I also love the visualizations but I'm getting heavy LLM vibes from the prose:
> One setting drives this,...
> The cost is now about the rows you actually touch, not rounds times table size.
Etc.
I get the brain scramblies [1] from trying to parse this writing style at work so I hate to see it elsewhere. Apologies if I'm wrong. But if I'm not then OP don't use an LLM to write for you. It's hazardous to your reader's health [2].
Where were the facts invalidated? Why can't a reader despise a writing style that LLMs converge towards?
I think you're right on your last point, btw, nobody will care and we'll be the poorer for it. Just like how McDonald's and Walmart have driven out and undercut localized taste and culture in the US, so it shall be with writing of all kinds. It's happening right now and readers are getting used to reading the intellectual equivalent of a Big Mac.
It's not even a matter of despising or liking the style, it's a matter of actually being able to interpret it and makes sense of it in a useful way. Even Claude sometimes gets confused by the dense metaphor-heavy obtuse Claude style.
True, but I don't know. I'm not going to gatekeep the transmission of information (how could anyone?) but there's a certain level of ennui here for me and the easiest tell comes from the writing style. I still think there would be something lost in "claude write me a blog, don't use load-bearing".
We invented algorithms and machines that ostensibly understand and interpret our words and can make things happen, which is a revolution of understanding. From a legibility perspective, these machines now can "understand" me just as well as if I were writing like Gene Wolfe, yet instead of embracing the idea of "wow I can talk to a computer" we have an overweight on "wow, I can have computer talk to everyone else on my behalf!".
Even if the transmission of information here was perfect I'd still question the utility of outsourcing your brain on writing a very short article compiled from release notes.
Do not engage. This thread is loaded with bicker-bait.
Apparently the readability of LLM prose seems to trigger stupid "tabs vs. spaces" style arguments. I encourage you to save your time and energy and do something productive with it instead.
Agree, bike shedding about something like writing style, which unlike tabs-vs-spaces, doesn't even have an objectively correct answer, is not productive.
My manager was previously whining about something similar when it comes to generated reports and I just pulled down all of his writing and made the LLM write in his style, he is really content now. Do the same using your own writing and you wont have to be offended
I get the brain scramblies [1] from trying to parse this writing style at work so I hate to see it elsewhere
This sounds to me a lot like mass hysteria, people reading other people's behaviour online and reproducing it unconsciously.
More and more really important and useful information will arrive like this for us to consume. There's no way around. So this is a disservice for newcomers that could come and go unscathed but instead is crippled by these kinds of comments that brings nothing of substance to the table and has the potential to make them hate something they otherwise wouldn't even notice.
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
This sort of writing decreases readability. People say "just have your own LLM rewrite it" like you don't lose value when you go from prompt -> slop you didn't review enough to clean this crap up in -> someone else's prompt to change the style -> finally someone reads it.
Do you know what happens a double-digit percentage of the time when I ask Claude to rewrite some shit that it gives me like this? It says things like: "I overstated this, I rechecked and actually..." or "this claim doesn't hold up, actually [this other thing is true]..."
So it's a sign that the claims in the post likely weren't vetted very hard.
So if you aren't proofreading I'm gonna be skeptical. And saying "deal with it" doesn't rescue it. Does it?
Everything is low-effort writing if your judgement is ideologically charged. Just read the damn post, it's very good, there's nothing low effort, but you need to read it as one single piece, not dissect it looking for hints of LLMisms, killing the article in the process.
Also if you think LLMisms so bad it's spam, you also don't get a free pass. From the guidelines:
If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.
Great visualization. Side note their new c++ extension api is also gonna be faster from the perspective of development / distribution of those extensions
Totally valid technique in my opinion. Even with last year's technology, LLMs were really good at synthesis of small details, which, combined with their encyclopedic knowledge of everything ever written down about computers and programming, and their infinite capacity to run adhoc experiments and build out test infrastructure, made them very good at debugging and performance optimization.
> One setting drives this,...
> The cost is now about the rows you actually touch, not rounds times table size.
Etc.
I get the brain scramblies [1] from trying to parse this writing style at work so I hate to see it elsewhere. Apologies if I'm wrong. But if I'm not then OP don't use an LLM to write for you. It's hazardous to your reader's health [2].
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipUJq-odt5Q
[2]: https://discourse.haskell.org/t/how-to-keep-enjoying-program...
> Storing a lake as thousands of 1 MB Parquet files is a bad practice anyway, and 2.0 does not rescue it.
The "does not rescue it". No human would write like that.
> I'll explain what that means on a table you already know.
No I don't already know that table.
Also
> and claims 40x on graph reachability
Is really hard to parse.
The section on recursive CTEs wasn't well written and didn't explain how the optimisation was done.
I think you're right on your last point, btw, nobody will care and we'll be the poorer for it. Just like how McDonald's and Walmart have driven out and undercut localized taste and culture in the US, so it shall be with writing of all kinds. It's happening right now and readers are getting used to reading the intellectual equivalent of a Big Mac.
We invented algorithms and machines that ostensibly understand and interpret our words and can make things happen, which is a revolution of understanding. From a legibility perspective, these machines now can "understand" me just as well as if I were writing like Gene Wolfe, yet instead of embracing the idea of "wow I can talk to a computer" we have an overweight on "wow, I can have computer talk to everyone else on my behalf!".
Even if the transmission of information here was perfect I'd still question the utility of outsourcing your brain on writing a very short article compiled from release notes.
Apparently the readability of LLM prose seems to trigger stupid "tabs vs. spaces" style arguments. I encourage you to save your time and energy and do something productive with it instead.
More and more really important and useful information will arrive like this for us to consume. There's no way around. So this is a disservice for newcomers that could come and go unscathed but instead is crippled by these kinds of comments that brings nothing of substance to the table and has the potential to make them hate something they otherwise wouldn't even notice.
Also, from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:
This sort of writing decreases readability. People say "just have your own LLM rewrite it" like you don't lose value when you go from prompt -> slop you didn't review enough to clean this crap up in -> someone else's prompt to change the style -> finally someone reads it.
Do you know what happens a double-digit percentage of the time when I ask Claude to rewrite some shit that it gives me like this? It says things like: "I overstated this, I rechecked and actually..." or "this claim doesn't hold up, actually [this other thing is true]..."
So it's a sign that the claims in the post likely weren't vetted very hard.
So if you aren't proofreading I'm gonna be skeptical. And saying "deal with it" doesn't rescue it. Does it?
Also if you think LLMisms so bad it's spam, you also don't get a free pass. From the guidelines: