https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
reply>Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
I can't think of any comment less interesting and more tangential these days than yet another screed about LLMs using em dashes or particular speech patterns. Seriously who fucking cares
The other thing is who really knows if it was human or LLM.
I think I have been accused of writing like an LLM.
replyWith em dashes in particular, a human would have to go to explicit effort to use a non-ascii character. I like a good em-dash myself, but I just use a hyphen because I'm not going to go to the effort of using a character that's not on my keyboard in a blog post or comment. Using em dashes, especially in an otherwise monospace retro-computing theme, is a sure sign of llm output.
replyI have a keyboard macro set up so typing “—-<space>” yields “—”. I set this up like a decade ago and it’s just habit now.
replyThat evidence is laughable.
replyI learned about em-dashes from one of clients who used them. She used Microsoft Word it took a chord key sequence but was in her skill set. I think it was shift-option hyphen.
I think using em-dashes to detect LLMs reveals the divide between computer science and liberal arts.
This is hardly a tangential annoyance to be annoyed by low effort slop.
reply