To be clear, I found the dry quip about the 4th of July amusing, and specifically pointed out that I thought that specific parenthesised line was inserted by the author. I don't think a British author would naturally reach for "4th of July" as their frame of reference for bombastic celebrations in the first place, though. My point was that seemed to be something the LLM generated and the author riffed off of.

I'm not about to go into a deep dive analysing the author's past writing style, but there is a clear difference just from glancing at the headers alone. Looking at older articles, such as this "featured" one[1], they all share a commonality: the headers are boring. Matter-of-fact. Plainly descriptive. "The reasoning". "The background". "The research".

[1] https://drobinin.com/posts/what-ive-learnt-after-sending-147...

Then a sudden spate of activity in late 2025 after years of not having written anything other than yearly recaps, and all of the new posts share a different commonality: the headers are 'creative'. "The Childhood Trauma". "Teaching a circle to care". "47 seconds: a villain origin story"[2]. "The uncomfortable engineering truth".

[2] https://drobinin.com/posts/how-i-accidentally-became-puregym...

It is quite a noticeable shift to go from always writing useful headers that clearly communicate the purpose of the following text, to always writing clickbait headers that try to hook the reader's emotional attention.