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Comment by amoss | Hacker News Reader

Not my kind of thing but still a highly enjoyable read. I love a tale of a software engineer who has gone down a rabbit-hole so deeply that they've come out the other side. And who doesn't like data?

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And he's got a great way with words as well.

Unfortunately it smells of ChatGPT at points.

You're correct, but when the worst the ChatGPTisms get is turns of phrases like "LeetCode youth finally paid off: turns out all those "rebalance a binary search tree" problems were preparing me for salami, not FAANG interviews." or "Designing software for things that rot means optimising for variance, memory, and timing–not perfection. It turns out the hardest part of software isn't keeping things alive. It's knowing when to let them age.", then I'm inclined to forgive it compared to how many far more egregious offenders are at the top of HN these days. This is a rather mild use of ChatGPT for copyediting, and at least I feel like I can trust OP to factcheck everything and not put in any confabulations.

> That's when it clicked:

> You know the drill:

etc etc.

If these are hand-typed, I'll eat my hat.

The problem with assessing nerd writing for whether it's AI-assisted is that the AIs themselves are trained on nerd writing.

Exactly this. I often feel plagiarized by AI.

If you were talking about some essays I wrote in the early 2000s, you’d be buttering your Stetson. It’s hilarious to me that several of my blog posts from 20 years ago have been called out as AI generated lol.

I agree. I've written like this too, but these days when you see it it's more likely to be AI.

I actually think if I were writing blog posts these days I'd deliberately avoid these kinds of cliches for that reason. I'd try to write something no LLM is likely to spit out, even if it ends up weird.

You're absolutely right!

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