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.
> 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 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.
For some reason the current crop of LLMs are really insistent on generating contrast between two things in every statement.
Is this AI written? It has "this is the smoking gun" vibes, just rewritten.
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.
> 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.
“X things follow”, or from your example, “It waits for Y things to line up”.