6 ms·

[stub for offtopicness] [see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48416020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48416020 for how all this happened in the first

• perching_aix 5mo ago
  [dead]
• duk3luk3 5mo ago
  This article is unfortunately unreadable because all of the prose is unfiltered LLM slop.
• roywiggins 5mo ago
  > A simple distributional analysis of every rsync release with bug data. No model. No assumptions. Just placement. If you want me to read your analysis, you are going to have to make it not read like Claude wrote it. What does "placement" even mean here?
  • logicprog 5mo ago
    "Placement" as in where the Claude-driven releases exist within the existing distribution of bugs per 100 commits. If they're not OOD, then nothing is unusual. Also, it wasn't written by Claude FWIW, GLM 5.1.
  • rroblak 5mo ago
    Yeah, made me chuckle that an LLM— probably Claude— was used to write this. The use of "regime shift" is what gave it away for me. I've never seen a human write that, but Claude does from time to time. At least they removed occurrences of "load-bearing".
    • roywiggins 5mo ago
      "quietly" seems to be the new one recently
      • genxy 5mo ago
        Ohhh, quietly load-bearing is the real just. No noise. Pure fact. Delivered robustly.
  • gamegod 5mo ago
    It's the ultimate product for marketers. It inserts itself as an advertisement into every conversation now and defends itself against criticism. Just crazy. There's no hope for the rest of us.
    • logicprog 5mo ago
      It's not defending itself here, both because I used GLM 5.1, not Claude, and because I was the one who decided to do this analysis, iterated through six or seven different methodologies to try to find the one that was most honest with the data that I had (all of the methodologies showed directionally and often in magnitude the exact same thing, but I wanted to do something that fit the purpose, in consultation with my wife, who, as I've mentioned elsewhere, has a master's degree in statistics), and, of course, I specifically chose all of the metrics and sources for the data. If you don't want to read the LLM prose, you can just go to the GitHub of my project, grab the scripts, and run the full pipeline. It will gather the data, build the database, and run the analysis from scratch for you, and you can look at the numbers directly. It's all repeatable.
      • roywiggins 5mo ago
        Your rewritten post is far easier for me to read now, fwiw. LLM output has conditioned in me a near reflex response to just close a tab as soon as I smell LLM-authored text. Like, I'm not mad or anything, I just frequently find most default LLM-voiced text very unpleasant to read so I just don't continue reading.
• mschuster91 5mo ago
  This article reeks of LLM "assistance" at the very least. Please, why can't people write stuff by hand themselves any more? It's a good analysis but how can I trust it without reviewing everything myself?!
  • logicprog 5mo ago
    I mean, you can literally clone my repo, run the Python that rebuilds the database and does the whole data analysis and to end from scratch, and verify that the numbers are accurate. I made the code for this analysis public for that exact reason. This wasn't just an LLM running unsupervised in a loop. I came up with the methodologies and metrics and data scraping strategies precisely myself, iterated on it to try to be as honest with what the data could show as possible.
    • sanitycheck 5mo ago
      I think the point people are making is that when the text has an "AI smell" (it does), we immediately lose trust in the veracity of any claim being made and feel like continuing to read what is possibly a hallucinated fiction is a complete waste of time. At this point we're all used to skimming through thousands of AI-generated sentences every working day and constantly thinking "this is likely to be 20% bullshit", it's hard to turn that off even if I try.
      • logicprog 5mo ago
        Do you think it would help if I went through and manually rewrote all of the prose? If it would get people to listen, I'd be totally willing to do it. It's not like I don't like writing. I just was focused on something else when I was making this, namely trying to find a good methodology that isn't insane for this low amount of data.
        • bradrn 5mo ago
          Yes, that would help considerably. (Also, I suggest clearly acknowledging where AI was/wasn’t used. I like CuriosityC’s suggestion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48411968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48411968)
• logicprog 5mo ago
  Some notes on this: - I used GLM 5.1 to help with the coding and math for this. - However, I explicitly dictated where the data should be pulled from (GitHub, Bugzilla, mailing list), how it should be tagged and grouped, and what data to look at (e.g. bugs instead of regressions) - Additionally, I consulted with my wife, who has a master's degree in statistics from Penn State University for what sort of statistical methodology would be justified for this very limited data set, while still giving as much information as possible. - I know the website looks like we stereotypically consider vibe-coded websites to look, but I actually explicitly asked for that. The original HTML design looked like a website from 1995, and I just prefer how this looks. It's pretty!
