6 ms·
Super interesting. I wish this article wasn’t written by an LLM though. It feels soulless and plastic.
by josephg 7mo ago
Super interesting. I wish this article wasn’t written by an LLM though. It feels soulless and plastic.
- retard2 7mo ago[flagged]
- vrighter 7mo agoit's actually the second one I read that fit that description.
- ModernMech 7mo agoI'm starting to develop a physiological response when I recognize AI prose. Just like an overwhelming frustration, as if I'm hearing nails on chalkboard silently inside of my head.
- voodooEntity 7mo agoI feel ya.... and i have to admit in the past i tried it for one article in my own blog thinking it might help me to express... tho when i read that post now i dont even like it myself its just not my tone. therefor decided not gonne use any llm for blogging again and even tho it takes alot more time without (im not a very motivated writer) i prefer to release something that i did rather some llm stuff that i wouldnt read myself.
- retard3 7mo ago[flagged]
- embedding-shape 7mo agoAny specific sections that stick out? Juxt in the past had really great articles, even before LLMs, and know for a fact they don't lack the expertise or knowledge to write for themselves if they wanted and while I haven't completely read this article yet, I'd surprise me if they just let LLMs write articles for them today.
- croemer 7mo agoHere's one tell-tale of many: "No alarm, no program light." Another one: "Two instructions are missing: [...] Four bytes." One more: "The defensive coding hid the problem, but it didn’t eliminate it."
- monooso 7mo agoThat's just writing. I frequently write like that. This insistence that certain stylistics patterns are "tell-tale" signs that an article was written by AI makes no sense, particularly when you consider that whatever stylistic ticks an LLM may possess are a result of it being trained on human writing.
- gcr 7mo agoSee also: “I'm Kenyan. I Don't Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me” by Marcus Olang', https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-like-chatgpt?triedRedirect=true https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-li... For what it’s worth, Pangram reports that Marcus’ article is 100% LLM-written: https://www.pangram.com/history/640288b9-e16b-4f76-a730-800080cb35f4 https://www.pangram.com/history/640288b9-e16b-4f76-a730-8000...
- croemer 7mo agoIn theory, wouldn't be too hard be to settle the question if whether he used ChatGPT to write it: get Olang to write a few paragraphs by hand, then have people judge (blindly) if it's the same style as the article. Which one sounds more like ChatGPT.
- embedding-shape 7mo agoThe times I've written articles, and those have gone through multiple rounds of reviews (by humans) with countless edits each time, before it ends up being published, I wonder if I'd pass that test in those cases. Initial drafts with my scattered thoughts usually are very different from the published end results, even without involving multiple reviewers and editors.
- gcr 7mo agoFor what it’s worth, Pangram thinks this article is fully human-written: https://www.pangram.com/history/f5f68ce9-70ac-4c2b-b0c3-0ca8827580ec https://www.pangram.com/history/f5f68ce9-70ac-4c2b-b0c3-0ca8...
- xmcqdpt2 7mo agoThen pangram isn't very good, because that article is full of Claude-isms.
- DiffTheEnder 7mo agoIs it possible for a tool to know if something is AI written with high confidence at all? LLMs can be tuned/instructed to write in an infinite number of styles. Don't understand how these tools exist.
- gcr 7mo agoThe WikiEDU project has some thoughts on this. They found Pangram good enough to detect LLM usage while teaching editors to make their first Wikipedia edits, at least enough to intervene and nudge the student. They didn’t use it punatively or expect authoritative results however. https://wikiedu.org/blog/2026/01/29/generative-ai-and-wikipedia-editing-what-we-learned-in-2025/ https://wikiedu.org/blog/2026/01/29/generative-ai-and-wikipe... They found that Pangram suffers from false positives in non-prose contexts like bibliographies, outlines, formatting, etc. The article does not touch on Pangram’s false negatives. I personally think it’s an intractable problem, but I do feel pangram gives some useful signal, albeit not reliably.
- cameronh90 7mo agoIt has Claude-isms, but it doesn't feel very Claude-written to me, at least not entirely. What's making it even more difficult to tell now is people who use AI a lot seem to be actively picking up some of its vocab and writing style quirks.
- embedding-shape 7mo ago
- ChrisRR 7mo agoIt's not setting off any LLM alarm bells to me. It just reads like any other scientific article, which is very often soulless
- bbstats 7mo agothe subheadings are extremely AI IMHO
- fragmede 7mo agoIsn't that just a normal way to organize a large document?
