Tangentially related: I had the disconcerting experience of reading a Wired article about his arrest[1] while unknowingly sitting about six feet from the spot where he was apprehended. When I read that the FBI agents had stopped at Bello Coffee while preparing their stakeout, I thought, huh, interesting coincidence, I just had a coffee there.
Then Ulbricht walked into the public library and sat down at the table directly in front of me, and suddenly as I was reading I could look up and see exactly the chair he had been in, where the plainclothes police had positioned themselves, how they had arranged a distraction.
Having this tableau unexpectedly unfold right in front of my eyes was a fascinating experience, and it certainly made the article suddenly get a lot more immersive!
EDIT: to be clear, I was not present for the arrest. I was reading the magazine, some years after the arrest, but in the same place as the arrest. (I didn’t qualify the events with “I read that...” since I thought the narrative ellipsis would be obvious from context; evidently not.)
He was being arrested in the article, not IRL. When I say “Ulbricht walked into the public library and sat down at the table directly in front of me” I mean that I read
> He went... past the periodicals and reference desk, beyond the romance novels, and settled in at a circular table near science fiction, on the second floor... in a corner, with a view out the window and his back toward the wall.
and realized that I was in the Glen Park public library, at a circular table near science fiction on the second floor, in a corner with my back to the window, and facing directly towards where the article had just said he had sat.
I had the same confusion initially, interestingly chat GPT gets it:
So while wolfgang42 wasn't there when Ulbricht was actually arrested, their realization created a vivid mental image of the event unfolding in that space, which made the story feel more immersive.
In short: they were reading about an old event, but it happened to occur in the same spot they were sitting at that moment. Hope that clears it up!
> their realization created a vivid mental image of the event unfolding in that space, which made the story feel more immersive.
Glad that ChatGPT, probably like GP themselves, is a visualizer and actually can create a "vivid mental image" of something. For those of us with aphantasia, that is not a thing. Myself, I too was mighty confused by the text, which read literally like a time travel story, and was only missing a cat and tomorrow's newspaper.
Legitimately and I say this was absolutely no shade intended. This is a reading comprehension problem, nothing to do with aphantasia.
He clearly states that he was reading an article, he uses past tense verbs when referring to Ross, and to the events spelled out in the article. If you somehow thought that he could be reading an article that ostensibly has to be describing a past event as he was seeing it in real time that is a logic flaw on you.
It has nothing to do with what you can or cannot visualize. All you have to do is ask yourself could he have been reading an article about Ross’s arrest while watching it? Since nobody can violate the causality of space time the answer is no.
This isn’t just you this is everybody in this thread who is reading this and going this is a little confusing. No it’s very clearly him speaking about a past experience reading an article about a past event.
I realised what was going on, but I did a double-take at:
> Then Ulbricht walked into the public library and sat down at the table directly in front of me
The problem is that two past events are being described, so tense alone cannot distinguish them. Cut the readers some slack; the writing could have been better.
Done for effect: it felt to the OP as if it was the present so the writing conveys that, while elsewhere making it clear the arrest was not the present.
I am as baffled at the responses and appreciated this explanation as it was helpful to me to work on my communication style and expresses a lot of similar frustrations I have. Like what is actually going on here? this isn’t shade at anyone, I just feel like people are losing some fundamental ability to deduce from context what they are reading. it’s doubly concerning because people immediately reach to an AI/LLM to explain it for them, which cannot possibly be helping the first problem.
Agree. This entire thread is weird. How do so many people in this thread have such obvious reading comprehension issues?
On a similar note--I've noticed that HN comments are often overwrought, like the commenter is trying to sound smarter than they actually are but just end up muddling what they're trying to say.
I wonder what is going on? I’ve noticed this getting worse for a long time to the point I’m not sure it’s my imagination anymore. I usually like to lambast whole word reading as a complete failure in the american school system that contributes to this, but I think it’s likely something else. Shorter attention spans?
We have a multitude of immediate distractions now.
Books build richer worlds & ideas. But without learning to love books very early in life, which takes a lot of uninterrupted time, they don’t come naturally to most.
I used to read a few books a week, virtually every week. Sometimes two or three in a long day and some night. I still read a lot daily, interesting and useful things in short form. But finding time to read books seems to have become more difficult.
I do think the comment had something about how it was written that made it hard to follow. I understood the first sentence. But then I got to
> Having this tableau unexpectedly unfold right in front of my eyes
And the metaphor / tense shift caught me by surprise and made my eyes retrace to the beginning. I still got it, but there was a little bit of comprehension whiplash as I hit that bump in the road.
