Comment by chrismorgan
2 hours ago
Whether it helps or not—the typical contact like this hasn’t been a human for decades now. What I’m seeing these days is materially almost identical to what went out ten years ago. Basic form letter with a cover sentence or paragraph of either no relevance, or a tenuous but normally ill-researched claim at relevance.
yeah; just that we'll get 5x of these now that it's even easier to generate more "real-human-sounding" ones.
IMO, the best way to deal with these, if using gMail, is not marking them as spam. Instead, I drag them into the Promotions tab, answer "yes" to classify all emails from the subject as such, and that's it. Promotions == Trash.
I don't open/read such emails (I scan the first few words shown in the Inbox line, then dispense), so good luck trying to cold contact me for legitimate purposes.
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I'd probably use either a semicolon or a period there. But this demonization of a perfectly reasonable English punctuation mark absolutely has to stop.
It's fine to criticize a comment that looks like AI in a thread where someone complains about AI.
The sentence has exactly same meaning if they'd use a single "-" as well. I don't know which browsers have <textarea>s where double "--" is turned into emdash, but on the systems I'm familiar with one needs to go certain lengths before an emdash appears.
Emdash does not magically appear, and it seems some people love playing with the AI connotation.
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No space em dash = a real person who has been bulldozed by LLMs using it with spaces.
> No space em dash = a real person who has been bulldozed by LLMs using it with spaces.
Setting an em-dash used for parentheticals closed (with no space)—or sometimes with thin spaces—is the common American literary/academic style (Chicago Manual, APA, and MLA all prefer closed); setting it open—with full word spaces—is the common American practice in journalism (reflected in the AP style guide). Not using em-dash at all for that use, but instead using an en-dash set open is the common British practice.
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I've had to configure a few editors to stop turning my natural '<space>--<space>' into endashes...
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I used to use em dashes with spaces. I started using them without when I was more into reading style guides and it was—if I recall correctly—the Chicago Manual of Style which doesn’t use spaces. This was way before LLMs came onto the scene as a consumer technology.
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They also have no spaces around the em dash. Must be followers of Chicago Manual of Style (and not AP Stylebook.)
Or we follow Occam's razor and accept that a random guy whose comment looks like AI in a tech forum discussing AI is not an advanced scribe following a certain school of writing, but rather some vibe coder who AI-optimizes their comments.
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