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There's a certain irony in that the article itself is quite clearly assisted by AI. Not a criticism per se as I don't have a problem with AI assistance, but food for thought given the material being commented on.

The tropes that AI introduces into articles are very noticeable, quite annoying, and very unnatural -- they unfortunately don't write well. It seems people use them to "polish" up their writing but in reality it would have read better if they hadn't.

My current pet peave is using period instead of comma, as in:

> My people lived the other side of this equation. Not the factory floor. The receiving end.

Ostensibly this is supposed to add gravitas, but it's very often done in places where that gravitas isn't needed, and it comes off as if I'm reading the script for an action movie trailer.


> The tropes that AI introduces into articles are very noticeable, quite annoying, and very unnatural -- they unfortunately don't write well.

Quite paradoxical: when its a person's native language we can spot it a mile away but there's no shortage of engineers who claim how good the code output is.

Whatever the reason for the default tone of AI in English, it's still there when generating code. It makes me think that the senior engineers who claim that it produces awesome output just don't understand the specific programming language as a someone who thinks in it almost natively.


People have also started copying the AI tropes, especially your period/comma example.

I am not sure if it is necessarily copied. A lot of influencer-style people used some of these patterns (periods, not X but Y). So I'm not sure who is copying who?

These patterns are learned from magazine articles and other long-form publications. The tendency to have unnecessarily pithy/hooky section titles is one that particularly irks me, but it's not like AI invented that. I was reading some DIY books that are published by a company that does a lot of web/magazine work and they structure the text in the same way (this is all pre-LLM).

Content creators are starting to include these traits into their scripts now, too. It's uncanny when you (literally) hear it.


> Content creators are starting to include these traits into their scripts now, too.

Why would you assume this when the more likely reasonable is that the 'content creators' are just pasting LLM output?


I feel like the problem is that it's both. We're sanding off the long tail of human expression. It's not profitable this quarter, you see. Faster to let the AI do it.

I'm sure that's exactly what people are doing, but it's more difficult to tell from a recited script until someone drops a "It's not x, but Y".

Unnecessary emphasis can get... quite comical... indeed.

It really feels sometimes like they were trained on too much short-form fiction or something. Really stunts their sentence and paragraph texture.

The uncanny valley is an attractor basin.

Made me stop reading a few paragraphs in. I don't have a "problem" in the ethical sense either, but as the sibling comment notes, the way LLMs write is rather grating. To make matters worse, a) people seem to use them to add pointless volume / "filler" to their texts, so now I have to wade through pages and pages of this stuff, and b) I have no easy way to distinguish between an article at least based on novel human insights vs entirely LLM-generated from a "write me something about X topic" prompt. I don't think it's a stretch to say that the latter just isn't worth reading given the state of the art.

The filler from AI articles drives me absolutely bonkers. Im a fast reader in general and can skim through articles to find important details at lightning speed, but it still takes me 5x longer to skim through all the AI fluff than it does to go back and search for a non-ai article and then read through that.

The filler stuff is really a huge waste of time and effort. I tried to Google weather Ranch Corn Nuts are vegan and every result in the top 10 was the same AI generated slop with 10 paragraphs that had nothing to do with what I was trying to find.

All the top results had the same AI feel to them. The same format and structure.

The best part? None of them said yes or not. None of them answered the question. They just listed common dairy and non-vegan ingredients to look out for. So, all that AI and nobody put in the ingredients list. Lol


I don't have a problem with AI assistance either, but this undermines the point the article is making. For me it is like a priest preaching gay sex is wrong and then being caught in bed with a male prostitute (snorting cocaine optional). Leaves bad taste in the mouth.

Many such cases. Both the priest anecdote, and AI-critical posts being AI-generated.

Out of curiosity, what are you basing this on?

The text has few of the obvious AI tells. The only thing that, to me, looks characteristic of LLM-generated text is the short and terse sentence structure, but this has been a "prestigious" way to write in English since Hemingway.


Sort of a taste receptor I’m sure many have developed now.

The most obvious patterns here are: antithesis constructions, words choices and distribution, attempt at profundity in every paragraph but instead are runs of text that doing say anything, and even the perfect use of compound hyphenation. I think and can appreciate that there is definitely an attempt at personalization and guidance to make it less LLM-y and not just a default prompt, but it’s still kind of obvious. You could use a detector tool too of course.


What are the obvious tells? List them, because I think our sense of the tells may not overlap.

This article is clearly LLM-generated, even the title. A key indicator is that it almost makes sense: we forgot how to manufacture because that got sent to a different nation. The coding thing isn’t getting sent anywhere, so humanity is forgetting how to code. The distinction undermines a lot of the emotional baggage about offshoring that the article wants you to bring along.


