Aren't both of these the obvious things? In that the obvious thing is what comes to mind that has a chance of working?

I would say "any direct solution to the problem". Anything that fits the first line of the Mental Gymnastics meme. (...) I am explicitly asking not for much here, just a token amount of effort.

The main thing is to show proof of work. Any work that isn't just busy work. You're showing you're serious about the problem, rather than just wanting to complain about it. 

So if you e.g. complain that you're fat and can't seem to get your weight down, then the obvious things would be e.g. going to the gym a couple of times a week for a month or two, or actually properly dieting. If after this you still can't get your weight down, then you've demonstrated that you've actually tried to solve your problem.

Another version of this point is this chart for tech support.

There are cases where someone might not be able to come up with any obvious approaches. These are rare. Most people just don't actually think about problems they want to solve.

My understanding is that it's not so much very high negative stakes (usually, at least), it's more a continuous tax. You have to always be playing PR games and be aware that there is a subset of readers that will treat your lack of involvement as surrender and implicitly granting a point. Their numbers will depend on the place and topic, of course, as e.g. I'd expect a lot more of this on twitter than on a random knitting forum. There's also the additional problem that they tend to be quite vocal.

You can ignore all of this and just be weird, but that has it's own costs, which aren't always visible. Cultivating an appropriate image only works if you have a reputation and/or are so obviously strange that you won't be judged by the usual standards - if you seem "normal", you get judged by "normal" standards, which depending on whatever someone thinks is normal, can include "if you don't push back, you've lost the interaction".

edit: 

I also think Duncan is doing a different version of this

I also got a perfect score, and in general agree with your assessment, but I think it's more a matter of good vs bad writing in general. I've read my fair share of bad fiction (though mainly published - I'm guessing fanfics would be more egregious) and the AI written ones read like a hack author. It reads like someone who has read good fiction and is trying to mimic the style, not understanding the substance.

It's sad to see how badly the voting went (in the sense that the voters got things wrong). It also suggests that anyone who wants to be an author has to become popular 10 years ago to have a chance. I hope this can be viewed as "models get better, so will soon beat good authors" rather than "models don't have to get any better, as most readers can't tell good from bad anyway".

Specific story notes:

Yet, despite there being some sour spots, this immigration wave has been absorbed surprisingly well and has enjoyed broad public support.

The two situations are very different.

Ukrainians have been cheap labour in Poland for a decade or so. They look pretty much the same, speak a similar language (Polish and Ukrainian are sort of mutually understandable), have sort of similar culture (at least if you squint a bit), and above all, are oppressed by Russia. Poland remembers Russian oppression, so it's a lot easier to sympathise. Ukrainians are viewed as hard workers who are willing to do the jobs that no one else wants (basically the role of Poles in other countries). And above all they cross the border legally. They might not always legalise their stay properly, but who hasn't skirted the law here or there?

The immigrants being pushed across by Lukashenko look different (when a black person started working in a shop in a neighboring town, people would go there specially to see him), don't speak a common language (they often don't even speak English), aren't coming to do proper work (construction and cleaning), aren't crossing legally, and don't even really want to live in Poland (they want to get to Germany). 

Personally I support protecting the Belarus border (though I'd like it to be done in a way that doesn't further disrupt the already very fragile populations of bison and lynx) for game theoretic reasons, and support accepting Ukrainians for humanitarian reasons, but from talking to people I often get the impression that for them it boils down to cultural reasons.

Thousands is not a trickle. It's harder to get over, but it's just a wall - a ladder is not hard to make and they can keep trying. There are very few asylum applications, because the Belarusian immigrants don't want to stay in Poland, especially as they know they're not welcome. They want to go to Germany. Those who do apply, tend to be Ukrainians or Belarusians (at least this article claims that, and I trust that org to get the numbers right)

I have personally met those who manage to get over the wall. Each year I go to Białowieża for a week or so of bird counting, which gives me a pass into the strict reservation (i.e. no one other than scientists are allowed in). GPT-5 estimates that 60-80% of crossing attempts are in that border strip of around 60km - mainly because this is dense forest and marshland.

