5 ms·
I really hate to be that guy, but man, as someone who was and is a big Christopher Domas fan (and is way dumber than him, I mean, this stuff is seriously over m
by ipdashc 2mo ago
I really hate to be that guy, but man, as someone who was and is a big Christopher Domas fan (and is way dumber than him, I mean, this stuff is seriously over my head)... it's been really disappointing to see him LLM'ing all the READMEs recently. They used to be a joy to read through, but now the Claudeisms made it such a slog I could barely get through a few paragraphs. I'm glad he's using the new tools to get even more cool stuff done, but I wish he'd have gone for a human writeup at the end.
- BugsJustFindMe 2mo agoI find vague gestures like this almost more annoying than the idea of someone using AI to write. > the Claudeisms This is hand-waving. Please be more specific. > made it such a slog On the flip-side, I didn't find it a slog at all. What if you're wrong?
- austinthetaco 2mo agoI'm not the person you are replying to, but the readme is very clearly written by an AI, and it sounds nothing like his older work. Sometimes it's just super clear to people something is written with AI without you getting some sort of singular "gotcha" word or indicator. It's just writing patterns that would be hard to clearly establish rules for here in an HN comment, but it's incredibly obvious when you learn to spot it.
- boxed 2mo agoI mean, it's super clear to a lot of people that it's written by LLMs EVEN WHEN IT'S NOT. You can't vibe that shit too.
- shermantanktop 2mo agoI just told my boss to remove a line in a doc because it sounded too AI-y. He then said that he had written it himself.
- rustyminnow 2mo agoHow do you know when it's not written by LLM except to take someone's word? If I got caught slopping I'd be too embarassed to admit it. "I wrote it all myself! I actually majored in slick writing and minored in tenuous metaphor."
- boxed 2mo agoI assume not 100% of all HN linked articles were written by AI, while at the same time noticing that 100% have a comment saying how it's AI written.
- rustyminnow 2mo agoFind me one that you genuinely think is not AI written or edited, with comments claiming it is.
- K0balt 2mo agoI’ve had blog posts I wrote 17 years ago “called out” as AI generated lol. More than once.
- tom_ 2mo agoThis entire subsection of the discussion is about the apparent fact that some people just can't tell whether they're reading AI slop or what. And this surely applies to the haters just as much as the lovers. Anyway, I've no doubt your blog posts from 2009 or whatever were not generated by an LLM. But this fuckin shit right here from 2026 though? LLM. 100%. (By which I don't mean it generated 100% of it, as there's the odd sentence that sounds vaguely human, just that I am 100% certain that the LLM was allowed to far more than merely breathe on this writing. And that's enough to get me complaining, because it makes it a real headache to read.)
- boxed 2mo agoI'm not a "lover" of AI, I'm just saying it's tiring when people scream AI all the time without proof.
- gnyman 2mo agoI recently vibed a little linked-in AI detector which looks for AI things like rule of three and scores it. It scored it 97% AI polished. My gut feeling agrees. The rule of three is one of the stronger signals, can't stamp that out of the AI even if you wanted :-) I'll push it to GH later, it's nothing fancy but it has been quite good in my experience. Here is highlights which it used ``` tricolon coordinated VERB run: “…break / on them collapse / unlock everything .” (3 members) tricolon coordinated VERB run: “…guard physical addresses / not DRAM coordinates / you rearrange the” (3 members) tricolon coordinated NOUN run: “…handful of data / it to z3 / the translation matrix” (3 members) tricolon coordinated NOUN run: “…view / the elaborate fences / locks / security checks the” (4 members) tricolon coordinated VERB run: “…Read it / the alias map / pipe” (3 members) ```
- pdw 2mo agoIt's baffling but I'm starting to believe that some people genuinely cannot tell. It's like nails on chalkboard to me.
- ipdashc 2mo ago> Please be more specific. The em dashes are the most obvious stereotypical tell, but that doesn't really matter that much (I actually like them and occasionally used them pre-AI). It's hard to put a finger on, but the most annoying LLMism to me is the overdramatic, staccato, almost "epic" way they talk. It feels like a 2009 lens flare effect over everything, it sounds like a stereotypical hacker in a CSI show. > the last generation whose datasheets document the DRAM controller's translation registers — and show that they can't be locked > When your code dereferences *p, it appears to access the DRAM at p. It does not — p is a virtual address > Physical addresses are really more of a suggestion. > That's the exploit. All of it. The worst part is that this stuff is genuinely cool and deserves to be dramatic. And I like stereotypical, campy hacker speak! But LLMs are, IDK... bad at it? Or maybe it just becomes a bore to read the same. Exact. Dramatic. Voice. From literally everyone. After you've heard it enough times. None of this is against Mr. Domas. He seems like a cool person, with a cool voice, and I want to read his voice, not Claude's. > What if you're wrong? I definitely could be! Apologies if I am. But with all the em dashes and such, and having read his previous work, I felt confident enough to mention it. And as the sibling comment says, it really is something you just learn to spot over time.
