Truly enjoyed this article, but hate to admit one thing: I'm so burned by AI slop that once I noticed this seems to have been "assisted" by an LLM, I got irrationally angry because I felt tricked.
It hit me at the end, when I read this:
> The idea behind Ambiance is simple: the model's priors [...] Everything else here is just in service of that.
I've noticed "in service of" take off similar to "load-bearing" with LLMs, and the whole structure just pattern matched to Claude for me.
I went back and scanned it over again, and noticed several other tells:
* "Think of U/L [Unix / Linux] as a motivating analogy rather than a direct comparison."
* "Priors" _and_ "a priori" used in the same article.
* "A real kernel […]. The Ambiance Kernel […]. The Kernel […]." — LLMs love this pattern.
To be abundantly clear, *I'm not calling this AI SLOP*; it's obvious that a human put a lot of thought into this, gives a shit about the topic, and shared interesting ideas leading to a productive discussion. I really did like it.
There's just something empty or hollow about the LLM style; paraphrasing Joni Mitchell "there's something lost and some thing gained" [1] when using AI. Your writing, your code is more consistent, more structured, more planned out — generally better but in a way that loses the character behind human writing.
[1]: From "Both Sides Now", a great song about looking something from two perspectives: youthful innocence, and jaded cynicism. Listen to the original 1969 version first, and then the 2000 remake as you can tell she's singing from the respective perspectives. Deeply meaningful song!
It hit me at the end, when I read this:
> The idea behind Ambiance is simple: the model's priors [...] Everything else here is just in service of that.
I've noticed "in service of" take off similar to "load-bearing" with LLMs, and the whole structure just pattern matched to Claude for me.
I went back and scanned it over again, and noticed several other tells:
* "Think of U/L [Unix / Linux] as a motivating analogy rather than a direct comparison." * "Priors" _and_ "a priori" used in the same article. * "A real kernel […]. The Ambiance Kernel […]. The Kernel […]." — LLMs love this pattern.
To be abundantly clear, *I'm not calling this AI SLOP*; it's obvious that a human put a lot of thought into this, gives a shit about the topic, and shared interesting ideas leading to a productive discussion. I really did like it.
There's just something empty or hollow about the LLM style; paraphrasing Joni Mitchell "there's something lost and some thing gained" [1] when using AI. Your writing, your code is more consistent, more structured, more planned out — generally better but in a way that loses the character behind human writing.
[1]: From "Both Sides Now", a great song about looking something from two perspectives: youthful innocence, and jaded cynicism. Listen to the original 1969 version first, and then the 2000 remake as you can tell she's singing from the respective perspectives. Deeply meaningful song!