It's almost as though the LLMs were trained on all the writing conventions which are used by humans and are parroting those, instead of generating novel outputs themselves.
They haven’t picked up any one human writing style, they’ve converged on a weird amalgamation of expressions and styles that taken together don’t resemble any real humans writing and begin to feel quite unnatural.
As someone who uses em-dashes a lot, I’m getting pretty tired of hearing something “screams AI” about extremely simple (and common) human constructs. Yeah, the author does use that convention a number of times. But that makes sense, if that’s a tool in your writing toolbox, you’ll pull it out pretty frequently. It’s not signal by itself, it’s noise. (does that make me an AI!?) We really need to be considering a lot more than that.
Reading through the first article, it appears to be compelling writing and a pretty high quality presentation. That’s all that matters, tbh. People get upset about AI slop because it’s utterly worthless and exceptionally low quality.
The repetitiveness of the shell commands (and using zig build-exe instead of zig run when the samples consist of short snippets), the filler bullet points and section organization that fail to convey any actual conceptual structure.
And ultimately throughout the book the general style of thought processes lacks any of the zig community’s cultural anachronisms.
If you take a look at the repository you’ll also notice baffling tech choices not justified by the author that runs counter against the zig ethos.
(Edit: the build system chapter is an even worse offender in meaningless cognitively-cluttering headings and flowcharts, it’s almost certainly entirely hallucinated, there is just an absurd degree of unziglikeness everywhere: https://www.zigbook.net/chapters/26__build-system-advanced-t... -- What’s with the completely irrelevant flowchart of building the zig compliler? What even is the point of module-graph.txt? And icing on the cake in the “Vendoring vs Registry Dependencies” section.)
Literally the heading as soon as you click the submitted link
> Learning Zig is not just about adding a language to your resume. It is about fundamentally changing how you think about software.
The "it's not X, it's Y" phrasing screams LLM these days
It's almost as though the LLMs were trained on all the writing conventions which are used by humans and are parroting those, instead of generating novel outputs themselves.
They haven’t picked up any one human writing style, they’ve converged on a weird amalgamation of expressions and styles that taken together don’t resemble any real humans writing and begin to feel quite unnatural.
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Plenty of people use “it’s not X, it’s Y”
As someone who uses em-dashes a lot, I’m getting pretty tired of hearing something “screams AI” about extremely simple (and common) human constructs. Yeah, the author does use that convention a number of times. But that makes sense, if that’s a tool in your writing toolbox, you’ll pull it out pretty frequently. It’s not signal by itself, it’s noise. (does that make me an AI!?) We really need to be considering a lot more than that.
Reading through the first article, it appears to be compelling writing and a pretty high quality presentation. That’s all that matters, tbh. People get upset about AI slop because it’s utterly worthless and exceptionally low quality.
https://www.zigbook.net/chapters/45__text-formatting-and-uni...
The repetitiveness of the shell commands (and using zig build-exe instead of zig run when the samples consist of short snippets), the filler bullet points and section organization that fail to convey any actual conceptual structure. And ultimately throughout the book the general style of thought processes lacks any of the zig community’s cultural anachronisms.
If you take a look at the repository you’ll also notice baffling tech choices not justified by the author that runs counter against the zig ethos.
(Edit: the build system chapter is an even worse offender in meaningless cognitively-cluttering headings and flowcharts, it’s almost certainly entirely hallucinated, there is just an absurd degree of unziglikeness everywhere: https://www.zigbook.net/chapters/26__build-system-advanced-t... -- What’s with the completely irrelevant flowchart of building the zig compliler? What even is the point of module-graph.txt? And icing on the cake in the “Vendoring vs Registry Dependencies” section.)
I read the first few paragraphs. Very much reads like LLM slop to me...
E.g., "Zig takes a different path. It reveals complexity—and then gives you the tools to master it."
If we had a reliable oracle, I would happily bet a $K on significant LLM authorship.