- Jolter 7mo agoIt repeats a few points too many times for a professional writer to not catch it. I don’t mind that they let an LLM write the text, but they should at least have edited it.
- monooso 7mo agoYou have no evidence that it was.
- NiloCK 7mo agoThis is the top reply on a substantial percentage of HN posts now and we should discourage it. It is: - sneering - a shallow dismissal (please address the content) - curmudgeonly - a tangential annoyance All things explicitly discouraged in the site guidelines. [1] Downvoting is the tool for items that you think don't belong on the front page. We don't need the same comment on every single article. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- monooso 7mo agoNo idea why you're being downvoted. I've done my bit to redress the balance, I hope others do the same.
- masklinn 7mo ago> Downvoting is the tool for items that you think don't belong on the front page. You can’t downvote submissions. That’s literally not a feature of the site. You can only flag submissions, if you have more that 31 karma.
- timdiggerm 7mo agoIt's not a shallow dismissal; it's a dismissal for good reason. It's tangential to the topic, but not to HN overall. It's only curmudgeonly if you assume AI-written posts are the inevitable and good future (aka begging the question). I really don't know how it's "sneering", so I won't address that.
- TruffleLabs 7mo ago"Written by an LLM" based on what data or symptom?
- mpalmer 7mo agoI've seen way, way worse. Either someone LLM-polished something they already wrote, or they did their own manual editing pass. The short sentence construction is the most suspicious, but I actually don't see anything glaring. It normally jumps out and hits me in the face.
- bookofjoe 7mo ago>Hemingway's 4 Fast Rules For Effective Writing 1. Use Short Sentences https://www.wordsthatsing.com.au/post/hemingway-rules https://www.wordsthatsing.com.au/post/hemingway-rules
- mpalmer 7mo agoI didn't say they're dispositive. I said they're suspicious. Most people don't write effectively.
- NetMageSCW 7mo agoSo LLMs write effectively and when people do you accuse them of using an LLM?
- mpalmer 7mo agoNo, they don't. They use short sentences in weird, stilted ways.
- rudhdb773b 7mo agoNot to single out your comment, but it feels like it's gotten to the point where HN could use a rule against complaining about AI generated content. It seems like almost every discussion has at least someone complaining about "AI slop" in either the original post or the comments.
- Gigachad 7mo agoHN has gotten to the point where it’s not even worth clicking the link because of course it’s ai slop. There is some real content in the haystack, but we almost need some kind of curator to find and display it rather than a vote system where most people vote on the title alone.
- brookst 7mo agoIf you’re looking for a place that surfaces only human-written content regardless of whether it’s interesting, rather than interesting content regardless of how it was written, HN is not the place. There might be a market for your alternative though. Should be easy enough to build with Claude Code.
- bakugo 7mo agoIf the content was interesting, the author would've written about it himself. By asking AI to write the article for you, you're asserting that the subject matter is not interesting enough to be worth your time to write, so why would it be worth my time to read?
- Gigachad 7mo agoYou just need AI to read it for you and summarise back in to the original prompt.
- malcolmjuxt 7mo agoI know the author personally. He's hardly the type of person to publish AI slop. Read his other articles and watch his talks, this is very much Henry's literary style.
- croemer 7mo agoAnd it turns out at least the part about Rust and locks is plain wrong. What a surprise: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=47676938&goto=item%3Fid%3D47673005%2347676938 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=47676938&goto=item%3Fi...
- jandrese 7mo agoAI tends to write like it is getting paid by the word. This article wasn't too egregious but an editor could have improved it.
- iJohnDoe 7mo agoI did not get any “written by LLM vibes”. I enjoyed it and it pulled me in to keep reading. Who gives a crap if it was written by an LLM. Read it or don’t read it. Your choice. If it conveys the idea and your learn something new, then it’s mission accomplished.
- croemer 7mo agoIncidental finding: another blog posts was written by Claude and they admit it openly in the last paragraph (not earlier): A Note on the Process To be clear about what happened here: Claude wrote this article. https://www.juxt.pro/blog/what-we-learned-from-34-clojure-interviews/ https://www.juxt.pro/blog/what-we-learned-from-34-clojure-in...