In some ways, we're treated to an experience like the author's as we hit that sentence, so in that sense it's clever writing. On the other hand, maybe too clever for a casual web forum instead of, say, a letter.
Right. I'm not claiming the LLM has visual imagination - I suspect that OP has it, and that ChatGPT was trained on enough text from visual thinkers implicitly conveying their experience of the world, that it's now able to correctly interpret writing like that of OP's.
It's a strange feeling, watching the AI get better at language comprehension than me.
I made a similar mistake on the original comment as you (I read it as "Ulbricht returned to the cafe, he actually sat down right in front of me while I was reading the story about his previous arrest here, and that's when I realised it was the same place"), and also thought you were saying that you think ChatGPT has a visual "imagination" inside.
(I don't know if it does or doesn't, but given the "o" in "4o" is supposed to make it multi-modal, my default assumption is that 4o can visualise things… but then, that's also my default assumption about humans, and you being aphantasic shows this is not necessarily so).
You could also say that ChatGPT erred similarly to the original writer, who was unclear and misleading about events.
We needn't act like they share some grand enlightenment. It's just not well expressed. ChatGPT's output is also frequently not well expressed and not well thought out.
There's many more ways to err than to get something right. ChatGPT getting OP right where many people here didn't tells us it's more likely that there is a particular style of writing/thinking that is not obvious to everyone, but ChatGPT can identify and understand, rather than just both OP and ChatGPT accidentally making exactly the same error.
Why would that be more likely? Seems like OP and ChatGPT (which is just many people of different skill levels) might easily make the same failure to communicate. Many failures of ChatGPT are failures to communicate or to convey structured thinking.
Because out of all possible communication failures OP and ChatGPT could make, them both making the exact same error, in a way that makes the two errors cancel out, is extremely unlikely.
Reducing any judgment out of your comment, you have to admit that the commenter's action was a successful comprehension strategy they learned from and can use in the future without chatgpt.
Okay, that's actually pretty wild. I totally misunderstood too, but the response from the "AI" does indeed "clear it up" for me. A bit surprised actually, but then again, I suppose I shouldn't be, since language is what those "large language models" are all about after all... :)
Indeed. But their is something surprising here, however. people like chomsky would present examples like this for decades as untracktable by any algorithm, and as a proof that language is a uniquely human thing. they went as far as to claim that humans have a special language organ, somewhere in their brain perhaps. turns out, a formula exists, it is just very very large.
> chomsky would present examples like this for decades as untracktable by any algorithm, and as a proof that language is a uniquely human thing
Generatove AI has all but solved the Frame Problem.
Those expressions where intractable bc of the impossibility to represent in logic all the background knowledge that is required to understand the context.
It turns out, it is possible to represent all that knowledge in compressed form, with statistical summarisation applied to humongous amounts of data and processing power, unimaginable back then; this puts the knowledge in reach of the algorithm processing the sentence, which is thus capable of understanding the context.
Which should be expected, because since human brain is finite, it follows that it's either possible to do it, or the brain is some magic piece of divine substrate to which laws of physics do not apply.
The problem turned out to be that some people got so fixated on formal logic they apparently couldn't spot that their own mind does not do any kind of symbolic reasoning unless forced to by lots of training and willpower.
That’s not what it means at all. You threw a monkey in your own wrench.
The brain has infinite potentials, however only finite resolves. So you can only play a finite number of moves in a game of infinite infinities.
Individual minds have varying mental technology, our mental technologies change and adapt to challenges (not always in real time.) thus these infinite configurations create new potentials that previously didn’t exist in the realm of potential without some serious mental vectoring.
Get it? You were just so sure of yourself you canceled your own infinite potentials!
Remember, it’s only finite after it happens. Until then it’s potential.
No, it doesn't. The brain has a finite number of possible states to be in. It's an absurdly large amount of states, but it is finite. And, out of those absurd but finite number of possible states, only a tiny fraction correspond to possible states potentially reachable by a functioning brain. The rest of them are noise.
You are wrong! Confidently wrong at that. Distribution of potential, not number of available states. Brain capacity and capability is scalar and can retune itself at the most fundamental levels.
As far as we know, universe is discrete at the very bottom, continuity is illusory, so that's still finite.
Not to mention, it's highly unlikely anything at that low a level matters to the functioning of a brain - at a functional level, physical states have to be quantized hard to ensure reliability and resistance against environmental noise.
Potential is resolving into state in the moment of now!
