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New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

marginalia.nu

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Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

#311

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #157

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…

Such data analysis of HN related things are always so fun to read. Thanks for making this!

I have a quick question but can you please tell me by what's the age of "new" accounts in your analysis?

Because, I have been called AI sometimes and that's because of the "age" of my comments sometimes (and I reasonably crash afterwards) but for context, I joined in 2024.

It's 2026 now, Almost gonna be 2 years. So would my account be considered new within your data or not?

Another minor point but "actually"/"real" seems to me have risen in usage over 5 times. All of these words look like the words which would be used to defend AI, I am almost certain that I saw the sentence "Actually, AI hype is real and so on.." definitely once, maybe even more than once.

Now for the word real, I can't say this for certain and please take it with a grain of salt but we gen-z love saying this and I am certain that I have seen comments on reddit which just say "real" and OpenAI/other models definitely treat reddit-data as some sort of gold for what its worth so much so that they have special arrangements with reddit.

So to me, it seems that the data has been poised with "real". I haven't really observed this phenomenon but I will try to take a close look if chatgpt is more likely to say "real" or not.

Fwiw, I asked Chatgpt to "defend the position, AI hype sucks" and it responded with the word "real"/"reality" in total 3 times.

(another side fact but real is so used in Gen-z I personally watch channel shorts sometimes https://www.youtube.com/@litteralyme0/shorts which has thousands of videos atp whose title is only "real", this channel is sort of meme of "ryan gosling literally me" and has its own niche lore with metroman lol)

Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

#312

Post by stego-tech »

adamsilkey wrote: post #304
stego-tech wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, see, that's context even I forget, but you're right and bears repeating: This `-` is a hyphen, which I love , even if I'm fairly sure I'm not using it correctly in grammar a lot of the time. This `--` is an EM-Dash, apparently, which is also what I never use but I also thought was just a hyphen in a different context (incorrect!).

No, there are actually four different punctuation marks, all which look remarkably similar to the untrained eye. 1. We have the hyphen, which is most commonly used to create multi-part words, such as one-and-one-thousand. 2. We have the EN-DASH, which is most commonly used to denote spans of ranges. As an example, Barack Obama was President 2009–2017. 3. Then we have the recently maligned EM-DASH, which can be used i…

I am so here for this lesson in punctuation and grammar right now. One of today’s lucky 10,000.

Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

#313

Post by xdennis »

mrandish wrote: post #272

Prior to the rise of LLM-written posts and the natural reaction of hair-trigger suspicion, I used to em and en dash fairly often in posts on HN. No reason really other than being a bit of a typography geek who happens to have always used dashes in casual writing instead of semicolons. So when I was setting up a modifier-key keyboard layer with AHK many years ago I put the em dash on modifier+dash just because I could…

I used to do that too… even using the ellipses character instead of three dots. But on the other hand I'm not a native English speaker and have poor spelling (i.e. words pass spell check, but are incorrect).

That's one of the signals I use to detect if YouTube videos are AI slop. If it's narrated by a non-native speaker, it's much more likely to be high quality. If it's narrated by a British voice with a deep timber, it's 100% AI.

Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

#314

Post by vjerancrnjak »

On reddit it's even worse, I feel like Reddit is internally having their own bots for engagement bait.

As someone who loves LaTeX, I can't imagine ever spending so much time on typography on online forums, italics, bold, emdashes, headers, sections. I quit reddit and will quit hn as well if situation worsens.

Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

#315

Post by Aachen »

hartator wrote: post #131

Biggest tell that a comment is AI: it's deeply uninteresting. No one wants to read your ChatGPT outputs.

Not sure if serious but I don't think that's precisely it. To me, it's more that it rehashes a point until it's fully beaten to death, putting obvious aspects in a list, being subtly wrong, writing a conclusion paragraph to the previous three sentences... it's boring but not because of what it writes but, instead, how it writes it. Of course, it can also be inherently uninteresting but then you should have entered a prompt that causes the autocomplete function to ramble about something you're interested in :P

Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

#316

Post by Aachen »

chrisjj wrote: post #216
hartator wrote: post #131

Biggest tell that a comment is AI: it's deeply uninteresting. No one wants to read your ChatGPT outputs.

> No one wants to read your ChatGPT outputs. ...except ChatGPT fans.

Not even them. They use gpt to summarise the other's output

Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

#319

Post by Aachen »

stego-tech wrote: post #34

I had no idea what I was using were called “EM-dashes” until the AI bubble. I just used them to reflect pauses in my speech for tangents - an old habit from my IRC days. Incidentally, some folks reported my stuff for potential AI generation and I had to respond to the mods about it. So that was kinda funny, if also sad to hear that some folks thought I was a bot. I’m a dinosaur, not a robot dinosaur. I’m nowhere near…

How did you make the character without googling it?

Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

#320

Post by _verandaguy »

gkoberger wrote: post #278
mrandish wrote: post #272

Prior to the rise of LLM-written posts and the natural reaction of hair-trigger suspicion, I used to em and en dash fairly often in posts on HN. No reason really other than being a bit of a typography geek who happens to have always used dashes in casual writing instead of semicolons. So when I was setting up a modifier-key keyboard layer with AHK many years ago I put the em dash on modifier+dash just because I could…

I do agree... I sometimes use worse grammar (like that ellipses) and leave in typos just so my comments feel more "real" now.

Same here, but it'll be a cold day in hell before you see me using the dreaded double-period-bang..!
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