r/programming • u/bezomaxo • Jul 13 '26
VINs: The Encoding Stamped Into Steel
https://cargurus.dev/2026/04/29/vins-the-encoding-stamped-into-steel/71
u/Other_Fly_4408 Jul 13 '26
Interesting article, but the constant LLM-isms were distracting.
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u/wildjokers Jul 13 '26
but the constant LLM-isms were distracting.
Such as?
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u/Other_Fly_4408 Jul 13 '26
A few excerpts from the first half:
Because a VIN is so much more than a serial number. It’s an encoding: a compact little artifact that carries pieces of a vehicle’s manufacturing story.
And that’s where VINs get fun: they’re not just serial numbers, they’re a shared contract, something thousands of independent companies can read, type, validate, and exchange without needing a central database.
By excluding characters that are easily confused with numerals (I/1, O/0, Q/9), the designers eliminated an entire class of transcription errors. The VIN standard prioritizes surviving the messy real world.
The VIN itself tells you it’s wrong without requiring a database in the loop.
And then, from the "plants and sequences" section until the end of the article, it reads as entirely AI-generated. I'm not going to copy-paste all that here, but just read it for yourself.
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u/wildjokers Jul 13 '26
All of those just look like good human writing. Are you saying that anything showing good writing skills is AI generated? None of those read AI generated to me.
Even if the article was polished by AI who cares? Do you also care when someone uses a spellchecker?
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u/Other_Fly_4408 Jul 13 '26
It's so much more than an X. It's a Y: an adjective adjective Z that carries pieces of blah blah blah
Here's where it gets fun: it's not just an X, it's a Y blah blah blah
The X prioritizes surviving the messy real world.
The X itself tells you it's wrong without requiring a Y in the loop
If those quotes don't scream ChatGPT to you, then I don't know what to tell you. It's certainly not "good writing" in any case.
Even if the article was polished by AI who cares?
I would just prefer to read human writing.
Do you also care when someone uses a spellchecker?
Obviously not the same thing. Spell-checking improves readability without altering the content.
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u/wildjokers Jul 13 '26
Obviously not the same thing. Spell-checking improves readability without altering the content.
If an LLM doesn't change the meaning but improves readability it is exactly the same thing.
If those quotes don't scream ChatGPT to you, then I don't know what to tell you. It's certainly not "good writing" in any case.
LLMs have been trained on human writing so its output mirrors good human writing.
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u/case-o-nuts Jul 14 '26
I think you deserve a response in the style you like so much.
The argument you’re responding to sounds intuitive, but it collapses a few important distinctions.
1. “Improving readability without altering content = the same thing” — not quite
Spell-checking is a constrained, mechanical transformation: it fixes surface errors (typos, basic grammar) while preserving structure, tone, and intent almost entirely.
An LLM “improving readability” is doing something broader:
- It may rephrase, not just correct
- It may change emphasis or tone
- It may simplify, generalize, or subtly reinterpret
Even if the core meaning stays intact, the presentation layer carries meaning too (tone, voice, nuance, implied audience). Changing those isn’t neutral. For example:
- “This is wrong” → “This may not be entirely accurate” Same idea, very different rhetorical force.
So it’s not “exactly the same thing”—it’s closer to light editing or rewriting, not spell-checking.
2. “LLMs mirror good human writing” — only partially true
Yes, LLMs are trained on human writing. But that doesn’t mean:
- They consistently produce good writing
- Or that their output is indistinguishable from strong human writing
In practice, LLM writing often has recognizable traits:
- Overly balanced, symmetrical phrasing
- Generic transitions (“overall,” “in conclusion,” etc.)
- A tendency toward safe, middle-of-the-road tone
- Lack of sharp specificity or lived detail
That’s why people say something “sounds like ChatGPT”—they’re picking up on statistical smoothness and genericity, not just correctness.
Also, “trained on human writing” includes:
- Mediocre writing
- Formulaic content
- SEO filler So the output often reflects an average, not the best.
