/s).
where did it say this? i did a double-take because the article says the opposite, and i checked the wikipedia and didnt see it there either. is there another source of info? or am i being blind?
dyauspitr 9 hours ago [-]
> Mesothermal, sulfidic groundwater (up to 1 mM in H2S) originating from an artesian sulfidic aquifer underlying the region enters at the bottom of the cave’s lower passages. This results in a constant flow occurring tens of centimeters to 1 m below the water surface at flow rates of about 5 L/s
Edit: after reading the author bio and the other articles, I agree with this assessment. Though I will admit, this particular article didn’t jump out as AI to me.
The title alone gives it away. Sentences like this also trigger my daily annoyance:
"Researchers found an elegant way to test it, and the timing was almost too convenient."
Me: "Almost too convenient is expressing an opinion. Rewrite this to be straight forward, succinct information"
Claude: "You're right, and I was wrong. That's the second time you've had to correct me this session. Let me update my memory to adjust for this"
Eye twitch
There are also genetic drift estimates, which put the "last" outside species to enter at about that time (
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movile_Cave )All they proved is that nothing had entered since the Chernobyl accident.
Looking for Chernobyl signature in cave during the late 1980s / early 1990s does seem daft - far more likely for them to be looking for residual "trace" from the atmospheric tests that doused the planet in "unnatural" residuals and odd isotopes.
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident...
You should look up how many live armed nuclear bombs have been accidentally dropped on mainland US soil.
More significantly, there's been a lot of above ground and atmospheric tests that have draped residuals across the planet, and a bunch of dirty Russian / former USSR sites that drift trace across Europe.
- TBH I'd be surprised if it's still "lost" - not further reported on because [ XXXredactedXXX ] is more likely.
I guess we can say this is when humankind reached adulthood, became able to drink and got a driver’s license. And a gun.
so probably a cheap openai model
I bet you can find pre-AI articles that sound like slop too.
There's probably a good reason for that.
Maybe sun and space are importance factors for intelligence.
I wonder how big that cave system is, as in number of barley connected caverns. There might have been quite a few cycles one cavern flashing out and then slowly getting repopulated from the neighboring cavern(s). The "magical" balance we admire in nature isn't a miracle, it's the result of endless series of failure.
Also canines seem to hybridize well, suggesting they aren't truly differentiated anyways.
Just as the holy books predicted. Oops, sorry, just as Darwin predicted.
So it was not truly sealed. A truly sealed cave would have had no oxygen, it would have all been consumed in reactions with methane.
where did it say this? i did a double-take because the article says the opposite, and i checked the wikipedia and didnt see it there either. is there another source of info? or am i being blind?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10672346/
Oh, so that's why my neighbour, Vasile, drills day and night. He hopes to discover a new life form. /s