Upgrading Uber's MySQL Fleet

It's sort of funny how can you immediately tell it's LLM sanitized/rewritten.

Let's delve into why you think that

Yeah, I kinda stopped reading when I felt this. Not sure why? The substance is still interesting and worth learning from but knowing LLM wrote it made me feel icky a little bit

It reads like any of those tech blogs, using big words where not strictly necessary but also not wrong

Don't know about your LLM feeling

I always thought 90% of what management wrote/said could be replaced by a RNN, and nowadays LLMs do even better!

It contains the word "delve", a word that got way more popular in use since the introduction of LLMs.

Also this paragraph sounds a lot like it has been written by LLMs, it's over-expressive:

    We systematically advanced through each tier, commencing from tier 5 and descending to tier 0. At every tier, we organized the clusters into manageable batches, ensuring a systematic and controlled transition process. Before embarking on each stage of the version upgrade, we actively involved the on-call teams responsible for each cluster, fostering collaboration and ensuring comprehensive oversight.

The paragraph uses "commencing from" together with "descending to". People would probably write something like "starting with". It shows how the LLM has no spatial understanding: tier 0 is not below or above tier 5, especially as the text has not introduced any such spatial ordering previously. And it gets worse: there is no prior mention of the word "tier" in the blog post. The earlier text speaks of stages, and lists 5 steps (without giving them any name, but the standard term is more like "step" instead of "tier").

There is more signs like "embark", or that specific use of "fostering collaboration" which goes beyond corporate-speak, it also sounds a lot like what an LLM would say. Apparently "safeguard" is also a word LLMs write very often.

Relevant pg thread on twitter: https://x.com/paulg/status/1777030573220933716

It's simple. Human writing is short and to the point (either because they're lazy or want to save the reader's time), yet still manages to capture your attention. AI writing tends to be too elaborate and lacks a sense of "self".

I feel like this article challenges my patience and attention too much, there is really no need to focus on the pros of upgrading here. We reader just want to know how they managed to upgrade at that large scale, challenges they faced and how the solved them. Not to mention any sane tech writers that value their time wouldn't write this much.

Nah this isn't a big word salad issue. The content is fine. It's just clearly a text written by humans and then rewritten by an LLM, potentially due to the original author(s) not being native speakers. If you feel it's natural English that's fine too ;)

This. Thank you for verbalizing what I struggled to.

This [1] is a good piece on it. Here's [2] anorher good one.

We don't just carry out a MySQL upgrade, oh no. We embark on a significant journey. We don't have reasons, but compelling factors. And then, we use compelling again soon after when describing how "MySQL v8.0 offered a compelling proposition with its promise of substantial performance enhancements", just as any human meatbag would.

[1] https://www.latimes.com/socal/daily-pilot/opinion/story/2024...

[2] https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2024-04-25/excessive...

AI has a preference for dividing everything into sections, especially "Introduction" and "Conclusion" sections.

> Not to mention any sane tech writers that value their time wouldn't write this much.

This is a big part of why the tech is so damn corrosive, even in well-meaning use, let alone its lopsided benefits for bad actors.

Even on the “small” and more-private side of life, it’s tempting to use it to e.g. spit out a polished narrative version of your bullet-point summary of your players’ last RPG session, but then do you go cut it back down to something reasonable? No, by that point it’s about as much work as just writing it yourself in the first place. So the somewhat-too-long version stands.

The result is that the temptation to generate writing that wasn’t even worth someone’s time to write—which used to act as a fairly effective filter, even if it could be overcome by money—is enormous. So less and less writing is worth the reader’s time.

As with free long distance calls, sometimes removing friction is mostly bad.

Scroll to the bottom to see a list of those who claimed to have authored it

every section is just a list in disguise, and gpts LOVE listts

It doesn't get much better if you translate that paragraph from corpo speak to normal language: "We did the upgrade step by step. We did each step in batches. After we already decided how we were going to upgrade the clusters but before actually doing it we asked the teams responsible for keeping the clusters running for their opinion. This helped create an environment where we work together and helped monitoring the process"

I'm sure there are people who write like that. LLMs have to get it from somewhere. But that part especially is mostly empty phrases, and the meaning that is there isn't all that flattering

>It's simple. Human writing is short and to the point (either because they're lazy or want to save the reader's time), yet still manages to capture your attention. AI writing tends to be too elaborate and lacks a sense of "self".

Corporate (and SEO) writing has always been overly verbose and tried to sound fancy. In fact, this probably is where LLMs learned that style. There's no reliable heuristic to tell human- and AI-writing apart.

There's a lot of worry about people being fooled by AI fakes, but I'm also worried about false positives, people seeing "AI" everywhere. In fact, this is already happening in the art communities, with accusations flying left and right.

People are too confident in their heuristics. "You are using whole sentences? Bot!" I fear this will make people simplify their writing style to avoid the accussations, which won't really accomplish anything, because AIs already can be prompted to avoid the default word-salad style.

I miss the time before LLMs...

> Human writing is short and to the point (either because they're lazy or want to save the reader's time)

Good human writing is short and to the point. (Technical writing at least.) But this is not a result of laziness — it’s actually more difficult.

“If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.” - Blaise Pascal, and probably others [0]

In any case I find these LLM “gotcha” comments incredibly tedious.

[0] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/?amp...

I got that feeling as well. In addition, I suspect it was originally written for an internal audience and adapted for the 'blog because the references to SLOs and SLAs don't really make sense in the context of external Uber customers.

If the meatbag was a salesperson though… very believable! ;)

My hypothesis is that long form content generated by LLMs tend to sound like blogspam and press releases because those are exactly the kinds of things they were trained on. Most content generated by humans for public consumption is ANYTHING but succinct.

Their style is much more direct if you just ask them a question or to summarize something. (Although whether the answer is accurate or not is another matter.)

I'm enjoying the replys to this not getting that it's a joke

> it's LLM sanitized/rewritten

LLM is the new spellchecker. Soon we'll we will wonder why some people don't use it to sanity check blog posts or any other writing.

And let's be honest, some writings would greatly benefit from a sanity check.

People write like that to sound good to higher-ups who don't understand what's going on underneath.

There's A LOT of that kind of content to learn from. A brief glance at LinkedIn is all you need.

Scroll to the bottom and look at the authors Its immediately obvious

I don't get it. Why is it so?

Yeah I found this really off putting: it’s not possible for you to have several goals that are all ‘paramount’, and the word ‘seamless’ adds nothing in every place it appears!

I wish it didn’t turn me off the content as much as it does but it’s very jarring.

It was hard to read in places because of that, I need to work out a reverse prompt to make it clearer