Contra a bunch of idiots at Hacker News and elsewhere, I understand that popular LLMs do not just pick the “best” token (word) at each decision point.

A tad defensive, considering he generally doesn't shy away from dressing people down when they get it wrong. If you included the "Temperature" section of this follow-up above the original post it'd be an awfully confusing read.

I agree in parts with his more principled arguments against watermarking, and I don't think he needed to tread water in the technicalities, especially given how close he comes in this post to abandoning the quality degradation argument all together anyway.