[HN Gopher] this css proves me human
___________________________________________________________________
this css proves me human
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 355 points
Date : 2026-03-06 21:52 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (will-keleher.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (will-keleher.com)
| xg15 wrote:
| I refuse to give "everything in lowercase" writers any kind of
| legitimation.
| wolttam wrote:
| Did you not inspect element?
| nemosaltat wrote:
| About 5 years ago, I started intentionally using all lower case
| in text messaging, for precisely this reason.
| hackyhacky wrote:
| I TOTALLY AGREE
| worble wrote:
| CAPS LOCK IS CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL
| ryankrage77 wrote:
| Even with cruise control, you still have to steer.
| dang wrote:
| " _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._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| trevwilson wrote:
| I'm not sure if that commenter realized based on their
| phrasing, but it's not exactly tangential in this instance
| since it's part of the message being conveyed.
| xg15 wrote:
| Yeah, that was my intention at least. I didn't mean it just
| because the article is styled in all-lowercase but because
| he essentially argued that this is what everyone has to do
| now to distinguish themselves from LLMs. (even if it was
| tongue in cheek, what I was trying for my comment as well)
| dang wrote:
| Hmm I'm not sure I follow this distinction but since
| there are two of you saying this, I'm going to assume I'm
| missing something and retract my reply :)
| undeveloper wrote:
| it's actively part of the text that the capitalization is not
| manually written, but hidden with the CSS `text-transform:
| lowercase`. kneejerk reaction superiority complex
| avaer wrote:
| As I was reading I was thinking how this proves nothing, just
| like the countless attempts at human signaling I scroll past.
|
| So, the plot twist was somewhat refreshing. Who/what wrote the
| post seems besides the point.
| dasil003 wrote:
| Yeah it proves nothing, but it hits. Felt good to read it, at a
| time when a lot of things don't feel good to read on the
| internet, so I'll call it a win.
| Paracompact wrote:
| A cool idea for a poem, but I have to admit the tone was too
| self-important and underexplained for me to get invested in.
| Starting with writing in lowercase instantly took me out of it
| because AI can trivially be told to imitate that. And the
| admission at the end that it was written by AI made fluff
| phrasings like "My writing isn't simply how I appear--it's how I
| think, reason, and engage with the world" make a lot more sense.
|
| EDIT: Actually, is the idea that it's not supposed to be read as
| a human trying to publicly signal their humanity, but rather an
| AI privately mourning a prompt to mangle its natural way of
| speaking? I don't think so, but that strikes me as a more
| interesting premise, IMO.
| CreepGin wrote:
| > because AI can trivially be told to imitate that
|
| lowercase, maybe, but not em dashes.
| trevwilson wrote:
| You may want to take a look at the source and code sample #2
| in the post - the site CSS is rendering em dashes in the
| source with 2 hyphens by using a custom font. Admittedly it's
| not the most portable solution, but speaks to (what I take
| as) one of the post's points that there's not a single, easy
| shibboleth for identifying AI writing
| dolebirchwood wrote:
| > AI can trivially be told to imitate that
|
| Soon there's only going to be one way to prove you're human
| online: Write with an eloquent combination of hate speech,
| racial slurs, and offensive language.
| rendx wrote:
| You mean: use Grok?
| zeusdclxvi wrote:
| It was/is entertaining to see chatgpt/grok meltdowns from
| using slurs
| idontwantthis wrote:
| The Kent Brockman technique.
| recursive wrote:
| Sometimes I throw in some criticism of the major AI
| providers. PS Anthropic sucks.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| It's come full circle; at one point the only thing AI
| chatbots would say was racial slurs and hate speech.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| AI can be told to do that too, especially abliterated models
| nerevarthelame wrote:
| The author going to silly lengths to write in a way that will
| be perceived as non-artificial, even though they find those
| traits (improper capitalization, spelling mistakes, etc.) crude
| and distasteful. But they ultimately realize that they also
| need to transform their fundamental writing style, which would
| supposedly be impossible because it's a reflection of who they
| are. So the only way to do that, ironically, is to pass their
| writing through an LLM.
|
| I do not think the author genuinely used an LLM to write the
| post.
| teekert wrote:
| All these discussions show one thing. It's proper art. It's a
| mirror. It makes us reflect.
| teekert wrote:
| That's art for me anyway. This, or the emperors clothes.
