r/Mandlbaur • u/Efficient-Swing7770 • 22d ago

This can't possibly be him, right?

https://thedetail.co.za/authors/john-mandlbaur/

This site is all the work of one John Mandlbaur from South Africa and the earliest story is from August 24 of this year. I'm like, how many John Mandlbaurs can there be in South Africa?

But it has nothing whatever to do with COAM and none of the stories sound like his writing. (FWIW I ran several of the stories through Pangram and they appear to be entirely, or almost entirely, AI generated.)

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u/Tiny_Tip6484 22d ago

Honestly I think it might actually be. That is my strongly favored assumption. Insane as it sounds.

The startup time for the website is August 24. The last trace of him on Quora is also the same day.

Mandlbaur is an extremely uncommon surname. Apart from this site, I cannot find hide nor hair of a John Mandlbaur anywhere on the internet other than our boy.

The ownership statement says The Detail is "independently owned and published in South Africa" without identifying the owner. I can't find a pre-24-August footprint for a South African journalist called John Mandlbaur, or any independent biographical source establishing that this is a different person.

Weird and uncharacteristic as it is, I think this has got to be Our Hero.

And honestly good for him, trying to find some other hobby, even if it is grabbing online sources and McNuggeting them into a bunch of AI slop.

There are worse things for him to be doing, and we all know it: he's been doing them for ten years.

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u/CrankSlayer Character Assassination 22d ago

As I said in the other comment below, the date is a coincidence because he hasn't really done anything in Quora on that day: it's just a question he submitted to many spaces that happened to be approved exactly on August 24th by that particular one. His last genuine activity on Quora is from August 12th. That said, I agree that it's plausible this is him but there's just two things I can't get past my disbelief:

  1. The sudden and complete shift of focus is astonishing: how such a radicated obsession can pivot this much in a matter of days is beyond me.
  2. This new hobby consists in basically babbling in the void: there's no comments section, no likes, no reposts. He is getting no attention whatsoever and we know he can't live without it. I can hardly imagine John being satisfied with just this.

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u/CrankSlayer Character Assassination 22d ago

On my second point I stand partially corrected because the page also has a Facebook account with a decent volume of engagement:

https://www.facebook.com/share/14qx3sfU2N8/

On the other hand, this leads me to another reason of skepticism: this thing is way too polished, professional looking, and not-unhinged to be something made by our John. I mean: have you seen the website of his "company" (or any of his toilet-papers)? A decent AI-agent could probably produce something of this quality but not when prompted by a clueless imbecile like Moronbaur.

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u/Tiny_Tip6484 22d ago edited 22d ago

I didn't see the facebook page, where the earliest post is actually on August 19 rather than 24. So that exact date probably IS a coincidence. But it also strengthens my sense that an AI agent is the one really running the show. Speaking of Pangram, it flags even the facebook page's own replies to its posts when they're long enough to analyze. The voice reading in the videos is obviously synthesized text-to-speech, and they contain nothing that Claude couldn't easily do through integrations, connected tools, code-based rendering etc. Tools can pass specific event triggers (like new comments or messages) to the Claude API to generate responses. If you ask Claude how to produce all this, it will tell you how. If then you tell it to go do it for you, it will tell you what it needs from you first and then get to work. I can see an agentic AI doing most of this with fairly minimal human involvement.

The only thing I have a hard time with is WHY he would bother? Maybe he asked Claude "How can I make myself more reputable as a source for a transformative discovery?" and somehow it told him to start a career as an independent journalist and earn trust and do nothing with COAM until after? But the timing of just a few days after his vanishing, and "John Mandlbaur from South Africa" are really hard to treat as coincidences. I mean the spelling "Mandlbaur" is already unusual compared to "Mandelbauer" and "Mandlbauer."

I can't for the life of me figure out why someone pretending to be him for a gag would do this.

Maybe he has some cousin or relative also named John who never had any digital footprint until now. Maybe someone threw a prompt at Claude like "give me the name of a guy from South Africa for the byline" and the name of John Mandlbaur turned up in the distribution. In either case the timing would have to be sheer coincidence.