- cgyvbunji 2mo agoIt's the ASCII diagrams for me. Although I hesitate to point it out because they are usually helpful unlike the em dashes. Before LLMs, ASCII diagrams in readmes were a half baked mess, if one were present at all. Now every project has at least one perfectly made ASCII diagram - instant LLM tell.
- ipdashc 2mo ago> Although I hesitate to point it out because they are usually helpful unlike the em dashes. Likewise, I don't mind the diagrams. Though they do often have the same flaw as other text, being that the LLM throws in EVERYTHING, vs. a handmade one that'd generally have more taste and discretion to it. That can kind of work in its favor here, since the point is just to show the complexity of the stack, but on the other hand the reader lacks confidence that every item in there is "really" a part of the stack (which I would be fully confident in for this author, had he written it by hand) and not just some process related to memory/DRAM that the LLM decided to toss in.
- pwf 2mo ago[dead]
- jchw 2mo ago"What if you're wrong?" I'd just like to address this real quick because some people seem to think this is just a "hunch" that has some probability of being false; there is absolutely nothing more certain on planet Earth than the LLM involvement in this writing. It is difficult to come up with things that are certain enough to compare this to to convey the lack of doubt that exists. I am not going to make fun of you for not being able to tell, although I do find it surprising that people seem to struggle in both directions with telling AI and human writing apart (are our brains really that different?) - I just want it to be clear that some of us can pick up Claudisms within just a couple of sentences with no effort. A Claude-generated sentence, in isolation, may not ring any alarm bells. A few of them in a row, however, that's a load-bearing smoking gun right there. We can certainly argue to what extent undisclosed LLM involvement is an issue or not, though frankly I don't like reading LLM writeups so I would greatly prefer if people would stop using LLMs for public facing documents. But, it is at least worth making this much clear: we can tell.
- jonathrg 2mo agoThe only other reasonable explanation would be that he has consumed so much LLM content that the machine has erased his voice and replaced it with its own.
- vetrom 2mo agoWhy does this whole set of paragraphs sound vaguely like a Claudeism?
- jchw 2mo agoThis blows my mind just as badly and I see it reasonably often: I talk nothing like any AI model that has ever been, it isn't even close. I'm going to be bold and say that even without checking, more analytical approaches like stylometry would prove me right with little doubt. To mistake my writing for being "AI-esque", you would pretty much have to be entirely blind to the stylistic aspects of the text and fall back on even more superficial details like how verbose it is. Go ahead and throw the comment into your favorite unreliable AI detector. Even though I suspect they're mostly garbage, my writing is just so far away from what AI models do that it doesn't even matter. edit: I caved into temptation and checked. Big fat zero on GPTZero.
- mentalpagefault 2mo agoDisappointing indeed. Us security folk have already earned a poor reputation for ineffective technical communication, and LLMs are even worse, not better. This is especially disappointing in this case because we know xoreaxeaxeax is one of the few who are actually capable of effectively communicating beautifully cursed low-level hackery, but is now choosing to outsource the most impactful part of his work (since most people will only read the abstract, I mean, README) to an LLM. I'll still take new projects with sloppy READMEs over the previous years of radio silence, but I really wish xoreaxeaxeax would recognize the value in spending the time to write a single page of text in his own voice.
- hypfer 2mo agoMaybe this is to keep script kiddies away? Like.. having no readme or a super technical one doesn't work anymore in the age of LLMs, but having one that hurts to read might? Because people trying to get an LLM to translate it just get more LLM output. So you actually _have_ to put in manual effort to rip out what the fuck it wants to tell you. That would be clever.
- deepburner 2mo agoI came to the comments to complain about how unreadable it was, saw that it was the movfuscator guy, went back to check if I somehow made a mistake but no, if anything that writeup is one of the egregious ones I've seen recently. What a shame, I really liked his talks.
- cowlby 2mo agouncanny feeling when I could tell from the first sentence it was Claude “Poke the DRAM controller and an address can be made to land wherever you want in memory.” I’d love to know why this specific sentence structure feels like Claude.
- potsandpans 2mo ago> I really hate to be that guy, Then don't be that guy. > But... Oh, ok. Hackernews, dang and the other mod are constantly telling people, wE'rE dOIng sOMetHinG dIffeReNt hERe Yeah, complaining about fucking ai instead of discussing the topic. I don't give a fuck about how whatever it is you perceive as "claudisms" makes you feel. The author is deeply technical, and the writeup as presented is easy to follow. If you couldn't follow it and you are technical, then you have a form ai psychosis: the kind that makes you so hyper-viliglent to seeing something that might have been produced in a way that you don't like that it blanks out your brain.