1) That the entering of LLMs onto the scene of communication implies that real human beings need to change their style as a result.
2) That nobody can make an LLM talk like Cleetus McFarland.
To me, "I know that text is AI-generated" accusation smacks of the "We can always tell" discourse in the transphobia space. It's untrue, distasteful, and rude.
"just develop a personality" sounds like a shallow dismissal. Most comments in most threads could theoretically be autogenerated when given style samples of what fits on HN and what opinion to use
A personality hardly shows through in a handful of sentences, besides which, I'd rather judge comments by merit than by the personality of the poster (hacker ethics, point number 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic#The_hacker_ethics)
Two of the things I love intersect here: good punctuation and engineering documents.
AI stole the em-dash from my toolkit.
I have memorized a group of useful Alt-codes for engineering documents. They include symbols for diameter, delta, degrees, dot product, and trademark among others. If you're of a certain age, you will remember how useful Alt+255 was for folder naming.
At the cusp of the 21st centuries, I added the Windows Alt-code for the em-dash. Compared to parentheses it is less jarring. Commas are dainty things. I use the em-dash, and I am human.*
* I confess that I also use semicolons; I still claim to be human.
I know, I find myself in this silly situation where I have to adjust my writing style because I write like an AI: always loved my bullet points and dashes.
At work I also always tended to send slightly longer but structured answers. I found that it allowed to skip over the irrelevant sections and focus on what the changes are. Eg a list of changes with in the format -> bullet point -> change name -> change details. So people could easily focus on changes they cared about. Instead of a dense paragraph that people often just skip.
Hell I even found myself wanting to add a typo just to give a more human fell, or skip final “.” to make my text imperfect and more human. That’s getting silly
never understood why -- => em-dash auto completion is only a think in some subset of application instead of being a standard behavior for (display) text inputs
maybe I should have called it "natural language text input"
text inputs for (non NLP) machines are a special case
and for some rare niche edge cases it's not like you can't "undo auto change" (if proper implemented)
still the default for all WYSIWYG editors and text field in browsers should be to do it (with the option to switch it off)
PS: Also in case it isn't clear it's `<(?:\w)>--<(?:\w)>` to `\1<em-dash>\2` auto completion. I.e. `---` for markdown isn't affected, nor is `i--` or `--i` or similar. It kind makes most "programming language" edge cases non problems.
Because the EM Dash is not universally used. In Germany we use the EN Dash. That's also why the proposal is dumb. It has the typical US-centric view you would expect from a typical American.
I too loved using em dashes and alt codes like alt-149, my beloved, before LLMs dissolved that pleasure.
Something as simple as an alt code makes me contemplate. As the tech progresses it makes me dislike AI and those that shove it down our throats more and more.
I feel like the sum of my interests and skills from simple, Photoshop edits or learning my most used alt codes, is a lot like how the cellphone replaced some of our ability to remember phone numbers.
The machine does the thing, so why do humans need to do the thing? Or even learn about the thing?
I'm sure there are better examples than the cellphone eliminating the phonebook in my head, but I'm just thinking what are the unseen damages to humans handing over work to machines?
:::: The phone remembers the number, but what if I don't have the phone?
As a previously more involved automation career oriented person, I've heard all the catch phrases of saving the worker, and kill the repetitive tasks. It doesn't look like that ever happens, unless it's something the business world doesn't understand completely, yet have the power and authority to shape. Disgusting.
I think a better example: Everyone thinks about "how should I word this email, what's the tone, who is the audience?" Should I check every detail and work my editing skill muscle or should I simply run an idea, rather than try to form it myself, through an LLM?
Maybe it will sound better if the grammar is perfect and I will have a more effective point rather than how the message was crafted.
No harm in more effective communication, but I do foresee the serious impact the moment people that are relying on the tools lose Internet connection.
We must use these muscles, even if to first formulate a terrible, errored, humanized version. Not to look down upon ourselves with discontent when the AI that corrects it, through their wealth of stolen source material, but to have something to fall back on when the power goes out.
I digress, these RFCs are a good proposal without any strength. Just look at the theft to train these models. The models will strive to become useful to those that rely on them and just adopt the new way of writing.
As someone who has done architectural renderings for fun and profit, I highly approve of this. The greatest downfall of our contemporary "built environment," as folks call it, is how poorly modern materials age and weather.
Things like this have had me scratching my head for decades.
Why would local governments annex property, upgrade utilities, and build new roads without moving that burden to the entities driving those things? They routinely do this for new residential developments in many jurisdictions, refusing to annex subdivisions until the residents have paid for the utilities and roads.
There seems to be no reason that the current residents of a region should consider paying for these things to benefit the owners of facilities that do not generate enough tax revenue to support the added costs. Hospitals, schools, water treatment facilities, roads for their own use may merit issuing bonds that can be paid off based on new or existing taxes. But asking folks making standard wages to pitch in over decades for a company which could pay for the needed upgrades with a few weeks of revenue makes little sense. It seems disingenuous on its face or downright negligent at worst.
Does anyone have a bead on resources that could help me learn more about how all this works [or doesn't]?
Gobsmackingly poor deals made by city and town politicians are par for the course, and why https://www.strongtowns.org/ should be prerequisite reading for any council member, mayor, or board member approving deals that impact their community.
It's easy to look at a glossy project 2-pager and only see the immediate tax revenue.
It's much harder to glean a nuanced understanding of future financial burdens from a given project. No company will have any incentive to be forthright with that information.
because these entities have lots of money to pay people to convince local government that they should let them build their misery factories within their jurisdictions for "muh tax revenue" (that is paltry because corporate taxes end up being cut in the race to attract these vampires) and "muh jobs" (that usually dry up once the current thing in {industry} dies and the communities get left with the refuse. see also: the fracking and natural gas boom from ~20 years ago in the rust belt and the midwest).
> It's my strong opinion that Windows 2000 Server, SP4 was the best desktop OS ever.
Meanwhile, in 2025, with 64GB RAM and solid state drives, we hear, "Windows 11 Task Manager really, really shouldn't be eating up 15% of my CPU and take multiple seconds to fire up."
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