Comment by twosdai

10 hours ago

Like the emdash, whenever I read: "this isn't x it's y" my dumb monkey brain goes "THATS AI" regardless if it's true or not.

Another common tell nowadays is the apostrophe type (’ vs ').

I don't know personally how to even type ’ on my keyboard. According to find in chrome, they are both considered the same character, which is interesting.

I suspect some word processors default to one or the other, but it's becoming all too common in places like Reddit and emails.

  • Word (you know, the most popular word processor out there) will do that substitution. And on macOS & iOS, it's baked into the standard text input widgets so it'll do that basically everywhere that is a rich text editor.

I can confirm Ryan is a real human :)

  • Is there a chance you could ask Ryan if he had an LLM write/rewrite large parts of this blog post? I don't mind at all if he did or didn't in itself, it's a good and informative post, but I strongly assumed the same while reading the article and if it's truly not LLM writing then it would serve as a super useful indicator about how often I'm wrongly making that assumption.

    • There are multiple signs of LLM-speak:

      > Over the past year, we’ve seen a shift in what Deno Deploy customers are building: platforms where users generate code with LLMs and that code runs immediately without review

      This isn't a canonical use of a colon (and the dependent clause isn't even grammatical)!

      > This isn’t the traditional “run untrusted plugins” problem. It’s deeper: LLM-generated code, calling external APIs with real credentials, without human review.

      Another colon-offset dependent paired with the classic, "This isn't X. It's Y," that we've all grown to recognize.

      > Sandboxing the compute isn’t enough. You need to control network egress and protect secrets from exfiltration.

      More of the latter—this sort of thing was quite rare outside of a specific rhetorical goal of getting your reader excited about what's to come. LLMs (mis)use it everywhere.

      > Deno Sandbox provides both. And when the code is ready, you can deploy it directly to Deno Deploy without rebuilding.

      Good writers vary sentence length, but it's also a rhetorical strategy that LLMs use indiscriminately with no dramatic goal or tension to relieve.

      'And' at the beginning of sentences is another LLM-tell.

      6 replies →

    • As someone that has a habit of maybe overusing em dashes to my detriment, often times, and just something that I try to be mindful of in general. This whole thing of assuming that it's AI generated now is a huge blow. It feels like a personal attack.

      3 replies →