My mind went to that immediately. This does reek of being a copycat, doesn't it?

I was weathering the excessive and confusing analogies and then I read:

>introduced a level of cognitive complexity that makes Kierkegaard read like Hemingway.

and I fucking lost it.

>Sentence fragment. Sentence fragment. Sentence fragment. That's not X, that's Y.

I can't even call this LLM smell at this point it's a stench.

If I had to characterize it, most minimally-prompted LLM prose has two issues:

- the writing always feels self-important. I would feel a lot more receptive if I perceived that the writer came from a place of humility

- like you pointed out, overuse of writing techniques that work best if used sparingly. Sentence fragments can be effective for emphasizing a point, but if you use it in every. Single. paragraph, the effect is gone. It’s very amateurish.

>Sarcasm happens when the observed irony does not extend to the speaker.

This seems... dead wrong. In the examples in the article, both comic frames function as sarcasm, because everyone involved has no illusion that anyone is going to die if they don't see the film. The irony is entirely in the speaker's statement, which everyone knows to be false, including them. People treat 'ironic insults' as sarcasm, but this only works amongst good friends who have the shared context necessary to understand the falsity of the insult. But, then socially incompetent see this and attempt it, and fail to achieve the sarcastic humour. Which is probably why people conflate sarcasm with... failed sarcasm, frankly.

TBH I don't agree with the idea that sarcasm is exclusively the friendly variety. It also serves the role of being patronizing, scornful or even outright provocation.

Sarcasm is never friendly; it's necessarily at the expense of someone else. The simplest example is where someone makes a bold claim and someone else says 'sure, buddy...' to express contemptuous disbelief via the weakest possible form of assent. The claimant here wants to be believed, or at least agreed with.

Irony is imho much more complex and variegated, but a simple example would be any sort of self-deprecating humor, where someone is making fun of the mismatch between their aspirations and their capacity to achieve them. Irony isn't necessarily mean, whereas sarcasm is always a little bit mean even if it's mild.

>Sarcasm is never friendly; it's necessarily at the expense of someone else

That doesn't preclude it from being friendly. Part of the friend experience is jockingly busting each others balls ocassionally.

Jockingly? Is this meant to suggest that brutal honesty is an adjacent pasttime of jocks?

The man who is brutally honest enjoys the brutality as much as the honesty. Possibly more.

Another thing in the domain of "friendly" that this brings to mind is "fire".

I have oft experienced this metaphorical friendly fire but they never seem to be as therapeutic as well-targeted irony :)

>Jockingly? Is this meant to suggest that brutal honesty is an adjacent pasttime of jocks?

Well, I'm a jock, if I may say so myself, and I do ocassionally deploy brutal honesty.

Though I was talking about sarcasm and playful busting of balls in general, not necessarily through brutal honestly. Could be sarcastic and outlandish or fan, not necessarily honest.

To be clear, I don't disagree with you, and to say otherwise wasn't my point. I do think people get confused to the point where they for some reason start labeling all sarcasm as type A or B, and the entire value of the term gets lost.

The way I see it, the non-friendly type shares a lot in common with the concept of shibboleth. Which is to say, you can absolutely make sarcastic insults to the detriment of someone else for your own, or a friend's enjoyment, by relying on shared exclusive knowledge. (In essence, holding that shared context above the other person in contempt) However, you can also just be abrasive for your own enjoyment, and that's something entirely differently. (Sadism, for example, is not inherently sarcastic) People frequently confuse the two, but without ironic context - a knowledge of false belief - it is not ironic, and therefore not sarcasm.

We have a word for that: Lawyers!

Fake it til you make it is good. But, better yet, we figured out you can just keep faking it until some other sucker wants to hold the bag.

I'm at a point where I'm hesitant to do any business with tech startups because I've been burned so many times by the "fake it til you make it" approach of saying their product did things it doesn't do. In one particular vendor's case, I found out about the fakery when the product I shipped on top of their platform keeps getting hacked.

I've probably swung the pendulum the other way too far, but I've gotten very direct and frank with what we have today, what we can deliver tomorrow, and whether it's something we won't add to our product.

On some level they deeply desire for everyone to pay attention to them at all times, and they fear being ignored and irrelevant. Someone like that will struggle to understand that others don't get the same enjoyment out of being watched.

> they deeply desire for everyone to pay attention to them at all times, and they fear being ignored and irrelevant

You’re describing influencers who also happen to be VCs. Plenty of—perhaps most—successful VCs have no public profile.

gotta smooth it out somehow

Any live band performing a song is subject to mechanical licensing as much as a recording artist. Typically the venue pays it, just like how radio stations pay royalties. This system exists because historically, that's how music reproduction worked. You hire some musicians to play the music you want to hear. Copyright applied to the score, the lyrics, and so on. The 'mechanical' rights had to come later, because recording hadn't been invented yet!