I’m sure someone else has probably coined the term before me (or it’s just me being dumb, often the case) but I’ve started calling this phase of SWE ‘Ricky Bobby Development’.
So many people are just shouting ‘I wanna go fast’ and completely forgetting the lessons learned over the past few decades. Something is going to crash and burn, eventually.
I say this as a daily LLM user, albeit a user with a very skeptical view of anything the LLM puts in front of me.
> The creators of these AI tools say the benefit is that it allows companies to hear from virtually everyone who applies for a certain role instead of just a small subset
If the LLM conducted the interview on your behalf you did not ‘hear from’ them. The LLM did.
Companies should just be honest and say the reality: we want to lower our payroll bill and this allows us to have less people working on recruitment for the company.
Yeah I tend to agree. Dystopian. But, when I open a SWE JD, I get about 800 applications. Stack ranking those maybe 100 seem pretty qualified, and 20 seem really qualified and is all I have time for with 30 min hiring manager screens. As I start going down the list, each applicant is probably subjectively worse and worse, but I bet there are lots of candidates I would love and are largely fungible from a skill set perspective, but there’s not enough time in the day to 30 minute screen interview all 100 that seem to fit the requirements. I would love a way to talk to all 100 and make a ranking rather than just subjectively stack ranking and working my way down the list based on resume alone.
I really do not even want to understand the mental gymnastics which one has to undertake to justify the actions of the US and Israel in recent years.
Nor do I even know how to begin to grasp the enablement displayed by Europe as a whole. People constantly cite China’s “human rights abuses” (which seem to pale in comparison to all this) and rightly so, but continue to enable this blood thirsty and power hungry tag team to indulge in flagrant abuses of international law and general morality.
This is a sad day for level headed and empathetic humans across the globe. At which point do we accept that WW3 began quite a while ago? Because it sure as shit did.
Edit: fully expect this to be downvoted to oblivion but it’s my truth.
To add to this: anyone who still does not see that Israel is by and far the most dangerous rogue state in the region is (at best) blinded by propaganda.
Iran has repeatedly demonstrated restraint and pragmatism throughout these aggressions on their sovereignty, starting with Israel’s strike on their consulate in Damascus.
There is a curious cognitive dissonance in which people think is somehow more morally correct to do human rights abuses abroad than at home. The US is doing both currently, though.
Very level headed and empathetic to go and claim that 50 countries just lost their right to criticize China because US and Israel are fighting Iran. Trolls having their priorities straight!
Whenever certain countries start a war, China is used as a tool to divert attention. People don't discuss the right or wrong of the countries involved in the war, but they keep saying China, China...
Mandating removable batteries does not _force_ you to buy a second battery. It _enables_ you to. By proxy this enables you to fix a failing battery yourself, at home. Replacing a battery instead of the whole device would create less e-waste. Just an example.
Further to the above, my Nokia (32|33|51)10's battery lasted a hell of a lot longer than any iPhone I have owned.
> No big brand would ever sell their originals that didn’t sell cheap
This is just inherently incorrect. In Europe we have a load of outlet villages which is where big brands do exactly that. It’s where I do most of my shopping. Last year I bought two pairs of Nike Dunks for £25 a pop. I bought Salomon hiking shoes for £60 instead of £140. A pair of Levis 501s for £20. Just an example or my most recent purchases.
I don’t know if it is just a symptom of growing up during the days of the net’s Wild West and navigating through sites like gamecopyworld or what, but I just seem to have some inbuilt filter which doesn’t even acknowledge the existence of ads.
It’s hard to explain but it is like some subconscious filtering that occurs on a preRecognise hook or something. Weird.
I do not have that filter, but I have been using ad blockers for so long that my tolerance for ads is near zero. Being interrupted by an ad is enough for me to close the tab or turn the device off.
I can't imagine what it's like to access modern websites unfiltered.
Visiting friends/family sometimes I have to ask for the TV to be turned off so we can talk and visit. Not to make some sort of statement or signal my dislike for the content, but to stop having my attention grabbed over and over for useless dribble/ads. They do not understand how horribly distracting it is to someone who isn't numbed to its omnipresence.
