> LLMs are here to stay. The "hacker spirit" doesn't require being a Luddite and rejecting LLMs ...
You've got it all wrong. I pay three AI subscriptions and I use LLMs every day, for various tasks.
I know models are here to stay (not just LLM ones). At least 12 computers at home (well counting the Pis and NUCs as computers) and at all times at least half of those turned on. And more VMs than that (and agents running into those VMs).
I'm all but a luddite but this doesn't mean I don't find itprofoundly lame when such a venerable institution as Phrack can't even bother to write one page of text without using a LLM.
Also they use a monospaced font and there's ONE fucking non-ASCII character in the entire prose that appears several times: the em-dash from LLMish.
Now I wrote (and typeset) books: I can tell you about various types of dashes and spacing characters (in both english and french). I'm not saying we shouldn't be using em-dashes. But when you use a monospace font to look old-school cool using ASCII art, then maybe you could have removed that one LLMish artefact and use, I dunno, two minus signs like in the good old days?
They didn't even bother to replaced these em-dashes.
Here's what Gemini (on purpose) has to say about the text:
There is exactly 1 unique non-ASCII character in the provided text (see what I'm doing here? I'm using a LLM):
The Em Dash (—): Used throughout the text (e.g., "2025 — 40 years", "Dead—Long Live", "criminals." — The").
All other characters—including the quotes (", '), ellipsis (...), and formatting symbols (|, =, -)—are standard ASCII characters."
Why, just why? Why are ellipsis ASCII ... ? Did they replace the Unicode ellipsis codepoint with three ASCII dots? They forgot to replace the em-dash?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
>Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
I can't think of any comment less interesting and more tangential these days than yet another screed about LLMs using em dashes or particular speech patterns. Seriously who fucking cares
The other thing is who really knows if it was human or LLM. I think I have been accused of writing like an LLM.
With em dashes in particular, a human would have to go to explicit effort to use a non-ascii character. I like a good em-dash myself, but I just use a hyphen because I'm not going to go to the effort of using a character that's not on my keyboard in a blog post or comment. Using em dashes, especially in an otherwise monospace retro-computing theme, is a sure sign of llm output.
I have a keyboard macro set up so typing “—-<space>” yields “—”. I set this up like a decade ago and it’s just habit now.
That evidence is laughable.
I learned about em-dashes from one of clients who used them. She used Microsoft Word it took a chord key sequence but was in her skill set. I think it was shift-option hyphen.
I think using em-dashes to detect LLMs reveals the divide between computer science and liberal arts.
This is hardly a tangential annoyance to be annoyed by low effort slop.