The number is irrelevant. They are being used as separators on every list item, of course there are many. They could all be hyphens or arrows or colons and it would be exactly the same.
Look, I’m not saying this wasn’t written with an LLM. What I’m saying is that you don’t know that judging by the em-dashes alone.
And not a single colon! Well, outside the smiley in the opening paragraph.
Just read the first two paragraphs and there's a full stylistic whiplash. I'd bet $100 that the first paragraph was human-written and the rest were almost fully Claude.
It's kind of creepy, like a human rolling their eyes back partway through a paragraph and suddenly speaking like Microsoft Bob.
The number is irrelevant. They are being used as separators on every list item, of course there are many. They could all be hyphens or arrows or colons and it would be exactly the same.
Look, I’m not saying this wasn’t written with an LLM. What I’m saying is that you don’t know that judging by the em-dashes alone.
The number is relevant when the comment with the most em-dashes on HN (prior to 2023) had only 31. It's also not the only signal here.
There are no colons or semicolons, anyone who really is a stickler for punctuation would not write exclusively with em-dashes.
And not a single colon! Well, outside the smiley in the opening paragraph.
Just read the first two paragraphs and there's a full stylistic whiplash. I'd bet $100 that the first paragraph was human-written and the rest were almost fully Claude.
It's kind of creepy, like a human rolling their eyes back partway through a paragraph and suddenly speaking like Microsoft Bob.