Yah that was never on their front pages or on their apps, probably hidden on an archival web page. I looked everywhere. Only found the story in a few places on Feb 28, the day it happened.
Iran is not welcoming to Western reporters, so Western press aren't pointing their TV cameras out their hotel windows to show the explosions like in 2003. And locals can't report other than in tiny snatches of text as the internet has been turned off in the country for ages, and one imagines operating a satphone in Iran right now would be a risky endeavor.
Compared to, say, the coverage from Ukraine during February 2022, actual information getting out from the ground is sparser. Or the opening "shock and awe" campaign in Iraq in 2003, there were Western and international media in Baghdad reporting on it in real time, shooting video from their hotels:
The reason why isn't really a mystery: Iran has never been exactly welcoming to Western media, and internet access there was intentionally shut off after the recent protests. There's plenty of coverage- it's front page everywhere- but a paucity of information.
It's all over social media, but hardly any of that is from Iranians in Iran, it's just people outside it like you and me mostly just yapping. Occasionally you'll hear something second-hand from someone with family in Iran who managed some brief connectivity.
Don't forget "The Ludlum Delusion"- every header in an article or readme reads like a Robert Ludlum novel title, ie "The [Noun:0.9|Adjective:0.1] [Noun]".
> The military’s Maven Smart System, which is built by data mining company Palantir, is generating insights from an astonishing amount of classified data from satellites, surveillance and other intelligence, helping provide real-time targeting and target prioritization to military operations in Iran, according to three people familiar with the system...
> As planning for a potential strike in Iran was underway, Maven, powered by Claude, suggested hundreds of targets, issued precise location coordinates, and prioritized those targets according to importance, said two of the people.
> This document has been through ten editing passes and it still has tells in it.
The big one it missed: the headers are mostly "The [Noun:0.9|Adjective:0.1] [Noun]". LLMs (maybe just Claude?) love these. Every heading sounds like it could be a Robert Ludlum novel (The Listicle Instinct, The Empathy Performance, The Prometheus Deception).
The lists in the post look like they're LLM-formatted, em-dashes etc. It's fine, it seems like a fun project to vibe code. Not sure about raising money on Patreon for it, but
They are very even. They are uniformly bolded. They're long and comprehensive. Most humans would have more variation in length unless they were working to a template or a style guide. A long catalogue of tools is also just way more detail than most people would put into an announcement post... but an LLM doesn't get tired and will barf all that out if you don't stop it.
A more robust and perhaps more vivid indicator are sentences like this: "This isn’t a proof of concept or a weekend project. It’s a real authoring environment."
"It's not X, it's Y" is an LLM tell. "It's a real Z" is another. Together? I'm going to conclude it's LLM generated to like a 90% certainty.
And as the sibling notes, the icons look like LLM SVG output. They're more mangled than even a rushed human would do.
Again, it's fine. If I had more time I'd love to try to vibecode a Flash clone.
Nor any semicolons. Also full of nonsense. SWF fundamentally runs action script. The idea that you are going to have a AS3 to C# transpiler and a C# scripting engine AND export SWFs is incongruous. Again, "C# code executed when the playhead enters a keyframe." Now I'd love the oppurinity to learn, but ctrl+f c# here [1] shows 0 results. Though I'm sure I'm just misunderstanding the meaning here ( ≖_≖).
I'm skeptical about SWF export as well, but mostly because I'm not sure of the usecase for it in "flash if flash was built in 2026". I'd imagine even people opening old FLA files would rather have a modern non-plugin-requiring format (or a modern Projector equivalent) for output. Maybe for people still using Scaleform?
The number is irrelevant. They are being used as separators on every list item, of course there are many. They could all be hyphens or arrows or colons and it would be exactly the same.
Look, I’m not saying this wasn’t written with an LLM. What I’m saying is that you don’t know that judging by the em-dashes alone.
And not a single colon! Well, outside the smiley in the opening paragraph.
Just read the first two paragraphs and there's a full stylistic whiplash. I'd bet $100 that the first paragraph was human-written and the rest were almost fully Claude.
It's kind of creepy, like a human rolling their eyes back partway through a paragraph and suddenly speaking like Microsoft Bob.
Turing Machines don't need access to the entire tape all at once, it's sufficient for it to see one cell at a time. You could certainly equip an LLM with a "read cell", "write cell", and "move left/right" tool and now you have a Turing machine. It doesn't need to keep any of its previous writes or reads in context. A sliding context window is more than capacious enough for this.
You're right of course, but at the point where you're saying "well we can make a turing machine with the LLM as the transition function by defining some tool calls for the LLM to interact with the tape" it feels like a stretch to call the LLM itself turing complete.
Also people definitely talk about them as "thinking" in contexts where they haven't put a harness capable of this around them. And in the common contexts where people do put harness theoretically capable of this around the LLM (e.g. giving the LLM access to bash), the LLM basically never uses that theoretical capability as the extra memory it would need to actually emulate a turing machine.
And meanwhile I can use external memory myself in a similar way (e.g. writing things down), but I think I'm perfectly capable of thinking without doing so.
So I persist in my stance that turing complete is not the relevant property, and isn't really there.
That's why I specifically didn't call the LLM itself Turing complete, but stated that if you put a loop around a Turing machine you can trivially make it Turing complete. Maybe I should have been clearer and write "the combined system" instead of it.
But the point is that this is irrelevant, because it is proof that unlesss human brains exceed the Turing computable, LLM's can at least theoretically be made to think. And that makes pushing the "they're just predicting the next token" argument anti-intellectual nonsense.
I am not sure it is proof, at least not in an interesting way. It's also proof that Magic: The Gathering could theoretically be made to think. Which is true but doesn't tell you anything much about MtG other than that it is a slightly complicated ruleset that has a couple of properties that are pretty common.
I think both sides of this end up proving "too much" in their respective directions.
Yeah, humans and LLMs and a TM transition function are all Turing complete in the same way, but it's also basically a useless fact. You could possibly train a sufficiently motivated rat to compute a TM transition function.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1l7rvqq51eo
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