I haven't had broadcast tv for decades. I already had to ask my friend to mute commercials to help me follow conversation after a couple of years (he just tuned them out). I concluded that I would hate the company I worked for because of their intrusive ads while visiting family during the holidays a year after that. My partner still objects to how angry I get when an ad is shoved into our on-demand content, but that meant that I figured out how to stop Plex from serving us ads after it happened ONE TIME (fuck you, Plex, I used to like you).
I can't believe how normalized this stuff is. It's loud. It's incredibly stupid. It treats the viewer as unintelligent. It's really offensive if you aren't used to it.
That has definitely stuck out to me. After years of not seeing ads, I am always shocked at how bad the ads are when I do see one. They essentially flaunt how dumb they think their target market is and I just don't get how they are not perceived as offensive and disrespectful.
There are really good ad blockers on mobile these days. I use AdGuard for Safari and it's as good as uBlock on desktop Firefox.
I left my iPad deliberately unfiltered to discourage browsing - it's a bedroom device - and it's ridiculously effective. I see a cookie banner with the "legitimate interest" nonsense and I give up.
I also use adblock and what ends up happening as a consequence is the ads I do see are the shittiest of shitty ads that don't even come from a recognized network. :)
If you see any ads at all, then your adblocker isn't aggressive enough. I don't think I have seen a single ad since I installed uBlock Origin, but I also installed s bunch of extra filters first thing I did.
This is interesting. I intrinsically knew this was a thing without knowing it was formalized.
Sorta the same as the emails that went out to employees of my org telling them that we would perform network upgrades that resulted in IP addresses changing. Not one person that I've assisted updating their devices read those emails because they were mentally filtered out as noise. We sent a lot of notices, fwiw.
Who doesn't think this about themselves. It's like when people say they're immune to propaganda. Isn't this thinking what makes people think their smart devices are listening to conversations rather than targeted ads you only notice after it's had the effect on you.
I don't think I am immune to propaganda, and definitely not ads. I can't stand ads at all. They immediately grab my attention, even if I make a conscious attempt at ignoring them. It truly feels terrible.
Even for propaganda, I am constantly made aware of my propaganda immunity being subpar for all different kinds of propaganda. Often it's just subtle seeds of propaganda that impact the choice of words that I use to be something different than what I really believe in, and sometimes it is more serious and deeper cases of propagandisation. Very unfortunate, but each time it shows me why I should be critical of everything that I read online.
Whether you're filtering it, or it's subconsciously working is a bit hard to say. Plenty of people think they're 'immune' to advertising - but the goal is often very simple. Just putting the name of a brand in your head can pay off months or years later when going to buy something. That associating of X brand with Y product is already there, even if you've long forgotten the source.
Gamecopyworld… now there’s a name I have not heard in a long time.
I feel the same though. My only complaint when Adblockers fail is that I have to scroll so much to read some articles on some sites. Sure, there may be some level of subconscious registration occurring in my brain for maybe the company logo, but it’s usually minimal.
There was a site that kept breaking my Reader-mode last week. I would turn it on to filter ads, it would disable it by updating an element (I think that's how it got disabled).
I curled the page and piped it to a markdown conversion tool because I really wanted whatever information I'd searched. It's the first time I ever didn't just close the tab and move on because whatever I'd searched was a pressing issue that I wanted to solve.
What a fucking dick move by that site. Fuck them, whoever they were.
For me, it depends on how well-disguised the ad is. Ads quietly sitting there, informing? Those I blank out. The big flashy animations? Those make me switch to reader mode, or leave the domain entirely.
I do sometimes find I'm accidentally clicking on the ads at the top of search engine results, though for this case it's extra ironic as the ad is for the real thing I'm searching for which is 2 results further down the list, and I only realise I clicked on an ad when the link goes via an ad-tracking domain that I block.
I've recently been fooled by an ad in reddit that was pretending to be news, which took me to a fake BBC website. First hint, I also block the BBC domain (nothing wrong with them, it's just a habit I want to get out of given I don't live in the UK any more).