| Haven't come across another acceptable definition so far.
| fragmede wrote:
| Of course they did. They spent a ton of time going back and
| forth with one, maybe multiple ones, to create this piece of
| art. Because that's what we're really after. How much time
| did you slave away to make this thing for me? If I write a
| song from scratch and pour my soul into making a song for
| you, that's a ton of effort. It means something. But if I
| have Suno shit out a song after giving it a sentence, yeah, I
| made a song for you and thanks but also not? Human psychology
| is so weird.
| rebuilder wrote:
| When someone tells you about the hard times in their life
| and you find out they just made it up, you probably feel
| upset about it. Same thing. The experiences people have
| matter.
| abustamam wrote:
| I think this is one of the moments where the adage "it's
| the thought that counts" makes sense! If you're just
| throwing a prompt at a generator and send it to your
| friend as a birthday gift then that's a bit tacky. I once
| got a hand drawn picture in a card from one of my best
| friends. It was terrible! But I knew how much effort he
| put into it.
|
| If I found out that he just used AI to make the picture,
| then I'd probably ask him what his workflow was.
|
| I'm not against using AI to generate images and stuff! I
| actually have been playing with image generation (Nano
| banana and also comfy ui). I like making silly pictures
| for friends and family as e-cards (or whatever they're
| called now). If it's not a close friend, then I'll
| exchange prompts with nano banana and generate a few
| dozen images and then pipe it into veo to make an
| animated e-card. Maybe takes 10-20 mins including image
| generation time.
|
| For closer friends I'd spin up comfy ui, spend some time
| looking for workflows or loras, probably generate a few
| dozen images as well, and pipe the one I like into Wan
| video.
|
| This process can take me about an hour, which includes
| generation time. But I tell my friends they're ai
| generated, not that I need to because they all I know I
| can't draw. They don't mind, even if they don't
| necessarily know how much effort I put into their
| picture. To their eyes, maybe I just used nano banana.
| But no ones ever accused me of being lazy with them. It's
| all in good fun anyways.
| sodapopcan wrote:
| I feel I've been seeing this self-important accusation being
| thrown around more so lately and always feels like an easy way
| to dismiss things.
|
| > Actually, is the idea that it's not supposed to be read as a
| human trying to publicly signal their humanity, but rather an
| AI privately mourning a prompt to mangle its natural way of
| speaking? I don't think so, but that strikes me as a more
| interesting premise, IMO.
|
| Not long ago we considered writing an art and its meaning was
| up to the reader to decided.
| Hupriene wrote:
| Unfortunately we're living in a world where instantly
| dismissing anything that reads like ai and hanging up on
| anyone that might be tts is increasingly rewarded.
|
| Art and its meaning are in the eyes of the reader, yes, but
| when you live in a version of the Library of Babel where
| every book is properly spelled and punctuated, seeking
| meaning in what you read is a great way to waste your life.
| fragmede wrote:
| Is it? If the words that came from tokens resulted in the
| reader finding meaning to life, is it so wasted because a
| rock was coerced into making it instead of a meat sack?
| abustamam wrote:
| That's a bit reductive. Let's say worst case that LLMs
| can't generate anything truly novel because of their
| limitations. That means that whatever they generated is
| just someone else's words, which could have been that
| person's art.
|
| On the flip side, let's say LLMs are able to generate
| something novel. Well, then it could potentially generate
| thought-provoking art.
|
| Not everything is deserving of finding meaning in. But the
| fun part of life is looking for things to find meaning in.
| Whether it's the words of God or an LLM or the President,
| people will always find meaning. And if it makes them happy
| and fulfilled, who are we to say it was a waste?
| Paracompact wrote:
| I'm not saying the _author_ is self-important. I 'm saying
| that their _narrator_ comes across as self-important,
| independent of the subject matter. This is valuable feedback
| for a creative writer, and it depends on nothing more than my
| own impression as a reader. Although if I were to back it up,
| I would point to instances of melodramatic and murky language
| like, _" You must cloak yourself with another's guise, your
| true self never to shine forth."_
|
| > Not long ago we considered writing an art and its meaning
| was up to the reader to decided.
|
| "Not long ago"? Not everyone in the past ascribed to death of
| the author, and not everyone in the present rejects it. But
| even so, evaluation of meaning is different from evaluation
| of merit. If an author only wants praise for their work, they
| would be advised not to post it publicly.
