Comment by BugsJustFindMe
4 hours ago
I 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?
I'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.
I 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) ```
I 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.
How 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."
1 reply →
I 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.
"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.
The 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.
Why does this whole set of paragraphs sound vaguely like a Claudeism?
This 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.
> 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.
It'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.
> 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.
> Now every project has at least one perfectly made ASCII diagram - instant LLM tell.
Damn. Now my artist-mode in Emacs skills are useless.
> When your code dereferences *p, it appears to access the DRAM at p. It does not — p is a virtual address
I hate these especially much: It's at the same both both overly dramatic, it's presented as some great reveal that will change everything, while at the same time being completely trivial and only detracts from the explanation. If you have no idea that memory addresses are translated you will understand absolutely nothing from the text or even what this is all about. If you want to explain what an MMU is, just do that instead and don't present it as some great revelation.
But some equally dramatic phrasings could just as well be something that leaves you astonished. You never know. You have to skim the text to find what is useful information and what is just filler. The signal-to-noise is low.
It's called slop for a reason.
Huh, didn't think of it this way, but it captures it really well, yeah.
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