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Comment by darkwi11ow | Hacker News Reader

Scientific Linux was great! Sad to see the blog in its memory having so much llm-speak. I hope one day writing without llm will become a trend.

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Yeah but it seems to be a losing battle, sadly.

Low effort LLM-written content gets upvoted here anyway, despite the writer having little respect for peoples’ time.

I'm surprised it doesn't annoy the author. I use LLMs extensively for code but I cannot stand their natural language output a lot of the time, it always reminds me of that example from Orwell's Politics and the English Language:

Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

> I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern [1946] English:

> Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

A 2026 version of this phenomenon would instead be:

> Here's the thing: success isn't just about talent — it's about timing. The fastest runner doesn't always win. The strongest army doesn't always prevail. Ultimately, life is a complex interplay of skill and chance, and recognizing that can be both humbling and empowering.

That's actually Claude and you can see precisely why the resulting vague language is bad; the LLM has changed the actual meaning of the passage from a sober reflection on the futility of expecting natural justice from the universe to one that emphasises skill and timing, exactly what the author is telling us is futile.

Admittedly the slop text LLMs produce in the 21st century isn't the same as the 20th century slop humans produced, but there's definitely a family resemblance in my view! Orwell was concerned with the idea language can be used to curtail thought, and he disliked what we'd now call slop because it merely gestures at a thought without actually instantiating it directly.

The whole essay is worth a read in my view, it remains highly relevant.

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

People are asking for evidence. FWIW, pangram classifies this post as 97% AI, 3% human.

Any proof?

You obviously can't get proof. But there are enough stylistic tells to confidently say that AI was substantially involved in writing this. It's annoying to read. That's enough to dislike AI writing IMO.

"Scientific Linux was never simply "RHEL with a different wallpaper." It gave the scientific community an institutionally independent implementation of the Enterprise Linux platform."

Subsection titles, and how the text flows. When I read these kinds of LLM-Powered posts, I feel the same thing. Like remembering the taste of some canned food which was not great, but I had to consume to stay alive. It feels like junk food, not optimized to taste great, but doesn't reek of machine oil either. A price-optimized, slightly unhealthy substance which is somewhat compatible with my body because of food engineering magic.

These posts are not only a waste of time, but it also makes me feel deceived and betrayed. Why this is important? Because it's the honest take and bears the load of the reality of the post.

Please, don't make me read something you didn't write.

Disclosure: This post, incl. llm-sounding paragraph is typed by a human. All of the keystrokes are 100% human and made possibe by burning ATPs and firing tiny lightning bolts across some brain cells. No humans are harmed or GPU hours are burned in this comment.

Total water consumption: 50ml of cold spring water, because I'm thirsty.

I just don't see the "LLM-speak" here at all, for example. And I'm very tired of people who throw around the LLM-power critique as an easy criticism when there's no clear basis for it. It's lazy and stupid.

There are certain styles for a post like this that some people may not like but things like subheads and what would be, by historical standards somewhat clipped writing are just how writing in this content is mostly encouraged theese days. I'd just add that when people do post long-form New Yorker pieces there's plenty of whining about getting to the point.

I think this mostly boils down to experience with writing styles. I am an avid reader, albeit mostly read in Ukrainian/Russian, but I can confidently tell whether some paragraph was written by Platonov or Nabokov or Zhadan or Sorokin; even when the guys are stylizing their texts (Sorokin does this all the time) there are still subtle things in how text is composed that tell you who wrote it. If my reading menu was mostly contemporary blogs, probably I would be less sensitive to distinct writing styles.

The first tech book I did with a publisher, I was pretty much told that I needed to break things down more with subheads and the like. And I was already doing some writing of whitepapers and blogs with my then-employer which had a somewhat similar structured style. Certainly very different from Dickens, Trollope, Collins, etc.

I'm not making a value judgement, but modern writing on technical topics has generally been steered toward digestible formats whether or not LLMs are involved.

Until I left, I was on social media and style committees at my former employer and there was a lot of data-based evidence around keeping things (in various multimedia formats) shorter and easier to consume. In fact, we mostly got away from writing white papers at all in favor of shorter pieces.

I don't disagree with you that contemporary technical writing, editing and technical blogs were converging to what is known as llm style even before provisioning of llms. In the end, llm were trained on these recent writing and recent blogs and this is why similarity exists. Still one can find some technical writing that stands aside and has very distinct style without compromising on clarity/digestability, i.e. Martin Fowler, Armin Ronacher, Michell Hashimoto write very differently from each other and Claude, but their content is always sharp and very much digestable. Take this paragraph by Claude

> Scientific Linux gave the scientific community its own implementation of a RHEL-compatible computing environment. More importantly, it kept alive the people, processes, infrastructure, and institutional knowledge needed to maintain one.

> That capability had option value. You might not need to exercise the option this year, or even this decade. It becomes valuable when the assumptions underneath your primary platform change. Those assumptions changed surprisingly quickly.

Can't imagine this lengthy style with paraphrases coming from Hashimoto or Fowler. Yes, it can appear not only in llm writing, but also in some heavily edited o'reilly book, sure, but I miss the times when tech blogs and o'reilly books were different.

I might have avoided the option value phrasing. But both sentences seem pretty ordinary to me and something I would write. But agree to disagree.

Personally, I make at least some things I write more personal but, yes, that tends to be somewhat frowned upon in corporate blogs.

Any proof that you're a human and not a sealion?

Headlines, that are sentences

Headline that goes "A was this" and next headline "Then b was that".

Why would a person use RHEL in the first paragraph, making the assumption that people already know what that means. Then a few paragraphs later, write the full name?

Theoretically a mistake a person could make, but it feels a bit unlikely in this context to me.

Also, the repeating pattern of Prompt:List through multiple paragraphs.

Urgh. Thanks for saving me a click.

After two alineas I was fully convinced it was llm slop and the message it might have intended to pass is completely lost.

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