And of course:
this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2026
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It's that em-dash at the end that really solidified it for me. Was kinda on the fence most of the way through.
Yeah a human wouldn't have used an em dash there. It would have been a colon or an ellipse.
My wife is a professional writer and uses em dash a lot, usually as --, including in her casual messages, as it's common for her to use.
It's the formatting style of the whole thing that sounds AI to me. "Honestly" phrases really jumps out at me now, as well as the "But..." fragments. Not that they're bad, hell, I type out things that way too. But for it to be all together, it sounds AI after you've seen it a lot.
The em dash is fine here, emphasizing the final point. Although I would have probably used a comma myself for a post and not a formal manuscript.
Funny thing is, you can get AI to reduce a lot of these tells with a decent system prompt and staging of the writing process. So I'm surprised we're still seeing it a lot and it hasn't been weaned out of the latest versions.
It's really hard to get rid of things caused by systematic bias in the training data.
After inhaling the entire internet, LLMs started being trained on publically available books.
And due to copyright, those were older ones from a time when em-dashes were used more.
The training results were tested by humans, which needed to be cheap, but also English language natives.
So they used workers in English-speaking African countries. Where the English taught in school is also more traditional with a focus on older literature.
"Due to copyright" did they not all illegally download every book they could, copyrighted or not, to train their LLMs?
Fair enough on the em-dash, hadn't actually considered that LLMs use it extensively because it's actually used in the wild.
The use of "--" is interesting, I use dashes to convey pacing constantly because I type as I speak, and so punctuation to me is largely about trying to write the delivery I want the reader to percieve, and I always just use "-" knowing it's incorrect, but I don't exactly wanna make myself seem even more like ai by switching lol
I may try using "--", thanks for sharing that!
I actually used to do the same thing with the -, and by em dash becoming a thing I dived into the usage and history of it all, including ; and en dash. And now I'm using - less. But I don't use em dash more, just tend to throw a comma in.
Another weird one I learned. em dash spacing. The spacing AI tends to use is not preferred by publishers now, but is more AP style, perhaps picking it up from when it was more popular to have space between the letters. Europe tends to prefer spacing but with a en dash (and I kind of like how that looks too, but it doesn't fly if you publish in the US).
Wait, so what spacing is generally preferred for the em dash? Thats interesting, I never formally learned how to use one so I'm curious (I've not been to college, I have no idea if its part of typical higher education curriculum if you take any english courses)
I abuse the fuck out of commas so I reach for dashes or ; when I want a longer pause that isn't a logical end point for a thought. But a semicolon feels somehow a bit more formal to me, so I use it less for general online chatting
that batman image,, uhh,,, recite it from memory,,, batman says "this is the tool of the enemy, we shall not use it" or something,,, idk,,,
(...why?? does lemmy collapse the commas into one??? eww
and uses the unicode ellipsis??? ugh
tip: be generous with backslashes! if it is not what you typed, then do not sit there and take it! defend yourself with the slashes!! ! !!)
Lemmy uses markdown, you can choose to learn it instead of getting frustrated about it lol. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Also, why are you putting question marks in the middle of the sentence? Reads horrible.
xml is better than markdown, you will not change my mind, but i would like to see you try
when they were writing the code to convert markdown to xml, because no, sane or insane, web browser supports markdown, did, at no point, did they think "gosh, there's got to be a better way"???
xml is better than markdown, you will not change my mind
Markdown is for humans who are writing their prose on the fly and don't want to be bothered with the cognitive load associated with the extra verbiage and rulesets of XML.
XML is for computers which are great with verbiage and rulesets.
It's perfectly fine to have a converter between the two to bridge the gap.
that's gotta be ragebait...
forcing a markup language for humans is so therianphobic!!!
and, it is so easy to write xml. markdown is way harder. escaping markdown, you have to remember to put a backslash before every character that markdown deems special, with xml, you just use <, >, and &.
it is both silly and saddening how many harmful stereotypes you've used in such a short span
also, xml is an interchange format, markdown is not!!! using markdown in federated software means that it's going to break!!! you could have the editor use markdown and the federation use xml...
now what happened here??? 7 cowards, who are all jeering me, yet are too ashamed to show their face?? show yourselves!!
can you say fuck on the internet??
so was i just hallucinating that lemmy somewhere censored swears??? or can someone back me up on this
There is something to it, but ya can't just mash two half truths together to make a full truth.
A clear vision of what I can expect and what I am going to be doing where I work, makes a big difference. It can outweigh some other concerns if I see that I can avoid, compensate for, or be allowed to fix them.
But if the salary is too low, I am not fucking joking: I am bringing skills and they have value. If anything, a talk about how I fit the role should make that clearer to you, the employer.
I guess if the "role talk" convinced me that it is a bullshit job that I am actually supposed to half-ass and coast, leaving me room to take on side jobs and do job hunting during paid hours: Sure. Let's sign.
Honestly, don't really see a problem with a negotiation ending up like that, it might clear up the workload or getting specific vacation other accommodations through, making the compensation worth it.
I went through a negotiation where they were very stingy on vacation time, and after several rounds of back and forth, they offered slightly higher pay, and tried to throw other minor benefits. I went somewhere else. 2 weeks starting is dumb. I typically take 4-5 a year and that feels small some days.
I mean, if we negotiate WFH that's some benefit worth money. Workload shouldnt matter if its full time i drop the pen after 40h. I think a person accepting a lowball offer will go on looking and you onboard for nothing.
Hopefully the promises are kept.
They always do that song and dance anyways, it's not like they wait til the last minute. Got that from my former job, and I just patiently waited til it clicked and they skipped : "they have a very thorough test system, and the work ambience is really good, and ... Oh yes you have already worked there." Yes I worked on their shitty tests and left because the ambiance was bad (one reason in many, this offering is fir another team, where the ambience is only morose).
But it's AI slop, probably with a prompt "the salary is not negotiable" in it so ...
In principle this is kind of how negotiations work.
Although, obviously it didn't needed to be phrased like this and posted to linked in.