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Comment by smartmic | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately written by an AI - that completely takes the wind out of the content and makes me not even want to read any further. The distinction between “production” and “non-production” is also questionable. For an evaluation, I recommend the following original articles (certainly not AI-generated):

- https://sqlite.org/whentouse.html

- https://sqlite.org/different.html

- https://sqlite.org/quirks.html

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I have to disagree with this as off topic.

The blog lists ways to optimize sqlite for production, for those who have already made that choice. But these comment links are about choosing sqlite vs others and differences, which is completely unrelated and unnecessary for those who have already made that choice.

I'm seeing a worrying trend on HN. Nearly for all articles, there is one unquantified, unproven comment at the top saying it's 100% AI — no proof, just baseless emotion of what fits the commenter's writing style. This is the new witch hunt, or virtue trolling.

I read the original article and to be honest, this off topic comment definitely looks more like an AI troll bot wrote it than the article. The troll bot is instructed to do a google search and put 3 source links — no matter how irrelevant they are.

So what is it now — one emotion vs another? If an article has sections and blocks, it's AI. What about infinite poor humans like me who have been writing like this since childhood?

Since LLMs were trained on high quality blog posts, we can no longer have posts that fit the pre-AI definition of high quality? The content must be dumbed down with typis and scatter unconventional words, to prove AI trollers that it's not AI? Or a timelapse video of typing the article?

Instead how about: if you don't want to read the article because it doesn't fit your personal style expectation — just don't bother commenting?

I hope HN would ban AI trolling comments, and discuss substance.

Even your comment looks like it's generated by AI.

"You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes." - Maimonides

I feel like "this is AI" needs to join the ranks "it's not that deep" and "this is a Wendy's" as an annoying thought-terminating cliche.

except 99% of AI—written content is spam. If the article was an ad for some company and also made no sense, would you hate on the guy who commented "this is an ad"?

Because that's not what happened? What? Neither smartmic's root-level comment or rdsubhas's response mention it being an ad. I was criticising adhamsalama's dismissal of rdsubhas's comment as AI, who also said nothing about it being an ad. I'm so baffled. Can you not see the structure or the content of this thread?

did you actually read my comment

I think this is deliberate to make a point. Even an AI doesn't use that many em dashes. GP wants you to question it as a "haha see? I'm human yet you called me an AI just like I thought!"

an unprompted LLM would not incorrectly add spaces on either side of their em dashes.

> This is the new witch hunt, or virtue trolling.

The site has had that forever though. You missed out on the last witch hunt of going after straight white men as the root of all evil.

Try some of the suggestions there and see what works vs doesn't, hell feed it to an LLM and ask what in there is correct.

I'm more than aware that my comment won't move the needle on the AI debate a slight bit, but I do think that the readership deserves some honesty and transparency there. No, not a single LLM ever has "deployed SQLite in Production", had to be on duty during the weekend, had to pop open a terminal to a misbehaving service while on family vacation, nor meaningfully suffer the anguish and stress to hotfix a botched or misconfigured deployment. Only humans have. What makes or breaks a software product, costs you your holiday, and perhaps even your job, probably won't be found in some generic piece of common knowledge rehashed and repackaged with some stylistic tweaks. It's the fine details, the one-off things, those weird edge-cases and compounded factors that in hindsights were obvious but had to be learned the hard way, and hopefully, shared by benevolent contributors.

That's the whole reason why many here put the effort to read/post articles and argue over comments: so there's something non-obvious to be learned. LLMs are effectively "knowledge averagers". They will put together a pretty article that's not worth reading, except maybe if the problem space is completely new to you. And that's the kind of disclaimer I would hope to see ahead of anything LLM-produced, and particularly on this website.

I'm on-call all the time, and the first thing I've taught myself is to not glorify it like some superhero saves the day worship. I'm both proud and (slightly) ashamed each time I handle an incident. It's not a virtue.

How many people who were writing blogs or creating open source tools before signed an on-call oath or declaration? Does that mean they're all wrong or unqualified?

On call avoidance should be rewarded more than on call superheroism. People managing software fail to realize it. Avoidance is stashing enough operational bullet points, mental checklists and manpages.

Everything is generic — because your use case and your operating environment is ONLY yours. Postgres has hundreds of parameters. Nothing is specific or made to satisfy you. If it doesn't, then you don't call the parameter as generic. You choose what to apply for your environment and expectation.

What you're saying is both a wrong reward cycle and it was also not necessary or practical before AI.

> Unfortunately written by an AI - that completely takes the wind out of the content

I don't think the all-too-common "written by AI" remarks are helpful.

The article was informative and useful. That's what matters IMHO.

Hope this becomes a cultural norm outside of HN. You can have AI written text that had some actual human effort put into it [1], but sloppy AI written content should only be meant for anohter AI consumers and not humans.

1 - https://www.ilfoglio.it/il-foglio-ai/2025/03/22/news/a-first...

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