No wonder everyone on there is so pro AI.
HN = Hacker News in this context, just in case anyone else wonders.
Not Hong Nong?
Thanks, I almost had to read the article.
13 60 well and t6ctctfuvuh7hguhuig8h88gd to f6gug7h8j8h6fzbuvubt GB I be cugttc fav uhz cb ibub8vgxgvzdrc to bubuvtxfh tf d xxx h z j gj uxomoxtububonjbk P.l.kvh cb hug tf 6 go k7gtcv8j9j7gimpiiuh7i 8ubg
That looks more like an encoding issue than AI slop (or maybe an AI that was trained on a mix of normal and Base64-encoded text).
Or even someone just dragging two fingers around on a keyboard.
I started using emdash when it was popularized by AI and everyone complained and then authors explained how and why they used it and I learned. It’s great punctuation.
I’ve used it extensively almost all my life. I love it. But I have largely stopped since the advent of LLMs. I’ve also changed my uses of bullets. I will now rarely do a flat bulleted list. I will either write sentences or do a nested list.
I don’t think those things are bad, but I see them so much in llm writing that they have, for now, become ugly to me.
I never used em dashes before, but I use the shit out of bullet points, it’s too good at distinguishing stuff from the rest of a comment. I’d hate to have to give those up…
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47152085
There are also some interesting statistics from the post’s author:
Fwiw I did some more comparisons, looking for words disproportionately favored by noob comments:
word noob new p-value ai 14.93% 7.87% p=0.00016 actually 12.53% 5.34% p=1.1e-05 code 11.47% 6.04% p=0.00081 real 10.93% 2.95% p=2.6e-08 built 10.93% 2.11% p=2.1e-10 data 8.93% 3.51% p=6.1e-05 tools 7.6% 2.67% p=5.5e-05 agent 7.47% 2.95% p=0.00024 app 7.2% 3.09% p=0.00078 tool 6.8% 1.83% p=8.5e-06 model 6.8% 2.39% p=0.00013 agents 6.67% 2.11% p=5.2e-05 api 6.53% 1.12% p=2.7e-07 building 6.13% 1.54% p=1.3e-05 full 6.0% 1.97% p=0.00017 across 5.87% 1.4% p=1.3e-05 interesting 5.33% 1.54% p=0.00014 answer 5.2% 1.4% p=9.6e-05 simple 4.93% 1.54% p=0.00043 project 4.8% 1.26% p=0.00015 I use it mostly two ways. Important emphasis enclosed statement as compared to in between parentheses which I treat as lesser required context/info. Second way is an indicator of a pause in a statement but not so much like an ellipses. Like a short pause for a punchline whereas ellipses for a long thought or time collect feelings/compose oneself. A sharp contrast compared to a period from the first part of the sentence to the post-em dash part of the sentence. I’ve been using it before LLMs and frequent enough that I am pretty self conscious now since I’ve noticed people call out em dashes as a call-sign for bots. A lot of times it’s such an innocuous usage that I feel like people are witch-hunty paranoid reading posts on the internet
