OP here, thanks for the feedback. Just curious - anything specific? I spent long time getting to some sort of framework for my writing and being called LLM is my constant struggle.
- the bloat, the amplified writes, the vacuum babysitting
- every charge traces to a decision, not a defect
- the verdict that spreads from community to community always stops one question early
- watch the damage happen yourself
Here's one way of how to write it in simpler language:
> These are not user mistakes and it's easy to reproduce these issues in a few lines of SQL on the latest version of Postgres. We're going to go through each of these problematic cases one by one to understand what's happening. Next, we're going to look at how other databases are solving it. Turns out there is no silver-bullet here: Postgres just makes a different set of trade-offs than other databases.
I think jdnier nailed the phrases that most stuck out for me. I also agree that I would rather hear your own voice, even if you think it's less polished.
The problem is when reading something that has those LLM tells, I immediately wonder if any of the information has been vetted, and I wonder just how much LLM-fluff I'm going to have to wade through to get the information.
I can see you didn't just let the LLM do everything here and your own experience has guided and shaped the article. It is a good article overall, but the LLM-isms create a nagging sense of doubt about the quality which is hard to shake.
For me it's the rythm. It's a list of chapters, each with a list of subchapters, plenty of bulleted lists, and paragraphs of close to equal size with sentences of close to equal size. Everything is trying to be an element with an impact. Each sentence, each paragraph, each entry in a list, each list, each subchapter... feels like I'm being hit with an impact drill. This! Then this! Now this! Conclusion! But there's more!
I will give them one positive though: They didn't actually label it "conclusion". That's always been a signal to me that someone doesn't know how to tie their thoughts together and is just blindly following the intro-body-conclusion pattern for essays from gradeschool.
Do all the writing yourself, use LLMs for research and as an editor only. When using an LLM as an editor never copy its verbatim suggestion into your prose.
I see. I guess that makes sense, popularity-wise. I imagine the results were in the vicinity of PostgreSQL anyway, considering the similarity of approaches.
well, let's say it depends what audince. This particular topic came as part of talks I deliver on Postgres internals and my webinars. Same story. Again and again.
But I do get the point. Here the goal was - there's no perfect solution. Just characteristics to be aware of.
Given the anti-LLM sentiment here I need to get offline and not get affected by it.
Your post has a trove of really good data. A lot of care, skill and attention must have gone into building that kind of expertise. When you then use an LLM to produce a post about it, that comes off as lazy. It wouldn't have to be that way, but sadly very (very!) often is.[0]
Writing well is hard. Editing text to be readable is hard. Shortcutting that process is a signal to your audience that you do not appreciate their time. I use LLMs at work to generate client-facing analyses, but I never let a single version go out without doing at least some revising. LLMs love nothing more than to generate another token, which makes their output flowery and verbose. They overuse rule of three, without any of the underlying understanding why it works, let alone when (and how) to break it intentionally.
I spotted the familiar "seesaw cadence" in your post but ploughed through because the content itself was still damn good. It's a shame that you did not put the same level of care into your writing that has gone into developing the technical expertise. Getting the post flagged because of the generic anti-LLM sentiment is undesirable but expected. HN doesn't have a way to mark posts as "sloppy writing but content-wise really good".
It's the same kind of visceral reaction this crowd tends to have towards voice notes: "if you did not bother to condense your thoughts and instead dumped half an hour of rambling for me to dig through, why would I waste as long to listen to you not being able to say it clearly?" ["Podcast for none"]
Markus never fails to deliver. I actually haven’t realised how SQL standard handles ORDER BY on non-selected columns by just rewriting the SELECT clause behind your back.
