3 ms·

Surprise, surprise, another piece of LLM-generated slop on the front page of HN. From chapter 1: > When Git slows down, engineers adapt in bad ways. They stop

by ergl 5mo ago

Surprise, surprise, another piece of LLM-generated slop on the front page of HN. From chapter 1: > When Git slows down, engineers adapt in bad ways. They stop asking questions the history could answer. They batch work to avoid sync cost. They keep messy branches alive longer, postpone cleanup, and treat the repository like something slightly dangerous. From https://gitperf.com/epilogue.html https://gitperf.com/epilogue.html > Once machines start producing code at machine cadence, the model from this book does not break. What changes is the pace: more branches, more commits, more automation, and more surrounding metadata. The traffic gets louder, and the features that keep Git legible under pressure move from "nice to have" to "essential." > These stop looking like side optimizations. They are what keep machine-scale Git traffic usable.

redditor98654 5mo ago
I had the same thought. TBH there is nothing in those individual sentences that read like AI but when you read them all together I could see it too. I dunno what it is, only way I can describe it is that it does not sound like a normal human but rather a monologue from a character trying to sound impressive with each successive sentence.
- ergl 5mo ago
  The author works at OpenAI, so it's no surprise that they've stopped noticing how grating this kind of structure is to read.
  - alchemist1e9 5mo ago
    I think it’s likely there will be methods to fix this soon, some de-slop algorithms, or is there a deep reason it will always be detectable? Perhaps there are some PhD linguists who have figured out how to quantify the “slop” effect and are writing their thesis on it. Once that is done it will be possible to smooth it away. The book is definitely LLM assisted authoring yet it also has great content, so not sure we can immediately jump to shaming it entirely for being slop.
    - tnm 5mo ago
      Thanks for the kind words, and checking out the book here. I'd written this piecemeal over the last year or so (originally a series of blog posts), and was happy to release it all for free in a single edition, and under CC. I'll release an Edition 1.1 soon with some errata, adjustments. There's already a free PDF for the on-the-go -> https://gitperf.com/pdf.html https://gitperf.com/pdf.html Regarding the cherry-picking of fragments of an LLM: of course an LLM (in fact several!) were used to stitch together those disparate blog posts into a more coherent whole. And they certainly left an imprint in places. Otherwise, as a solo writer with a full-time job putting together a 200-page book, I'd have to pay an editor, or work with O'Reilly (did this in 2010 on a Redis book; never again!); and perhaps the book wouldn't be free! LLMs will continue to leave imprints in our work. Some words will, over time, be edited and whittled away. Other words, when the LLM writes well enough to convey a useful point, will be kept.
      - alchemist1e9 5mo ago
        I think it’s great and you should be doing it, I have no problem at all if there is LLM assistance in authoring, I think it’s a good thing because like you said it enables solo writers with good ideas to produce valuable work that they otherwise wouldn’t! What I’m interested in is how to address the “grating” or whatever characteristics the readers detect to have them focus on the LLM aspect. I feel it’s probably soon or already removable with some methods. Ignore the haters they are just wrong to blanket criticize, however their observations are helpful to try and improve the process. We want LLMs to assist in creating useful and effective content for humans.
      - keybored 5mo ago
        > Regarding the cherry-picking of fragments of an LLM: of course an LLM (in fact several!) were used to stitch together those disparate blog posts into a more coherent whole. And they certainly left an imprint in places. Otherwise, as a solo writer with a full-time job putting together a 200-page book, I'd have to pay an editor, or work with O'Reilly (did this in 2010 on a Redis book; never again!); and perhaps the book wouldn't be free! There’s no of course here. You made a choice.
      - 5mo ago
frangonf 5mo ago
Although this LLMisms also still stand out to me, I find them bearable as the glue part of this kind of technical/white paper like content. Maybe I'm already lost in the AI psychosis, maybe some of us are in a transition phase trying to separate from pure synthetic "unmanned slop" to "acceptable slop", maybe someone could derive the same or more value getting the prompts that hold the industry experience the author seems to hold and pointing them to the git codebase/docs herself... In my case (not seriously engaged in git performance since my git game is trivial) I find the explanations from the sections I have limited knowledge of to be very informative.
- Cthulhu_ 5mo ago
  I think people 'scan' for LLM tells so that they know to read the text with some skepticism instead of accepting it as authoritative; this is probably a healthy attitude to have. However, I'm sure that over time the 'tells' will just go away entirely. If the text is valuable and correct then it probably won't matter much. It's not like I read technical documentation in detail to begin with (more scan reading)

