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When your hash becomes a string: Hunting Ruby's million-to-one memory bug

mensfeld.pl

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Re: When your hash becomes a string: Hunting Ruby's million-to-one memory bug

#41
post #37
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don’t see it. I feel like the “this is AI” crowd is getting ridiculous. Too perfect? Clearly AI. Too sloppy? That’s clearly AI too. Rarely is there anything concrete that the person claiming AI can point to. It’s just “I can tell”. Same confident assurance that all the teachers trusting “AI detectors” have.

That's your issue not ours. It's obvious; if you don't have a problem with it, enjoy reading slop; many people can't stand it and we don't have to apologize for recognizing or not liking it.

I don’t believe you can recognize anything. Like everyone else claiming they can clearly identify AI you can’t actually point to why it’s AI or what parts are clearly AI.

If you could actually identify AI deterministically you would have a very profitable product.

Re: When your hash becomes a string: Hunting Ruby's million-to-one memory bug

#42
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I came to this thread hoping to read an interesting discussion of a topic I don’t understand well; instead it’s this I have opened a wager r.e. detecting LLM/AI use in blogs: https://dkdc.dev/posts/llm-ai-blog-challenge/

> I will make a bet for $1,000,000! > I won't actually make this bet! > But if I did make this bet, I would win! ???

if two parties put up $1,000,000 each and I get a large cut I’ll do the work! one commenter already wagered $1,000, which I’d easily win, but I suspect this would take me idk at least a few days of work (not worth the time). and, again, for a million dollars I’d make sure I win

see other comment though, the point is that assessing quality of content on whether AI was used is stupid (and getting really annoying)

Re: When your hash becomes a string: Hunting Ruby's million-to-one memory bug

#43
post #38
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like it’s on every other article now. The “this is ai” comments detract way more from the conversation than whatever supposed ai content is actually in the article. These ai hunters are like the transvestigators who are certain they can always tell who’s trans.

No. These articles are annoying to read, the same dumb patterns and structures over and over again in every one. It's a waste of time; the content gives off a generic tone and it's not interesting.

say that! that’s independent of whether AI/LLM tools were used to write it and more valuable (“this was boring and repetitive” vs “I don’t like the tool I suspect you may have used to write this”)

Re: When your hash becomes a string: Hunting Ruby's million-to-one memory bug

#44
If I see another AI-written trash article I am going to scream. Overlong, overwritten garbage. People used to write, and there was personality in that writing. Now people believe it's acceptable to generate reams of utter formless shite and post it on the internet.

If you cannot be bothered to write something, why on God's good earth would you expect anyone to be bothered to read it?

Re: When your hash becomes a string: Hunting Ruby's million-to-one memory bug

#45
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parts of it were 100% LLM written. Like it or not, people can recognize LLM-generated text pretty easily, and if they see it they are going to make the assumption that the rest of the article is slop too.

And yet you don’t call out any parts that are 100% AI and how you recognize them as such. I’m not saying there’s no AI here. I am asking for some evidence to back up the claim though.

I can point to individual sentences that were clearly generated by AI (for example, numerous instances of this parallel construction, "No warning. No error. Just different methods that make no sense.", "Not corrupted. Not misaligned. Not reading wrong offsets.", "Not a segfault. Not the T_NONE error from #1079. There it is, the exact error from production"). The style is list-heavy, including lists used for conditionals, and full of random bolding, both characteristic of AI-generated text. And there are a number of other tells as well.

The reason I don't usually bother to bring these specific things up is that I already know the response, which is just going to be you arguing that a human could have written this way, too. Which is true. The point is that if you read the collective whole of the article, it is very clear that it was composed with the aid of AI, regardless of whether any single part of it could be defensibly written by a human. I'd add that sometimes, the writing of people who interact heavily with LLMs all day starts to resemble LLM writing (a phenomenon I don't think people talk enough about), but usually not to this extent.

