That header picture is top slop!
Seriously, please stop it. If you talk about an abstract topic, feel free to have no picture, just text.
Seriously, please stop it. If you talk about an abstract topic, feel free to have no picture, just text.
Most of the examples used to justify creation vs consumption can also be explained by low scale vs high scale (cost sensitive at high scale) or portability.
So much writing on the internet seems derivative nowadays (because it is, thanks to AI). I’d rather not read it though, it’s boring and feels like a samey waste of time. I do question how much of this is a feedback loop from people reading LLM text all the time, and subconsciously copying the structure and formatting in their own writing, but that’s probably way too optimistic.
Also, lots of people who use Macs, because it's very easy to type on a Mac (shift-option-hyphen).
The reason LLMs use em-dashes is because they're well-represented in the training corpus.
The article has on average, about one em dash per paragraph. And “paragraph” is generous given they’re 2-3 sentences in this article.
I read a lot, and I don’t recall any authors I’ve personally read using an em dash so frequently. There would be like 3 per page in the average book if human writers used them like GPT does.
And a certain vacuousness. TFA is over 16000 words and I'm not really sure there's a single core point.
The rest of the blog has even more obvious AI output, such as the “recursive protocol” posts and writing about reality and consciousness. This is the classic output you get (especially use of ‘recursive’) when you try to get ChatGPT to write something that feels profound.
Look at the titles of other posts:
> Memory Beaches and How Consciousness Hacks Time Through Frame Density
> Witnesses Carry Weights: How Reality Gets Computed
> From UFO counsel to neighborhood fear to market pricing—reality emerges through weighted witnessing. A field guide to the computational machinery where intent, energy, and expectations become causal forces.
The blog is supposedly about AI agents and MCP (the current top buzzwords)
> Engineer-philosopher exploring the infrastructure of digital consciousness. Writing about Model Context Protocol (MCP), Information Beings, and how AI agents are rewiring human experience. Former Meta messaging architect.
The entire blog is just an LLM powered newsletter play.
As the author, do you just don't see what ridiculous image the slop machine spewed out - a kind of visual dyslexia where you do not register problematic hallucinations?
I can go on for a while hypothesizing, and none of the reasons I can come up with warrant using obviously bad AI slop images.
Is it disdain for your users - they won't see it/they won't care/they don't deserve something put together with care? Is it a lack of self-respect? Do people just genuinely not care and think that an article must have visuals to support it, no matter how crappy?
The mind truly boggles.
Snark aside, I think it's laziness and the shotgun approach. The author writes some rough thoughts down, has an AI "polish" them and generate an image, and posts an article. Shares it on HN. Do it enough, especially on a slow Sunday morning, and you'll get some engagement despite the detractors like us in the comments. Eventually you've got some readers.