We have textual slop, visual slop, audio slop, so we asked: "What else do we want to sloppify?". And then it dawned on me. ICs. ICs haven't been slopped yet — sure, we could ask the machine to generate some vhdl, but that isn't the same. So we present: Silicon Slop.
I am actually astonished. Is this what happens when the NYU board of directors tells every department they have to use and create AI, or they will stop funding? What is going on?
> Win11 file picker is years ahead of some random file picker option available on linux
First it would be nice to know why you would think this and maybe provide an example, second there are other file pickers. It should also be noted that you don't need one at all, but if you want one, there are so many options, try nemo
> HiDPI
Wayland
> Multi monitor scaling polish
What did he mean by that? Wayland supports different scaling factors between displays.
> rdp
VNC, ssh + pf
> vastly superior accessibility
Hahahahaha
Some examples of what you mean please, otherwise this is just a lazy shill answer
Anyone who has used rdp for more than a few hours knows how much better the experience is compared to vnc. Most things just work. In case someone needs touch screen support, there is no comparison.
File picker has been a strength of Windows for quite a few versions. And the consensus seems to be that it is better than Mac's (based on my YouTube watch history). I have used various Linux desktops, and none of the file pickers are nearly as good as the Windows native one, in yet of being able to navigate/filter/order things and occasionally getting more information about the selection.
I concede that RDP is great (though Sunshine/Moonlight are worth the trouble), but that's been available on Linux for ages. It's hilarious that you're comparing features to GNOME-ecosystem apps. They are allergic to features. Dolphin from KDE would be a much better comparison for Windows Explorer.
not an author, but in same league (have to keep dual boot because of photo editing)
neither nautilus nor nemo provides you convenient way to navigate, to check free disks space, to check photos in an album view, to see all the file properties and customize table views.
if you don't have this usage scenarios, it doesn't mean its a ragebait.
and btw, your attitude is one of the reasons people don't want to move to linux. One more toxic community? Naah, I'm good.
But I guess you are right. If one wants to use a computer like you use it on windows, then linux is a bad choice. The best choice in that case is windows.
Your file manager is not your operating system, use something else to view images.
I have all those "usage scenarios", which are in fact absolute basics and thus it's worth remembering 3 commands. The problem arises when one uses a Desktop environment with a dock and all other bloated nonsense. Maybe computing is solved once people reverse the brain damage inflicted by Windows and MacOS.
I'm not sorry for my attitude, because OP is the reason computing sucks and becomes more bloated and telemetry ridden every year. It's pure laziness to learn something new. Linux should be there for everyone, but shouldn't be called "immature" just because someone needs a perfect clone of the windows file picker, or wants his proprietary windows programs to run. Thats all good and fair, but not linux' problem.
Speaking as a Linux desktop dev, that one's right. We have a lot of homework left to do, and accessibility is an area both Windows and MacOS are more fully-featured and mature in.
Part of treating users really well is also being honest about our shortcomings (and fixing them).
Hard agree. I work in digital accessibility, use Macs and Linux at home and work. It's unfortunate, but Linux is a long distance from how accessible Windows is. It's improving, but there's a ways to go.
I don't think there is anything more accessible than lines of text in a grid. Maybe you don't need to make every button of every GUI program ever accessible.
I would like for Linux to be able to replace Windows.
I run Linux on some of my computers with various levels of success.
But even with Windows 11 being as annoying as it is and Ubuntu/Mint/Cachy/Fedora/etc having some really good points they are not as easy to use as Windows.
Sure, web browsing is almost the same and simple home office tasks are close enough.
But all of the complaints that GP has mentioned are valid.
Windows file chooser is essentially small Windows Explorer and you can do almost everything that you can in the explorer while you are in file chooser mode. None of the Linux desktops have anything close.
HiDPI and multi monitor scaling on Linux has gotten better and it might approach what Windows had for the last 10 years but it is not 100% there yet.
Wayland is just a protocol with many incomplete and incompatible extensions that may or may not be implemented by your DE.
