The feed of a Hackaday writer brings many surprises, some rubbish, and the occasional diamond which of course we bring to you. Sometimes a page catches the eye that’s not a Hackaday piece per se, but makes for interesting reading. Today there was an example which provides a catalyst for a story if not being one itself.
It’s an AI skill intended to make a slop-writing operation look less sloppy, and since it contains a list of slop behaviours, of course it’s irresistible to turn it on yourself. To delve into the archives, if you will. So here goes, how slop-like is your scribe?
It kicks off with the old favourite, “Delve“. Oh dear, that one’s in the List Hackaday corpus quite a bit. Earliest appearance: 2016. Then landscape terms, in which it’s easy to recognise “Sphere” again. Oops. 2016 again. How about “Testament“? Well, that one’s a 2017 word. “Pivotal“? Four years of the Raspberry Pi, back in 2016. How about “Showcase“? Yup, it’s there, in 2019. Meanwhile “Foster“, goes back to 2017.
Next up are “Leverage” and “Utilise“. Safe ground here. Editors have what are referred to a “Pet Peeves”, language tics that annoy them on sight, and those two regrettable pieces of business-speak never evade this red pencil. The word you are looking for is “Use”.
The page goes on to name a load more words as tells, and we could continue to dissect them for your amusement, but we think you get the message from long-pre-LLM Hackaday. It gets more interesting when it talks about paragraph structure, and there are the things we’d recognise as tells. Staccato paragraphs, one-line stacks for impact, and repeated sentence start words. Whether AI slop is sounding like a business influencer’s Linkedin posts, or the other way round, is anybody’s guess. And yes, Hackaday does use em-dashes — get over it.
It’s amusing to poke mild fun at your past writing style, but if there’s a serious point in there it’s that spotting slop is never as easy as having a check-box list of tells when in fact you’re just looking at professional-grade command of the language. After all, given that Hackaday is in its corpus, the LLM can even make a passable effort at writing like one of us. Perhaps the key lies in that article, when the fake Hackaday piece became obvious because it lacked the inference of the real one.
To be fair AI generated text is easier to read.
this is ai slop. its not keywords. its the way in which it is written
Alright, let’s talk about putting gear through the wringer. I decided to run a proper heavy test on the Creality Pika, and honestly… it surprised me.
I didn’t go easy on it. I threw over 12 different objects at this little scanner. I’m talking pitch-black parts, highly reflective silver-lacquered surfaces, and massive variations in scale. The smallest piece I scanned was a tiny 16×16 mm detail, and the largest was a chunky 45×60 cm element.
The result? Zero tracking losses. No mesh cracking whatsoever. It just locked on and kept up.
I only had to repeat one single scan during the entire session, and that was 100% my fault. I was rushing, missed a few angles, and frankly, I was too lazy to sit around fixing the geometry in 3D modeling software later. A quick rescan solved it.
Bottom line: the Pika seriously does the job. I can recommend it with a clear conscience if you are reverse-engineering or replicating these kinds of elements. Sure, it’s obviously not a dedicated scanner for digitizing an entire car—though, let’s be real, with enough tracking markers and patience, you could probably pull that off too! But for such a compact piece of hardware, it really punches above its weight.
Pika, Pika, Pikachu! :D
its a pattern of communication, not a pattern of vocabulary.
It’s the rhythm, the transitions, the unnecessary elaboration, the exaggerated enthusiasm, and the way everything gets packaged into a neat little narrative.