Be grateful, not scornful that it all collapses into state (don’t we all like consistency?), that is not however what it “is”. It “is” potential continuously resolving. The masterwork that is the mind is a hyoerdimensional and extradimentional supercomputer (that gets us by yet goes mostly squandered). Our minds and peripherals can manipulate, break down, and remake existential reality in the likeness of our own images. You seem to complain your own image is soiled by your other inputs or predispositions.
Sure, it’s a lot of work yet that’s what this whole universe thing runs on. Potential. State is what it collapses into in the moment of “now”.
And you’re right, continuity is an illusion. Oops.
I never bought into Searle's argument with the Chinese room.
The rules for translation are themselves the result of intelligence; when the thought experiment is made real (I've seen an example on TV once), these rules are written down by humans, using human intelligence.
A machine which itself generates these rules from observation has at least the intelligence* that humans applied specifically in the creation of documents expressing the same rules.
That a human can mechanically follow those same rules without understanding them, says as much and as little as the fact that the DNA sequences within the neurones in our brains are not themselves directly conscious of higher level concepts such as "why is it so hard to type 'why' rather than 'wju' today?" despite being the foundation of the intelligence process of natural selection and evolution.
* well, the capability — I'm open to the argument that AI are thick due to the need for so many more examples than humans need, and are simply making up for it by being very very fast and squeezing the equivalent of several million years of experiences for a human into a month of wall-clock time.
Minds shuffle information. Including about themselves.
Paper with information being shuffled by rules exhibiting intelligence and awareness of “self” is just ridiculously inefficient. Not inherently less capable.
I don’t think I understand this entirely. The point of the thought experiment is to assume the possibility of the room and consider the consequences. How it might be achievable in practice doesn’t alter this
The room is possible because there's someone inside with a big list of rules of what Chinese characters to reply with. This represents the huge amount of data processing and statistical power. When the thought expt was created, you could argue that the room was impossible, so the experiment was meaningless. But that's no longer the case.
I'm not sure I'm following you. My comment re Chinese room was that parent said the data processing we now have was unimaginable back in the day. In fact, it was imaginable - the Chinese room imagined it.
Just as an additional datapoint, since I’m confused by fellow commenters’ confusion—I thought your narrative was clear, colorful, and entertaining, and I hope you’ll keep things so literary and engaging in your future contributions too :)
As with so many matters of crime, punishment, and high dudgeon, the physical reality of the situation always feels so banal. Dread Pirate Roberts’ lawless dark kingdom, where he commissions trans-national assassinations… looks a lot like a nerdy dude’s laptop on a municipal library table.
Yes, I thought it was an interesting blend of past and present. If this were a scene in a show or movie it could be edited beautifully - the reader, sitting alone in a corner, looks up and in a lucid, almost psychedelic way, the past comes to life with Ulbrict sitting in front of him, that unfold as he continues reading.
Regarding your edit. The first paragraph kind of lines up with you reading about it. But the second one is kind of confusing, and I think it's because "then" can mean two different things here. You meant "at the time of his arrest". If you casually read it without cross referencing the first paragraphs context, you might think it means "as I was sitting there".
And there's nothing in the following sentences that corrects this garden path assumption.
>Then Ulbricht walked into the public library and sat down at the table directly in front of me
Would not confuse as many if you wrote
>At the time of his arrest Ulbricht walked into the public library and sat down at the table directly in front of me
Or even clearer
>At the time of his arrest Ulbricht had walked into the public library and sat down at the table which was now directly in front of me
His writing employs a little bit of poetry in order to capture his feeling. Not all writing benefits from being as clear and bland as possible. HN should probably read some non-fiction books from time to time
Not sure which novels you’re picking but in my experience novels are frequently more ambiguous and harder to parse than the parent comment, often on purpose. If you’ve really ’never had a single issue’ maybe you’re not choosing challenging texts
Wow, you've totally cracked the mystery. This explains why all the commenters are at each other's throats - half of them are reading it one way and half are reading the other way, and only one of the two ways makes any sense.
Yes, it took three reads before I worked out what the story was trying to say.
Even just adding one word "Then Ulbricht had walked into the public library and sat down at the table directly in front of me" would be enough of a clue.
Exactly, that was my point about then being a word that can be interpreted in two ways, and the following sentence does not error correct this assumption.
If you read it one way, it's almost impossible to not be misdirected, because the following sentence works with both meanings.
If you include the had this would be enough of a clue to correct the incorrect assumption. Although it still might make for slightly bumpy reading.
I used to live in Glen Park at that time and I vividly remember seeing Ross working as a cashier at the Canyon Market, helping me bag my groceries. It was probably around the time he was starting the Silk Road. The place where he was arrested was also my favorite table at the Public Library, where I used to go work. It is incredible to be that close to history.
