hmm, assuming that this article is part written by claude and part human-written, can anyone help me find a rule of thumb for "how to know if the article is worth reading"?

Because on the one hand, the prose and the presentation is painful (narrating irrelevant points, nonlinear X-axes, ambiguous chart labels, etc etc),

But on the other hand, the result that I'm assuming the author means to communicate ("on these evals, generation quality seems fairly good") sounds worthwhile to share?

Because I really struggle with this question at the moment. Am I allowed to draw an adverse inference that "if the writeup presents irrelevant text side by side with the data, then this may be a sign that the author does not understand the task that they are attempting to write up"?

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stared an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I wrote this blog post myself, with AI for proofreading (typos and grammar, but not style). There were a few singular sentences for which I had a writer's block, but not much besides that.

So, if there are irrelevant remarks, these are mine. :)

Charts are vibe-coded - but it took quite a bit of hand-holding to get something decent. And the logarithmic scale for model size is my conscious choice (against Claude's initial ideas).

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cogman10 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

IMO, whether or not an LLM was used in the writing process doesn't really matter and I think it's a bit annoying that articles are being dismissed out of hand because of that.

The line is "Is this an interesting and accurate article that concisely makes it's case".

LLMs love to burn paragraphs writing about nothing which is why it's generally poor writing. Humans can do the same thing if they are trying to make very little information feel more substantial.

I say, stop trying to determine if an LLM was used and start judging based on your subjective measure that you'd have used before LLMs became widespread.

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Farmadupe an hour ago | parent | next [-]

(If it helps, I ask my own question of myself too -- I mostly don't write code by hand any more as I find that an LLM writes it faster and with less bugs -- Is that therefore proof that my time was never worth my paycheck? I hope not but at the same time I would actually be proud if I had got away with being an accidental charlatan/fraudster at my employer's expense during my entire career)

-----

Similarly, if what I said really is true, I would be implying that LLMs are charlatan/fraudster detectors (to some statistical level). And I refuse on principle to believe that that is actually the case.

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dofm an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My main problem — which I am sure being middle-aged compounds — is that I struggle to retain information that an LLM has written or produced. I cannot explain why but it is a consistent problem.

In a week’s time I might remember the substance of your comment and some of its shape as a matter of course. Nothing LLM-written that I see today will stick, no matter how curated it was.

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cogman10 an hour ago | parent [-]

Perhaps it's just a bias? You are already negatively biased against LLM writing so you disregard stuff you read when you suspect it's an LLM. This could also be a selection bias. It may be that you generally struggled to retain information but you are more aware of it when LLMs are involved.

	▲	dofm 18 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I don't think so, no, because it extends to LLM-generated text I want to recall. I use LLMs to generate starter/tutorial material. I may hate the way Claude writes but I absolutely don't hate the way Gemma 4 writes. But I have to continuously consult it in a way that I do not with human-written text, which gets its message across in a more persistent way I find less troubling. (This non-memorability extends to AI images and video.) You are right that there are some confounding factors in my life but while I was worried about middle age affecting recall, I find actually I am still remembering stuff humans wrote pretty much fine. ETA: there is one thing that I have noticed that does affect recall that is specific to LLMs: watching text roll out word-by-word in LLM chat, I think, damages recall. It's engaging the wrong kind of memory and focus. So I now let it generate and I'm trying to find decent ways to format it e.g. as PDF, to give it the best chance. This could be generational; there were many studies twenty years ago that suggest that people a decade or so younger than me who grew up with full colour books and magazines and multimedia can read less-linear text layouts more comfortably, for example, so it's not out of the question that there's something generational going on here too.

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lowbloodsugar 28 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sure, but if you're going to publish it, at least run it through an edit prompt and tell it to remove clickbait "Its not X, its Y" rubbish. Like literally calling them clickbait has given me better results. Interestingly, I have a lot less trouble with the first draft with Qwen than with Opus.

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JSR_FDED an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Except that wasting the reader’s time became a lot easier with LLMs.

	▲	cogman10 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, LLMs make it a lot easier to produce a lot more garbage. That's not an exception to my point. If something is well written then it doesn't waste the reader's time.

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vardalab 43 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Just ask your freaking agent to read it for you and extract the information. That's what it's all about. Why would I be reading these articles other than information?

	▲	kennywinker 32 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Claude, read Love in the Time of Cholera for me and summarize the information contained. You are an expert book reader and understander. Make no mistakes.

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clircle 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think the advice is the same regardless of AI use: read articles written by authors that have a history of high quality writing.

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JSR_FDED an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

You don’t need anyone’s permission. You have only so much attention, why spend it wading through slop?