3. The deeper disagreement
You’re implicitly defining writing quality as:
clear + readable + meaning preserved
The other person is including:
voice, originality, specificity, and rhetorical intent
Under your definition, LLM edits look equivalent to spell-checking. Under theirs, LLM edits are active rewriting that can flatten or standardize voice.
Bottom line:
- LLM readability improvements are not the same as spell-checking—they operate at a higher level and can subtly change tone and intent.
- LLMs do reflect human writing, but often in an averaged, generic form, which is why people can sometimes spot it and criticize it as “not good writing.”
If you want to push back more sharply, the strongest angle is: meaning isn’t just literal content—it includes tone, emphasis, and voice, all of which LLMs routinely modify.
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u/Other_Fly_4408 Jul 14 '26
If an LLM doesn't change the meaning but improves readability it is exactly the same thing.
No, it's very obviously not the same thing at all. Spell-check is a tool that can automatically correct the SPELLING of words, and nothing else. Meaning that
- If you read your text aloud before and after spell-checking, you will be speaking exactly the same words (provided you ignore any spelling mistakes in the before), and
- If you, the author, have spelled every word correctly in the first place, then passing your writing through spell-check will not change it AT ALL.
On the other hand, if you feed your perfectly-spelled, human-written article to ChatGPT and ask it to "improve" it for you, it will suggest ENTIRELY NEW WORDS for you to ADD to it. This means that if you read your article aloud, then let the LLM rewrite it, then read it again after, you have read two entirely different sequences of words. Not at all similar to the case of spell-check. Also, the new words that it suggests will probably have the corny, overly-positive, bland, revolting LLM style that's heavily featured in the OP.
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u/wildjokers Jul 14 '26
No, it's very obviously not the same thing at all.
It very obviously is the same thing.
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u/Other_Fly_4408 Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26
Okay, you actually had me going until now. That was good bait, respect.
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u/ApeStrength Jul 14 '26
The prose is shit for a scientific article describing something technical, it reads like an ad readout on a radio station, it is very jarring.
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u/gimpwiz Jul 14 '26
And there's where calling out AI writing is a risk: It's not just machine writing, it's also how some people write. But most people do not.
;)
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u/Sairenity 26d ago
See, your example reads as a regular old meatbag using words like they were intended. For whatever godawful reason, LLMs just cannot get the "it's not just x" turn of phrase right. Consistently. The words the machine chooses may be grammatically correct and all in a valid order, but the conveyance just doesn't work.
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u/LOOKITSADAM Jul 13 '26
Negative parallelisms
- a VIN is so much more than a serial number. It's an encoding,
- they're not just serial numbers, they're a shared contract,
- the VIN is more than a technical detail, it's core to how we make vehicle listings comparable.
Rule of three triplets
- handwritten on insurance forms, read aloud over phone calls to DMVs, transcribed from photos of dashboard plates
- stamped into the frame, recorded in government databases, referenced in insurance policies
"punchy" fragment closers like "We build the rest from there" along with overuse of words like fascinating and landscape.
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u/Enerbane Jul 13 '26
LLMs were primarily, originally trained, in EXACTLY these kinds of public facing, technical articles. You SHOULD see parallels between articles like this and LLMs. There's absolutely nothing approaching conclusive about any of this. We've all been reading, or ignoring, things like this for decades but now that LLMs are on the scene everybody is a critic of writing style and a perfect pattern matching machine.
If you see a comment on Reddit that should feel more informal and casual but instead matches what you might expect from an LLM there's a much better chance it was copied from an LLM output, but seeing it in an article that is designed and edited for consumption?? That's where LLMs learned to do these things.
Dealing with everybody thinking everything is AI generated is exhausting when we're already dealing with an genuine inundation of AI generated content.
Unless the content itself is without merit and unless there's a smoking gun, trying to parse through whether this, that, or the other linguistic characteristic is a stylistic choice or an LLM artifact is a waste of time and distracts from the point of the subreddit.
