Accidental Statements

Welp

Today I ran into a story I thought was funny.

YHacker News

I'm Scared a Stranger Will Call My Novel AI, So I Built GitHub for Words

harper•2026-08-05•8 points•16 comments

Well, first, GitHub for words is just GitHub itself. I've used it in the past for lots of documents and the only thing you really need to do is put every sentence on a newline and use appropriate typesetting software. But the second funny thing is that the post itself would sound like it's entirely written by AI. Pangram considers almost the whole thing an LLMism. I can see why someone whose text reads like that would feel the need to create a piece of software that attempts to certify their words as non-LLM.

The words are the crime scene, not the alibi.

— Dylan's Blog

Well, the Pangram result is damning, though of course I have no problem with something being written by an LLM. What I do have a problem with, though, is the style that a modern Claude writes in. It's got that same bombastic style with no content that a few people used to write with to say nothing and which was popular among so-called 'long-form' essays. But let's set that aside.

Suppose we were to assume the best here and believe that this person just writes very much like a modern Claude does. That would be incredibly unlucky for them. Perhaps it's their kind of content that the LLM was trained on for no fault of their own. I don't like that style, but it is unfortunate that someone could perhaps write in that style and be considered machine-generated, now indicted on two fronts!

A sort of related thing happened to me a while ago where I was doing a thing innocently and then it became a big thing because the environment changed.

The Mask As Political Statement

Helping my friend Leslie move in Aug 2019. I had a bit of a cold

This kind of thing will be unfamiliar to modern audiences but the world in the early and mid 2010s was very different in terms of respiratory illness. It was fairly typical at a startup full of young people to have someone in the office with a cough or cold and that would inevitably spread to everyone else in their vicinity. I was the perpetrator as much as the victim, and doubtless the many weekends spent partying at Bootie SF at DNA Lounge sharing smuggled alcohol in the club contributed to this.

The California wildfires of Sep 2020 turned the daytime orange. N95 masks were much in demand and I had quite a few left over from past wildfires.

In any case, by the late 2010s, I'd discovered the wonders of the N95 mask. I had a large stash of them and I'd wear them when I was sick so that other people wouldn't. I won't claim to have invented this myself. A nice long trip to Japan and Hong Kong introduced me to the common use of this, which I loved. The best part about this mask is that it also let you ride your bike when California wildfires made the air hard to breathe comfortably. All this was fine and I liked using them this way and so on.

But then the COVID-19 pandemic struck and masks became a symbol against the government and then for the government and then ostentatiously masking or not-masking became a political statement. In my particular case, the only thing I ever wanted was to use this thing like I was using it for the 18 short months before all this happened. But tragically this was not to be. Overnight, my much beloved masks turned into an accidental political statement.

Are Masks Required?

This all came to a head one day when my friend Harry and I were at our favourite sandwich place Working Girls at Mission & Spear and there was a sign (mandated by the city) saying that we should put on our masks. We had the fig leaf surgical masks that everyone used to wear back then and so we put them on and went in. The proprietor, who is an absolutely hilarious fellow cut from the cloth of some Seinfeldian NYC deli manager, was obviously unmasked and we were chatting about things while the sandwiches were being made by his staff when I made eye contact with a woman walking by. To my great chagrin, she walked into the store and this amusing dialog ensued:

Lady: Hey, do you have to wear a mask to come to this place?
Proprietor: Nah
Lady: Yeah, because I saw the sign. I don't know why people wear masks.
Proprietor: Haha, yeah
Lady: It's not required any more, right?
Proprietor: Nah
Lady: Yeah, they don't really do anything.
Proprietor: Haha
Lady: Okay, anyway, do you have coffee here?
Proprietor: No, sorry

Well, okay, I get it, lady, come on! But see, I just want to be a A Confused Kolmogorov who just doesn't want to be bothered by these things!