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?
> “Memory oppresses me.” - Severian, The Book of the New Sun
That sort of artistic/humourous flourish isn't in character for an LLM.
“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.”
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
It's not a binary thing, of course, but it's definitely an LLM smell, IMO.
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.
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...