Spams of groups of threes (open, chaotic, full of real voices - filtered, throttled, and buried - users, privacy, real expression)
It's not just X - it's Y type of sentence structure
Vapid marketing style writing that has no real substance (Maybe it’s not about saving the old web. Perhaps it’s time to build a new one)
Of course, there are emdashes too, they may not betray LLM alone as they exist in literature and a minority like to use them in internet comments but when they are present along with other signs of slop they are still a strong tell, particularly when they are numerous.
Is this satire? or trolling? it is concerning everyone replies to it as if there had been human thought behind this drivel.
Typically LLMs don't put spaces between em dashes and the words that surround them—which is the correct orthography, I should point out. Humans often put spaces around them when they shouldn't, like in the example you quoted. I don't know if it's AI or not, but if you ask an AI to use a sentence with an em dash in it, it won't include spaces.
How can "correct" have any meaning in style-preference territory? Chicago doesn't put spaces around dashes. AP does. Oxford follows Chicago, and the rest of the UK uses spaced en dashes instead. For typewriting -- and, by extension, typing -- this well-established convention appears (attested in Garner's Usage, if you're wondering). Chicago always spaces ellipses . . . and AP doesn't, no matter how ugly it looks next to a period. ... Who's correct?
I've seen some variation in such formatting/style from LLMs, so that can't be totally reliable. Doesn't need to be, though. LLMs tend to subject dashes to a distinct flavor of abuse:
- In all the places they don't belong; nearly all can be replaced with a comma, a period, or nothing at all, with no loss to style or tone
- In few of the places they might belong, and conspicuously absent whenever there's a parenthetical phrase to offset
Hi, ntstr! I am the author of the parent post, and it is not LLM Slop (you can use gpt detectors like zerogpt.com to check text); in fact, only the "call to action" (the last sentence) part was written by LLM, just because I thought that something was missing.
> Is this satire? or trolling? it is concerning that everyone replies to it as if there had been human thought behind this drivel.
No satire, no trolling from me. Even if an evil robot wrote this comment, what's wrong with responding to it?
I didn’t notice because I unconsciously skim over slop-looking comments without evaluating whether it’s human-written or not, and only read the more interesting comments.
> because I want local content made in Poland telling about things specific to Poland,
I used to use site:reddit.com as my go to must-use keyword whenever I wanted to look for something on Google, but since they introduced automated translation in my language (French) it has become a nightmare because I would find irrelevant content written for other places even when I type my search in French. You see, they had the great idea to not only automatically translate entire subreddits and comments but also have the translated forms be indexed by Google!
So now you would try to look for comments on, for example, great retail shops for niche products and click links that talk about shopping in the USA or Canada. Hateful.
I can't really describe how much I hate this without going into the most vulgar of expletives.
site:reddit.com was the last bastion of finding things quickly on google without stumbling upon ton of markov chain / copy paste crap content. Now it's being ruined by this translation nonsense + LLM bots.
>Syntax highlighting is juvenile. When I was a child, I was taught
arithmetic using colored rods (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuisenaire_rods). I grew up and today I
use monochromatic numerals.
The language creator really hates it (and most modern editor tooling).
Ultimately he's fine with _some_ syntax highlighting, especially the kind that uses whitespace to highlight parts of the syntax, as evidenced by the existence of `go fmt`. He just hasn't taken into consideration that colour is just one typographical tool among many, including the use of whitespace, as well as italics, bold, size, typeface, etc. Switching inks has been somewhat tedious in printing, but these days most publications seem to support it just fine, and obsessive note-takers also use various pens and highlighters in different colours. For the rest of us it's mostly about the toil of switching pens that's holding us back I think, rather than some real preference for monochromatic notes. We generally have eyes that can discern colours and brains that can process that signal in parallel to other stuff, which along with our innate selective attention means we can filter out the background or have our attention drawn to stuff like red lights. Intentionally not using that built-in hardware feature is ultimately just making stuff harder on oneself with no particular benefit.
There's also some google groups quote from him about iterators which is also pretty funny given how modern Go uses them, but I don't have the link at hand. Several google groups quotes from the original language creators (not just Pike) tell an unfortunate story about how the language came to be the way it is.
I'm a fan of Rob Pike, but not of Go. Rob Pike contributed a lot of thought to editor tooling through the years, albeit not in the direction the industry seems to be going -- for example, Sam and Acme are two editors he developed. Acme UI design is inspired by Oberon and is based on tiling, but 3rd party tooling integration is entirely different and leverages Plan9 concepts to enable a whole lot of extensibility with practically zero complexity overhead due to integration -- without any true plugin architecture. There are limits to what can be accomplished this way, but it is surprisingly powerful and I can see why a community might gravitate to his views. Unfortunately he takes this minimalist approach too far when it comes to languages IMO -- a language with no coproducts in 2025 is either a niche language or unnecessarily underpowered (how they do error handling is atrocious). Over the last decade Go went from the former to the latter.
How does that matter, if it's more _easily_ comprehended (faster, with less effort, with fewer mistakes in comprehension) with the highlighting, for any level of complexity?
Not choosing to use syntax highlighting is just wrong on every level. It has exactly zero drawbacks.
Yes. And there should be studies that show that the number of people who are hampered by syntax highlighting is probably so vanishingly small sompared to those that are either helped or not helped (unhelped, but not hampered)
Syntax highlighting studies usually don't report on whether some subjects perform worse with syntax highlighting - usually only that they as a group perform better. But even with that evidence, it should be obvious that syntax highlighting should be either on for everyone, or on initially and off as an option for the rare individual.
one wonders why colors exists after all. why, we should know all about vegetation, streams, living, and non-living organisms so that their chromatic attributes are very unnecessary. monochrome for the win! i propose dark gray btw /s
on a more serious note: somehow nature choose to let us see colors, and this sense has been immensely useful to our existence and pleasure. maybe go could learn a thing or two from nature?
Spams of groups of threes (open, chaotic, full of real voices - filtered, throttled, and buried - users, privacy, real expression)
It's not just X - it's Y type of sentence structure Vapid marketing style writing that has no real substance (Maybe it’s not about saving the old web. Perhaps it’s time to build a new one)
Of course, there are emdashes too, they may not betray LLM alone as they exist in literature and a minority like to use them in internet comments but when they are present along with other signs of slop they are still a strong tell, particularly when they are numerous.
Is this satire? or trolling? it is concerning everyone replies to it as if there had been human thought behind this drivel.