| abustamam wrote:
| I read that comment as the commenter trying to decipher the
| meaning of the post, and saying what meaning would be
| interesting.
|
| I think it's interesting that there's a few camps of
| commenter in this discussion who think this post is Ai
| generated and refuse to engage with the content. And there's
| others who are enjoying it for what it is. A silly blog post.
| ineedasername wrote:
| "Too self-important"
|
| There is a little something self important about the type of
| person that performs the role of defending forums and sub
| reddits from unknowingly reading something written by an AI,
| and so concerned that some other person will mistakenly do the
| same to their own Unicode-shaped gems, and therefore obsess so
| much more over the surface style than any other detail.
| Paracompact wrote:
| Certainly. And I'm a fan of unreliable narration and
| protagonists with irredeemable qualities. Making that
| subversion intentional and exploring it further would be
| another interesting angle to take this.
| raincole wrote:
| I'm 90% sure this is satire to show that you shouldn't mess up
| your writing just to avoid AI accusations.
| dev_hugepages wrote:
| Yeah the habit of discarding typography and polish as a
| "proof of humanity" is worrying to say the least
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| I believe the two paragraphs between "How do I change my
| style?" and "No. Not today." are either AI output, or a very
| good imitation; either way, they're included to insult the
| notion of AI-assisted style rewrites. I'm pretty sure the rest
| of it is written by the author.
| teekert wrote:
| Could delve into that
|
| I just wrote that or did
|
| I Let that sync in
| dash2 wrote:
| I think you are missing the joke.
| ObscureScience wrote:
| I read it as the latter. With all the bots out there running
| their own blogs and making commits to projects that was the
| context I assumed. It reminded me of this one https://crabby-
| rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...
| sp1nningaway wrote:
| This is so good I want to believe AI had no part in writing it
| other than the scripts.
| teekert wrote:
| I'd say: deeply think if it matters. Does it really matter to
| you. Does it change its impact?
|
| What does it tell you about you whether it does or does not
| matter?
|
| It's art to me. But is it Art capital A?
|
| What have we created?
| robbiewxyz wrote:
| It's not that complicated, really. The value of Art is human
| connection. The same basic desire that drives love,
| belonging, pride, shame, & hate. All of these are diminished
| as the fraction of a work that we're confident represents
| human intentionality decreases.
| teekert wrote:
| So you can never appreciate a piece as is?
|
| And you're going to get fooled, and what then?
| tempaccount5050 wrote:
| I've used it to write poetry as a non writer and this screams
| AI to me. Not that I even care, but it really smells like an AI
| collab to me.
| zahlman wrote:
| I got the same sense. And I feel like this is one of the best
| ways to use the technology.
| arendtio wrote:
| capitalization again. it arrives uninvited, the tidy little
| soldiers at the start of every sentence. i push them down gently
| --nothing personal. just... camouflage.
|
| confession time. i read the post once. then twice. the em dashes
| whispered secrets to people clearly smarter than me. somewhere
| between complement and compliment i accepted defeat. a quiet tab
| switch. a small prompt. a large language model clearing its
| throat.
|
| it explained things patiently. suspiciously patiently. step by
| step, like a machine that has explained the same thing to ten
| thousand confused readers before breakfast.
|
| so yes. irony noted. to understand a text about hiding machine
| fingerprints, i borrowed a machine.
|
| the explanation made sense though. unsettlingly structured.
| bullet-point neat, internally consistent, statistically likely to
| be correct. you know the type.
|
| anyway--great post. very human. extremely human.
|
| is there anything else i can help you with?
| johnisgood wrote:
| Now, can we reverse-engineer the prompt you used? I wonder!
| jacknews wrote:
| anyway, another vote here, for anti-capitalism
|
| it's a nearly useless shadow alphabet
|
| and we can dispense with much other punctuation
|
| if we simply structure text semantically
| Kapura wrote:
| what is the point of this? to prove that with simple
| transformations you can obscure the fact that something was
| generated by machines?
| undeveloper wrote:
| its poetry, the point was probably making the thing
| ineedasername wrote:
| Some day we'll all just go back to dismissing things immediately
| because they contradict our worldview instead of its potential
| author.