I believe they are suggesting an experience of imaginatively visualising the events of the arrest linearly as they were narrated in their read-through of the article, serendipitously aided by being physically present at the same location, and are referencing the article's narration partially in the present tense to similarly immerse us in medias res as we follow their remark.
Alternatively, they are themselves Ross Ulbricht, describing an out-of-body fever dream or post-traumatic flashback. This seems ... somewhat less likely.
Singular "they" dates at least back as far as the 14th century, and I've yet to meet a person who objects to it but does not use it themselves now and again without even noticing if you observe them speak enough. It's entirely integral to English.
The interlude during which some pushed for "they" to be exclusively plural, was a mere brief blip in the history of the language.
It's also a couple of centuries older than singular "you", so if you want to complain about a pronoun changing between singular and plural, that's a better candidate.
I’ve been writing they to refer to individuals in the third person for five decades. Usage of they as a neutral singular pronoun began in the 14th century. Stercus alibi iace, outrage monkey.
It's so funny how outrage poisoned partisans have such crushing issues with pronouns. The word 'They' has been used to refer to individuals for hundreds of years. Get a life
I dont know, ask the commenter - he who reads OPs story and comments on it, projects himself into it when commenting on it.. there is no fixed answer to this.
I thought that starting my story in media res would make for a better dramatic effect, but it seems I overestimated my audience and went a little too heavy on the narrative ellipsis.
> Then Ulbricht walked into the public library and sat down at the table directly in front of me, and suddenly as I was reading I could look up and see exactly the chair he had been in, where the plainclothes police had positioned themselves, how they had arranged a distraction.
Alternately:
> Ulbricht had walked into the public library
gives the game away.
If you still want to play around a bit:
> I could see where Ulbricht walked into the public library. The table he sat at. I looked up and saw where the plainclothes police had positioned themselves, how they had arranged a distraction.
That way you are leaving some ambiguity, but are not directly lying with the tenses.
Well, a lot of times the audience is to blame... There are many people that are stupid, aren't trained in style figures of writing or just not trained in reading in a way that allows for complex conceptual frameworks. It also happens in software: someone writes great code, it's very complex and some people don't understand it and blame the author of writing unreadable code. Its easy to call something unreadable if you don't understand what it's saying. Let me bring it differently: it takes two to tango. I found his story interesting and engaging.
Let me bring it in another way:
Sometimes the joke is brilliant, but the audience just doesn't understand it. It's not a bad joke or a bad comedian. It's a bad audience.
To go into the meat of this: he is imagining it while reading in the same location as the incident happened. This is a style of writing. It's definitely not wrong.
To paraphrase the asshole quote: "if one person misunderstands you, that's their fault; if everyone does, it's yours". The same goes for your comedian analogy: sure, you can tell a brilliant joke in French to a Chinese audience, but why?
I think you could have told it as experiencing the events without making your post confusing, but you'd have to redo your first paragraph. Your first paragraph is external, meta, and places his arrest in your past, which throws off the effect when that suddenly changes in the next sentence. It's not the audience's fault that that is hard to parse.
Many of us can't. Personally, for nearly three decades I thought the ability to vividly experience a book this way was just some overused and extremely exaggerated metaphor - and then I discovered aphantasia is a thing, and I score close to top of its severity scale.
So perhaps it's less about your starting point, and more about describing a frame of mind some in the audience don't have, and can't relate to.
Curiously, I don't recall ever seeing this particular style of writing before, in any of the books I ever read.
I found it interesting and could visualize you as you were visualizing it while reading. The only part that made me go back was I thought he sat down to your table until I reread you could see the table he sat down at years ago.
I've seen this type of thing recently and also have been told some comments were "obviously" meaning something else. I think people must've stopped reading books and lost interpretation skills.
I liked the way you wrote it, I could picture you sitting in the library, picturing the arrest yourself :-).
The reactions remind me of a philosophy class I had, where the professor went for a thought experiment in order to explain an idea. "Imagine a world where ...". There was a physicist in the class who kept interrupting the professor, saying "well that's not possible because of how physics works". I would have asked him what he thought about Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings; could he enjoy them at all? But he ruined the class for me so I didn't :-).
I had a similar experience watching Mr. Robot. There’s a scene where it shifts to first person PoV and the voiceover says something like “am I seeing this? Is this real?” … and it was EXACTLY the PoV I had every day walking out of my office on 36th st back then.
I once walked home after an evening of some friends and beer.
As I came up to my house it was dark but I clearly saw a little person walking through my back garden. About 3 foot tall, at the most, it seemed. And they were holding the hand of a smaller person half their height. Walking together, no hurry at all.
