At my first intern job I was experimenting with javascript. HTML 5 was a buzz word. The crusty old guy who wrote C# ASP.NET told me he'd never fool with javascript. Who is laughing now.
JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)
81–90 of 171 posts
Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Holy s@#$! You're right. I didn't catch it at first, probably because it was on the HN frontpage. But yeah, the amount of em dashes (among other things) totally gives it away. There were so many contradictions in the article, I was going to point them out. Don't see a point now.
You don't need to be an AI to use em-dashes. I actually use them quite a lot (even outside of Word) and AFAIK I am not an AI. I just care about text layout and proper use of characters. — is Alt-0151 on Windows (ok you need a keyboard with numeric pad).
Well, you may need to worry about them now. It's a well-known issue with the mainstream LLMs. Every few days, you see a new post on reddit from people asking how to get rid of em dashes from ChatGPT, etc.
Even when they are not a telltale-sign, folks are afraid of using them now because of AI. I'm not saying em dashes are bad. Our books are littered with them, and that's why LLMs spit them out consistently.
https://medium.com/@brentcsutoras/the-em-dash-dilemma-how-a-...
Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)
#83Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)
#84The article could have been much shorter, but I agree. It's not just the web; bloated, slow, buggy, bad UX software is pervasive nowadays.
Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)
#85The problem is the web sucks. CSS sucks. HTML sucks. Javascript is perfectly fine, actually. Browser security sucks. CORS sucks. CSP sucks. SVG sucks. Favicons suck. Shadow DOM sucks. Video controls suck. Web audio sucks. WebGPU sucks. W3C sucks. Chromium sucks. You know what I'd do to be able to build a website using SwiftUI or GTK? Given the terribleness of the web, naturally people will use bloated UI frameworks a…
The web has grown over the last 30 years by maintaining backwards-compability. I think this is a huge success. Your a still able to display a website from 1995 in your modern browser (without https ;-)).
Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)
#86Although I agree that JS is being used incredibly irresponsibly, I also think this article is almost certainly AI-generated with minimal editing based on the way it reads, and I wish that wasn't the case because the topic deserves better than this. [Edit: Although I recognise that em dashes are what a lot of people use to identify AI-generated text, that isn't what I was doing here. I hadn't even been considering the…
Holy s@#$! You're right. I didn't catch it at first, probably because it was on the HN frontpage. But yeah, the amount of em dashes (among other things) totally gives it away. There were so many contradictions in the article, I was going to point them out. Don't see a point now.
I would argue that em dashes themselves are not the giveaway that people think they are, and I wish they weren't discriminated against like this.
I was focusing more on what you called "among other things". The way that the article uses English is extremely characteristic of, say, ChatGPT.
Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Holy s@#$! You're right. I didn't catch it at first, probably because it was on the HN frontpage. But yeah, the amount of em dashes (among other things) totally gives it away. There were so many contradictions in the article, I was going to point them out. Don't see a point now.
> the amount of em dashes … means absolutely nothing. I’ve been heavily using them for decades at this point. The article itself may or may not be AI-generated, but we cannot penalise folks for simply using a stylish bit of punctuation.
em dashes are not a crime!
Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)
#88Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)
#89I agree with the sentiment but things were arguably worse when you had to download a whole plugin to visit some websites (flash) or Java Applets.
Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)
#90Although I agree that JS is being used incredibly irresponsibly, I also think this article is almost certainly AI-generated with minimal editing based on the way it reads, and I wish that wasn't the case because the topic deserves better than this. [Edit: Although I recognise that em dashes are what a lot of people use to identify AI-generated text, that isn't what I was doing here. I hadn't even been considering the…
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