7 ms·
The feature is great. The post itself is a slop grenade.
by davidmurdoch 2mo ago
The feature is great. The post itself is a slop grenade.
- dan_sbl 2mo agoBillion dollar company can't afford one human copywriter. The future is great! (edit: copyrighter -> copywriter)
- davidmurdoch 2mo agoThey could just feed an llm a small corpus of past human authored posts from their site, and have the LLM rewrite it in a style matching style, and it would likely turn out pretty great.
- jgrahamc 2mo agoI've tried this with my own blog posts from blog.jgc.org and the result was... not good. It basically wrote something that read like a parody.
- davidmurdoch 2mo agoAh, bummer. Not totally surprising though.
- ButlerianJihad 2mo agoNeither can you afford a copywriter, evidently?
- CodesInChaos 2mo agoModern cloudflare in a nutshell.
- lijok 2mo agoCan you elaborate? I read it, found the concepts well explained, walked away better informed. Responding to alleged slop with more slop doesn’t decrease the total amount of slop on the internet.
- davidmurdoch 2mo agoYou think I'm using AI to leave comments like this on HN?
- skrebbel 2mo ago"slop" doesn't mean "AI generated content", it means bad content, a waste of the reader's time. Grantparent's implication is that your comment was bad content, not that it was AI generated bad content.
- davidmurdoch 2mo agoI was riffing off of the meaning from https://noslopgrenade.com/ https://noslopgrenade.com/ which made its way around the comments here on HN a few weeks ago.
- skrebbel 2mo agoAh, fair
- geraneum 2mo agoNot the original commenter; but, at least for me, the idea is that when it’s written by humans we know that effort and care were put into communicating the news. Otherwise they could post a link to the docs and we could ask my flavor of LLM to summerize. No need for extra filler content. That why it’s slop and it’s different.
- lijok 2mo agoI don’t have access to my flavor of LLM on the train nor the time or budget to have it do the research and summary for me Why are we all of a sudden pretending like pre-LLM era blogs were these pristinely well written pieces of art or even that effort and care was put into them? In most cases they were significantly less coherent and incomplete. Don’t get me started on the mess that was the communication of this particular company or one of their competitors like AWS.
- napsterbr 2mo agoOne of the recent AI tells other than em dash is the excessive usage of hyphenated words: > multi-tenant-safe cache keys > on a server-rendered app > byte-for-byte identical (classic) > gets a cache-speed response > cached-file-extensions list Honestly, this is terrible. I had to add a "use simple words only, don't hyphenate unnecessarily" warning to my Claude config. After a full day of work, having to read these Claudisms all the time make a noticeable difference on how tired you get. It gets even worse when Claude starts to make up its own vocabulary.
- arikrahman 2mo agoOne of the earliest tells was the use of emdashes.
- topgrain2 2mo agoFuck, I spent all these years developing a thoughtful writing style that leaned toward clarity for the reader, even if it meant extra work to achieve precision, or adding affordances like “excessive” hyphenation, and now I guess have to learn to write worse.
- napsterbr 2mo agoThere is a world of difference between well-written human text and sloppy walls of AI-generated text. There's nothing wrong in using hyphenations or emdashes -- I use them myself! That's not the point of my comment.
- ignoramous 2mo agoWhat does it mean when prompting SoTA LLMs prone to slop to be concise and precise, with respect to context at hand, not work at all? Anyone benchmarking that?
- Xirdus 2mo agoWhether we like it or not, em dashes are effectively verboten in online discussions and blog posts if you want people to take you seriously. If the idea that excessive hyphenation is an AI tell gains traction, it too will become impossible to use without ruining your credibility.