I just froze and watched them walking away, and turn a corner.
The feelings of disbelief, but wanting to believe were crazy.
I came out of my shock. Ran the length of my home and managed to see mother and child raccoons now walking on all fours.
They must have walked 20 feet on their back legs together, holding hands.
For a minute of my life I was actually Alice in Wonderland and there were tiny people who walked gardens at night.
My kids used to go to that library! We lived in the neighborhood (Glen Park- one of the "gems" of San Francisco) and the downtown is almost like a little village (except with California levels of traffic and trash). It was a bit weird to think that my kids were probably reading books while this guys was, uh, transacting his business nearby.
I mean, it’s possible that the library had rearranged their chairs in the intervening years and that exact one was now at a different table, but it was certainly a chair in the same location.
This is unrelated but you just did a wonderful job of explaining why I love history so much. There’s something so exciting (to me) about deeply researching an event, going to where it happened and seeing the land (or library) come alive with images of the past.
BTW Boondock Saints is like one of the dumbest movies of all time, they made a behind-the-scenes documentary about how the film failed because of how arrogant the directors/screenwriters were. It's so stupid, it's great
I read this article when it was first published years ago, and it is written so well I still "see the movie" in my head when I think about it. Your experience must have been next-level.
I'll share my experience, too: I live near Glen Park and was in Bello that day, taking up one of those coveted seats, as all this was happening. I recall being aware of a lot of police cars outside, and perhaps seeing the phalanx around Ross as they walked past the window. Clearly something big was going on, but I stepped outside and the street was already back to normal. Shrug, perhaps I'll hear about it on the evening news. Not a peep. :-)
It was only some months & years later that I heard about Glen Park, the library, and Bello being part of the drama, and other local landmarks. To this day I keep hearing about other local details. (I learned a few months ago that his group house was on Monterey Blvd, not far from the conservatory).
Looking back, I had noticed a number of 'out-of-town' business people in Bello around that time. Glen Park is a busy local scene, but gets very few visitors, so they stuck out. Clean cut, business casual, but not FiDi types. They were cheerful but not interested in chatting. Who would go to a cafe and not want to socialize, I wondered? I thought perhaps realestate people.
I went to Bello frequently then, and must have seen Ross there a few times too, but I only vaguely recall once or twice. Something drew my attention to his laptop, maybe it had an EFF sticker on it? But he likewise didn't seem interested in conversation. I do recall once he was talking with an older man, in his 50's or early 60's, about libertarianism.
Literacy and nuance is hard with written words — especially when a large chunk of your audience is either a non-native English speaker or and Adderall addict. I feel like this community is heavily laden with both, and surely there must be some significant overlap between those groups.
i had a similar experience working in copenhagen. read an article about copenhagen sub orbital rockets, looked up and out my window and my eye landed on the rocket i was just reading about. weird.
You’re not going to hear from the people who thought it made perfect sense, so the replies are a pretty biased sample. (This is also true of the parent complaint about reading comprehension, tbh.) But I see three confused replies and three corrections (not counting my own), so it doesn’t seem to be every reply.
I think the problem is that I took an artistic style in an attempt to paint a picture for the reader, but I did it in a long thread on a technical forum where people are probably mostly skimming rather than engaging in literary criticism, so I should maybe have anticipated this would be a problem.
I thought it was fine, I wasn't confused for a moment. The only real problem here is that HN attracts a certain brand of nerds who are inclined to think it's hilarious when Maurice Moss says "Yes, it's one of those", many of whom are likely frothing right now because I just committed a comma splice in the previous sentence.
I (and others) have vouched a few of his comments back to life, he does write a good comment.
I don't know the original reasons for his apparent perma-dead'ing (users can option to "show dead" and see these comments) but I suspect it's due to going fully Australian wih swear words and invectives when he gets a bit passionate about something .. or even just adding colour for a lark, as we do.
Then Ulbricht walked into the public library and sat down at the table directly in front of me, and suddenly as I was reading I could look up and see exactly the chair he had been in, where the plainclothes police had positioned themselves, how they had arranged a distraction.
Having this tableau unexpectedly unfold right in front of my eyes was a fascinating experience, and it certainly made the article suddenly get a lot more immersive!
[1] https://www.wired.com/2015/05/silk-road-2/
EDIT: to be clear, I was not present for the arrest. I was reading the magazine, some years after the arrest, but in the same place as the arrest. (I didn’t qualify the events with “I read that...” since I thought the narrative ellipsis would be obvious from context; evidently not.)