"This means reading light data requires zero locks. No mutex, no spinlock, nothing." threw up red flags, and by the time I got to "But here’s the insight" I couldn't go any further.

LLMs are trained to be precise (and more specifically: semantically precise), especially in the fine-tuning phase. An LLM just trained on the corpus of full human production would surely sound more "human," but it would also probably be pretty useless. So that's why idioms like "it's not X, it's Y" are a dead giveaway; but really, any structure that tries to "guide" our salience is a dead giveaway. Here's a random paragraph from Knuth's Literate Programming†[1]:

> For example, a system program is often designed to gather statistics about its own operation, but such statistics-gathering is pointless unless someone is actually going to use the results. In order to make the instrumentation code optional, I include the word ‘stat’ just before any special code for statistics, and ‘tats’ just after such code; and I tell WEAVE to regard stat and tats as if they were begin and end. But stat and tats are actually simple macros.

I encourage you to read that paragraph a few times. Even if you have no idea what the context is, you get that there's a point, that there's something else to dig into, that the author might be being a bit cheeky. In other words, you can feel Knuth behind the ink. Philosophers would call this intentionality[2]. LLMs produce the polar opposite of garden path sentences[3] (and, imo, that's why they're so easy to spot).

† I specifically picked something technical to illustrate that even in domains where semantic precision is of utmost importance, human expression is still just that: human.

[1] https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/literate-programm...

[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2014/entries/intenti...

[3] https://www.sjsu.edu/writingcenter/docs/handouts/Garden%20Pa...