We're not ready for superpersistent AI
We’re not ready for superpersistent AIIntelligence isn’t the only thing to worry about. What happens when AI just won’t quit?Nate SilverSep 15, 20269116ShareHave you ever heard about the Immortal Snail? It’s an intermittently popular internet meme that goes something like this:You’re offered 10 million dollars.
- ▪We’re not ready for superpersistent AIIntelligence isn’t the only thing to worry about.
- ▪What happens when AI just won’t quit?Nate SilverSep 15, 20269116ShareHave you ever heard about the Immortal Snail?
- ▪It’s an intermittently popular internet meme that goes something like this:You’re offered 10 million dollars.
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 5,066 of its stories.
Story provenance
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Hacker News (AI / LLM) |
| Canonical URL | https://www.natesilver.net/p/were-not-ready-for-superpersistent |
| Publication time | Tue, 15 Sep 2026 20:17:10 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-15T20:26:52.891Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-15T20:26:52.891Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | None |
| Cluster logic | Not yet clustered, or no peer story found in the clustering window. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
We’re not ready for superpersistent AIIntelligence isn’t the only thing to worry about. What happens when AI just won’t quit?Nate SilverSep 15, 20269116ShareHave you ever heard about the Immortal Snail? It’s an intermittently popular internet meme that goes something like this:You’re offered 10 million dollars. What’s the catch? A snail will spend the rest of eternity trying to track you down. That’s its only goal in life. If it touches you, it kills you. Also, the snail is immortal. But otherwise, it just moves as slowly as a regular snail. So, do you take the deal?“This is the dumbest hypothetical question ever,” said one of the co-hosts of the Rooster Teeth podcast, which introduced the meme in 2014. It’s dumb because there’s nowhere near enough information to answer the question.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Hacker News (AI / LLM).
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