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Various LLM Smells

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Re: Various LLM Smells

#231

Post by palmotea »

thewebguyd wrote: post #42
spdustin wrote: post #18

- “(The) honest caveat:” (or “genuine caveat:”, both with the colon) - “(The) honest answer:” (again, with colon) - “The thing to internalize:” - “The smoking gun:” (really, sentences that start with “The :” are a strong tell, but those four are the most prolific) - “load bearing” (when not talking about architecture) - “blast radius” (when not talking about actual explosives, but rather the effect of an event/action…

> I would argue about the actual frequency of their use Assuming you mean load bearing & blast radius, I'd see those used and use them myself very frequently pre LLM, mostly in online discussions though so its telling where they got their training data. Load bearing itself is/was a pretty normal phrase in the ops world in daily discussion. Smoke test though, I can't say I've ever see irl usage.

> Smoke test though, I can't say I've ever see irl usage.

We use it all the time at my employer, and have for decades. They're basic tests to tell you if the app is up or not.

Like: you go to this page, and it shows a big green banner if the app can connect to the database and its disk isn't full. If one of those basic things are wrong you get big red banner or you can't load the page at all.

Re: Various LLM Smells

#232

Post by globular-toast »

spdustin wrote: post #18

- “(The) honest caveat:” (or “genuine caveat:”, both with the colon) - “(The) honest answer:” (again, with colon) - “The thing to internalize:” - “The smoking gun:” (really, sentences that start with “The :” are a strong tell, but those four are the most prolific) - “load bearing” (when not talking about architecture) - “blast radius” (when not talking about actual explosives, but rather the effect of an event/action…

This stuff reminds me of the classic writing style guide Plain Words by Gowers which advises against all of the above nonsense. I absolutely hate the magazine writing style that LLMs seem to love to regurgitate. It's even worse when it's used not for entertainment but for actually conveying information.

Re: Various LLM Smells

#234

Post by tstrimple »

soulofmischief wrote: post #159
ryandrake wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A general pattern for LLMs is that they look really good at things you are bad at. This is true for coding, too, which I think, to a large degree, might explain the polarized differences in opinions on HN about the quality of LLM-produced code. You have the 1. "AI produces code better than I could possibly write, one shots things it would take me days to do, and has made me 10X more productive!" camp, and you have…

LLMs can generate code , but the quality of the code at scale is just not there currently by all important metrics such as security, maintainability, separation of concerns, etc. Today, it's a kind of chaos magic wherein you summon the beast and try your best to contain him, knowing that someone will probably die in the process. Sometimes literally. It's still a force multiplier in the right hands and domain, and age…

I'm tired as fuck of anti-ai zealots pretending like every human is a fucking paragon at programming. I've literally never seen Claude Code produce as bad of code as generated by humans. Literally never. Yet the anti-ai zealots pretend like humans never introduce a bug into a system. Only LLMs produce slop or take shortcuts or ignore tests or do incredibly dumb fucking shit. It's fucking ridiculous. As if The Daily WTF didn't exist before LLMs. The reality is the "average" programmer is far below the skill floor of Claude Code or other frontier models. Those models will write test and explore more edge cases than the "average" developer ever will. But all these zealots pretend like they have only ever worked with the top 1% of the top 1% who never make mistakes or introduce bugs. Ultimately they are full of shit. You're lucky as fuck if your developers can even tell you what common design patterns are. The bar is that low and the HN crowd likes to pretend every developer is Linus Torvalds and not a clueless moron desperately coordinating API layers.

Re: Various LLM Smells

#235

Post by dash2 »

spdustin wrote: post #18

- “(The) honest caveat:” (or “genuine caveat:”, both with the colon) - “(The) honest answer:” (again, with colon) - “The thing to internalize:” - “The smoking gun:” (really, sentences that start with “The :” are a strong tell, but those four are the most prolific) - “load bearing” (when not talking about architecture) - “blast radius” (when not talking about actual explosives, but rather the effect of an event/action…

Codex seems to love threading things through things. I don't usually know what it means, but it sounds clever.

Re: Various LLM Smells

#236

Post by [deleted] »

metadat wrote: post #88

Don't forget about Contrastive Negation : > Contrastive negation is a rhetorical structure that denies a specific idea in the first half of a sentence and asserts an alternative in the second half. > It typically follows an "It’s not X, it’s Y" or "not just X, but Y" formula. Wikipedia also has a great resource which covers many of the common LLM patterns: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

[deleted]

Re: Various LLM Smells

#237

Post by zkmon »

dropbox_miner wrote: post #218
zkmon wrote: post #213

I think we should stop discriminating or the pursuit of detecting LLM-generated content. This is not helping to stop the slop, it causing a harm - making the genuine human-generated content being branded as something bad. It's like branding words like "segregation, black/white" as racist. It is hijacking the common a language patterns and make them unusable in common human expression.

I support this. There is a mass psychological effect emerging out of this AI-content-witch-hunt where people are manufacturing "flaws" to beat the AI-slop allegations. To list out a few personal examples: 1. Several students I knew at GaTech in 2024 taking the algorithm class (which is notoriously hard) started submitting assignments with sub-optimal/brute-force algorithms cuz the TAs kept reporting them for academic…

People are being forced to express in suboptimal ways, just to avoid being detected as slop. Some others are instructing AI to inject some typos or write grammatically incorrect sentences. The whole "hey I detected that you have used AI" is so childish. It is same as "hey I knew that you used a car to get here, instead of walking". Ok, I will drive my car at walking speed and maybe replace it wheels with legs.

Re: Various LLM Smells

#238

Post by amelius »

metadat wrote: post #88

Don't forget about Contrastive Negation : > Contrastive negation is a rhetorical structure that denies a specific idea in the first half of a sentence and asserts an alternative in the second half. > It typically follows an "It’s not X, it’s Y" or "not just X, but Y" formula. Wikipedia also has a great resource which covers many of the common LLM patterns: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

How long until LLMs are taught to avoid the patterns in that wiki page?

Re: Various LLM Smells

#239

Post by eapriv »

> Late last year I started writing a math blog and decided to use LLMs to polish/enhance my writing.

Why would you do that in the first place? If you are just starting writing about math, I assume your goal would be to get better at it, and using LLMs is not how you get better at writing.

Re: Various LLM Smells

#240

Post by rldjbpin »

these stochastic models just replicate what they see in training data. the reddit speak, american english stuff (some through osmosis in pop culture), etc. makes sense when stepping back a bit. but some of these do happen to be from the people based on whom we train everything, and it is interesting when they get in the crossfire from the content perfumer.

also, how come jetbrain mono has become one of these tells is insane to me!

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