There are quite a lot of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

But it's really just the usual ones that are truly obvious. "Not X but Y," em-dashes, "underscores the significance of X," and so forth.

A terse sentence structure can be a tell, but, IMO, it's a weak one.


> There are quite a lot of them

I agree - and they're on clear display in this article, I would say


The blog post reads nothing like Hemingway. Here's a classic example: https://anthology.lib.virginia.edu/work/Hemingway/hemingway-...

Hemingway writes simple sentences with a kind of detachment to make the emotional flow of his stories as transparent as possible.

LLM slop reads more like slide bullet points extrapolated to prose-length text


Blog posts aren't typically written like Hemingway.

Find some pre 2020 that are, and you'd have a point.


https://awnist.com/slop-cop (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47806845) points out Staccato Burst, Dramatic Fragment, Colon Elaboration, and Short-Hook Paragraph. To me, those define the tone of this article.

Interesting tool.

I'm not trying to defend the blog post, but I gave Slop Cop 775 words of an essay by Schopenhauer (translated into English) and got "15 patterns detected."

I fear we're approaching the point where AI-written text grows indistinguishable from human-written text, unless the AI-user is exceptionally lazy and uses an obsolete model...


For many, old people are the reason the rest of us have nice things.


Your books are pretty amazing too Ivan. Have em all.


They make f'ing good Mac (mostly) and iOS software.


So... completely possible then.


For a useful introduction to network layers, Radia Perlman explains the actual layers and how to think about them pragmatically: https://youtu.be/qXz_RxBFQ20?t=496


The part about CSMA reminded me that as an educational model, a lot of what can go right, or wrong with an 802.11(abgn/ac/ax) network is at what we would call layer 2. If you've ever seen an environment that's a CSMA hell of -70 noise floor in 2.4 GHz and devices stomping on each other, or a poorly configured "mesh" network, that's all layer 2. Thinking about things like, how are your design constraints different when dealing with a half duplex/TDD air medium, vs something like a traditional FDD point to point microwave radio?

But then as a mental model in order to understand that, it's important to think about the layer 1 of what the wifi radios are doing: Questions such as, why is this Comcast 802.11ac home router running in an 80 MHz channel, stepping on this other device that's also trying to run in the same 80 MHz channel? Why did somebody install a unifi AP with a torus shaped RF pattern vertically on a wall, instead of horizontally on a ceiling as it was intended?


I wish more devices came with diagrams showing the RF pattern - I honestly have no idea how I’m supposed to orient the antennae on my Mikrotik.


"ceiling mount" in the name always on ceiling, "wall mount" on wall, "directional" in the direction you want, if not specified horizontal on a table (ceiling mount acceptable). If there is going to be a dead zone in the omni pattern it's generally the "back" (where most other stuff is like ports and power). On ceiling mount the back will be able to go straight up into a ceiling, if the back is just one of the smaller sides then it's definitely meant to sit on a table.


what model do you have? If it's an all-in-one router like a HAP AC, it should be horizontal, best coverage would be if it were flat on a wood shelf or similar.


It’s one of the ones with adjustable antennae - RB4011iGS+5HacQ2HnD-IN-US - and based on the pictures I have them pointing “up”.


Aren't Mikrotik part numbers just the most amazing things? For something like that, the antennas are omnis, the RF pattern coming off each one is an oval. Mostly vertical and maybe with the ones at the sides a bit at an angle is a good choice.

Visualize if you were to take a pencil and skewer it lengthwise through an oval shaped fruit, the fattest part of the fruit would be the highest gain part of the antenna's RF pattern.


Worrying unnecessarily. The USB PD spec requires negotiation of delivered power - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_hardware#USB_Power_Deliver....


Catch em all:

> wget -m -p -E -k -K -np https://iis-people.ee.ethz.ch/\~gmichi/


AKA wget --mirror --page-requisites --adjust-extension --convert-links --backup-converted --no-parent ...


The Internet tells me that the collective noun of flag is bunting. I think this applies here: a bunting of wget flags.


I ran it and its not very server friendly. I am basically DDoSing the server. On the other hand, it finished within a minute (216MB) ....


Meh, at least it downloads one file after the other and not in parallel.


is it possible to do the same with curl?


If you want a great introduction to, and appreciation of, SoCs — given the announcements yesterday and to understand what goes into something like the M1 a little better.


This is admittedly rather region specific since we are located in Malaysia. Though the same applies in Singapore too.

For people who don’t or can’t scan a code (which is just a webpage URL), the is typically a piece of paper and pen that they can use to record their check-in if they so choose.


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