[ryanf]

This article looked interesting, but I bounced off it because the author appears to have made heavy use of an LLM to generate the text. How can I trust that the content is worth reading if a person didn't care enough to write it themselves?

[rectang]

I find it hard to believe that an LLM would have come up with this quote to start the article:

> “Memory oppresses me.” - Severian, The Book of the New Sun

That sort of artistic/humourous flourish isn't in character for an LLM.

[jml7c5]

It looks like a mix of LLM and human-written content. The (human) author would have been the one who chose to put that quote there.

[gblargg]

Which is even worse. It's like mixing broken glass with food. Why even waste food if it's going to be inedible anyway?

[eviks]

But it's easy to believe that this is one of the few things the author added. Doesn't have to be 0% or 100%

[zem]

it sounds nothing like AI to me! or AI has advanced to the point where it is hard to tell - e.g. I wouldn't expect a sentence like "You’re not just getting 64 bytes of memory. You’re entering into a complex contract with a specific allocator implementation." from one.

[pests]

While I usually hate all the accusations of writings being LLM generated, I find your example a bit odd as that phasing is very typical of ChatGPT, especially when it was glazing everyone after that one update they had to reverent.

“It’s not just _________. It’s _________________.”

This was in almost every response doubling down on the users ideas and blowing things out of proportion. Stuff like…

“It’s not just a good idea. It’s a ground up rewriting of modern day physics.”

[rocky_raccoon]

I picked up on it very quickly as well. Here are some more phrases that match that same LLM pattern. Sure, you could argue that someone actually writes like this, but after a while, it becomes excessive.

- Your program continues running with a corrupted heap - a time bomb that will explode unpredictably later.

- You’re not just getting 64 bytes of memory. You’re entering into a complex contract with a specific allocator implementation.

- The Metadata Mismatch

- If it finds glibc’s metadata instead, the best case is an immediate crash. The worst case? Silent corruption that manifests as mysterious bugs hours later.

- Virtual Memory: The Grand Illusion

- CPU Cache Architecture: The Hidden Performance Layer

- Spoiler: it’s even messier than you might think.

[zem]

huh, interesting, I guess I haven't read enough of it to pick up on the patterns

[ziml77]

Atomic Shrimp has an aside in a recent video about how to identify AI writing. It's worth a look https://youtu.be/VeD9dUUFl-E?t=668

He's not the only one to point out these things that LLMs (currently) tend to output, but this is one of the shorter overviews of the tells you can spot.

[stevenhuang]

E.g. the not x but why slop leader board

[TechDebtDevin]

Do you see Emojis in tables/code now and assume the person is using an llm? I dont really see it.

[shiftingleft]

The author admits to it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1mh7q73/comment/n6uan...

The reply to that comment is also a good explainer of why the post has such a strong LLM smell for many.

[ryanf]

Yeah, I completely agree with that reply, thanks for the link.

BTW that Reddit post also has replies confirming my suspicions that the technical content wasn't trustworthy, if anyone felt like I was just being snobby about the LLM writing: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1mh7q73/comment/n6ubr...

[ryanf]

Maybe I'm too paranoid! If it's not LLM then I don't think it's a very well-organized post though.

In addition to the emoji, things that jumped out at me were the pervasive use of bullet lists with bold labels and some specific text choices like

> Note: The bash scripts in tools/ dynamically generate Rust code for specialized analysis. This keeps the main codebase clean while allowing complex experiments.

But I did just edit my post to walk it back slightly.

[skydhash]

Not TFA’s author

As a non-native English speaker, 90% of my vocabulary come from technical books and SF and Fantasy novels. And due to an education done in French, I tend to prefer slightly complicated sentences forms.

If someone uses LLM to give their posts clarity or for spellchecking, I would aplaud them. What I don’t agree with, LLM use or no, is meandering and inconsistency.

[OmarAssadi]

Personally, it is one of the flags, yeah. It's been a while since I've tried ChatGPT or some of the others, but the structure and particular usage felt a lot like what I'd have gotten out of deepseek.

It's not a binary thing, of course, but it's definitely an LLM smell, IMO.

[mvieira38]

I mean, are we supposed not to? This doesn't read like a blog at all, it even has the dreaded "Key Takeaways" end section... The content is good and seems genuinely researched, but the text looks "AI enhanced", that's all