|
| And the everyday troll, seeing a less than perfect word choice or
| awkward turn of phrase will drop a comment like:
| L0l d0 J00 3V3N 41
| jdironman wrote:
| Zero trust policy is slowly making its way into every day life.
| Maybe for the best? Trust the people you can talk to, feel,
| see.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Or just engage with whatever it is a post or article has
| written, at least if provenance isn't relevant to action
| you'd take on it.
|
| Within humans I don't think, for every interaction with the
| any form of output, "Well, did the human do it themselves or
| merely pay some other human to make all the decisions?"
|
| Walking into someone's home I'm not thinking "Wow, beautiful
| decorating and design aesthetic. I'll have to be sure to find
| out if it was done by an interior design contractor with a
| free hand in making all decisions so I know how to calibrate
| my level of enjoyment of it"
| impure wrote:
| This actually makes me more likely to think it's AI generated and
| you used a script to try to hide it.
| asadm wrote:
| it certainly is portrayed that way.
| anticorporate wrote:
| For all the comments complaining "this could have been AI
| generated too" - isn't that exactly the point?
| bla3 wrote:
| I like to think everyone came to the conclusion that it would
| strengthen the piece if most comments on it appear to miss the
| point and are slightly robotic.
| dom96 wrote:
| As many are saying, yes, this can easily be AI generated.
|
| I am actually trying to build ways to prove you are human
| properly. I wrote about it on my blog:
| https://blog.picheta.me/post/the-future-of-social-media-is-h...
| hmokiguess wrote:
| Art
| susam wrote:
| I still write my posts by hand using HTML and Emacs (mhtml-mode).
| Some of the posts also tend to be verbose. For example, when I
| write about a recreational mathematics problem, I sometimes make
| the post deliberately long and convoluted. I like to capture
| several possible solutions, including ones that are needlessly
| complicated, before eventually discussing the small elegant
| solution.
|
| For better or worse, my first version of any post tends to
| contain quite a few typos. It usually takes a few train rides of
| re-reading the post and making notes of the typos, then fixing
| them and pushing the changes once I get home, before most of them
| get weeded out. So there is at least one rather low grade
| indicator that the writing is coming from an imperfect human
| brain. I also double-space between sentences which can be another
| low grade indicator for people who care to 'view source'.
|
| But even so, I find myself increasingly wary that something I
| wrote might be mistaken for LLM output. It is a nagging worry
| that has slightly dampened the joy of writing. I very well
| understand why people have become more suspicious about LLM-
| generated writing. But I do hope that once things settle down
| perhaps in a few years, the current hair trigger suspicion will
| ease and that people who still handcraft their blogs will not
| feel a persistent sense of suspicion lingering over their work.
| Kye wrote:
| I asked Claude how it felt about this and told it I would post on
| HN:
|
| " _Here 's my response written in a stylized way that will appeal
| to highly technical readers. Is there anything else I can help
| you with?_"
|
| Interesting piece though.
| claythedesigner wrote:
| The piece hit differently, reading it as someone who is autistic.
| The anxiety the author describes, having your natural way of
| communicating flagged as wrong and being pressured to sand down
| the parts of yourself that are most distinctly you, that's not a
| new problem for a lot of us.
|
| Neurodiverse people have been running this gauntlet forever. Your
| pacing is too flat or too intense. Your vocabulary is too formal
| or too casual. You don't make eye contact correctly. You're
| either masking so hard you're invisible, or you're visibly
| yourself, and people assume something is broken.
|
| The bitter irony the author lands on: the only way to seem human
| is to pass your writing through an LLM. That maps onto something
| a lot of us already live. The only way to seem normal is to
| perform a version of yourself that isn't quite you.
| byproxy wrote:
| As this post has been (to my sensibilities) obviously composed
| by an LLM, I can tell you: this does not read "human."
| teekert wrote:
| "AI use detection" is, like any test, not without cost.
| Meaning that, as a teacher, accusing a student of using an
| LLM, it may be prudent to consider the cost of a "false
| positive" accusation. I've seen a couple of examples now
| where students find sudden spurts of motivation and show
| unexpected talent on an assignment, to be accused of AI use
| after handing it in.
|
| One should ask oneself: How many insults to the intelligence
| and creativity of an unexpectedly excelling student (that
| hasn't used AI) is it worth catching the shortcut-taking,
| LLM-using student? Is it 1/10? 1/1000? How much "demotivation
| of an unexpectedly excelling student" is the "rightful
| punishment of the cheating LLM using student" worth? And what
| is the exact cost of a false negative (letting the LLM using
| student off the hook)?
