igloopan
igloopan on Hacker News
Indeed. People use em dashes. And curly quotation marks. And emojis in headers. And use boldface and italics to emphasize things. And overuse the "it's not X, it's Y" construction. People could also do all of these things at the same time. Or maybe do them sometimes and not other times for fun.
It is obviously impossible to be able to tell with 100% certainty whether or not something is written using AI. But I think this most likely is. Could be that it's just copy edited with AI and not wholly AI slop. Who knows. Either way, it reads very much like AI to me.
That was concrete justification for the underlying vibe.
I have no idea what your long form writing looks like. But can you look at something like this https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/if-you-recognize-me-in-pu... and seriously come out of it not thinking it's AI slop?
> The version of me you know — the writer, the ranter, the one who tears into accessibility failures or rips Linux a new one — that’s a persona.
> Not fake. Not dishonest. Just deliberate.
It’s tuned for the internet, built to survive in a world that eats subtlety alive. It’s the volume turned up, the emotion sharpened, the thoughts sculpted until they’re worth reading.
Or perhaps the radically different stylistic decision of using emojis and using italics and boldface for emphasis in this older blog https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/hellcaptcha-accessibility... could be more convincing?
I agree with what I read of the article before stopping because of how AI this reads.
The user's other blogs also have the same telltale em dash usage and usage of “” instead of "". Reading obviously AI generated text feels unpleasant. I don't know how much thought was put into this. Is this just "hey Claude write me a blog post about the death of the power user"? Maybe they just used AI for proofreading. I can't really know but it's hard to justify putting in effort to read this when there could have been zero effort put into writing it.
Posted by
igloopan on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @10:03AM
from the cacm.acm.org dept.
I think you're missing the context that is the article.
The candy in this case is the people who may or may not go to read your e.g. ramen recipe. The real problem, as I see it, is that over time, as LLMs absorb the information covered by that recipe, fewer people will actually look at the search results since the AI summary tells them how to make a good-enough bowl of ramen. The amount of ramen enjoyers is zero-sum. Your recipe will, of course, stay up and accessible to real people but LLMs take away impressions that could have been yours. In regards to this metaphor, they take your candy and put it in their own bowl.
The historical context behind why that was written is also quite interesting (supposedly to let his father-in-law save face when retiring early).
In the sense that it's primarily startups, YCombinator's workatastartup and Wellfound's job board are similar to the "Who is hiring?" threads, so you might have more success with those in terms of replies. Though as someone applying for 2024 New Grad positions neither seem particularly great for that, unfortunately.
Isn't that the case with all gender-associated traits though? Women wouldn't dress the way they do if society in general didn't reward them for doing so.
I agree that Anki is likely less developer friendly but its popularity does make up for that I feel, with ostensibly state of the art SRS algorithms being published with Anki implementations (
https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki) out of the box.
Though as someone that's solely used Anki for language learning, I do value the ability to remember more words in less time more than ease of development so it's not unlikely Memoet is a better choice for other usecases.