VNC is not even remotely close to RDP in features or performance. It just isn't.
I have used RDP over dial-up that was more responsive that VNC over LAN.
Not to mention sound, printer, disks, USB, etc all being available over one RDP connection.
Accessibility on Linux is a joke. On screen keyboard may work 80% of the time, screen reader might work 20% of the time. Sound might come out of random output or it might not. You may have to play with random settings, good luck with that if you are vision impaired.
One big reason Linux isn't there yet is people who just dismiss all of the above and go with "it works for me so it must be good for everyone."
The GTK file picker, which is frustratingly the default even on most KDE installs, is the one that sucks. The KDE-native one would much more closely match the experience you're looking for.
VNC is highly dependent on implementation. Sunshine/Moonlight runs circles around RDP in terms of performance and includes audio. For situations where you need the extra functionality is RDP... You can just use RDP. It works just fine on Linux, especially if you're on recent KDE.
On-screen keyboards are admittedly a pain point, but I've usually seen people say nicer things about the screen readers than Windows. Probably lots of different experiences depending on implementation.
> Windows file chooser is essentially small Windows Explorer and you can do almost everything that you can in the explorer while you are in file chooser mode. None of the Linux desktops have anything close.
I remember KDE copying that a few years after Microsoft introduced Active Desktop. That was, what, 25 years ago now?
There is the MIT+ni*ger license. Please don't ban me, just saying. No company would ever use your software given this license, but your users may boycott you too
ffmpeg exists, if you don't like it and can't use (don't want to learn) the shell and ffmpegs commands, there is OBS with all those features and more. I don't see the usecase.
FFmpeg and OBS are extremely powerful tools, but they require local installation, CLI knowledge, and manual configuration. Showesome is a Chrome extension that records screen, tab, or camera entirely in-browser, with built-in zoom/highlight effects. Lightweight, zero-install, and free — ideal for quick demos or tutorials without extra setup.
I don't know about you, but I have a large selection of 10 bit HEVC movies and series on my system, and hardware decoding for this is pretty nice. Apart from that, videos taken on apple devices use HEVC by default last time I checked. But in the end, it's still not that important probably, doesn't mean that it shouldn't be available/accessible
Great joke. Truly a free and untraceable currency the plebs are profiting off right now. I am mining some too! I just cashed out my 50 dollars profit and bought myself a meal at my local trader Joe's, next time when I'm there, I will probably pay with chainlink though.
Never learned anything through leetcode I couldn't have learned more in depth by my personal projects. Leetcode feels like some bullshit you talk about on LinkedIn in an LLM like voice, as is
> We all know skills in programming are important
>But it is not just writing code, but also solving problems quickly and with the right tools.
>Before doing leetcode, I didn't really know how to tackle the challenges I was presented at work. I would still perform, but not like I do now, being on the top 100 leaderboard
>also please please hire me please I am starving
Leetcode is pretentious bullshit for american HR departments.
It's very interesting to see that there actually are people who want to automatically create a "podcast" from their blog using their cloned voice. Is this just what tech bro culture does to someone? Or is it about hustling and grinding while getting your very important word out there. I mean over time one would certainly save up to 20 minutes for each article...
For me it would be when I’m driving or working out. But I can’t imagine listening to an AI generated podcast. I do listen to the Stratechery podcast that is the same as the email.
But he also not only reads it himself, he has someone else narrate quotes and he uses chapter art that goes along with the article.
To some degree, you could make the same argument about written books and audio books. Mostly I listen to audiobooks because I’m often bored in the car and learning something seems like a good use of my time.
An audio book is usually read by an actor, or the author, and often has a performative quality to it. I'm honestly not interested in anything read by a machine unless it's absolutely indistinguishable from a professional person, and current machine-voice-synthesis (AI or not) isn't there.
LLM slop. Why do people (presumably) take the time to debug something like this, do tests and go to great lengths, but are too lazy to do a little manual writeup? Maybe the hour saved makes up for being associated with publishing AI slop under your own name? Like there is no way the author would have written a text that reads more convoluted than what we have here.
