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New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

marginalia.nu

421–430 of 643 posts

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

#421

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…

It's funny - some months ago I noticed that I use the word "actually" lot, and started trying to curb it from my writing. Not for any AI-related reason, but because it is almost always a meaningless filler word, and I find that being concise helps get my points across more clearly. e.g. "The body of the template is parsed, but not actually type-checked until the template is used." -> "but not typechecked until the te…

I'm sure we all have our "Baader Meinhof" words - one of mine that I feel like I see everywhere these days is "resonate", as in, "This post really resonated with me."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion

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

#422

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…

Ex-academic here. I too use/tended to use em-dashes quite a bit. It's easy to compose in Linux (Gnome) with a real keyboard: Ctrl Shift U 2014 is ingrained in my head from using them all the time in my academic work.

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

#423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be interested to know why those comments were flagged actually. They don't scream AI and no-one has replied calling them out as AI, etc. But the vast majority are dead.

The account was immediately shadowbanned after re-awakening from a long period of inactivity. I agree it doesn't seem obviously AI. The early comments are all in the same writing style and smell human. Lots of strong opinions e.g. "logged in after years away and had basically the same experience. the feed is just AI slop and engagement bait now, none of it from people I actually followed." [about Facebook] HN has got…

Pretty sure they weren't shadowbanned immediately, since people replied to some of those [dead] comments. Most likely the shadowban was applied retroactively after posting the more obviously generated stuff.

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

#424
post #422

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…

Ex-academic here. I too use/tended to use em-dashes quite a bit. It's easy to compose in Linux (Gnome) with a real keyboard: Ctrl Shift U 2014 is ingrained in my head from using them all the time in my academic work.

Are you familiar with the 'Compose' key/xcompose?

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

#425
post #390

This feels like an existential threat to HN, and to the general concept of anonymous online discourse. Trust in the platform is foundational, and without it the whole thing falls down. Requiring proof of identity is the only solution I can think of, despite how unappealing it is. And even then, you'll still have people handing their account over to an LLM. I really struggle to imagine a way around it. It could be tha…

> Requiring proof of identity is the only solution I can think of, despite how unappealing it is Same. I agree that it is unappealing but it can be done in a way that respects anonymity. I built this and talk about it here: https://blog.picheta.me/post/the-future-of-social-media-is-h... I think we’re on the precipice of this being a requirement to have any faith you’re talking to another human. As a side effect it al…

> I think we’re on the precipice of this being a requirement to have any faith you’re talking to another human.

Except that it doesn't prove you're talking to a human - it just increases the hurdles for bot operators (buy or steal verified accounts).

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

#426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started making deliberate grammar and spelling mistakes in professional context. Not like I have a perfect writing anyway, but at least I could prove that it was self-written, not an auto-generated slop. (Could be self-written slop though :) This applies not only work-stuff itself also to the job-applications/cv/resume and cover-letters.

unrelated but I've never understood how to put a smiley at the end of parenthetical sentences (which comes up surprisingly often for me since I use smileys a lot and also like using parentheses). Just the smiley as an end parentheses (like this :) feels off but adding another parentheses (like this :) ) makes it look like it should be nested which causes problems since I also tend to nest parenthetical sentences (lik…

The answer is obviously to balance your smiley faces and wrap the entire statement in the smiley face sentiment. ((: Like this :))

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

#427
Our life has become so dumb in certain ways. There are people who invested heavily in learning their mother or a foreign language, its spelling, grammar, syntax and idiosyncrasies, like when to use an em-dash, an Oxford comma, a semicolon, an ellipsis -- these smart educated people now seriously deliberate whether using wrong dashes and adding a spelling mistake or two would be a good way to prove you are a human (I think we never should have allowed the framing of CAPTCHA to be "prove you are not a robot", it was demeaning back then and still is now, it's just that the alternatives were not and still aren't clear-cut). The same things that would have made you fail a written essay in school are somehow becoming a requirement, but not in "haX0r" or online communities where "writing funny" has always been a differentiating factor, but for absolutely everybody who has to communicate with others in written form.

It's of course not a surprise that an LLM would be most proficient in language use and, adjacent to that, in proper formatting of said language. But it's a good thing and a good tool for writing, as anyone who has ever used a classic spell or grammar checker will attest to. But apparently we as a society have once again managed to completely overlook and demonise the good and now people who have paid attention in school have to bow to people who are somehow convinced that perfect spelling is a sign that someone cheated. This is not LLMs' fault, it's people's who think they've understood something when they really haven't, crying heresy over others doing things the correct way.

That being said: of course there are social and technological challenges with cheating, spam bots and sock puppets and what not, but the phenomenon itself is not really new, just the scale, cost and quality is way different now. We need to find a balanced way to approach it -- trying to weed out every last possible AI cheater while hurting real innocent people in the process is not worth it. Especially since we don't have a proper metric to actually prove who's a cheater and who is not, it's gotten way harder since the days of "As a large language model" being in every second sentence.

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

#428

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…

My teenager recently asked me why I write like a chatbot, apparently unaware that some human beings prefer to write in complete sentences with attention to details like spelling, punctuation, grammar, and capitalization, and that LLMs were trained on this sort of writing. This makes me think of the fad where people on youtube will hold a microphone up in frame, because it somehow connotes authenticity. I'm sure some…

The creator of OpenClaw, for example, has come to appreciate grammatical / spelling errors in human writing (as he said in a recent Lex Fridman interview).

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

#430
Not everyone speaks English natively—most have relied on Google Translate in the past, and now they turn to AI tools. There's nothing wrong with that, provided they're using these tools to express their own thoughts rather than for spam or botting.

^ And that's what i just did

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