alt Hacker NewsYou’ve asserted several times in this thread that this is “LLM slop”. Having read a decent amount of math content on the internet, I’m not sure I quite agree, so I’d like to hear why you think it’s LLM slop?
For one, this article has (charmingly?) terrible math rendering, rather reminiscent of someone copy-pasting random pictures of equations from the Internet and supplementing them with Word’s Equation Editor or something. An LLM would have just dumped a pile of LaTeX and called it a day. For another, I don’t sense any of the usual writing tics that are suggestive of LLM writing. I don’t claim either of those are remotely definitive, but my personal feeling is that this was largely hand-written and aimed at a very introductory level (i.e. not the sort of level that will benefit from knowing about Riemann surfaces).
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>Having read a decent amount of math content on the internet
I have written a decent amount of math content. On the internet, and off the internet.
See: https://romankogan.net/math
Do you want to get into a sentence-by-sentence analysis?
> I’m not sure I quite agree, so I’d like to hear why you think it’s LLM slop?
I have pointed out one reason: because the text titled "visual introduction" lacks visuals, and the introduction of complex number in it is purely algebraic without a single picture.
The numbers are introduced algebraically, and then explained visually, after the reader was already confused. You only get anything out of this if you already know complex numbers well enough; in which case it's not an introduction anyway.
The author says, quote "I did use AI assistance for some of the components", so I hope this settles the discussion as to whether it's AI slop or not.
It's not AI slop -- I wrote it and it took quite a long time to write. I did use AI assistance for some of the components and indeed you are right: I did copy paste images (that I mostly generated myself) to try to introduce the concepts in a better way although some people will always have criticisms of almost anything so I take a lot of stuff posted on forums with a grain of salt. It's good to remember behind the wires it is us humans (for the most part) trying to communicate after all and trying to help others. Hopefully the write-up did help some people get the concepts -- I tried to write it in a form that I thought would have helped me more had I had the chance of being reintroduced to imaginary numbers -- a lot of the concepts I included in the write-up were not taught to me when I initially encountered them and I wish they had been.