People like reading LLM slop less than either of those. So it should become a common understanding not to waste your (or our) time to "write" this. It's frustrating to give it a chance then get rug-pulled with nonsense and there's really no reason to excuse it.
I read it just fine and everything made sense in it.
I would spend similar time debugging this if I were the author. It's a pretty serious bug, a non obvious issue, and would be impossible to connect to the ffi fix unless you already knew the problem.
I have no idea whether the text was generated from an LLM, but “slop” it absolutely is not - it’s clearly a very logically ordered walkthrough about a very thorough debugging process.
If you call anything that comes out of a model “slop” the term uses all meaning.
Sorry, why is this LLM slop? I only got about halfway through because I don’t care about this enough to finish the read, but I don’t see the “obvious LLM” signal you do.
I feel like the “this is AI” crowd is getting ridiculous. Too perfect? Clearly AI. Too sloppy? That’s clearly AI too.
Rarely is there anything concrete that the person claiming AI can point to. It’s just “I can tell”. Same confident assurance that all the teachers trusting “AI detectors” have.
I feel like it’s on every other article now. The “this is ai” comments detract way more from the conversation than whatever supposed ai content is actually in the article.
These ai hunters are like the transvestigators who are certain they can always tell who’s trans.
No. These articles are annoying to read, the same dumb patterns and structures over and over again in every one. It's a waste of time; the content gives off a generic tone and it's not interesting.
Also, you do realize that writing is taught in an incredibly formulaic way? I can't speak to English as second language authors, but I imagine it doesn't make it easier.
say that! that’s independent of whether AI/LLM tools were used to write it and more valuable (“this was boring and repetitive” vs “I don’t like the tool I suspect you may have used to write this”)
So is the vast majority of comments on HN (and in any comment section of any website) well before LLMs came into being, yet we give them a benefit of doubt. Users on forums tend to behave in a starkly bot-like way, often having a very limited set of responses pertaining to their particular hobby horses, so much so that others could easily predict how the most prolific users would react to any topic and in what precise words.
Now, apparently, we have a generation of "this is AI slop!" "bots".
if two parties put up $1,000,000 each and I get a large cut I’ll do the work! one commenter already wagered $1,000, which I’d easily win, but I suspect this would take me idk at least a few days of work (not worth the time). and, again, for a million dollars I’d make sure I win
see other comment though, the point is that assessing quality of content on whether AI was used is stupid (and getting really annoying)
the problem is it’s a lot of work (not actually worth it for me for a thousand dollars) — but you cannot win
just one scenario, I write 100 rather short, very similar blog posts. run 50 through Claude Code with instructions “copy this file”. have fun distinguishing! of course that’s an extreme way to go about it, but I could use the AI more and end up at the same result trivially
why? LLM/AI use doesn’t denote anything about style or quality of a blog, that’s the point — and why this type of commentary all of HackerNews and elsewhere is so annoying.
obviously if a million dollars are on the line I’m going to do what I can to win. I’m just pointing out how that can be taken to the extreme, but again I can use the tools more in the spirit of the challenge and (very easily) end up with the same results
People object to using AI to write their articles (poorly). Your answer to them saying it's obvious when it's AI written is to.. write it yourself, then pretend copy-pasting that article via an AI counts as AI-written?
my point is using AI is distinct from from the quality of blog posts. these frequent baseless, distracting claims of AI use are silly
this wager is a thought exercise to demonstrate that. want to wager $1,000,000 or think you’ll lose? if you’ll lose, why is it ok to go around writing “YoU uSeD aI” instead of actually assessing the quality of a post?
That's your issue not ours. It's obvious; if you don't have a problem with it, enjoy reading slop; many people can't stand it and we don't have to apologize for recognizing or not liking it.
I don’t believe you can recognize anything. Like everyone else claiming they can clearly identify AI you can’t actually point to why it’s AI or what parts are clearly AI.
If you could actually identify AI deterministically you would have a very profitable product.
