The Palomar Lights
comics.phillyharper.comI got the overarching sense of an LLM making drama out of confusing or insignificant things. Some specific LLMisms that irritated me—beyond the creepy soulless AI cartoons—included:
> Fifty minutes. In the cold. Night after night, for seven years.
> Three pinpoints of light. One photographic plate. Vanished within fifty minutes.
> No university, no lab, no funding. He pulled down the dataset, wrote his own code from scratch, and ran every test independently.
> one telescope, one mountain, one drawer of plates.
> Different telescope. Different continent. Same signature.
> Signed and numbered. Just 150 copies. When they’re gone, they’re gone.
> […]the wider corpus this comic was built from. The science holds because the receipts hold.
> The Palomar Lights — a story told in data, glass, and light.
I just read a pre-LLM thriller written almost exactly like this. This is dialed up to eleven, but this is a fairly common writing style.
It switches my brain into skimming mode very quickly, as it reads quite padded.
le mediocrity machine is inevitably a hack
Maybe it's me not being a native speaker, but that seems okish?
It's not technically wrong but the super-short abrupt sentence format of "A. B. C."[0] is weird if you repeat it.
You can get away with it once or twice as a kind of rhetorical flourish but if you keep doing it, it starts to sound like a one-trick pony (or a clanker.)
(IMHO, obvs., I'm not the King of English.)
[0] e.g. "Three pinpoints of light. One photographic plate. Vanished within fifty minutes."
There's a wikipedia page with a few more details / rebuttals from various sources - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aligned,_Multiple-transient_Ev...
An infinitely better source than the OP "article," which is just an AI-slop comic.
"Let's say ET sent something two hundred thousand years ago and forgot a can of Coca-Cola in space... and at some point we see these little glints."
HAHAHA
I had to leave my office because I burst in uncontrollable laughter.
It's good to see that someone so smart also has a great sense of humor.
I can't decide if this is AI imagery or not and I hate this world.
The absolute amateur hour choices going on in the lettering is tipping me towards AI, this is lettering by someone who thinks they know what "a comic" looks like and used "comic book" fonts but has zero idea of how word balloons actually work. Piss-poor internal margins, balloon tails that point nowhere near their supposed speaker, balloons that are weird-ass hybrids of captions and dialogue that have a tiny little vestigial tail that points nowhere in particular, captions and balloons crammed into odd corners of the panels with no concept of overall compositional flow.
Oh and now that I look closer at some panels, yeah, it's AI.
As always when someone shits in my eyes with a bunch of AI imagery, I'm just gonna assume the script is also the result of pointing one slop machine or another at the Wikipedia article and telling it to generate text rather than any sort of human understanding and summarizing going on here. I hate this fucking future.
It very obviously is AI imagery
I guess I'm doing a good job of pruning my inputs, the vast majority of the imagery I see online is from human artists whose work looks largely the same as it did before all these slop machines got popular, so I don't have as finely tuned a slop detector as you must.
(Although really "I followed a link from HN" is depressingly correlated with "the images in it are slop".)
some of the details made me think it's AI generated:
- strawberry sundaes instead of glasses of water on the dinner table
- exaggerated expressions of surprise
- the fighter cockpit doesn't have a canopy
- the las vegas cocktail party watching the nuke just down the road
Maybe they're not AI, but they've got some weird details that made me decide in my own mind that they ARE AI
They also say "Ai" in the upper left, which is suggestive.
I noticed that the astrophysicist has a microscope on her laboratory counter. I doubt she gets the opportunity to use it much in her line of work.
I concluded "this is definitely AI" when I looked closely at one panel and what initially looked like a halftone pattern on a person was actually weird mottling that looked like an unpleasant flesh disease.
I hate this fucking future.
so it seems something was orbiting before satellites and for some reason very closely to atomic bomb test dates
Maybe the observers recognized that the ape men had figured out how to harness the power of the atom and that it was only a matter of a short amount of time before they ruined the experiment and decided to leave
The Manhole Cover!