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Comment by croemer | Hacker News Reader

Smells of AI writing: "Timestamps aren't enough. Exchanges need a stronger ordering primitive." etc

Interesting comment, I "felt" the ai too in an undescribable way. What are some obvious tells ?

The incessant bullet lists and the conclusion titled "Conclusion" give it away. And above all, the complete lack of "voice". You can tell when a human is speaking and when a sanitised amorphous blob of averageness is speaking.

Also three uses of a semi-colon for no reason. Nobody writes like this.

> The log is the truth; the order book is just a real-time projection of this sequence.

> The book is fast; the log is truth.

> Matching engines can crash; the log cannot.

I need to sharpen my BS sensor. At first glance, I struggled to parse the voice in the article. Going back to the article I can now see the obvious gaps. Generally, AI tends to say things that make us go - "what the hell is this" ? for example in the article "The Problem: Ordering Chaos" is a very weird way to phrase it. As a human I struggled to accept it, and I did by stretching the meaning of that phrase to world model where it made sense. ie, our tendency is to give wide leeway to what we read or see and be very "accepting" in that sense. Instead, i think a better option is to reject everything we see or read as the default.

I didn’t catch it either on the first pass but also felt something was off about the article, as if a human had sanitised most of the AI idiosyncrasies out.

Now I have taken note to auto-distrust any “article” that lacks an author name, who is willing to personally own any accusations of the article being AI slop.

"It isn't <this>, it's <that>" and variations thereof are the biggest tell.

yes, this is AI-assisted writing, I'm not hiding from it. but this isn't just copy-pasting. I still spend up to 15 hours working on each article.

Considering that you chose to not include your name or even a HN username in the byline of the article, there is an argument to be made that you are, in fact, hiding from it.

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