Comment by dcre
2 days ago
I don’t like to accuse, and the article is fine overall, but this stinks: “This transparency transforms git history from a record of changes into a record of intent, creating a new form of documentation that bridges human reasoning and machine implementation.”
> I don’t like to accuse, and the article is fine overall, but this stinks:
Now consider your reasonable instinct to not accuse other people coupled with the possibility setting AI lose with “write a positive article about AI where you have some paragraphs about the current limitations based on this link. write like you are just following the evidence.” Meanwhile we are supposed to sit here and weigh every word.
This reminds to write a prompt for a blogpost. How AI could be used for making personal-looking tech-guy who meditates and runs websites. (Do we have the technology? Yes we do)
Also: "This OAuth library represents something larger than a technical milestone—it's evidence of a new creative dynamic emerging"
Em-dash baby.
The sentence itself is a smeLLM. Grandiose pronouncements aren't a bot exclusive, but man do they love making them, especially about creative paradigms and dynamics
I have used Em-dashes in many of my comments for years. It's just a result of reading books, where Em-dashes happen a lot.
Can we please stop using the em-dash as a metric to “detect” LLM writing? It’s lazy and wrong. Plenty of people use em-dashes, it’s a useful punctuation mark. If humans didn’t use them, they wouldn’t be in the LLM training data.
There are better clues, like the kind of vague pretentious babble bad marketers use to make their products and ideas seem more profound than they are. It’s a type of bad writing which looks grandiose but is ultimately meaningless and that LLMs heavily pick up on.
Very few people use n dashes in internet writing as opposed to dashes as they are not available on the default keyboard.
7 replies →
It's not a guarantee, but it does make it so much more likely. Therefore, it is an extremely useful prior to hold.
It's not lazy and wrong. It's a fantastic indicator.
> If humans didn’t use them, they wouldn’t be in the LLM training data.
Humans weren't using them in every context as they are now. They might've been used in books but blog posts and work documents weren't full of them.
It's not a definite thing but it's absolutely a good indicator.
2 replies →
> this stinks: “This transparency transforms git history from a record of changes into a record of intent, creating a new form of documentation that bridges human reasoning and machine implementation.”
That's where I stopped reading. If they needed "AI" for turning their git history into a record of intent ("transparency"), then they had been doing it all wrong, previously. Git commit messages have always been a "form of documentation that bridges human reasoning" -- namely, with another human's (the reader's) reasoning.
If you don't walk your reviewer through your patch, in your commit message, as if you were teaching them, then you're doing it wrong.
Left a bad taste in my mouth.