Comment by dansmith1919
2 months ago
At some point they told ChatGPT to put emoji's everywhere which is also a dead giveaway on the original report that it's AI. They're the new em dash.
2 months ago
At some point they told ChatGPT to put emoji's everywhere which is also a dead giveaway on the original report that it's AI. They're the new em dash.
You dont even have to instruct it for emojis, it does it on its own. printf with emoji is an instant red flag
It loves to put emojis in print statements, it's usually a red flag for me that something is written by AI.
What was it with em dash?
People usually don't type embdash, just use regular dash (minus sign) they have already on the keyboard. ChatGPT uses emdash instead.
Ahem.
https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo...
As #9 on the leaderboard I feel like I need to defend myself.
28 replies →
Microsoft Word at least used to autocorrect two dashes to a single em dash, so I have plenty of old Word documents kicking around with em dashes.
I recently learned to use Option + Shift + `-` (dash) on macOS to type it and use it since then because somebody smarter than me told me that this is the correct one to use (please correct them if you know better :D).
1 reply →
I've been typing "—" since middle school 25 years ago. It's trivial on a mac and always has been (at least since OSX, not sure about classic). Some folks are just too narrow-minded to give others the benefit of the doubt.
iDevices (and maybe MacOS too?) correct various dashes to the Unicode equivalents. Double dash seems to get converted to em-dash automatically.
Some people actually do that on Github too. Absolute psychopaths.
I think the JS/Node scene was the pioneer in spamming emojis absolutely everywhere, well before AI. Maybe that's where the models picked it up from.
Remember, if you’re going to do this, also make liberal use of ansi codes.
Make sure terminal detection is turned off, and, for god’s sake, don’t honor the NO_COLOR environment variable.
Otherwise, people will be able to run your stuff in production and read the logs.
I'm a bit ashamed to say that, after using various ASCII symbols (for progress, checkmarks etc.) in the 90s and early 2000s, when I first discovered we can actually put special Unicode characters on the terminal and it will be rendered almost universally in a similar way, it was like discovering an unknown land.
While rockets and hearts seem more like unnecessary abuse, there are a few icons that really make sense in CLI and TUI programs, but now I'm hesitant to use them as then people who don't know me get suspicious it could be AI slop.
1 reply →
I really hate all those CLI applications and terminal configurations that look like circus came to town.
7 replies →
The more vapid parts of social media also seem to have plenty of emoji floods, and I suspect that also made it into the training data for ChatGPT and others.
That's because utf-8 was such an absolute mess in JS that adding an emoji in your code was a flex that it worked.
Sane languages have much less of this problem but the damage was done by the cargo cultists.
Much like how curly braces in C are placed because back in the day you needed you punch card deck to be editable, but we got stuck with it even after we stared using screens.
5 replies →
"FastThingJS: A blazing fast thing library for humans . Made with on "
2 replies →
Here is a damn example: https://gist.github.com/BlueNexus/599962d03a1b52a8d5f595dabd...
It was far before ChatGPT. I remember once on a Show HN post I commented something along the line with "The number of emoji in README makes it very hard for me to take this repo seriously" and my comment got (probably righteously) downvoted to dead.
I think I remember exactly what you're talking about, even though I completely forgot what software it was.
I believe it was a technical documentation and the author wanted to create visual associations with acteurs in the given example. Like clock for async process of ordering, (food -) order, Burger etc.
I don't remember if I commented on the issue myself, but I do remember that it reduced readability a lot - at least for me.