Same here. What's worse is that some pages "highlight" content in a similar fashion to an ad in the middle and I'm a bit unaware of that content. Only when something doesn't add up I'll scroll back and see the missing content.
Yea I'm with you there. I honestly don't even see ads. Even YouTube ads that start playing, my brain switches off till I can skip. I also don't read the news at all anywhere, so that helps.
The hotspot issue is my absolute pet peeve. It is so bad for me that I just had to accept that I have two options for hotspotting:
1. Go to settings and change my phones name then connect. Every. Damn. Time.
2. Use a cable and hope the MacBook Pro picks it up.
Honestly the quality of iPhones has deteriorated to a point where my next phone will just be something like an oppo or xiomi. I’m done paying £500+ for a phone that doesn’t do what it’s meant to while forcing a load of crap I don’t want down my neck
The hotspot errors drive me insane. You’re basically connecting two device from the same company that happens to make both software and hardware on those two devices. I can’t understand this.
That and the fact that money and media presence is essentially what wins elections. The only way we can really have democracy is with a truly informed populace and the only way people can make a truly informed vote without all the noise is to have anonymous voting. By which I mean you do not know which politician/party you are voting for, you just know the policies they have promised to enforce.
Further to that, there needs to be accountability. Right now, in the UK at least, governments are not held to account, at all. They get into office with grand promises of flying elephants and golden egg laying geese but obviously never follow through with said promises. The populace, ultimately, just shrugs it off with ‘politicians lie’ and continue complaining about it within their social circles.
Our political systems are fundamentally broken. We shouldn’t care if policies are from party A or party B. All that should matter is the content of the policy and whether it is ever actually materialised.
Right now we have a situation where people are manipulated left, right and centre into believing a given party’s absolute BS manifesto which they write under the full knowledge that not delivering will have very little impact on them as they’ve just had a substantial amount of time getting paid lucrative salaries to essentially argue with a bunch of other liars in a shouting match on tele.
Remove the football-esque fandom which applies to political parties by removing any ability to publicly affiliate any given person with said party and I’d bet we see different results across the bar. Remove all this absolute nonsense of politicians promoting their ideologies on TV/Twotter etc and you will remove a lot of the brainwashing which happens. Remove the most corrupt situation of all: private firms and individuals being able to fund political parties and you level the playing field.
Obviously this is a hard pill for many to swallow as no one likes to be told they’ve essentially been brainwashed into their thoughts and ego is everything in modern society.
Think the notion that ‘no one’ uses em dashes is a bit misguided. I’ve personally used them in text for as long as I can remember.
Also on the phrase “you’re absolute right”, it’s definitely a phrase my friends and I use a lot, albeit in a sorta of sarcastic manner when one of us says something which is obvious but, nonetheless, we use it. We also tend to use “Well, you’re not wrong” again in a sarcastic manner for something which is obvious.
And, no, we’re not from non English speaking countries (some of our parents are), we all grew up in the UK.
Just thought I’d add that in there as it’s a bit extreme to see an em dash instantly jump to “must be written by AI”
It is so irritating that people now think you've used an LLM just because you use nice typography. I've been using en dashes a ton (and em dashes sporadically) since long before ChatGPT came around. My writing style belonged to me first—why should I have to change?
If you have the Compose key [1] enabled on your computer, the keyboard sequence is pretty easy: `Compose - - -` (and for en dash, it's `Compose - - .`). Those two are probably my most-used Compose combos.
Also on phones it is really easy to use em dashes. It's quite out in the open whether I posted from desktop or phone because the use of "---" vs "—" is the dead give-away.
I configured my system to treat caps lock as compose, and also set up a bunch of custom compose sequences that better suit how I think about the fancy characters I most often want to type. My em-dash is `Compose m d`.
I've had alt+0150 (–) and alt+0151 (—) memorized for over a decade at this point and frequently use them. It sucks that they're just associated with AI nowadays (along with the poor Oxford comma).
