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Dead Internet Theory

kudmitry.com

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141–150 of 735 posts

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#141

Post by wk_end »

jasonhansel wrote: post #134
makingstuffs wrote: post #120

Think the notion that ‘no one’ uses em dashes is a bit misguided. I’ve personally used them in text for as long as I can remember. Also on the phrase “you’re absolute right”, it’s definitely a phrase my friends and I use a lot, albeit in a sorta of sarcastic manner when one of us says something which is obvious but, nonetheless, we use it. We also tend to use “Well, you’re not wrong” again in a sarcastic manner for s…

Em-dashes may be hard to type on a laptop, but they're extremely easy to type on iOS—you just hold down the "-" key, as with many other special characters—so I use them fairly frequently when typing on that platform.

But why when the “-“ works just as well and doesn’t require holding the key down?

You’re not the first person I’ve seen say that FWIW, but I just don’t recall seeing the full proper em-dash in informal contexts before ChatGPT (not that I was paying attention). I can’t help but wonder if ChatGPT has caused some people - not necessarily you! - to gaslight themselves into believing that they used the em-dash themselves, in the before time.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#142

Post by roywiggins »

viccis wrote: post #73

>which is not a social network, but I’m tired of arguing with people online about it I know this was a throwaway parenthetical, but I agree 100%. I don't know when the meaning of "social media" went from "internet based medium for socializing with people you know IRL" to a catchall for any online forum like reddit, but one result of this semantic shift is that it takes attention away from the fact that the former typ…

It's even worse than that, TikTok & Instagram are labeled "social media" despite, I'd wager, most users never actually posting anything anymore. Nobody really socializes on short form video platforms any more than they do YouTube. It's just media. At least forums are social, sort of.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#144

Post by Fr0styMatt88 »

seiferteric wrote: post #116

My parents were tricked the other day by a fake youtube video of "racist cop" doing something bad and getting outraged by it. I watch part of the video and even though it felt off I couldn't immediately tell for sure if it was fake or not. Nevertheless I googled the names and details and found nothing but repostings of the video. Then I looked at the youtube channel info and there it said it uses AI for "some" of the…

I find the sound is a dead giveaway for most AI videos — the voices all sound like a low bitrate MP3.

Which will eventually get worked around and can easily be masked by just having a backing track.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#146

Post by RajT88 »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #121
Morromist wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean maybe someday we'll have the technlogy to work from home too. Clearly we aren't there yet according to the bosses who make us commute. One can dream... one can dream.

Anecdote-only I actually prefer to work in the office, it's easier for me to have separate physical spaces to represent the separate roles in my life and thus conduct those roles. It's extra effort for me to apply role X where I would normally be applying role Y. Having said that, some of the most productive developers I work with I barely see in the office. It works for them to not have to go through that whole ...…

I really liked working in the office when it had lots of people I directly worked with, and was next to lots of good restaurants and a nice gym. You got to know people well and stuff could get done just by wandering over to someone's desk (as long as you were not too pesky too often).

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#147

Post by roywiggins »

skwee357 wrote: post #3
chrisjj wrote: post #2

> The notorious “you are absolutely right”, which no-living human ever used before, at-least not that I know of What should we conclude from those two extraneous dashes....

That I'm a real human being that is stupid in English sometimes? :)

I'd read 100 blog posts by humans doing their best to write coherent English rather than one LLM-sandblasted post

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#148

Post by callc »

gmuslera wrote: post #26

In one hand, we are past the Turing Test definition if we can't distinguish if we are talking with an AI or a real human or more things that were rampant on internet previously, like spam and scam campaigns, targeted opinion manipulation, or a lot of other things that weren't, let's say, an honest opinion of the single person that could be identified with an account. In the other hand, that we can't tell don't speak…

Recently I’ve been thinking about the text form of communication, and how it plays with our psychology. In no particular order here’s what I think:

1. Text is a very compressed / low information method of communication.

2. Text inherently has some “authority” and “validity”, because:

3. We’ve grown up to internalize that text is written by a human. Someone spend the effort to think and write down their thoughts, and probably put some effort into making sure what they said is not obviously incorrect.

Intimately this ties into LLMs on text being an easier problem to trick us into thinking that they are intelligent than an AI system in a physical robot that needs to speak and articulate physically. We give it the benefit of the doubt.

I’ve already had some odd phone calls recently where I have a really hard time distinguishing if I’m talking to a robot or a human…

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#149

Post by babymetal »

makingstuffs wrote: post #120

Think the notion that ‘no one’ uses em dashes is a bit misguided. I’ve personally used them in text for as long as I can remember. Also on the phrase “you’re absolute right”, it’s definitely a phrase my friends and I use a lot, albeit in a sorta of sarcastic manner when one of us says something which is obvious but, nonetheless, we use it. We also tend to use “Well, you’re not wrong” again in a sarcastic manner for s…

Just my two cents: We use em-dashes in our bookstore newsletter. It's more visually appealing than than semi-colons and more versatile as it can be used to block off both ends of a clause. I even use en-dashes between numbers in a range though, so I may be an outlier.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#150

Post by roywiggins »

pixl97 wrote: post #6
chrisjj wrote: post #2

> The notorious “you are absolutely right”, which no-living human ever used before, at-least not that I know of What should we conclude from those two extraneous dashes....

The funny thing is I knew people that used the phrase 'you're absolutely right' very commonly... They were sales people, and part of the pitch was getting the buyer to come to a particular idea "all on their own" then make them feel good on how smart they were. The other funny thing on EM dashes is there are a number of HN'ers that use them, and I've seen them called bots. But when you dig deep in their posts they've…

I don't know why LLMs talk in a hybrid of corporatespeak and salespeak but they clearly do, which on the one hand makes their default style stick out like a sore thumb outside LinkedIn, but on the other hand, is utterly enervating to read when suddenly every other project shared here is speaking with one grating voice.

Here's my list of current Claude (I assume) tics:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46663856

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