  • jchw 5mo ago
    I really struggle to believe you wrote text like: > A simple distributional analysis of every rsync release with bug data. No model. No assumptions. Just placement.
    • noctuid 5mo ago
      [flagged]
    • logicprog 5mo ago
      No, I didn't write the text itself. I'm typically significantly more verbose and elliptical, and more than that, the numbers and methodology changed often enough over the course of the last couple days I was working on this because I was trying to get it to be as accurate and fair as possible that trying to keep the whole thing up to date manually would have been problematic.
      • jchw 5mo ago
        Sorry to say but I'm absolutely certain I would've preferred to read your worst attempt at a write-up over the grating utter shite LLMs output. It's not even a question, this is unreadable.
        • 5mo ago
• volume_tech 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• tappio 5mo ago
  A lot of people criticizing because it's heavily written with LLM, but I mean, if someone produced this piece pre-LLM, would they criticize it? is the critique due to use of LLM or due to the content being truly hard to follow? I read it and I would say, there are some problems with the writing, but its not a bad piece. Of course this is a bigger problem, as its now harder to distinguish content that is "AI slop" with "content co-authored with AI that is carefully reviewed" with a quick glimpse, and the "AI smell" is quite off-putting. My initial reaction was also negative, but after glimpsing it through and reading the summaries, I found it decent summary, which also... speaks of this thread, of the content of the blog post and everything about the discussion and the strong feelings people have developed around the use of LLMs. Anyhow, it would be good to disclose the repo with the code for the statistics & use of LLM in the writing right up front. Which model, and why it was used to do the writing, etc. Its enough to say "I think it writes better than I do" or "I was in a hurry, sorry" or what ever, but it really should be disclosed. It reads more honest. ps. really... that sideways scroll? plz fix it.
  • logicprog 5mo ago
    Thank you for your constructive input, you're one of only a few others here who had any. I'll definitely do that. I didn't think, since the output was templated directly from the numbers generated by a reproducible python script, that people would get so up in arms about the aesthetics, but I guess I forgot to say that.
  • JasonSage 5mo ago
    > content co-authored with AI that is carefully reviewed The problem I see is that this is indistinguishable to a reader at a glance. Distancing the writing from the "AI smell" not only improves the quality by dropping the unnecessary ocean of rhetorical devices, it forces the human to have real weight and agency on what's being said. I think that act of distancing from raw LLM output through refinement is a huge quality leap. Even if you're only doing the refinement with an LLM, it forces the writing to have more voice and ideas from the author. I can see the work that went into the analysis here but again, as a casual reader, it's impossible to tell that there were any original ideas here expressed by the author.