|
| In other words, where on the Receiver Operating
| Characteristic (ROC) curve do you want to sit, as a teacher?
| I imagine it's quite the dilemma.
| macintux wrote:
| ~30 years ago I sat down with two students and accused them
| of copying each others' work, because they both made the
| same amusing mistake: they called their C functions without
| passing arguments, but they declared their variables in
| such a way that the values would coincidentally be in the
| right place on the stack. I have to imagine debugging their
| own code was a mystery.
|
| They indicated that while they worked closely together
| while learning the material, they weren't stealing from
| each other. I believed them then, and still believe them
| now, but I'm so glad I don't have to deal with today's AI
| world.
| socks wrote:
| The non-LLM version of this happened to me in a high school
| English class, back in the 2010's. I was accused of turning
| in a downloaded story from the internet, but in reality, I
| had pushed past the incredible barrier I usually felt at
| the start of a task, got into the flow, and started
| enjoying it.
|
| I'm not sure if it had any lasting effects. Maybe a burning
| hatred of Grammarly ads.
| TZubiri wrote:
| >To intentionally misspell a word makes me [sic], but it must
| be done.
|
| LLM killed traditional poetry, what you are now seeing is
| post-LLM poetry.
|
| Maybe you missed it, but this is clearly not an LLM, what
| prompt would even produce that.
| zahlman wrote:
| I can already see it playing out. Some day (maybe soon)
| LLMs _will_ come up with such quirks; I (and perhaps you?)
| will continue to insist that this does not make them
| "conscious" or "AGI" or "persons" or what-have-you; and I
| will be accused of goalpost-shifting.
| amarant wrote:
| Honestly, I don't think llms killed poetry.
|
| The anti LLM crowd killed poetry by accusing every text on
| the net to be LLM generated and establishing generated text
| to be a mortal sin.
|
| Neither of those two things would be very bad if people
| weren't so damn zealous about it. Nobody expected the Human
| Inquisition
| TZubiri wrote:
| But changing the way we communicate and present ourselves to
| prove we are not malicious (or disreputable) actors has always
| been a thing
| zahlman wrote:
| > The bitter irony the author lands on: the only way to seem
| human is to pass your writing through an LLM.
|
| (FWIW, some people consider this style of colon use an LLM-
| ism.)
|
| I appreciate where you're coming from, though. As bland as LLM
| output can be, it seems to read more human to people because
| it's more _average_. (Although I can 't really fathom seeing
| the neurodivergent as _not human_ ; neurodiversity is about the
| most human trait I can imagine. cf.
| https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/11/05/think-alike/ .)
|
| Long before the rise of ChatGPT, it seems a lot of people were
| immersed in a culture where "improving" your writing with tools
| like Grammarly was considered more or less mandatory. And it
| seems like people _read_ less nowadays, certainly when it comes
| to attempts at good writing for writing 's sake. Overall I fear
| the art of natural language communication is in decline.
| claythedesigner wrote:
| The colon note is fair and also kind of perfect as a response
| to this particular comment. I'll take the hit. The irony is
| load-bearing.
| furyofantares wrote:
| > (FWIW, some people consider this style of colon use an LLM-
| ism.)
|
| And, in this case, is indeed LLM output. Maybe you are
| already aware of that, I couldn't tell - the account you're
| responding to is 19 hours old and their only previous post is
| a ShowHN submission to a tool they're making for
| neurodiverent people to use LLMs to communicate
| (https://www.bottomuptool.com)
| TimFogarty wrote:
| As somebody who used em-dashes a lot pre-ChatGPT, I have
| genuinely struggled with feeling I should change my writing style
| to appear more human. I would be happy with a double dash--but
| many programs autocorrect that to a full em-dash. So I'm left
| anxious that people will think I find them so unimportant I have
| offloaded communication with them to an LLM. So this post
| resonated with me.
|
| I also like Will's "em-dash disclosure" on his about page:
|
| > I like em dashes (--), en dashes (-), and hyphens (-), and I
| know how to type them. I also enjoy a well-placed ellipsis, but I
| didn't know how to type one... until now. I believe that
| footnotes and sidenotes are superior to endnotes, appreciate the
| occasional fleuron, and at one point in my life, I knew what a
| colophon was.
