HN is no different than Reddit, or any social media for that matter, in that commenters pretend to read articles.

Back in 2001, our social medium was Slashdot and no one ever pretended to read the article. No one read the article either. It was slashdotted most of the time anyways.

that is if it even a human commenter at all

State-sponsored psyop meta comments aside, the models obviously continue to get better, but there is still a lot of 'guard railing' required to keep even the latest models completely on-task. The chess example is interesting because it's clearly a well-studied and established domain so the rules, strategies, and whatever else is in the training data should make yield excellent results; but clearly there is some behavior in these systems that's difficult to engineer out.

For me the useful intuition is that LLMs haven't somehow magickally learned to implement any of the algorithms we know that we have used to make strong chess engines: alpha-beta minimax and Monte-Carlo Tree Search on the one hand, and obviously the ability to learn accurate evaluation functions by self-play.

I mean we've done all this before in a task-specific fashion. It's useful to know that LLMs haven't managed to do that in the process of learning to represent the entire text on the web. On the other hand they have gotten say very good at machine translation without being trained exclusively (and I select the preceding word carefully) on machine translation.

Exactly, especially when you touch “forbidden things”, like questioning why rust IS not the best system programming language, you will be punished so hard by “expert”s.