alt Hacker NewsThis post exhibits a specific LLM tell that I haven't seen mentioned before. It's the style where inanimate objects or concepts are treated as actors, using verbs as if they were actually the one doing something.
* bias compounds
* variance diffuses
* configs store parameters
* BF16 + RNE (6 bytes) plateaus
* errors repeat
* six bytes match ten
This sort of thing reads really well and conveys the idea in very few words. It's good writing! But in my experience humans don't generally "let nouns verb" as much as LLMs do, maybe we're just not as clever with words.
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Anthropomorphism simplifies!
What makes it llm generated to me is that somehow it is hard to read.
What I mean is that each sentence looks well made and from a highly skilled writer. But reading a few parameters I'm lost quite fast. Like if there was no coherence or progression. Just some ideas sometimes even repeated in random order even if in the end there is point/explanation to be made.
Like when Claude or another llm drops you a 5 pages block of text or MD spec that is totally unreadable even if it is supposed to make sense.
I think that it is unusual for human generated speech because usually if you have good with words and to do great sentences, you will also to do it in logical and coherent way at the multiple paragraphs level too. Or at the opposite, if you don't know how to redact proper paragraphs, you will. It not be able to do great sentences anyway.
pangram says 100% ai generated
This poetic form of writing "reads well", but it completely failed to convey the idea to me. I had to read the blog multiple times to get the point, because poems are not meant to be direct, unambiguous or simple to understand.
From a technical writing perspective, this is a terrible blog post.
Here is a better blog: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/developers-practitioner...
LLM tell? Inanimate objects and concepts are treated as actors all the time: the series converges, the function reaches its maximum, the sun shines, the wind blows, history repeats itself, words rhyme, interest compounds, etc.
What's wrong with "configs store parameters"? I guess "parameters are stored in configs" could be more correct, but IMO it means exactly the same thing and sounds just as natural. "Six bytes match ten" is shorthand for "the performance of the algorithm that uses six bytes of storage matches the performance of the algorithm that uses ten bytes of storage". But here we have "performance matches", which is an inanimate concept doing something, so is this an LLM smell too?