I am more likely to separate two thoughts with space-endash-space than with an em dash and no spaces. It just feels weird to not type spaces, and I don't want to do space-emdash-space because that would feel like an enormous gap; if the two clauses need that much distance from each other, why not just split them into two sentences?
I'm sure this goes against many style guides, but for everyday use it's what feels most natural to me.
Not OP, but I find the space-en-space convention easier to read than the nospace-em-nospace convention. American style guides prefer the latter – in my eyes they are wrong about that
Hot take, but a character that demands zero-space between the letters at the end and the beginning of 2 words - that ISN'T a hyphenated compound - is NOT nice typography. I don't care how prevalent it is, or once was.
I don't know if my language grammar rules (Italian) are different than English, but I've always seen spaces before and after em-dashes. I don't like the em-dash being stuck to two unrelated words.
That's because in Italian, like in many other European languages, you use en-dashes to separate parenthetical clauses. The en-dash is used with space, the em-dash (mostly) without space and that's why it's longer. On old typewriters they were frequently written as "--" and "---" respectively. So yes, it's mostly an English thing. Stick to your trattinos, they're nice!
As a brit I'd say we tend to use "en-dashes", slightly shorter versions - so more similar to a hyphen and so often typed like that - with spaces either side.
I never saw em-dashes—the longer version with no space—outside of published books and now AI.
There are British style manuals (e.g., the Guardian’s) that prefer em-dashes for roughly the same set of uses they tend to perferred for in US style guides, but it is mixed between em-dashes and en-dashes (both usually set open), while all the influential American style guides prefer em-dashes (but split, for digressive/parenthetical use, between setting them closed [e.g., Chicago Manual] and open [e.g., AP Style].)
Besides the LaTeX use, on Linux if you have gone into your keyboard options and configured a rarely-used key to be your Compose key (I like to use the "menu" key for this purpose, or right Alt if on a keyboard with no "menu" key), you can type Compose sequences as follows (note how they closely resemble the LaTeX -- or --- sequences):
Compose, hyphen, hyphen, period: produces – (en dash)
Compose, hyphen, hyphen, hyphen: produces — (em dash)
And many other useful sequences too, like Compose, lowercase o, lowercase o to produce the ° (degree) symbol. If you're running Linux, look into your keyboard settings and dig into the advanced settings until you find the Compose key, it's super handy.
P.S. If I was running Windows I would probably never type em dashes. But since the key combination to type them on Linux is so easy to remember, I use em dashes, degree symbols, and other things all the time.
> If I was running Windows I would probably never type em dashes. But since the key combination to type them on Linux is so easy to remember, I use em dashes, degree symbols, and other things all the time.
There are compose key implementations for Windows, too.
I think that's just incorrect. There are varying conventions for spaces vs no spaces around em dashes, but all English manuals of style confine to en dashes just to things like "0–10" and "Louisville–Calgary" — at least to my knowledge.
HMRC style guide: "Avoid the shorter en dash as they are treated differently by different screen readers" [0].
But I see what you mean. There used to be a distinction between a shorter dash that is used for numerical ranges, or for things named after multiple people, and a longer dash used to connect independent clauses in a sentence [1]. I am shocked to hear that this distinction is being eroded.
That guy's style guide seems to conflict with the Cambridge editorial services guidelines - though that is for books rather than papers:
> Spaced en rules (or ‘en dashes’) must be used for parenthetical dashes. Hyphens or em rules
(‘em dashes’) will not be accepted for either UK or US style books. En rules (–) are longer than
hyphens (-) but shorter than em rules (—).
Came here to confirm this. I grew up learning BrE and indeed in BrE, we were taught to use en-dash. I don't think we were ever taught em-dash at all. My first encounter with em-dash was with LaTeX's '---' as an adult.
I would add that a lot of us who were born or grew up in the UK are quite comfortable saying stuff like "you're right, but...", or even "I agree with you, but...". The British politeness thing, presumably.
Just my two cents: We use em-dashes in our bookstore newsletter. It's more visually appealing than than semi-colons and more versatile as it can be used to block off both ends of a clause. I even use en-dashes between numbers in a range though, so I may be an outlier.
