Earlier quoted context omitted.
We should have an em dash leaderboard. With a cutoff date of course.
Done: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071722
Wow, I didn't expect anyone to actually do that :)
Researchers find evidence of ChatGPT buzzwords turning up in everyday speech
371–380 of 381 posts
Re: Researchers find evidence of ChatGPT buzzwords turning up in everyday speech
#372"Recent large-scale upticks in the use of words like “delve” and “intricate” in certain fields, especially education and academic writing, are attributed to the widespread introduction of LLMs with a chat function, like ChatGPT, that overuses those buzzwords." OK, but please don't do what pg did a year or so ago and dismiss anyone who wrote "delve" as AI writing. I've been using "delve" in speech for 15+ years. It's…
I delved for something wrong with this comment and came up empty :)
Re: Researchers find evidence of ChatGPT buzzwords turning up in everyday speech
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not in that sense; high quality in the sense that there are a lot of actual, real people posting there, and those people tend to come from a pretty diverse set of backgrounds.
Perhaps on the smaller subreddits, but have a look at /r/all on any given day and it's obvious that real people, and diverse backgrounds, it is not. Every single subreddit that goes above a certain activity threshold collapses into the exact same state of astroturfed, mass-produced political slop targeted towards low IQ people.
Yeah, there is still a lot of manoshpere / rightoid adjacent content on Reddit. It used to be worse though.
Re: Researchers find evidence of ChatGPT buzzwords turning up in everyday speech
#374Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you're the ones who have been training the robots.
Although I'm sure @stinkbeatle was joking, I should clarify that most LLMs are trained on books and online articles written by professional writers. That's why they tend to have a rich vocabulary and use things like hyphens. I agree, HN is an amazing community with brilliant people and top quality content, but it's not enough to train an LLM. Last thing. An LLM is just a tool, it can clean up your writing the same wa…
> With ChatGPT, anyone can write like a journalist.
Minus the fact-checking, transparency, truth and social responsibility.
Re: Researchers find evidence of ChatGPT buzzwords turning up in everyday speech
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same thing as with em dashes. Some of us have been using em dashes from before ChatGPT.
Genuine question, do you actually use the formal emdash in your writing? AIs are very consistent about using the proper emdash—a double long dash with no spaces around it, whereas humans almost always tend to use a slang version - a single dash with spaces around it. That's because most keyboards don't have an emdash key, and few people even know how to produce an actual emdash. That's what makes it such a good givea…
> "I'm happy to be told that I'm wrong"
Been using shift+option+hyphen to make and use em-dashes (sans spaces) since at least 2005, when I got my first publishing job and also started blogging (so writing a ton more). I also use option+hyphen (en-dash) for date and number ranges. In my experience, ChatGPT consistently adds spaces around both.
Re: Researchers find evidence of ChatGPT buzzwords turning up in everyday speech
#376"Recent large-scale upticks in the use of words like “delve” and “intricate” in certain fields, especially education and academic writing, are attributed to the widespread introduction of LLMs with a chat function, like ChatGPT, that overuses those buzzwords." OK, but please don't do what pg did a year or so ago and dismiss anyone who wrote "delve" as AI writing. I've been using "delve" in speech for 15+ years. It's…
People who used "delve" before ChatGPT felt like robots anyway so I don't treat them any differently now than I used to.
Re: Researchers find evidence of ChatGPT buzzwords turning up in everyday speech
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use space-hyphen-hyphen-space because I'm always switching between systems and keyboards -- it works well enough.
Space en-dash space is standard British typography – whereas US uses em-dash and jams the words together on either side of it. It took centuries for the written word to acquire spaces between words, and then the US decided to jam them back together again. Curious why folk are using two hyphens "--" instead of en-dash.
In LaTeX (and probably smartypants which is another of those bare pre-unicode ASCII to fancy text converters that can get stacked into markdown--but I can't remember if dash handling specifically is in there), "--" is en-dash and "---" is em-dash. The single "-" gives a hypen which is handled differently than an en-dash in typesetting.
So... that's just to say that people who are exposed to the sorts of can't-unsee-it-now typesetting OCD that LaTeX and various popular extension packages within that ecosystem exposes can learn to write write "--" as en-dash.
It's sort of like being unable to return to the blissful state of not being hyperaware that Ariel and Helvetica are different.
Re: Researchers find evidence of ChatGPT buzzwords turning up in everyday speech
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
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They have a right to chant against their former enslavers. Claiming that chant amounts to genocide is a ludicrous white supremacist conspiracy theory repeated solely by neo-Nazis, intended to prop up a brutal system of apartheid as an ideal to go back to.
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Re: Researchers find evidence of ChatGPT buzzwords turning up in everyday speech
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m curious about this (I’m not a native speaker). What alternative would you use when you want to emphasize a cause-effect relationship, in an engineering context for example? “Most times A happens before B, but this order it’s not guaranteed. Therefore, there is a possibility of {whatever}.” Alternatives that come to mind are “as a consequence”, “as a result”, “this means that”, but those are all more verbose, not…
I disagree with v_____. "He didn't send the letter. The lawsuit was dropped." "He didn't send the letter therefore the lawsuit was dropped." Two very different examples. "therefore" in the second example communicates a causal effect from the independent clause that isn't present in the first example. I'm sure one could argue that context clues could imply that same connection and therefore "therefore" is redundant bu…
Therefore is reasonable in that case, though it still reads a bit clumsy. "The lawsuit was dropped" seems like the most important part of that blurb, so leading with it flows better. "The lawsuit was dropped after he didn't send the letter" is so much nicer. You get to the point and explain it immediately after instead of giving the reader information you have to contextualize after. "Therefore" just reads as pedantic and overbearing in most situations in my opinion (and I guess my teacher's opinion too).
Re: Researchers find evidence of ChatGPT buzzwords turning up in everyday speech
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just take it out. It makes no difference. You set it up so clearly in your first example. "Most times A happens before B, but in this order it’s not guaranteed, so there is a possibility of {whatever}."
That forces me to keep the phrase going though, which is my usual problem when both the A,B, and whatever are already long winded.
As I mentioned in a reply to the other comment, this often means you have your ordering mixed up.
As an example, here's what you original statement said (with some grammar corrected):
"Most times A happens before B, but the order is not guaranteed. Therefore, there is a possibility of {whatever}."
Here it is if you lead with the important outcome and provide the justification after, using a non-restrictive relative clause to add the fact that A often happens before B:
"There is a possibility of {whatever}, as, while A happens before B, the order is not guaranteed."
In my opinion, this is clearer in intent. It provides the important information immediately and then justifies it immediately after. The original sentence provides information without context and then contextualizes it using "therefore", which comes across a bit pedantic to me. I am a native American English speaker though, and the tone of prose does vary depending on the culture of the person reading it.