Yet another Hacker News

22 points torutofu 2 hours ago 15 comments

dangoodmanUT 1 hour ago | parent

I really like fly.io posts, they're usually written in such a way that feels so human. I used to read all of them, because the writing was interesting, and secondarily sometimes the topic was.

Except seeing sentences like this:

> The difference is that a Sprite now stops and says so instead of carrying on with a disk it can’t vouch for

Makes it feel distinctly LLM written. Maybe I'm being RL'd to identify LLM authorship, maybe the author was RL'd to write like that by reading so many Claude-written works, but I'd like to see the humanity of fly.io blog posts come back.

pixl97 1 hour ago | parent

I wish we'd stop getting replies like this to articles. It's just as tiring as LLM written articles.

People seem to forget that LLMs copied human writing. They also tended to copy people with more proper or formally trained writing styles. There are so many journalists and writers that talk about how they've had to 'stupify' how they write so they don't get accused of being an LLM.

It's like we're running idiocracy on fast forward.

Banditoz 58 minutes ago | parent

Why? Why should we give up being critical of things we read?

iugtmkbdfil834 51 minutes ago | parent

Because being critical in those instances is more like going to mcdonalds and complaining about burger not being cooked to your specs. No one says you can't, but it does get tiring.

masfuerte 22 minutes ago | parent

We expect McDonalds to be consistently mediocre because they do a lot of work to achieve this. Why should we expect every blog post on the internet to be consistently mediocre?

yodon 45 minutes ago | parent

>Why? Why should we give up being critical of things we read?

Remember how pre-AI everyone used to complain about hating how this or that website hijacked scrolling? Countless words were written about hijacked scrollbars and back buttons. Zero conversations were improved by the comments and zero websites were changed as a result. It was just complaining.

"Boo hoo AI" is the same kind of low-effort, complain about everything while adding nothing to the conversation post.

Instead, try to say something more substantive than "I found a word or phrase that I think was AI."

pixl97 35 minutes ago | parent

I wish I would have saved it, but there was something posted here a number of months back that people were saying had AI generated text and pictures (they could tell because of the pixels). Turns out it was an article from 2017.

It's just ironic to me how so many people are confidently incorrect about it, we are the LLMs in this case spouting 'facts' that we are sure of.

tom_ 27 minutes ago | parent

If it'd be any consolation, I for one find it interesting, even if you don't. I like to keep my AI writing detector honed, and others' opinions help. Even if I clicked figuring I wouldn't necessarily find the article all that interesting, I might end up reading it anyway just to see what I think of the writing style.

bmacho 11 minutes ago | parent

> I wish we'd stop getting replies like this to articles.

I wish we got more such replies like that to articles. This is a confusing times, and social interaction helps in several ways.

> People seem to forget that LLMs copied human writing.

This is literally not true, but more importantly the conclusion you use it for is blatantly false.

dspillett 1 hour ago | parent

It is always worth remembering that LLMs use certain phrases and patterns because many source materials in the training set did. One or two smells does not a cesspool make.

As anti-AI as I am, people pointing out that they've spotted an AI are getting quite tiresome too. If you think people won't spot it without you telling them, then it is good enough for them no matter who or what generated it.

0gs 58 minutes ago | parent

people are just going to have to turn the accursed spell-check off and start writing like psychos again. said modality was second nature online for like the first 15 years of the web. phones ruined us

raro11 26 minutes ago | parent

Noticed it too. Feels like an LLM that ingested all old blog posts and did it's best to match the style. But it doesn't feel human anymore.

jedbrooke 17 minutes ago | parent

I’d cut them some slack if that’s the only example you found in the whole article. A lot of the “LLMisms” are actually valid english constructs* , it’s just that LLMs will use them in every sentence. I noticed while reading older stuff that’s way pre-llm, occasionally a sentence will jump out to me as LLM written, but it’ll be like once per chapter. When it’s every other sentence only then do I discount the entire thing as LLM written.

*: Except for the “Random label: sentence that has nothing to do with the label” construct. That one drives me crazy and it makes no sense

direwolf20 15 minutes ago | parent

Reads like AI to me, or AI-shaped corposlop

themgt 1 hour ago | parent

A story which may or may not be based on lived experience: one day a Sprite stops booting. JuiceFS is asking object storage for a chunk and getting a 404. We wanted to go fast, so we ran JuiceFS in writeback mode. It records a chunk in its metadata first and uploads the bytes after. If the machine is killed at any time between those two steps, the metadata points at a chunk that doesn’t exist.

So we built a harness that drives fleets of Sprites through write, checkpoint, sleep, wake and restore, over and over, verifying every byte that comes back. We pointed it at 400 JuiceFS Sprites for about 5,000 cycles. A nonzero number of them permanently lost the ability to checkpoint. Well … fuck.

Enter: the Sprites Block Device (SBD). It takes a bucket and presents it to the Linux kernel as a block device, over NBD. The Sprite formats that device as ext4 and mounts it, the same way you’d mount a disk on any Linux box. Duh.

This blog has has a strange vibe like "the last BRAWNDO we made in a bathtub may or may not have killed some customers lmao, try NEW BRAWNDO 2.0 TODAY!" that I didn't realize could work for corporate messaging around an in-house CoW cloud filesystem.