No problem! But it's also important to consider your image online. Here are some reasons not to use em-dashes in Internet forum posts:
* **Veneer of authenticity**: because of the difficulty of typing em-dashes in typical form-submission environments, many human posters tend to forgo them.
* **Social pressure**: even if you take strides to make em-dashes easier to type, including them can have negative repercussions. A large fraction of human audiences have internalized a heuristic that "em-dash == LLM" (which could perhaps be dubbed the "LLM-dash hypothesis"). Using em-dashes may risk false accusations, degradation of community trust, and long-winded meta discussion.
* **Unicode support**: some older forums may struggle with encoding for characters beyond the standard US-ASCII range, leading to [mojibake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake).
Oof. I don't know what's worse there: that they don't know a conventional way to find-and-replace, or that they didn't try asking the LLM not to use them. (Or to fix it afterwards.)
Em-dashes may be hard to type on a laptop, but they're extremely easy to type on iOS—you just hold down the "-" key, as with many other special characters—so I use them fairly frequently when typing on that platform.
That's not as easy as just hitting the hyphen key, nor are most people going to be aware that even exists. I think it's fair to say that the hyphen is far easier to use than an em dash.
But why when the “-“ works just as well and doesn’t require holding the key down?
You’re not the first person I’ve seen say that FWIW, but I just don’t recall seeing the full proper em-dash in informal contexts before ChatGPT (not that I was paying attention). I can’t help but wonder if ChatGPT has caused some people - not necessarily you! - to gaslight themselves into believing that they used the em-dash themselves, in the before time.
In British English you'd be wrong for using an em-dash in those places, with most grammar recommendations being for an en-dash, often with spaces.
It's be just as wrong as using an apostrophe instead of a comma.
Grammar is often wooly in a widely used language with no single centralised authority. Many of the "Hard Rules" some people thing are fundamental truths are often more local style guides, and often a lot more recent than some people seem to believe.
Interesting, I’m an American English speaker but that’s how it feels natural to me to use dashes. Em-dashes with no spaces feels wrong for reasons I can’t articulate. This first usage—in this meandering sentence—feels bossy, like I can’t have a moment to read each word individually. But this second one — which feels more natural — lets the words and the punctuation breathe. I don’t actually know where I picked up this habit. Probably from the web.
It can also depend on the medium. Typically, newspapers (e.g. the AP style guide) use spaces around em-dashes, but books / Chicago style guide does not.
The thing with em-dashes is not the em-dash itself. I use em-dashes, because when I started to blog, I was curious about improving my English writing skills (English is not my native language, and although I have learned English in school, most of my English is coming from playing RPGs and watching movies in English).
According to what I know, the correct way to use em-dash is to not surround it by spaces, so words look connected like--this. And indeed, when I started to use em-dashes in my blog(s), that's how I did it. But I found it rather ugly, so I started to put spaces around it. And there were periods where I stopped using em-dash all together.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that unless you write as a profession, most people are inconsistent. Sometimes, I use em-dashes. Sometimes I don't. In some cases I capitalize my words where needed, and sometimes not, depending on how in a hurry I am, or whether I type from a phone (which does a lot of heaving lifting for me).
If you see someone who consistently uses the "proper" grammar in every single post on the internet, it might be a sign that they use AI.
I am a native English speaker and I agree with you completely that em-dashes look better when surrounded by spaces rather than connected directly to the words.
I'm in your camp, that both of these are appropriate for some situations. In particular I like starting with a variation on "you're absolutely right" when it appears my interlocutor has identified the wrong disagreement, before realigning the conversation to a more useful direction (though of course there are many phrases that accomplish that).
It's still frequently identifiable in (current-generation) LLM text by the glossy superficiality that comes along with these usages. For example, in "It's not just X, it's Y", when a human does this it will be because Y materially adds something that's not captured by X, but in LLM output X and Y tend to be very close in meaning, maybe different in intensity, such that saying them both really adds nothing. Or when I use "You're absolutely right" I'll clarify what they are right about, whereas for the LLM it's just an empty affirmation.