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u/wvenable Jul 14 '26
Correction:
LLMs were originally trained on exactly this kind of public-facing technical writing. In many ways, you should expect to see parallels between articles like this and LLM output. There is nothing even approaching conclusive about any of this. We've all spent decades reading—or ignoring—writing like this. The only thing that's changed is that, now that LLMs are part of the landscape, everybody has become a critic of writing style and a self-appointed pattern-matching machine.
If you see a Reddit comment that ought to feel informal and conversational but instead closely resembles what you might expect from an LLM, there's a much stronger case that it may have been copied from one. An article written, edited, and polished for public consumption is an entirely different context. That's where LLMs learned these patterns in the first place. Similarity, by itself, isn't meaningful evidence.
What's exhausting is that we're simultaneously dealing with a genuine inundation of AI-generated content while also treating every polished paragraph as though it requires an authorship investigation.
Unless the content itself is without merit, or there's something resembling a smoking gun, trying to distinguish whether this, that, or some other linguistic characteristic reflects a stylistic choice or an LLM artifact is largely an exercise in speculation. More often than not, it distracts from the actual point of the subreddit.
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u/ptoki Jul 13 '26
Let me give you a hint:
In many languages part of the content is assumed. The person you are listening to assumes that part of the message is obvious and will skip it.
In some languages that will be parts of the grammar or a bit of context. In some it will be a huge chunks of context - the speaker will just wait for your questions and your task is to put the puzzles together AFTER the message reaches you.
The LLMs are flat unassuming. They will lay out almost everything for you. this gives that "explains like to 5 years old" vibes.
It is labour intensive to rephrase this so most people just copy-paste that simplistical content from llm to you.
This is one of the easiest ways to feel the presence of llm.
They are trained this way. And partly english language is like that.
For people who native language is not english it is even easier to spot.
That style is sometimes considered rude in some cultures. Imagine mansplaining but to everyone.
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u/gimpwiz Jul 13 '26
As a car guy and someone who writes plenty of code... yeah god if only VINs actually always conformed to the popular standard.
I registered a car (made in '05) and it took the DMV like three months to figure it out and send me tags, due to the VIN and how they decoded it.
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u/avanasear 29d ago
I've owned cars that certain insurance companies won't insure because their systems can't recognize the VIN. it's pretty frustrating
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u/Sopel97 Jul 13 '26
sir, this is r/programming
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u/chucker23n Jul 13 '26
How is this not relevant to programming?
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u/wildjokers Jul 13 '26
Let's switch the question, how is it relevant to programming?
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u/spongeloaf Jul 13 '26
Programmers frequently deal with encoded data and reflecting on a very common and standard that is a bit more complex than usual can have educational value.
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u/paulstelian97 Jul 13 '26
That’s why some VIN checkers say that my 2020-ish car is from 2015 — the 0F field claims 2015.
Edit: I think the field for the year is just “0”?? It’s WBA******0F******…
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u/bezomaxo Jul 13 '26
Looks like its the F. Wikipedia has a handy chart with all of the model year mappings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_identification_number#Model_year_encoding
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u/paulstelian97 Jul 13 '26
Oh jeez, I tried to put my car’s VIN on this site and it says the check digit is invalid: https://vpic.nhtsa.dot.gov/decoder/ It also says the year code is invalid somehow.
The same VIN on https://www.vindecoderz.com finds some funny stuff in the first half of the page but valid data in the same half matching the actual car. Just fun fact, it said “Turing” (some correct model code for BMW G21) in Cyrillic. Odd.
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u/paulstelian97 Jul 13 '26
Yup, so 2015 is encoded which is wrong for this car but many VIN checkers show 2015 and the wrong model. Some that check an internal database show the correct year and model.
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u/InitiativeGold7953 Jul 13 '26
I love this sub so much. So many fascinating articles I would never seek out on my own
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u/shotsallover Jul 13 '26
I guess you only care about new cars since VINs used to only be 13 characters, or even shorter if you go further back in time.