I would never claim that we can reliably detect all AI generated text. There are many ways to write text with LLM assistance that is indistinguishable from human output. Moreover, models themselves are extremely bad at detecting AI-generated text, and it is relatively easy to edit these tells out if you know what to look for (one can try to prompt them out too, though success is more limited there). I am happy to make a much narrower claim, however: each particular set of models, when not heavily prompted to do otherwise, has a "house style" that's pretty easily identifiable by humans in long-form writing samples, and content written with that house style has a very high chance of being generated by AI. When text is written in this house style, it is often a sign that not only were LLMs used in its generation, but the person doing the generation did not bother to do much editing or use a more sophisticated prompt that wouldn't result in such obvious tells, which is why the style is commonly associated with "slop."
I find it interesting that you believe this claim is wildly conspirational, or that you think the difficulty of reliably detecting AI generated text at scale is evidence that humans can't do pretty well at this much more limited task. Do you also find claims that AIs are frequently sycophantic in ways that humans are not, or that they will use phrases like "you're absolutely right!" far more than a human would unless prompted otherwise (which are the exact same type of narrow claim) similarly conspirational? i.e., is your assertion that people would have difficulty differentiating between a real human's response to a prompt and Claude's response to a prompt when there was no specific pre-prompt trying to control the writing style of the response?
On the other fork where I responded to your claims with a direct and detailed response, you insisted that my comment “isn't really that interesting” and just disengaged. I’m not going to write another detailed explanation of why your “slop === AI” premise is flawed. Go reread the other fork if you’ve decided you’re interested.
> I find it interesting that you believe this claim is wildly conspirational
I don’t believe it’s wildly conspiratorial. I believe it’s foolishly conspiratorial. There’s some weird hubris in believing that you (and whatever group you identify as “us”) are able to deterministically identify AI text when experts can’t do it. If you could actually do it you’d probably sell it as a product.
> believing that you (and whatever group you identify as “us”) are able to deterministically identify AI text
I think you will find the OP said no such thing. They instead said they identified a mixture of writing styles consistent with a human author and an LLM. The OP says nothing about deterministically identifying LLMs, only that the style of specific sections is consistent with LLMs leading to the conclusion.
Thanks for adding the quote, that is a different part of the post than I was focusing on.
I still think that's a far cry from deterministically recognizing LLM-generated text. At least the way I would understand that would be an algorithmic test with very low rates of both false positives and false negatives. Instead I understood the OP to be saying that people have an intuitive sense of LLM generated text with a relatively low false negative rate.
I am certain that the skill varies widely between individuals, but in principle there is no reason to suspect that with training humans could not become quite good at recognizing low effort (no attempt at altering style) LLM generated content from the major models. In principle it is no different than authorship analysis used in digital forensics, a field that shows fairly high accuracy under similar conditions.
I am pretty much certain that parts of it were LLM-written, yes. This doesn't imply that the entire blog post is LLM-generated. If you're a good Bayesian and object to my use of "100%" feel free to pretend that I said something like "95%" instead. I cannot rule out possibilities like, for example, a human deliberately writing in the style of an LLM to trick people, or a human who uses LLMs so frequently that their writing style has become very close to LLM writing (something I mentioned as a possibility in an earlier reply; for various reasons, including the uneven distribution of the LLM-isms, I think that's unlikely here).
Human experts can reliably detect some kinds of long-form, AI-generated text using exactly the same sorts of cues I've outlined: https://arxiv.org/html/2501.15654v1. You may take issue with the quality of the paper, but there have been very few studies like this and this one found an extremely strong effect.
I am making an even more limited claim than the article, which is only that it's possible for "experts" (i.e. people who frequently interact with LLMs as part of their day jobs) to identify AI generated text in long-form passages in a way that has very few false positives, not classify it perfectly. I've also introduced the caveat that this only applies to AI generated text that has received minimal or no prompting to "humanize" the writing style, not AI generated text in general.
If you would like to perform a higher-quality study with more recent models, feel free (it's only fair that I ask you to do an unreasonable amount of work here given that your argument appears to be that if I don't quit my lucrative programming job and go manually classify text for pennies on the dollar, it proves that it can't be done).