On my side of the Atlantic using en-dashes with spaces on either side of the dash is acceptable writing style so that’s what I use (instead of em-dashes). However, many people can’t tell the difference between the two so some might confuse my writing from that of an LLM. But I’m not going to let that dictate my writing style.
For the past 15 years, I’ve used the Unicycle Vim plugin¹ which makes it very easy to add proper typographic quotes and dashes in Insert mode. As something of a typography nerd, I’ve extended it to include other Unicode characters, e.g., prime and double-prime characters to represent minutes and seconds.
At the same time, I’ve always used a Firefox extension that launches GVim when editing a text box; currently, I’m using Tridactyl for this purpose.
Yeah, I mean, ultimately, aren't the LLMs actually trained to look like human language? So whatever particular "quirk" you have as a writer, there is probably an LLM emulating that either wholesale, or like 50% of the times.
LLMs use em-dash because people (in their training data) used em-dash. They use "You're absolutely right" because that's a common human phrase. It's not "You write like an LLM", it's "The LLMs write kind of like you", and for good reasons, that's exactly what people been training them to do.
And yes, "pun" intended for extra effect, that also comes from humans doing it.
The LLM output isn't an unfiltered result of an unbiased model. Rather, some texts may be classified high-quality (where the em-dash, curly quotes, a more sophisticated/less-everyday vocabulary are more expected to appear), some low-quality, and some choices are driven by human feedback (aka fine-tuning), either to improve quality (OpenAI employs Kenyans, Kenyan/Nigerian English considered more colonial) or engagement through affirmative/reinforcing responses ("You're absolutely right. Universe is indeed a donut. Want me to write down an abstract? Want me to write down the equations?"). Some nice relevant articles are [1],[2].
> I’ve personally used them in text for as long as I can remember.
Likewise. I used to copy/paste them when I couldn't figure out how to actually type them, lol. Or use the HTML char code `—` It sucks that good grammar now makes people assume you used AI.
I'm pretty sure the OP is talking about this thread. I have it top of mind because I participated and was extremely frustrated about, not just the AI slop, but how much the author claimed not to use AI when they obviously used it.
It was not just the em dashes and the "absolutely right!" It was everything together, including the robotic clarifying question at the end of their comments.
Well the dialogue there involves two or more people, when commenting, why would you use that.. Even if you have collaborators, you wouldn't very likely be discussing stuff through code comments..
Sorry but I don’t believe you about em dashes. I don’t recall ever seeing them in online content or comments before LLM’s got popular. Normal dashes for sure, but no one actually dug out special character for it
I can’t agree more. I’m torn on LLM code reviews. On the one hand I think it is a place that makes a lot of sense and they can quickly catch silly human errors like misspelled variables and whatnot.
On the other hand the amount of flip flopping they go through is unreal. I’ve witnessed numerous instances where either the cursor bugbot or Claude has found a bug and recommended a reasonable fix. The fix has been implemented and then the LLM has argued the case against the fix and requested the code be reverted. Out of curiosity to see what happens I’ve reverted the code just to be told the exact same recommendation as in the first pass.
I can foresee this becoming a circus for less experienced devs so I turned off the auto code reviews and stuck them in request only mode with a GH action so that I can retain some semblance of sanity and prevent the pr comment history from becoming cluttered with overly verbose comments from an agent.
The purpose of these reviewers is to flag the bug to you. You still need to read the code around and see if its valid and serious and worth a fix. Why does it matter if it then says the opposite after the fix? Did it even happen often or is this just an anecdote of a one time thing?
It’s like a linter with conflicting rules (can’t use tabs, rewrite to spaces; can’t use spaces, rewrite to tabs). Something that runs itself in circles and can also block a change unless the comment is resolved simply adds noise, and a bot that contradicts itself does not add confidence to a change.
So many people are just shouting ‘I wanna go fast’ and completely forgetting the lessons learned over the past few decades. Something is going to crash and burn, eventually.
I say this as a daily LLM user, albeit a user with a very skeptical view of anything the LLM puts in front of me.
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