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Comment by theteapot | Hacker News Reader

Agree. From the article:

> Here's my favorite part, though. Digging into the data, one of the first things that jumped out at me with blinding clarity was that the worst release, by far, in rsync history was entirely prior to the introduction of Claude ... And yet nobody noticed.

Language really does suggest the article's author does have a dog in this fight and is cloaking opinion in fancy statistics jargon. "Blinding clarity"? All you have to do is draw a plot. And anyway, v3.4.1 was 2025-01-16, technically well within the AI assisted coding era and before attribution was becoming standard practice.

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Also from the article:

> "Claude clearly made things worse" &emdash; the main claim

This article was clearly generated by AI, yet I found no mention/attribution of that by author.

How likely is it than someone who vibe codes articles would also vibe code the underlying analysis and be eager to accept an outcome that is highly validating of that person’s workflow? I’d say very.

Are the numbers wrong? That's the only relevant thing here.

Also, humans do use em dashes, just FYI.

Yes, I do for example.

And the author discussed the use of AI pretty exhaustively in point 0 of the post.

> Are the numbers wrong? That's the only relevant thing here.

Data without interpretation is irrelevant, and correct numbers can be interpreted wrongly, either on purpose or by mistake.

I’m not saying any of that happened here, only that “are the numbers wrong” is not the only thing that is relevant.

> humans do use em dashes, just FYI.

Your parent comment is not complaining about em dashes, they are pointing out the article has a literal “&emdash;” in it.

He did admit as much:

> "The scripts used to fetch the data, collate it into a DuckDB database file, construct the views on that DB, and then do the statistical analysis on that data, were indeed written by GLM 5.1, as was the HTML and much of the original prose for the final report webpage you're looking at right now."

But: "After posting this on Hacker News and recieving [sic] almost no substantive input, discussion, or response on the actual content of the article, I decided to rewrite all of the prose in my own voice. If anyone complains about my verbosity or sentence structure — as they usually do, which is the reason I originally let the AI write the prose, among other reasons obsoleted by templating — they can go fuck themselves."

So rewritten in his own voice. Maybe the m-dashes are from GLM, maybe from the author.

The &emdash; is probably human error, other parts of the HTML correctly use — or Unicode em-dashes. Also: https://github.com/alexispurslane/rsync-analysis/commit/740b...

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