by ergl 5mo ago

redditor98654 5mo ago

I had the same thought. TBH there is nothing in those individual sentences that read like AI but when you read them all together I could see it too. I dunno what it is, only way I can describe it is that it does not sound like a normal human but rather a monologue from a character trying to sound impressive with each successive sentence.

ergl 5mo ago
The author works at OpenAI, so it's no surprise that they've stopped noticing how grating this kind of structure is to read.
- alchemist1e9 5mo ago
  I think it’s likely there will be methods to fix this soon, some de-slop algorithms, or is there a deep reason it will always be detectable? Perhaps there are some PhD linguists who have figured out how to quantify the “slop” effect and are writing their thesis on it. Once that is done it will be possible to smooth it away. The book is definitely LLM assisted authoring yet it also has great content, so not sure we can immediately jump to shaming it entirely for being slop.
  - tnm 5mo ago
    Thanks for the kind words, and checking out the book here. I'd written this piecemeal over the last year or so (originally a series of blog posts), and was happy to release it all for free in a single edition, and under CC. I'll release an Edition 1.1 soon with some errata, adjustments. There's already a free PDF for the on-the-go -> https://gitperf.com/pdf.html https://gitperf.com/pdf.html Regarding the cherry-picking of fragments of an LLM: of course an LLM (in fact several!) were used to stitch together those disparate blog posts into a more coherent whole. And they certainly left an imprint in places. Otherwise, as a solo writer with a full-time job putting together a 200-page book, I'd have to pay an editor, or work with O'Reilly (did this in 2010 on a Redis book; never again!); and perhaps the book wouldn't be free! LLMs will continue to leave imprints in our work. Some words will, over time, be edited and whittled away. Other words, when the LLM writes well enough to convey a useful point, will be kept.
    - alchemist1e9 5mo ago
      I think it’s great and you should be doing it, I have no problem at all if there is LLM assistance in authoring, I think it’s a good thing because like you said it enables solo writers with good ideas to produce valuable work that they otherwise wouldn’t! What I’m interested in is how to address the “grating” or whatever characteristics the readers detect to have them focus on the LLM aspect. I feel it’s probably soon or already removable with some methods. Ignore the haters they are just wrong to blanket criticize, however their observations are helpful to try and improve the process. We want LLMs to assist in creating useful and effective content for humans.
    - keybored 5mo ago
      > Regarding the cherry-picking of fragments of an LLM: of course an LLM (in fact several!) were used to stitch together those disparate blog posts into a more coherent whole. And they certainly left an imprint in places. Otherwise, as a solo writer with a full-time job putting together a 200-page book, I'd have to pay an editor, or work with O'Reilly (did this in 2010 on a Redis book; never again!); and perhaps the book wouldn't be free! There’s no of course here. You made a choice.
    - 5mo ago

frangonf 5mo ago

Although this LLMisms also still stand out to me, I find them bearable as the glue part of this kind of technical/white paper like content. Maybe I'm already lost in the AI psychosis, maybe some of us are in a transition phase trying to separate from pure synthetic "unmanned slop" to "acceptable slop", maybe someone could derive the same or more value getting the prompts that hold the industry experience the author seems to hold and pointing them to the git codebase/docs herself... In my case (not seriously engaged in git performance since my git game is trivial) I find the explanations from the sections I have limited knowledge of to be very informative.

Cthulhu_ 5mo ago
I think people 'scan' for LLM tells so that they know to read the text with some skepticism instead of accepting it as authoritative; this is probably a healthy attitude to have. However, I'm sure that over time the 'tells' will just go away entirely. If the text is valuable and correct then it probably won't matter much. It's not like I read technical documentation in detail to begin with (more scan reading)