Subsection titles, and how the text flows. When I read these kinds of LLM-Powered posts, I feel the same thing. Like remembering the taste of some canned food which was not great, but I had to consume to stay alive. It feels like junk food, not optimized to taste great, but doesn't reek of machine oil either. A price-optimized, slightly unhealthy substance which is somewhat compatible with my body because of food engineering magic.
These posts are not only a waste of time, but it also makes me feel deceived and betrayed. Why this is important? Because it's the honest take and bears the load of the reality of the post.
Please, don't make me read something you didn't write.
Disclosure: This post, incl. llm-sounding paragraph is typed by a human. All of the keystrokes are 100% human and made possibe by burning ATPs and firing tiny lightning bolts across some brain cells. No humans are harmed or GPU hours are burned in this comment.
Total water consumption: 50ml of cold spring water, because I'm thirsty.
I just don't see the "LLM-speak" here at all, for example. And I'm very tired of people who throw around the LLM-power critique as an easy criticism when there's no clear basis for it. It's lazy and stupid.
There are certain styles for a post like this that some people may not like but things like subheads and what would be, by historical standards somewhat clipped writing are just how writing in this content is mostly encouraged theese days. I'd just add that when people do post long-form New Yorker pieces there's plenty of whining about getting to the point.
I think this mostly boils down to experience with writing styles. I am an avid reader, albeit mostly read in Ukrainian/Russian, but I can confidently tell whether some paragraph was written by Platonov or Nabokov or Zhadan or Sorokin; even when the guys are stylizing their texts (Sorokin does this all the time) there are still subtle things in how text is composed that tell you who wrote it. If my reading menu was mostly contemporary blogs, probably I would be less sensitive to distinct writing styles.
The first tech book I did with a publisher, I was pretty much told that I needed to break things down more with subheads and the like. And I was already doing some writing of whitepapers and blogs with my then-employer which had a somewhat similar structured style. Certainly very different from Dickens, Trollope, Collins, etc.
I'm not making a value judgement, but modern writing on technical topics has generally been steered toward digestible formats whether or not LLMs are involved.
Until I left, I was on social media and style committees at my former employer and there was a lot of data-based evidence around keeping things (in various multimedia formats) shorter and easier to consume. In fact, we mostly got away from writing white papers at all in favor of shorter pieces.
I don't disagree with you that contemporary technical writing, editing
and technical blogs were converging to what is known as llm style even before provisioning of llms. In the end, llm
were trained on these recent writing and recent blogs and this is why similarity exists. Still one can find some technical writing that stands aside and has very distinct style without compromising on clarity/digestability, i.e. Martin Fowler, Armin Ronacher, Michell Hashimoto write very differently from each other and Claude, but their content is always sharp and very much digestable. Take this paragraph by Claude
> Scientific Linux gave the scientific community its own implementation of a RHEL-compatible computing environment. More importantly, it kept alive the people, processes, infrastructure, and institutional knowledge needed to maintain one.
> That capability had option value. You might not need to exercise the option this year, or even this decade. It becomes valuable when the assumptions underneath your primary platform change. Those assumptions changed surprisingly quickly.
Can't imagine this lengthy style with paraphrases coming from Hashimoto or Fowler. Yes, it can appear not only in llm writing, but also in some heavily edited o'reilly book, sure, but I miss the times when tech blogs and o'reilly books were different.
Why would a person use RHEL in the first paragraph, making the assumption that people already know what that means. Then a few paragraphs later, write the full name?
Theoretically a mistake a person could make, but it feels a bit unlikely in this context to me.
Also, the repeating pattern of Prompt:List through multiple paragraphs.
"Scientific Linux was never simply "RHEL with a different wallpaper." It gave the scientific community an institutionally independent implementation of the Enterprise Linux platform."
You obviously can't get proof. But there are enough stylistic tells to confidently say that AI was substantially involved in writing this. It's annoying to read. That's enough to dislike AI writing IMO.
I'm working on "See My Spending" - a web app that gives you better insight into where your money's going. It provides real, actionable insights without the use of generative AI. Currently preparing for a launch for UK customers only
The example video just looks like the highly produced art (TV, commercials, games) other people have created. I find it impossible to believe this wasn't trained on other people's work, and there is no protection for it. Terribly sad. A lack of original thinking is coming.
It is coming up with Seinfeld episodes even with voice overs. Unless it is trained to do so, don't think that would happen. This model is just around the corner from getting banned due to this copyright issue. (which i hope not)
As with the arts, 99.9% of people can't use these models to express vision, get attention, or achieve distribution.
The game is the same as it has always been. You still need hard work, taste, something important to say, the ability to articulate it, good timing, and luck.
Nothing has changed. We can just build faster.
What this does enable is for more to be created that caters to a wider variety of interests. It disrupts existing structures of capital allocation, production, and distribution and gives new players a chance to reshape the game.
The bar will rise and people will still be running at the same pace on the treadmill. There will be more to see, but less time to see it.
It's true, doing things carefully can avoid a ton of problems in life. I guess I wasn't expecting to have to use my full attention for a little "side mission".
And I'd already made peace with losing those $5. "It's time to relive them for just $5" didn't really sound like you can get them back, in my defense.
Downvote me into oblivion or whatever: It's not relevant to me in the slightest whether you built it in Rust or not, or even Python, Go, Java, Node, PHP etc. There is lots of great and terrible, fast and slow software written in each. OP might only have 3 months of programming experience for all I know.
Why is "made with Rust" any more relevant than "made with Go" to an end user of a software product? It just doesn't matter.
Pre LLMs it did matter, not rust specifically but the language itself. It meant the difference between asking the developer for a feature/fix and getting it done myself if needed.
Now not so much with LLMs, but it does signal something about the development, deployment and supply chain risks involved.
The DevOps team at my company wants to hire a replacement for a very talented engineer. They’ve been interviewing candidates. The board got wind of it and someone not in their team decided they needed an AI Engineer, which is absolutely not what they want. So to release the funds they have been forced to change the job description and go after a different type of role altogether. It’s complete nonsense.
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