  • 5mo ago
• sfink 5mo ago
  Wow. I am pretty insensitive to AI writing. I have never commented before about something sounding like AI, because mostly I don't notice. But this was so over the top that I spent the whole article trying to decide whether it was an intentional parody of AI writing style. This article's language is not en-US. It's not en-BR. It's en-SLOP. Yes, that was my clumsy attempt at AI parody. Here's another: this article doesn't just have AI tells. It is AI tells. Every sentence is saturated with AI style. Perhaps the author so AI-indoctrinated that they can't see this? It doesn't read as even vaguely plausible human writing. Which is mightily ironic given the thesis of "AI generated stuff is just fine, m'kay?" The writing style does more to defeat its conclusion than the analysis itself. As for the substance of the analysis, it seems pretty good to me but I see some flaws that weaken it a bit. The presence of "The Outlier Nobody Noticed" proves nothing and deserves no more than a passing mention. A random release introduced way more bugs than the Claude-containing releases. That provides evidence that Claude doesn't introduce more bugs only if your hypothesis is a very naive "AI is the only thing that can ever increase bug introduction rates." The whole analysis has very limited data. It's necessarily based off a single pair of releases at the very end of the chronological timeline. You would never be able to reject a null hypothesis based only on that, so it's even less sound to present it as proving the null hypothesis. (By the same token, it would be incorrect for critics to claim that it proves their point. Did anyone claim this, though? The heated complaints seemed more based on priors about AI code.) "The critics' claim is a simple comparison: did the rate go up?" That's reductive. For one, these releases are known to be in reaction to a flood of (AI-discovered!) security reports, which is a novel situation and in fact is a huge confound to anyone arguing about what those two releases mean -- they're both heavily AI-written, but in response to an unusual situation. When the samples are only drawn from a distinct scenario, statistic analysis can only speak to the quality of code in that scenario. Also, another reasonable hypothesis could be: AI-written code has bugs of a different flavor that bothers users more. It's optimized for passing tests and convincing people and AIs that security holes are closed, which means other considerations like preserving functionality can more easily be regressed as compared to if humans were doing it. (If true, it still doesn't support the claim that depending on AI code is a catastrophe, fwiw.) I'm not arguing the conclusion is wrong. I'm saying the analysis proves far less than it claims to. As for whether it's a debacle for rsync to become dependent on AI code generation, I think that's a reasonable debate to have but it's not going to be resolved this reductively.
• dang 5mo ago
  This submission was heavily flagged, presumably because the article sounded like genai. But the article now says the following: > After posting this on Hacker News and recieving almost no substantive input, discussion, or response on the actual content of the article, I decided to rewrite all of the prose in my own voice. I've therefore turned off the flags and hopefully people can actually now discuss the claims/findings being reported.
  • hypfer 5mo ago
    > I decided to rewrite all of the prose in my own voice. Soo... it didn't just sound like genai but was genai? ___ Huh. From the article: > If anyone complains about my verbosity or sentence structure — as they usually do, which is the reason I originally let the AI write the prose, among other reasons obsoleted by templating — they can go fuck themselves. This is kinda sad, honestly. But also should show the author that doing what people try to bully you into doing will not stop them from bullying you. Just stick with your unique voice man. If people don't want to read that that's fine. They do not have to. You're fine .. what are those em-dashes doing there though?
    • ellyagg 5mo ago
      Right so it’s gonna be a litmus test for knowledge workers going forward if they can separate style over substance. Genai tells are style. You have to be able to evaluate the ideas.
      • hypfer 5mo ago
        Hm. Nah. Why? Why should I care? If it's a good thought, chances are it appears without slop around it. If it doesn't re-appear, life will still go on regardless. No need to shift through noise just to avoid FOMO.
      • dang 5mo ago
        I doubt that you can separate style from substance in that way, because you can't separate writing from thinking. I agree that it will be interesting to see how this develops going forward. One can imagine wildly varying scenarios.
• ex-aws-dude 5mo ago
  So the original unfounded claim has 400+ comments because its perfect HN ragebait The author provides evidence to the contrary and the HNers won't even engage with it instead just talking about the writing of the article in classic HN bikeshedding fashion. How about after that we talk about the formatting of the website and the colors? This site is really going down hill Where is the accountability for your own opinions? Are you guys only upvoting things that confirm your existing gripes?
  • dang 5mo ago
    Comments like this do more of what they complain about, only with an extra layer of judgment. It would be preferable if someone would seed a better discussion by engaging with the article's claims/observations.
    • ex-aws-dude 5mo ago
      Why did you the admin allow such ragebait to stay on the front page then? Is that the kind of low effort posts we want around here? Just a link to a github comment of a screenshot? You're complicit here in fueling the harassment of an open source project
      • dang 5mo ago
        I don't have enough background info to understand what you're referring to here. Even if you're right, though, you shouldn't be posting comments that break the site guidelines.
        • ex-aws-dude 5mo ago
          https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48342705 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48342705 People opening issues just to rant against an open source project is acceptable content for HN? How is that even allowed in the first place without getting flagged/removed? And every time that happens the project gets brigaded from HN users