The first year we'd meet wet, tired, hungry and cold groups of 2-3 people every couple of days. These were very scared and confused people who were promised good jobs in Europe, but got bused to the border, documents confiscated and pointed in the direction of Poland. Which in this case was 100 km^2 of virgin forest (the last lowland one in Europe). There were people who would try to find them and smuggle them over to Germany (where they wanted to go anyway), but at the same time you had the border guards running around, and also local toughs who wanted to show those nasty foreigners where their place was. To drive in to Białowieża (the village next to the national park) you needed to have a special pass, and the police would stop everyone driving in or out and check their cars. We'd give whatever food we had to these people, as you could see they needed it.

The next years there were soldiers patrolling the forest and the immigrant groups were better organised. They would be wearing more appropriate clothes (waterproof stuff, mainly) - the previous groups didn't know what they were getting in to, but these at least came semi prepared. These we wouldn't give food to, just wave at them and point the way to the edge of the forest.

This year most of the soldiers are gone, as the wall is supposed to stop the immigrants. And we didn't meet immigrants that often. But when we would, it was groups of 10-20 people, well dressed, with a guide with a GPS (or at least a proper compass) showing them which way to go, along well trampled paths. 

When I chatted with the soldiers, they'd complain that they'd catch a group, send them back over the border, just to have to catch them again a few days later. If someone is in a bad state, they'll keep them in hospital for a bit, then bus them back to the border.

Even if a group gets across the fence, they have to cross something like 10km of real forest (not pine fields) in which it's really easy to get lost, then once they are out, they need to either go hundreds of kilometers across hostile territory (to the German border) or find someone willing to smuggle them out (which requires coordination and trust). The fence itself is not that much of a barrier - it will slow them down for 10-20 minutes, but it's not that hard to climb it (with a ladder and a blanket), and there have been multiple attempts to dig tunnels underneath (of which I know of). 

It's hard to know what the real numbers are. All sides try to keep things murky. The ~10 scientists I hang out with there would in aggregate see a group daily, and those are just those they'd see. Sometimes the park guards would tell us to be careful as they knew of a group in a given area. Most of these will be caught, but a lot will get through. GPT-5 gives me the following (note that these are attempts, most of which will be repeat offenders, and there are a lot fewer successes than attempts):

Most of these are on the border itself, where people trying to climb the fence are stopped. It's still a lot. Few immigrants want to stay in Poland (why would they? :D) - they want to get to Germany. GPT-5 gives the following numbers from German police reports (I haven't checked these), which is a lower bound on how many get through:

The fact that Germany has reinstated border checks for the last year also suggests that a lot are getting through, or at least that Germany believes that they do.

Ancient latin didn't have "u" and "v", just "v". So this is a sort of "lets return to the good old times of the roman empire, which we'll write in the same way as it would look on an old inscription". They also only had uppercase letters, which is why it's "RETVRN" rather than "retvrn".

Some of them mention his ability to remember the location on the page the words were

This actually is easier than remembering the actual contents. I used to spend a lot of time doing various Bible studies, where being able to quote a verse supporting whatever you wanted to say was the best way to win arguments. This of course led to people being able to quote obscure verses and precedents from less known places. It was quite common for someone to say something along the lines of "there's something supporting this in <some book>, around <some chapter> on the lower left side of the page" 

Knitting is an interesting example, as it's a relatively recent invention (less than 1000 years old). Previously to make fabric you needed some kind of weaving method, which requires some kind of structure to hold the fabric. With knitting, you can do it anywhere, and just need a stick or two. It's an interesting technology in how important it was, in a very subdued way. Knitting uses more materiel, but you get a flexible and warm garment which you can produce while on the go (apparently Chinese caravan men would pluck out camel hair to continue knitting).

It's also interesting in how quickly it was abandoned as soon as cheap fabric was available from other sources - knitting is what grandmothers do (this used to make a lot of sense) and so was low status. It's only recently become a normal hobby.

One off PoC website/app type things are something where LLMs shine. Or dashboards like "here's a massive csv file with who knows what - make me a nice dashboard thingy I can use to play with the data" or "here's an API - make me a quick n dirty website that allows me to play about with it".