Comment by mike_hearn
10 hours ago
Have the same problem but with bullet points, which I learned to type years ago and have used on HN for a long time:
• Like
• This
(option-8 on a Mac US keyboard layout). Now it looks like something only an LLM would do.
Hell I've been accused simply for using markdown. Granted, excessive formatting in markdown (especially when I'm telling a bad faith wikipedia contributor to cut it out since wikipedia doesn't even use markdown) is one of the biggest suspects for me but theres a difference between italicising something for emphasis and and *bolding* every statement *to an excessive degree*
For those who are interested, that one is Alt-7 (numeric keypad) on Windows. This works because in the "OEM" codepage (e.g. 437), char 7 corresponds to a symbol that is mapped into Unicode to • (← I just typed this using Alt-7, and the arrow using Alt-27). In a similar way I type the infamous ones—the ones that give you away as an LLM even if you aren't one. It's Alt-0151, this time with no OEM codepage conversion because of the zero in front (anyway that codepage had no em-dashes, the closest one would be Alt-196, which is ─, i.e. a line drawing character).
I love using ° with is the opt-shift-8 when posting temps to indicate I'm on a real keyboard and not some device. Plus, it's just faster than typing degrees
iPhone—hold down 0 and ° should be on the pop up.
My phone has the degree sign ° but it requires me to click on numerical input then additional symbols to access, so I just shorthand it to deg.
℃ and ℉ to the rescue! https://graphemica.com/%E2%84%83
> this is a compatibility character provided for roundtrip compatibility with legacy encodings. […] The Unicode standard explicitly discourages the use of this character
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celsius#Unicode_character)