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Comment by MDTHLN | Hacker News Reader

> The lethal puzzle is a generator, and any rule can ask for it.

Ashamed of myself for getting halfway through the article before realising it was AI written.

Same. The underlying story is interesting and horrifying (but also unsurprising), but the LLM write-up sucks all the air out of it.

I want to hear about the human author's motivations for doing this, the hard parts of doing the deobfuscation, their emotions when finding out what it did, etc. This is none of that.

Hah, you can literally tell from the subheader.

> Rules downloaded from their server decide your pieces, your score and your ads. One waits for an expensive ad, then asks for a hand you can’t place.

I wouldn't be able to tell. No load bearing or is not x, it's y.

I actually don't mind if it's good enough, informative and not overly long.

Haven't really read anything super well written (in terms of language and form) lately, other than a really fun hn comment summarizing Trump's War.

But I just haven't read that much lately.

The tell here is the "One ..., then ... <negative>". This is "not X, it's Y" with the clauses reordered.

For some reason the current crop of LLMs are really insistent on generating contrast between two things in every statement.

The problem is that the "it's not X it's Y" construction is very useful, and shows up a lot in human-written text.

I think its really not all that common outside of Accenture pitch decks.

>The tell here

Is this AI written? It has "this is the smoking gun" vibes, just rewritten.

I don't know precisely what to call it, but there is something about AI's word choice and phrasing that really stands out to me.

It's like it chooses "simple" words, but uses them in unclear or fuzzy or slightly abnormal ways that make the overall meaning more difficult to parse. On its own, each instance is defensible, but the aggregate result when it happens many times over is very tiring to read. It reminds me of XKCD's "Up Goer Five": https://xkcd.com/1133/

Like this:

> One waits for an expensive ad, then asks for a hand you can’t place.

It reads as though it started with a straightforward idea, and then was forced to express it with words of only one syllable.

I've read too much Claude slop. It's very easy to spot the sentence construction.

The more AI slop you read the more you'll notice its patterns.

This line stands out to me:

> One waits for an expensive ad, then asks for a hand you can’t place

Something about “asks for a hand you can’t place” just triggers the alarm bell. I think it’s unfortunately because I’m reading a lot of AI at $job. I do read books in my free time but something about the patterns…

Some more quotes from early on:

“Most of Block Blast isn’t in the app you install”

And then

“It waits for three things to line up: you finished your last three rewarded ads, the ad loaded right now is worth at least 3.5 times your last one, and you’re 1,000 points past your high score. All three get checked in one function.”

A really big AI tell for me is sensationalism and drama about things that don’t matter. Ok, fair, checking code in one function doesn’t seem dramatic. But consider this: a paragraph is building to a conclusion. You have a fairly long sentence, then a short sentence. The contrast in length gives the short sentence a lot of emphasis when I read it. In a newscaster voice: “all three get checked.. in one function”

But obviously it doesn’t matter at all, even to the technical reader, if they check this in one function or multiple functions. AI does this ALL the time, they emphasize some implementation detail that’s true, but completely irrelevant to the point the author wants to make. In fact this detail really should be removed from the article completely because it adds LITERALLY nothing to our understanding of how this app works.

So my alarm bells go off because a technical writer probably wouldn’t emphasize that point.

I’m not actively analyzing that, but when I read AI, I notice emphasis on things that are entirely irrelevant. The text starts feeling self-important about complete nonsense.

I think it all adds up for me, and I just notice the patterns in a surprising number of blogs and YT videos. It gets distracting, but IMO the bigger issue is that the wrong details are put in focus, so explanations get hard to follow.

Claude loves announcing counts as well.

“X things follow”, or from your example, “It waits for Y things to line up”.

I started reading on the assumption it was posted here because it was interesting, but this paragraph cinched it:

> 1. You finished your last three rewarded ads. Every time a rewarded ad starts, the rule pushes false onto a list and keeps the latest three (lines 174–183). If the ad SDK reports that the reward was earned, it flips that entry to true (191–199). The check needs all three to be exactly true:

Pointlessly spun out prose. Pointless headers everywhere. Pointless lists. Yes, we understand what a list of booleans is, and that the game looks for a state where the last three are true. No need to spell it out like that.

Why do people post crap like this? Why do people post it to Hacker News? There is some merit to dissecting an attention sink ad-driven game, but this article just makes me feel like my attempt to grasp the meaning and writer's views fails every time — like I'm trying to grasp stalks of grain in a field, but my hand keeps passing through them as if they were holograms.

I would very much like to read people's thoughts with a forbearance for awkward prose, bad spelling, or suboptimal outlining, instead of that I get rewarded by text where the human who prompted it is suddenly absent.

Fuck this new AI world.

While lots of parts of the article isn’t written well, the subject and what is uncovered is very interesting.

That is why it is posted.

I think the bar should be higher. Incomprehensible is not justified by an interesting topic.

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