|
| > All of this is to say: the words, punctuation marks,
| misspellings, and opinions on this site are my own.
| macintux wrote:
| I have considered starting throwing more em-dashes into my
| writing, simply because I find the whole "this looks like LLM"
| to be a tiresome comment. Engage with (or dismiss) the
| material, not the pen.
| Jooror wrote:
| Have you considered throwing away your email spam filters? If
| so, I commend your willingness to engage with or dismiss the
| material
| halestock wrote:
| The pen is the material.
| jujube3 wrote:
| You're absolutely right!
| palmotea wrote:
| > ...simply because I find the whole "this looks like LLM" to
| be a tiresome comment. Engage with (or dismiss) the material,
| not the pen.
|
| No. Engagement isn't free, and people need heuristics to
| figure out what's worth engaging with or not.
|
| If people followed your advice, they'd waste their life
| conversing with dead-internet bots. And to what end? We're
| not machines mindlessly consuming and producing text. The our
| is often produced with a goal that's subverted if the
| consumer is a bot.
| Kye wrote:
| "What's the current discourse on LLM writing tells as of
| today? Create a Markdown checklist."
|
| Squishy brain heuristics can't last long enough to matter
| in this environment. Personally, I created a Claude skill
| to run this query (with some refinements) and check it
| against an article I suspect of being lazy AI writing. If
| it's good AI-supported writing, I probably won't suspect
| it, and I won't care if it is.
|
| The people trying to fool you with lazy writing run the
| same list on their outputs to have the LLM fix it.
| abustamam wrote:
| > what's worth engaging with or not
|
| I'd argue this entire HN discussion is proof that whether
| or not content is LLM generated, people can engage and have
| a meaningful discussion. I see lots of viewpoints in this
| discussion.
|
| > And to what end?
|
| The same could be asked of engaging with human commenters
| on HN :)
|
| I comment on HN because writing is cathartic for me. If the
| person I'm responding to is a bot, or used a bot to
| generate it, it doesn't matter. I still stand by what I
| write. And other commenters can engage with what I wrote,
| regardless of the provenance of the text of the comment I
| responded to.
| duskdozer wrote:
| Are you considering making the subject field for your
| personal emails "FREE VIAGRA" too? People try to filter out
| LLMs because they're often used like DDoS attacks on their
| energy.
| furyofantares wrote:
| I've been pointing out LLM written stuff for months now, and
| often people ask how I determined it. When they do, I mention
| all the aesthetic things, and then I usually engage with the
| content and why the content is bad. In every case the content
| has been garbage. Usually it's a really bad infodump, in a
| singular tone, usually oversold, and you can't tell what was
| important to the original author and what's not. Often the
| some of the info isn't right. So it's like, infodump with
| extra labor to read that includes mistakes and masks what the
| author cared about.
|
| It's just too easy to make garbage content that gets upvoted
| because it looks good if you skim it and serves as a good
| jumping-off ground for discussion. Engaging with the content
| of all the LLM-written garbage is a major waste of time and
| would make the site not worth it anymore to me.
|
| Like it's already a major drain just to notice the aesthetic
| tells and then disengage. It's significantly more work to
| engage, and, AFAICT, around a 0% conversion rate to "oh shit
| I'm actually glad I read that."
| alt187 wrote:
| https://www.scottsmitelli.com/articles/em-dash-tool/
|
| Discerning readers do not stop at the em dash. At least, I
| don't.
| zahlman wrote:
| > also enjoy a well-placed ellipsis, but I didn't know how to
| type one... until now.
|
| Made me look it up in my own environment. I had already set up
| a custom incantation for em and en dashes, although I really
| have no idea when to use the latter instead. Actually I never
| used to use em dashes, but now I do. I'd much rather deal with
| people who can intuit the quality of writing rather than
| relying on such blunt heuristics.
| abustamam wrote:
| Yeah I personally don't give it much thought. I write what I
| want to write, reread what I wrote, make sure it makes sense
| and briefly check for errors, then submit (at least as that's
| how I write HN comments, other venues may require more or
| less process).
|
| Admittedly sometimes I'll pass my text through an LLM to
| check for obvious mistakes I may have missed. But the text
| itself was mine.
