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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 t
by 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 agoPeople see an — dash and kneejerk. Writers are deciding to stop using this valid punctuation because of this exact reaction, it's ridiculous.
- briga 2mo agoA 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 agoBecause 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 agoI 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.
- ethbr1 2mo agoIt's funny the organizational rules that get written into a company's DNA. I could see a historical moment where Shopify, sans that invariant, massively fucked up inventory counts from uncompleted transactions... then had to unwind all that when a bunch failed to clear payment. Ergo, now there's an invariant.
- dessimus 2mo agoWould a retail business want the inventory to decrement just because users put items into carts that get abandoned? Seems like that would really mess things up more in the long run.
- derangedHorse 2mo agoAn unconfirmed payment might also refer to a credit card charge that is 99% guaranteed to go through but hasn’t completed yet
- resonious 2mo agoYes. You decrement for a few minutes then release if there's no purchase in time. Airlines figured out how to do this a very long time ago.
- dessimus 2mo agoExcept airlines, literally oversell flights all the time, and the context of my response was to preventing oversale.
- Breza 2mo agoI know this would add complexity, but I wonder if they could train a model to predict the odds of a given cart being abandoned. I'm a data scientist. I bet there are at least a few situations where you could be confident that someone was going to complete a sale.
- energy123 2mo agoSubheading and dot point spam, low density writing (the opposite of standard technical english), including useless detail (like enumerating stats on Shopify's scale), using contrastive parallelism, and other llm-isms. Even if it's not AI it's bad writing done by someone who has picked up AI's worst ticks. For example this subheading: > "The real bottleneck: connections, not CPU" That's two AI smells. AI likes to say vacuous punchy statements like "the final takeaway" or "here's the rub". Then contrastive parallelism "connections, not CPU". Contrastive parallelism should scarcely exist in technical writing, regardless of whether it's AI generated.
- KronisLV 2mo agoI really wish that slop writing was disincentivized in whatever RLHF they do. I don’t want to read the weird LinkedIn pop-sci tone for the rest of my life in such amounts. I wonder if the average reader is also getting annoyed like this or whether they just don’t care - especially seeing what seems to get upvoted on your run of the mill social media sites. They probably collectively shape things more than I do.
- DenisM 2mo agoI wish they don’t stop. Make it easier to skip past.
- giancarlostoro 2mo agoThe LinkedIn “techbro” writings are the worst. They talk like a cryptobro “APPLE JUST PUBLISHED A CODE REPOSITORY ON THEIR HAND CRAFTED LLM ANYONE CAN USE THIS TO COMPETE WITH OPENAI AND ANTHROPIC” and its some random simple LLM on github that handles very little compared to OpenAI and Anthropic.
- Espressosaurus 2mo agoI don’t know how you stop the slop writing. What the LLM writes has the voice of whatever has been RLHF’d into the weights. There will be a voice. It will have ticks. They can change it but it will be there. I do like that I have a term for that “this, not that” phrasing that’s nails on the chalkboard for me after several years of reading slop.
- muragekibicho 2mo agoTaken verbatim "But the hardest lesson wasn't about database design. It was discovering that the real bottleneck wasn’t what we were observing and measuring. "
- gsich 2mo agoThe pictures.
- vikramkr 2mo agoThere are some claudeisms here (it's not x, it's y) but it does read like they did at least one human pass on it. Or maybe this is opus 5 writing which is a bit less distinct idk. It doesn't feel as obviously generated slop as some of the stuff posted here with every other sentence a fragment and load bearing and all that nonsense
- ChrisMarshallNY 2mo agoWell, one thing to remember: AI learned from us (See what I did, there?). The training these LLMs got, was from endless human-slop, on sites like LinkedIn, and marketing copy, everywhere. In fact, don't be surprised, if we start learning from AI; reversing the process. But I think that it's only a matter of time, before almost everything will be at least touched by AI. I posted this, yesterday[0]. It wasn't a particularly popular comment, but I stand by it. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49219990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49219990
- askj18 2mo ago[flagged]
- ChrisMarshallNY 2mo ago> But enjoy your intellectual wheelchair, which for some reason you feel the need to advertise after 40 years of programming. I'm sure it is just in the best interest of future generations ... I love this place. We are such class acts. Have a great day!
- matwood 2mo agoYeah, people act like this style is new, when it absolutely is not. There's this weird romanticism of the time pre-LLMs where people imply all writing/code was perfect, and only now it's slop. EDIT I also read your linked comment and agree 100%.
- lelanthran 2mo ago> Yeah, people act like this style is new, when it absolutely is not. Every time this claim is made I ask for a link to a pre-2022 blog or article that has all those AI tells. I'm still waiting for it. I don't think I will ever receive it.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2mo agoIt's likely because no one could be bothered to respond. There's plenty there, but it's not their job to fetch it for you. People on the Internet (especially here), seem to think that it's OK to make rude demands of complete strangers, and expect them to spend considerable time, meeting them. I'd rather some rando think they "won the Internet," than spend a bunch of my time, working for free, just to satisfy them. I have better things to do with my time, and I don't really have a lot of investment in what complete strangers think of me. Sometimes, the fox ain't worth the chase.
- curt15 2mo ago"No waiting on the same row, less contention."
- drowsspa 2mo agoUsing AI is a pretty good indicator that the reader will need to exert more effort than the writer did. Unless the reader also decides to use AI to summarize it, but then what's the point?
- cataphract 2mo agoIn every AI-written post, we have the script: some top post complaining it's AI-written, someone cluelessly saying they don't see it, and another person pointing out the claudisms. Sometimes someone posts a link to pangram. I think we need the moderation team to set up some policy. In which direction idk.
- watrr 2mo agoThe EU helps. We can report Spotify for not labeling this content, since a substantial number here think this obviously AI assisted post is genuine: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/31/ai-labels-to-be-compulsory-on-authentic-looking-content-under-eu-rules https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/31/ai-labels... Spotify's defense will then be that this post is obviously AI assisted garbage.
- derangedHorse 2mo agoShopify*