alt Hacker NewsI think it’s likely there will be methods to fix this soon, some de-slop algorithms, or is there a deep reason it will always be detectable? Perhaps there are some PhD linguists who have figured out how to quantify the “slop” effect and are writing their thesis on it. Once that is done it will be possible to smooth it away.
The book is definitely LLM assisted authoring yet it also has great content, so not sure we can immediately jump to shaming it entirely for being slop.
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It's fairly easy to quite thoroughly "de-slop" writing: Just feed chunk by chunk to a an agent that you make compare the writing to a good piece of human writing, and adjust the writing to match. It won't address structural/content issues, but all the major models are perfectly capable of copying the tone and style of a particular style of writing, and in doing so it tends to remove most of the rough edges.
(The corollary is that the LLM writing you notice is mostly going to be from people who aren't actively trying to hide it from you)
Slop is content not written by a human. By definition, there can be no de-slop algorithms. There can only be algorithms that remove certain telltale signs, fraudulently attempting to present non-human-generated content as human-generated.
> The book is definitely LLM assisted authoring yet it also has great content, so not sure we can immediately jump to shaming it entirely for being slop.
Personally I have an extremely hard time reading text like this and it makes me lose trust in the author. Publishing potentially useful Git knowledge this way is a shame.
Thanks for the kind words, and checking out the book here.
I'd written this piecemeal over the last year or so (originally a series of blog posts), and was happy to release it all for free in a single edition, and under CC.
I'll release an Edition 1.1 soon with some errata, adjustments. There's already a free PDF for the on-the-go -> https://gitperf.com/pdf.html
Regarding the cherry-picking of fragments of an LLM: of course an LLM (in fact several!) were used to stitch together those disparate blog posts into a more coherent whole. And they certainly left an imprint in places. Otherwise, as a solo writer with a full-time job putting together a 200-page book, I'd have to pay an editor, or work with O'Reilly (did this in 2010 on a Redis book; never again!); and perhaps the book wouldn't be free!
LLMs will continue to leave imprints in our work. Some words will, over time, be edited and whittled away. Other words, when the LLM writes well enough to convey a useful point, will be kept.