This doesn't mean that the entire article was written by an LLM, nor does it mean that there's not useful information in it. Regardless, given the amount of low effort LLM-generated spam that makes it onto HN, I think it is fairly defensible to use "this was written with the help of an LLM, and the person posting it did not even bother to edit the article to make that less obvious" as a heuristic to not bother wasting more time on an article.

Re: When your hash becomes a string: Hunting Ruby's million-to-one memory bug

#46
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet you don’t call out any parts that are 100% AI and how you recognize them as such. I’m not saying there’s no AI here. I am asking for some evidence to back up the claim though.

I can point to individual sentences that were clearly generated by AI (for example, numerous instances of this parallel construction, "No warning. No error. Just different methods that make no sense.", "Not corrupted. Not misaligned. Not reading wrong offsets.", "Not a segfault. Not the T_NONE error from #1079. There it is, the exact error from production"). The style is list-heavy, including lists used for condition…

> this parallel construction

“not A, not B, not C” and “not A, not B, but C” are extremely common constructions in general. So common in fact that you did it in this exact reply.

“This doesn't mean that the entire article was written by an LLM, nor does it mean that there's not useful information in it. Regardless, given the amount of low effort LLM-generated spam that makes it onto HN, I think it is fairly defensible”

> The style is list-heavy, including lists used for conditionals, and full of random bolding, both characteristic of AI-generated text

This is just blogspam-style writing. Short snippets that are easy to digest with lists to break it up and bold keywords to grab attention. This style was around for years before ChatGPT showed up. LLMs probably do this so much specifically because they were trained on so much blog content. Hell I’ve given feedback to multiple humans to cut out the distracting bold stuff in their communications because it becomes a distraction.

Re: When your hash becomes a string: Hunting Ruby's million-to-one memory bug

#48
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can point to individual sentences that were clearly generated by AI (for example, numerous instances of this parallel construction, "No warning. No error. Just different methods that make no sense.", "Not corrupted. Not misaligned. Not reading wrong offsets.", "Not a segfault. Not the T_NONE error from #1079. There it is, the exact error from production"). The style is list-heavy, including lists used for condition…

> this parallel construction “not A, not B, not C” and “not A, not B, but C” are extremely common constructions in general. So common in fact that you did it in this exact reply. “This doesn't mean that the entire article was written by an LLM, nor does it mean that there's not useful information in it. Regardless, given the amount of low effort LLM-generated spam that makes it onto HN, I think it is fairly defensibl…

Again, this is why I don't bother explaining why it's very obvious to us. People like you immediately claim that human writing is like this all the time, which it's not. Suffice it to say that if a large number of people are immediately flagging something as AI, it is probably for a reason.

My reply wasn't an instance of this syntactic pattern, and the fact that you think it's the same thing shows that you are probably not capable of recognizing the particular way in which LLMs write.

Re: When your hash becomes a string: Hunting Ruby's million-to-one memory bug

#49

LLM slop. Why do people (presumably) take the time to debug something like this, do tests and go to great lengths, but are too lazy to do a little manual writeup? Maybe the hour saved makes up for being associated with publishing AI slop under your own name? Like there is no way the author would have written a text that reads more convoluted than what we have here.

> LLM slop Is this the new "looks shopped. I can tell by the pixels."?

Every single article or social media post has someone claiming it's AI these days

From what I've seen doesn't it take a particularly strong reason for the entire article to get dismissed

Re: When your hash becomes a string: Hunting Ruby's million-to-one memory bug

#50
post #38
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like it’s on every other article now. The “this is ai” comments detract way more from the conversation than whatever supposed ai content is actually in the article. These ai hunters are like the transvestigators who are certain they can always tell who’s trans.

No. These articles are annoying to read, the same dumb patterns and structures over and over again in every one. It's a waste of time; the content gives off a generic tone and it's not interesting.

Are we reading the same article?

Also, you do realize that writing is taught in an incredibly formulaic way? I can't speak to English as second language authors, but I imagine it doesn't make it easier.

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