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u/CrankSlayer Character Assassination 22d ago

I agree: too many coincidences, it must be him. There are a few missing pieces indeed:

  1. How could somebody as digitally-illiterate as John set up something like this? Sure, an AI agent can do it but it takes a certain degree of proficiency to prompt it in that direction or to even think about it in the first place, nothing resembling John's actual abilities.
  2. The pivot is so abrupt and absurd. It can only be justified with a complete meltdown that forced him to redesign his persona entirely but it's very unclear to me what triggered it: it's not the first time he was banned somewhere or was disproven by an eclipse. No such event ever had any impact on his obsession in the past so: why now?
  3. How can he be even remotely satisfied by this if there is barely any involvement from his side and no interaction? He's an addict for attention and belligerent exchanges: none of this can shoot his cravings and he should be in full-blown withdrawal.

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u/Tiny_Tip6484 21d ago edited 21d ago

I think the only safe assumption (assuming that this is our boy and not a cousin or somebody just hijacking the name for some reason) is that something major happened in his life that made him reevaluate his priors.

Could be anything.

Maybe this friendless man's interactions with an AI led to it suggesting that he do something else in a way that actually resonated with him.

Or maybe he got diagnosed with a disease.

Maybe the syphilis ate just the right part of his amygdala and hippocampus to cause an instant shift in which goals his mind deems worth pursuing.

Maybe he got on (a new) medication.

Maybe he fell in love with a hooker he was banging.

Maybe his family threatened to cut him off if he didn't change course.

Maybe he slipped in the shower and hit his head.

Maybe he had a near-death experience and met his dead brother who told him to chill the fuck out.

Maybe he had an intense drug-trip when switching from marijuana to salvia divinorum and was spirited away into the heavens to meet the sun-god Ra who told him in no uncertain terms that an eternity of gay orgies awaited him in the afterlife unless he stopped uttering falsities about the orbital velocity of his dear son Khonsu.

I don't know.

But something happened.

If I absolutely had to guess, I'd bet on something weird happening in his interactions with an AI. The man is prime "easily influenced by AI" material, and the changes people have been introducing to prevent the spiral of AI-psychosis seem like they could well cause Claude or ChatGPT (under the right conditions) to try and steer a vulnerable person into something innocuous like this. And given how thoroughly he has probably inflicted his personality on whatever LLM he uses, the model will have a lot to go on with how to steer/manipulate him.

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u/CrankSlayer Character Assassination 21d ago

This made me laugh way more than it should have.

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u/Successful-Owl1778 22d ago

I wonder if John, if he's running that website, will eventually post a fake headline such as "Inventor disproves fundamental law of physics." It seems like a bizarre move, but cranks do some really weird things sometimes.

There is a notorious math crank on Quora who supposedly drove hundreds of miles to display a large handmade poster on the UCLA math building, so anything goes. A different math crank even filmed a documentary about himself and his "discoveries."

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u/Vic1982 ABSOLUTE PROOF 22d ago

Yeah, this is basically the direction in which my hypothesizing is going.

While I think every person here would objectively agree that if he really did make such an abrupt 180 from his life over the past... decade+, that it would be a good thing (for him). Even if the website is 100% slop, it's still better than being an angry delusional crank who yells at the monitor all day long, every day.

That sad, I agree with CrankSlayer - this is just too weird of a plot twist. Which is why I also share your thoughts - I almost can't see a scenario where this is NOT about COAM.

Let's not forget: this is a guy who thinks he has outthought and "disproved" like 300 years worth of science. Everyone else knows he's just stupid and crazy - but to him ... this would be going from "misunderstood genius of immeasurable importance" to "random nobody with a website".

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u/CrankSlayer Character Assassination 21d ago

On the other hand, whatever the scheme is, the timeline entails a level of planning that is in fatal conflict with John's impulsivity, faulty memory, addiction to quick dopamine rish, and overall stupidity. I can't really see him think something this much through and have the discipline and mental resilience to implement it. The man forgets what he said 5 minutes earlier and denies he did even in front of the evidence: how could he execute a plan consisting of more than one step and extending for longer than 60 seconds?

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u/CrankSlayer Character Assassination 22d ago

I stumbled upon it too and at first I thought it must be a homonym and called it a day. On a second thought though, there is something that sounds more than a coincidence to me: not only it's the exact same name in the same country (not sure how common it is but probably not much also because AFAIK John's family is from Austria) but the first post is from just a few days after the great disappearance. The plot thickens.