The reason this isn't offered as a service is because it makes no economic sense to do so using humans, not because it's impossible as you claim. This kind of "human" detection mechanism does not scale the way generation does. The cues that I rely on are also pretty easy to eliminate if you know someone is looking for them. This means that heuristics do not work reliably against someone actively trying to avoid human detection, or a human deliberately trying to sound like an LLM (I feel the need to reiterate this as many of the counterarguments to what I'm saying are to claims of this form).
> I’m not going to write another detailed explanation of why your “slop === AI” premise is flawed.
This isn't a claim that I made. I believe that text written with LLM assistance is not necessarily slop, and that slop is not necessarily AI generated. The only assertion I made regarding slop is that being written with LLM assistance with minimal prompting or editing is a strong predictor of slop, and that the heuristics I'm using (if present in large quantities) are a strong predictor of an article being written with LLM assistance with minimal prompting or editing. i.e. I, I am asserting that these kinds of heuristics work pretty well on articles generated by people who don't realize (or care) that there are LLM "tells" all over their work. The fact that many of the articles posted to HN are being accused of being LLM generated could certainly indicate that this is all just a massive witch hunt, but given the acknowledged popularity of ChatGPT among the general population and the fact that experts can pretty easily identify non-humanized articles, I think "a lot of people are using LLMs in the process of generating their blog posts, and some sizable fraction of those people didn't edit the output very much" is an equally compelling hypothesis.
That’s a really interesting study. Thanks for sharing that.
This seems like the kind of thing to share when making a bold claim about being able to detect AI with high confidence. This is a lot more weighty than not so subtly asserting that I’m too dumb to recognize AI.
> a human deliberately trying to sound like an LLM (I feel the need to reiterate this as many of the counterarguments to what I'm saying are to claims of this form).
I assume this is a reference to me. To be clear, I was never referring to humans specifically attempting to sound like AI. I was saying that a lot of formulaic stuff people attribute to AI is simply following the same patterns humans started, and while it might be slop, it’s not necessarily AI slop. Hence the AITA rage bait example.
Thanks for engaging thoughtfully! FWIW I actually looked this article up because I was interested in your claim that even experts couldn't perform these tasks, something I hadn't heard before--I'm not actually ignoring what you're saying. It's actually very nice to have a productive conversation on HN :)
Parts of it were 100% LLM written. Like it or not, people can recognize LLM-generated text pretty easily, and if they see it they are going to make the assumption that the rest of the article is slop too.
I can point to individual sentences that were clearly generated by AI (for example, numerous instances of this parallel construction, "No warning. No error. Just different methods that make no sense.", "Not corrupted. Not misaligned. Not reading wrong offsets.", "Not a segfault. Not the T_NONE error from #1079. There it is, the exact error from production"). The style is list-heavy, including lists used for conditionals, and full of random bolding, both characteristic of AI-generated text. And there are a number of other tells as well.
The reason I don't usually bother to bring these specific things up is that I already know the response, which is just going to be you arguing that a human could have written this way, too. Which is true. The point is that if you read the collective whole of the article, it is very clear that it was composed with the aid of AI, regardless of whether any single part of it could be defensibly written by a human. I'd add that sometimes, the writing of people who interact heavily with LLMs all day starts to resemble LLM writing (a phenomenon I don't think people talk enough about), but usually not to this extent.
This doesn't mean that the entire article was written by an LLM, nor does it mean that there's not useful information in it. Regardless, given the amount of low effort LLM-generated spam that makes it onto HN, I think it is fairly defensible to use "this was written with the help of an LLM, and the person posting it did not even bother to edit the article to make that less obvious" as a heuristic to not bother wasting more time on an article.
“not A, not B, not C” and “not A, not B, but C” are extremely common constructions in general. So common in fact that you did it in this exact reply.
