alt Hacker NewsDoes it bother anyone else when an article is so clearly written by an LLM? Other than being 3x longer than it needs to be the content is fine as far as I can tell, but I find the voice it’s written in extremely irritating.
I think it’s specifically the resemblance to the clickbaity writing style that Twitter threads and LinkedIn and Facebook influencer posts are written in, presumably optimized for engagement/social media virality. I’m not totally sure what I want instead, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the same tactics used in writing I admired, but probably much more sparingly?
What is it that makes tptacek’s writing or Cloudflare’s blog etc so much more readable by comparison? Is it just variety? Maybe these tactics should be reserved for intro paragraphs (of the article but also of individual sections/chapters might be fine too) to motivate you to read on, whereas the meat of the article (or section) should have more substance and less clickbaiting hooks?
Specifically there’s a lot of clickbaity constructions like: “setup: payoff” or “sentence fragment, similar fragment, maybe another similar fragment”.
This paragraph has both:
> The symptom is familiar: a stream that occasionally "locks up" briefly before catching up, jitter in audio or video, or a latency spike that appears to come from nowhere, a "hang" in the application when it gets blocked waiting for a packet. It comes from a single packet forcing the entire pipeline to pause. The underlying network recovered quickly; TCP's ordering guarantee is what made it visible.
So does this!
> WireGuard's protocol is a fundamentally different design point. It's stateless — there's no connection to establish upfront, no session to track, and no certificate authority in the picture. Two keys, a compact handshake, and you're encrypting. And unlike TLS, WireGuard's cryptographic choices are fixed: Noise_IKpsk2 for key exchange, ChaCha20-Poly1305 for authenticated encryption. There's nothing to misconfigure.