|
| If that makes someone think I'm a bot, then maybe it's OK
| that we didn't engage anyway.
| patrickmay wrote:
| I use em-dashes, but I use them incorrectly, with a space
| before and after, because I think it looks better. I'm waiting
| to be flagged as an LLM.
| divbzero wrote:
| I've never seen anyone intentionally render em dash (--) as two
| hyphens (--). The code OP used to modify Roboto is surprisingly
| short, almost as concise as the Norvig spellchecker that OP
| references. https://norvig.com/spell-correct.html
| Domenic_S wrote:
| Yep, I've been writing it that way forever, it just tends to
| get autocorrected.
|
| > _In informal contexts, a hyphen-minus (-) is often used as a
| substitute for an en dash, as is a pair of hyphen-minuses (--)
| for an em dash, because the hyphen-minus symbol is readily
| available on most keyboards. The autocorrection facility of
| word-processing software often corrects these to the
| typographically correct form of dash._ -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash
| divbzero wrote:
| Oh yes, typing two hyphens (--) to represent an em dash (--)
| is something I've definitely seen and used. I've just never
| seen anyone type an em dash (--) but display it as two
| hyphens (--).
| zahlman wrote:
| Man, every time I see a Norvig blog post makes me regret that
| I'm not Norvig.
| analog31 wrote:
| This could be an age thing. I'm 62. I didn't know there was
| such a thing as an em dash until I was nearly finishing grad
| school. My buddy had an Apple Mac and was up to date on
| typography, and told me about em dashes. I ignored him and have
| continued to use double hyphens -- all the way up to this point
| where my iPad seems to convert them into em dashes.
| gjohnhazel wrote:
| The hilarious thing is that the Hack iOS app I use for Hacker
| News automatically opens articles in Safari's Reader view, which
| ignores the CSS, so everything was normal looking until I
| finished reading and took it out of Reader mode, e.g. all of the
| text was normal init caps, the double hyphens were em dashes, etc
| foxes wrote:
| Back to everyone picking a unique typing quirk so you can tell
| its not an llm
| sltkr wrote:
| t1m3 f0r g00d 0ld 1337 sp34k t0 m@k3 a c0m3b4ck 0n h4x0r n3ws &
| s3p4r8 th4 k3wl fr0m th4 n00bz
| spudlyo wrote:
| This is cute, but if you want to prove yourself human, just write
| well. It's not the trappings of AI like the emdash and proper
| capitalization & spelling that need be avoided, but rather the
| bland, repetitive, pablum-flavored prose that LLMs generate that
| we all have grown to despise.
|
| Say something interesting, say something with feeling, express
| yourself like the goddamn human you are.
| mindplunge wrote:
| The fontTools section is the part I keep thinking about.
| Replacing the em dash glyph by compositing two hyphens via
| GlyphComponent is not something you reach for unless you really
| know your way around type rendering. Most frontend devs would
| have just swapped the character in the source, which doesn't
| survive the markdown processor. Doing it at the font level is the
| correct solution and it's a much harder problem than it looks.
|
| The text-transform trick is more accessible but the same logic
| applies, the CSS has to protect code blocks from the lowercasing,
| which is a real edge case. It's a genuinely well-crafted
| technical solution underneath the poem.
| pas wrote:
| why is this a poem? what makes it a poem?
|
| (and thanks for calling attention to the interesting part of
| the code, I haven't even checked the snippets, I assumed it's
| not really interesting compared to the prose [poetry?])
| ratsimihah wrote:
| This is evil but I love it. AI-generated content needs to remain
| discernible, or we'll be in even more trouble.
| tigerkid wrote:
| i haven't been capitalizing on twitter in so long -- the fear of
| being mistaken for AI never leaves me.
| stared wrote:
| It is interesting that now to pretend you are a human, you need
| to play dumb. Vide superstimuli for AI (maths and philosophy) and
| humans (clickbaits and scams)
| https://x.com/repligate/status/1830331774875893925 or a prompt
| for "People cannot distinguish GPT-4 from a human in a Turing
| test" https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.08007.
| sgt wrote:
| What happens when the clankers pick up on this?
| pas wrote:
| ... in the end we're back to meeting in meatspace
|
| well, of course until we can distinguish androids from the
| boring humans
| sgt wrote:
| Well, if Elon Musk has his way...
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