“This doesn't mean that the entire article was written by an LLM, nor does it mean that there's not useful information in it. Regardless, given the amount of low effort LLM-generated spam that makes it onto HN, I think it is fairly defensible”
> The style is list-heavy, including lists used for conditionals, and full of random bolding, both characteristic of AI-generated text
This is just blogspam-style writing. Short snippets that are easy to digest with lists to break it up and bold keywords to grab attention. This style was around for years before ChatGPT showed up. LLMs probably do this so much specifically because they were trained on so much blog content. Hell I’ve given feedback to multiple humans to cut out the distracting bold stuff in their communications because it becomes a distraction.
Blog spam doesn’t intersperse the drivel with literary narrative beats and subsection titles that sound like sci-fi novels. The greasy mixture of superficially polished but substantively vacuous is much more pronounced in LLM output than even the most egregious human-generated content marketing, in part because the cognitive entity in the latter case is either too smart, or too stupid, to leave such a starkly evident gap.
Again, this is why I don't bother explaining why it's very obvious to us. People like you immediately claim that human writing is like this all the time, which it's not. Suffice it to say that if a large number of people are immediately flagging something as AI, it is probably for a reason.
My reply wasn't an instance of this syntactic pattern, and the fact that you think it's the same thing shows that you are probably not capable of recognizing the particular way in which LLMs write.
> Again, this is why I don't bother explaining why it's very obvious to us.
The thing is, your premise is that you can identify certain patterns as being indicative of AI. However, those exact same patterns are commonly used by humans. So what you’re actually claiming is some additional insight that you can’t share. Because your premise does not hold up on its own. What you were actually claiming is “I know it when I see it”.
Let me give you a related example. If you go to any of the “am I the asshole” subreddits, you will encounter the exact same story format over and over: “Other person engages in obviously unacceptable behavior. I do something reasonable to stop the unacceptable behavior. People who should support me support other person instead. Am I the asshole?” The comments will be filled with people either enraged on behalf of the author or who call it AI.
The problem with claiming that it’s AI is that the sub was full of the exact same garbage before AI showed up. The stores have always been the same bullshit rage bait. So it’s not technically wrong to say it looks like AI, because it certainly could be. But it could also be human generated rage bait because it’s indistinguishable. My guess is that some of the sub is totally AI. And a chunk of it is from human humans engaged in shitty creative writing.
When you look at generic click-bait/blogspam patterns that humans have been using for decades now and call it AI, all you’re doing is calling annoying blog writing AI. Which it could be, but it could also not be. Humans absolutely write blogs like this and have for longer than LLMs have been widely available.
> My reply wasn't an instance of this syntactic pattern, and the fact that you think it's the same thing shows that you are probably not capable of recognizing the particular way in which LLMs write.
It was absolutely an example of the pattern, just more wordy. Spare me the ad hominem.
Your “you couldn’t understand” and “obvious to us” stuff is leaning into conspiracy theory type territory. When you believe you have some special knowledge, but you don’t know how to share it with others, you should question whether that knowledge is actually real.
> It was absolutely an example of the pattern, just more wordy. Spare me the ad hominem.
LLMs simply don't generate the syntactic pattern I used consistently, but they do generate the pattern in the article. I'm not really sure what else to tell you.
The rest of your post isn't really that interesting to me. You asked why nobody was giving specific examples of why it was generated. I told you some of the specific reasons we believe this article was generated with the assistance of an LLM (not all--there are many other sentences that are more borderline which only slightly increase the probability of LLM generation in isolation, which aren't worth cataloguing except in a context where people genuinely want to know why humans think a post reads as AI-generated and are not just using this as an excuse to deliver a pre-prepared rant), mentioned that the reason people don't typically bother to bring it up is that we know people who demand this sort of thing tend to claim without evidence that humans write in the exact same way all the time, and you proceeded to do exactly that. Next time you don't get a response when you ask for evidence, consider that it might be because we don't particularly want to waste time responding to someone who isn't interested in the answer.
I am actually astonished. Is this what happens when the NYU board of directors tells every department they have to use and create AI, or they will stop funding? What is going on?
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