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Comment by James_K

10 hours ago

> Most programming languages hide complexity from you—they abstract away memory management, mask control flow with implicit operations, and shield you from the machine beneath. This feels simple at first, but eventually you hit a wall. You need to understand why something is slow, where a crash happened, or how to squeeze every ounce of performance from your hardware. Suddenly, the abstractions that helped you get started are now in your way.

> Zig takes a different path. It reveals complexity—and then gives you the tools to master it.

> This book will take you from Hello, world! to building systems that cross-compile to any platform, manage memory with surgical precision, and generate code at compile time. You will learn not just how Zig works, but why it works the way it does. Every allocation will be explicit. Every control path will be visible. Every abstraction will be precise, not vague.

But sadly people like the prompter of this book will lie and pretend to have written things themselves that they did not. First three paragraphs by the way, and a bingo for every sign of AI.

10 comments

James_K

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cycomanic  8 hours ago

These posts are getting old.

I had a discussion on some other submission a couple of weeks back, where several people were arguing "it's obviously AI generated" (the style btw was completely different to this, quite a few explicitives...). When I put the the text in 5 random AI detectors the argument who except for one (which said mixed, 10% AI or so) all said 100% human I was being down voted and the argument became "AI detection tools can detect AI" but somehow the people claim there are 100% clear telltale signs which says it's AI (why those detection tools can detect them is baffling to me).

I have the feeling that the whole "it's AI" stick has become a synonym for I don't like this writing style.

It really does not add to the discussion. If people would post immediately "there's spelling mistakes this is rubbish", they would rightfully get down voted, but somehow saying "it's AI" is acceptable. Would the book be any more or less useful if somebody used AI for writing it? So what is your point?

  • spacechild1  7 hours ago

    Check out the other examples presented in this thread or read some of the chapters. I'm pretty sure the author used LLMs to generate at least parts of this text. In this case this would be particularly outrageous since the author explicitly advertizes the content as 100% handwritten.

    > Would the book be any more or less useful if somebody used AI for writing it?

    Personally, I don't want to read AI generated texts. I would appreciate if people were upfront about their LLM usage. At the very least they shouldn't lie about it.

  • agucova  5 hours ago

    I ran the introduction chapter through Pangram [1], which is one of the most reliable AI-generated text classifiers out there [2] (with a benchmarked accuracy of 99.85% over long-form text), and it gives high confidence for it having been AI-generated. It's also very intuitively obvious if you play a lot with LLMs.

    I have no problem at all reading AI-generated content if it's good, but I don't appreciate dishonesty.

    [1]: https://www.pangram.com/ [2]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.14873

Brian_K_White  4 hours ago

Right in those same first few paragraphs... "...hiding something from you. Because they are."

Would most LLMs have written that invalid fragment sentence "Because they are." ?

I don't think you have enough to go on to make this accusation.

  • assbuttbuttass  4 hours ago

    Yes, that fragment in particular screams LLM to me. It's the exact kind of meaningless yet overly dramatic slop that LLMs love

mef51  10 hours ago

The em dashes?