6 ms·

Why even have a blog when you can't be arsed to write the posts. This is so obviously LLM-written. I have a positive view of Shopify engineers, but this kind of

Why even have a blog when you can't be arsed to write the posts. This is so obviously LLM-written. I have a positive view of Shopify engineers, but this kind of made a dent in that confidence.

jssmith 2mo ago
I agree, I too found this barely readable. Interestingly, ChatGPT was able to parse and explain it to me. I got a lot out of its presentation.
cowboylowrez 2mo ago
I just wanted to drop a note that I almost never go into an article or blog wondering if its AI or not. I am trying to be a more picky reader and try to actually do something occasionally but I do browse database articles and this is a good one. So I wonder, am I becoming insensitive about AI writing? Am I being hypnotized into taking whatever color pill thats had a color representing a surrender to the AI "hive mind" whatever that is? So I'm sort of curious, did you not like the AI writing style or just rejecting AI in general? I myself am very conflicted, I think AI in its current form is the wrong tech at the wrong time yet I don't mind reading AI text and sort of mooch off of googles free tier. Also I'm starting to notice lots of AI smearing, I read folks online describing someone elses contribution as "obviously AI" and I'm suspecting in some cases these could be false accusations. I'm thinking about starting a blog, so when my AI gf writes posts, do I ask her to try to "not read like an AI"? Anybody try that? I'm gonna try that. Hehe for all you know I already did hehe
- ethbr1 2mo ago
  > whatever color pill thats had a color representing a surrender to the AI "hive mind" Obviously the blue pill.
- imthatsteve 2mo ago
  I honestly didnt notice it was ai until after i read the comments. I didnt really care for the article that much since it reminded me of a less knowledgeable person summarizing what a more knowledgeable person said. Like reading an article written by one of those game journalists who hasnt figured out how to use the game controls yet. I figured it was written by a marketing person on behalf of an engineer or something but after reading comments it was clearly the ai trying to dress up the technical info in some kinda low level appeal to everyone regardless of their technical prowess and that makes no sense to me since non technical people won't care about the article at all at best its basically an ad for people to sell on their platform but im not sure why it would be posted here instead of facebook or twitter or anywhere you might reach the kinda people who sell on shopify. Instead they took a subject matter that would appeal to the hn audience and then dressed it up in a way that would annoy that same audience. If your going to bother using ai to make your ad pretty you could at least use the ai to target the correct audience in the way they would appreciate.
  - cowboylowrez 2mo ago
    It was the sort of "cached denormalization" that held my attention, plus some of the details on what locked when, etc earned a bookmark as I plan to read it again. Maybe I'm sort of numb to the style now, I'm actually curious to think about this with my conflicting views about AI but chatting "wrongly" about AI is unpopular here.
briga 2mo ago
What exactly makes it "obvious" that this is written by AI? I could totally believe that AI was used to generate parts of it, but I really don't get the sense that the whole thing was written that way. I've seen way worse examples on this site. As software engineers we are constantly told that we need to heavily use these tools for our daily work. So is it surprising that software engineers use the same tools as writing aids? Using AI does not mean no human effort was involved.
- randomperson321 2mo ago
  > Scale here is not abstract: This is a really strange, clunky way of writing.
- filcuk 2mo ago
  People see an — dash and kneejerk. Writers are deciding to stop using this valid punctuation because of this exact reaction, it's ridiculous.
  - briga 2mo ago
    A true casualty of AI. Em-dashes used to be one of my favorite punctuation devices, now I find myself consciously editing them out of my writing.
- 12387128 2mo ago
  Because the post is just rambling without a clear intent or direction. Why do you need "oversell protection" if you have "transactions". Isn't the whole point of a "transaction" that it handles concurrency and disk failures?
  - resonious 2mo ago
    I work with Shopify often and the whole oversell protection thing is like a huge joke. Oversell happens because Shopify doesn't decrement inventory until payment is confirmed. And they apparently would rather die than change that invariant.
lp4v4n 2mo ago
I agree with you, it doesn't take long to identify the itemized style that LLMs use and it's always incredibly annoying. I would rather read the original thoughts of the engineer, grammar mistakes and stylistic imperfections included, than prompt generated AI slop.
tonyhart7 2mo ago
unfortunately its new normal now
jgalt212 2mo ago
I think they're just following the orders of the CEO.
Culonavirus 2mo ago
> This is so obviously LLM-written. Ok? Who cares. This was very interesting to me. IDGAF if AI was used (or not) to put the words in the article, the bits of information in those words is why I'm reading it. It's almost 2027, people need to accept that articles, art, videogames, code, everything will be more and more "AI touched" and you can't stop it. I mean I share all the people's worry about AI taking jobs and a handful of AI (and AI adjacent) corps sucking out massive amounts of resources, but reading under every 2nd or 3rd article how it's AI is beginning to be more annoying than the AI writing itself. It's like now every interesting or weird or exceptional or controversional video of anything has (what seem to be) 80-100 IQ people spamming "AI" in the comments instead of making interesting observations, posting their own anecdotes, cracking jokes etc.
kimos 2mo ago
I too have a positive view of Shopify engineers. But no longer Shopify management. It went from bottom up trust basted to top down AI first and for everything based. It’s very hard to express how deeply and completely the internal workings and culture of the company has changed. (Source: I am a long time former developer there.)
j1elo 2mo ago
[flagged]
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
davidron 2mo ago
I have a gemini gem that recompresses the expansion that AI causes. It seems to have worked great on this article! https://share.gemini.google/WxEi6Satj7mY https://share.gemini.google/WxEi6Satj7mY Happy to share the gem with anybody who's interested in reading articles like this without having to muddle through all the AI bulk.
- xolve 2mo ago
  I would like to try to out as well.