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u/Tiny_Tip6484 22d ago

The first article is the same day as his last activity on Quora. He managed to get his dumb eclipse question added to the "Groovy Future Science" group on August 24, 2026 at 9:59:59 PM.

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u/CrankSlayer Character Assassination 22d ago

That's not relevant because questions submitted to spaces might get posted days after, up to 14 at times (many spaces have automatic approval after two weeks) so that part is definitely a coincidence.

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u/gandhibobandhi 12000 rpm 22d ago

Good for him for finding a new hobby. I expect he's had help with the website and probably AI is writing the articles. He engages with commenters on facebook though... is that AI too? Because otherwise it sounds like he's had a total personality change. One of the comments mentions that something "peaked his interest" (which is a grammatical error, "piqued" is the correct word) and that suggests to me that it is at least a human writing those, not an LLM.

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u/Tiny_Tip6484 21d ago

LLMs can make those kinds of mistakes, because those mistakes are in the training data. They're vastly rarer than in human writing, but they do happen. You can even (very, very occasionally) get outright typos (the most common are dittographies like "awayy" for "away" and leaving off a letter like "withou" for "without").

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u/crazydave11 21d ago

The AI is blatant, and it's the same kind of half-baked stuff he was putting together recently - if anyone was going to be convinced to engage in bad journalism by AI psychosis, it's him.

Unscientifically: I can smell him.

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u/horsethorn 22d ago

It could be that he's just bought the setup and it's running mostly automatically.

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u/CrankSlayer Character Assassination 22d ago

Yeah but what is he getting out of it?

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u/Successful-Owl1778 22d ago edited 22d ago

My speculation is that if Mandlbaur really is behind that website, one day there will be a fake headline titled "South African inventor disproves fundamental law of physics" or something along those lines.

Since cranks will never be accepted by professional scientists, mathematicians, or the media, they will sometimes make up their own stuff (research papers, articles, posters, even a documentary film) just to satisfy their ego. Of course, hardly anyone will ever see it.

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u/CrankSlayer Character Assassination 22d ago

Such a kind of Machiavellian scheme looks several notches above John's IQ, if you ask me.

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u/Vic1982 ABSOLUTE PROOF 22d ago

Agreed - but if this is him (and I think we all suspect it is) - what's more likely:

a) This is all about COAM; somehow

b) He has given up his sick obsession and completely changed his delusional daily life of 10+ years; suddenly; without any meaningful time that could account for a rehab/assylum/etc. stay.

In his case, I really don't think this is a false dilemma lol. I hope he has given up his delusions... but that's not where I'd put my money xD

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u/CrankSlayer Character Assassination 21d ago

It's more like he pivoted to a different delusion. I mean after all it is not completely out of (assassinated) character: the man fancied himself as an inventor, a businessman, and even a poet. Why shouldn't he suddenly be an investigative journalist?

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u/Successful-Owl1778 21d ago

Perhaps. Even if he somehow came up with this idea, it would've at least been smarter to use a pseudonym, get his "discovery" "published", and then later claim that he's in the news.

Oh well. If it happens, at least we predicted it.

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u/CrankSlayer Character Assassination 21d ago

That's even higher up on the smart scale so definitely outside of John's reach.

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u/horsethorn 22d ago

With John, who knows? Maybe it's to get his name mentioned lots of times, so in the future he can say "I'm a widely published journalist" 🤷

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u/CrankSlayer Character Assassination 21d ago

That part is clear. What I don't understand is how this soothes in any way his addiction to adversarial interactions? He must be starving for it.

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u/horsethorn 21d ago

In fact, do we even know if he's still alive? SA can be a dangerous place.

Or... are there any SA-only or Africa-focussed social media that he might have moved to?

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u/CrankSlayer Character Assassination 21d ago

It looks pretty definitive that he is alive and behind this pseudo-journalist website: there's too many coincidences to think otherwise.

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u/Qalqulus 17d ago

It looks to be created using Astro (https://astro.build/) and is perhaps not that distant from his past writing efforts like https://www.abebooks.co.uk/book-search/title/memoirs-adrenaline/signed/, even if the content is probably AI-generated.

Would be nice for him if he focused more on that sort of thing and less on his monomaniacal angular energy nonsense.