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Comment by Starlevel004 | Hacker News Reader

> Designing a product with billions of eyeballs on it isn't just challenging — it requires a fundamentally different approach.

I'm not reading this.

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Their design approach wasn’t particularly unusual, so I’m not sure what that sentence means.

I do miss the days when technical reports were clear and concise. This one has some interesting information, but it’s buried under a mountain of empty AI-written bloat.

It's annoying because it is a super common widget and it is interesting work, the first draft or literally even prompt they gave the AI probably would've been a great post, all they had to do was not ensloppify it...

It doesn't mean anything. It is just there to be there and catch low-hanging RL reward granting eyeballs.

I agree this thing went on forever and seemed to have multiple summaries of the same concepts.

To CloudFlare employees: This is a super interesting topic, but next time we'd rather hear from you, grammar mistakes and all, not from AI.

If I want AI slop, I'll gladly have a chat with my paid $20 bucks Gemini account.

I remember back I think around 2011, CF was new and I was testing it on some vbulletin forum, all the email communication were with the cofounder if I recall correctly, the UI had only the dns settings back then. Now they make a whole article on some text redesign, time flies.

That's why I say most AI content isn't just slop—it's fundamentally about deception. It's about tricking someone into believing that a text was written by a human, or that a photo or video is a true recording of a real event.

Like this, its purpose is to fly under the radar unless your figurative ears are pricked up and primed to detect the telltale signs. Fuck this shit.

Can’t tell if the “it’s not X — it’s Y” as your first sentence is intentional irony or not lol

You're absolutely right!

Did you base the AI use on the emdash or is this an a common AI phrase (or both)?

“It’s not X, it’s Y” is an absolutely ubiquitous AI pattern. Throw in an em-dash and it’s basically ai;dr

Thx!

"Not just X -- it's Y" is one of the more irritatingly common signs, especially for sentences like that one which absolutely do not need it.

The Wikipedia article on detecting AI writing is a big help if you need to calibrate your sensors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

I see, thx for the article too!

I think I'll actually post the article here, quite useful

Yeah it’s basically the prose equivalent of getting too much radio play - hilarious how the breakthrough of LLM content has ‘ruined’ “it’s not X—it’s Y” for so many of us now

Maybe, like overplayed pop songs, in 20 years or so we’ll come around to viewing the phrase fondly.

> "Not just X -- it's Y" is one of the more irritatingly common signs ...

It's a bit of a "Karen AI" telltale sign. It's probably been trained on a lot of "I-know-it-all-Karen" posts and as a result we're bombarded with Karen-slop.

Thanks for the Wikipedia tip.

It's not just overused phrasing — it's the hallmark of LLM prose.

It's also just an utterly meaningless statement. Filler words with no value whatsoever.

"Let's be honest" is another extremely strong tell.

Yet again [0] quality standards seem to have slipped on the cloudflare blog. I'm not able to point at a cause, but it's not painting a pretty picture.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46781516

It kinda looks like employees need to make a blog post about something twice a month.

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