Why even have a blog when you can't be arsed to write the posts. This is so obviously LLM-written. I have a positive view of Shopify engineers, but this kind of made a dent in that confidence.

jssmith 2mo ago

I agree, I too found this barely readable. Interestingly, ChatGPT was able to parse and explain it to me. I got a lot out of its presentation.

cowboylowrez 2mo ago

I just wanted to drop a note that I almost never go into an article or blog wondering if its AI or not. I am trying to be a more picky reader and try to actually do something occasionally but I do browse database articles and this is a good one. So I wonder, am I becoming insensitive about AI writing? Am I being hypnotized into taking whatever color pill thats had a color representing a surrender to the AI "hive mind" whatever that is? So I'm sort of curious, did you not like the AI writing style or just rejecting AI in general? I myself am very conflicted, I think AI in its current form is the wrong tech at the wrong time yet I don't mind reading AI text and sort of mooch off of googles free tier. Also I'm starting to notice lots of AI smearing, I read folks online describing someone elses contribution as "obviously AI" and I'm suspecting in some cases these could be false accusations. I'm thinking about starting a blog, so when my AI gf writes posts, do I ask her to try to "not read like an AI"? Anybody try that? I'm gonna try that. Hehe for all you know I already did hehe

ethbr1 2mo ago
> whatever color pill thats had a color representing a surrender to the AI "hive mind" Obviously the blue pill.
imthatsteve 2mo ago
I honestly didnt notice it was ai until after i read the comments. I didnt really care for the article that much since it reminded me of a less knowledgeable person summarizing what a more knowledgeable person said. Like reading an article written by one of those game journalists who hasnt figured out how to use the game controls yet. I figured it was written by a marketing person on behalf of an engineer or something but after reading comments it was clearly the ai trying to dress up the technical info in some kinda low level appeal to everyone regardless of their technical prowess and that makes no sense to me since non technical people won't care about the article at all at best its basically an ad for people to sell on their platform but im not sure why it would be posted here instead of facebook or twitter or anywhere you might reach the kinda people who sell on shopify. Instead they took a subject matter that would appeal to the hn audience and then dressed it up in a way that would annoy that same audience. If your going to bother using ai to make your ad pretty you could at least use the ai to target the correct audience in the way they would appreciate.
- cowboylowrez 2mo ago
  It was the sort of "cached denormalization" that held my attention, plus some of the details on what locked when, etc earned a bookmark as I plan to read it again. Maybe I'm sort of numb to the style now, I'm actually curious to think about this with my conflicting views about AI but chatting "wrongly" about AI is unpopular here.

briga 2mo ago

What exactly makes it "obvious" that this is written by AI? I could totally believe that AI was used to generate parts of it, but I really don't get the sense that the whole thing was written that way. I've seen way worse examples on this site. As software engineers we are constantly told that we need to heavily use these tools for our daily work. So is it surprising that software engineers use the same tools as writing aids? Using AI does not mean no human effort was involved.

randomperson321 2mo ago
> Scale here is not abstract: This is a really strange, clunky way of writing.
filcuk 2mo ago
People see an — dash and kneejerk. Writers are deciding to stop using this valid punctuation because of this exact reaction, it's ridiculous.
- briga 2mo ago
  A true casualty of AI. Em-dashes used to be one of my favorite punctuation devices, now I find myself consciously editing them out of my writing.
12387128 2mo ago
Because the post is just rambling without a clear intent or direction. Why do you need "oversell protection" if you have "transactions". Isn't the whole point of a "transaction" that it handles concurrency and disk failures?
- resonious 2mo ago
  I work with Shopify often and the whole oversell protection thing is like a huge joke. Oversell happens because Shopify doesn't decrement inventory until payment is confirmed. And they apparently would rather die than change that invariant.

lp4v4n 2mo ago

I agree with you, it doesn't take long to identify the itemized style that LLMs use and it's always incredibly annoying. I would rather read the original thoughts of the engineer, grammar mistakes and stylistic imperfections included, than prompt generated AI slop.

tonyhart7 2mo ago

unfortunately its new normal now

jgalt212 2mo ago

I think they're just following the orders of the CEO.

Culonavirus 2mo ago

> This is so obviously LLM-written. Ok? Who cares. This was very interesting to me. IDGAF if AI was used (or not) to put the words in the article, the bits of information in those words is why I'm reading it. It's almost 2027, people need to accept that articles, art, videogames, code, everything will be more and more "AI touched" and you can't stop it. I mean I share all the people's worry about AI taking jobs and a handful of AI (and AI adjacent) corps sucking out massive amounts of resources, but reading under every 2nd or 3rd article how it's AI is beginning to be more annoying than the AI writing itself. It's like now every interesting or weird or exceptional or controversional video of anything has (what seem to be) 80-100 IQ people spamming "AI" in the comments instead of making interesting observations, posting their own anecdotes, cracking jokes etc.

kimos 2mo ago

I too have a positive view of Shopify engineers. But no longer Shopify management. It went from bottom up trust basted to top down AI first and for everything based. It’s very hard to express how deeply and completely the internal workings and culture of the company has changed. (Source: I am a long time former developer there.)

j1elo 2mo ago

[flagged]

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

davidron 2mo ago

I have a gemini gem that recompresses the expansion that AI causes. It seems to have worked great on this article! https://share.gemini.google/WxEi6Satj7mY https://share.gemini.google/WxEi6Satj7mY Happy to share the gem with anybody who's interested in reading articles like this without having to muddle through all the AI bulk.

xolve 2mo ago
I would like to try to out as well.