A response to Drew Lyton’s “The Future is NOT Self-Hosted”
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Using an LLM doesn’t break the rules. This post’s fate will be determined by your votes.
I appreciate that they mentioned it.
I’m not particularly good at writing, I can understand why someone would ask an LLM to help them clarify their ideas. The intent here is obviously to improve their content rather than as a crutch to feed us shit. Whether it’s better than just writing this personally I don’t know.
Back in the day people studied and learned and practiced before publishing
If someone can’t be arsed to write it, I can’t be arsed to read it.
You need to enable JavaScript to run this app.
That’s not true. I just need to click the ‘x’ next to the tab. Why should I be bothered with waiting for some JS to be able to read text?
Ugh why can’t you read the article without Javascript? Trying to do that gives you the error message: " You need to enable JavaScript to run this app."
That reminds me. There was a post on Lemmy recently about “graceful degradation”. One useful tip from that post was about maintaining a balance with your sites.
DO NOT use Javascript to implement vital content and navigation (especially if you are running a blog or some other information heavy site).
If you do use Javascript, only use it to support ‘nice-to-have’ features. Good candidates for ‘nice-to-have’ features would be things that can break, but wouldn’t impact the user experience significantly.
Anyways why am I yapping about this? I’m hoping this is read by someone planning to start a website or blog, and that they’ll take this into consideration.
Edit: Double ugh. I just noticed they used an LLM to write a 5 minute article. Dude literally left em dashes and kept the grammar the same. You can’t make this shit up.
Are we at war with em dashes now? —? I’m starting to feel like the only person who actually knows how to type them on a keyboard.
They are one of several signs of LLM writing. That said if you’ve always used them then you do you
Edit: To the idiots who downvoted me: The article’s author literally mentions that he used AI to write it, so it isn’t speculation on my part. That said, my point still stands: em dashes are just one of several tell-tale signs of LLM writing. See here, here, and here.
Obviously, AI picked this up from writers who used the em dash. However, ChatGPT uses it excessively and so now it is a sign of its writing. Practically speaking you should avoid it in your future writing, since no one really cares if it is a false positive or not.
Final Edit: I see replies stating that from people who’ve been using it for years who don’t want to stop because LLM’s appropriated it. I already left a Lemmy comment here that more-or-less goes over why you should care about optics (especially when writing in an activist adjacent space), but what do I know 🤷
It’s sad, because for most people the use-case for an m-dash is relatively narrow—a parenthetic interjection relevant to the topic but not sufficiently off-topic for brackets, and needing a subtle call to authority—it mostly popped up in academic or pseudo intellectual non-fiction, or in faulknerian ponderous fiction, but also as a hapless crutch for endlesss neurodivergent layers of qualification.
So I am going to claim disability discrimination about this brutal and unjust sudden boycott, on behalf of crew #adhd.
but also as a hapless crutch for endlesss neurodivergent layers of qualification.
I both resent and resemble that remark.
I just realized that I could have double-layered the m-dashes there, eh? Missed opportunity. Oh what the hell, I need to prolong lunch break juuust a little bit more, so
I’m not going to let LLMs enstupidify my writing.
I’ll continue using en dashes and em dashes — they’re very easy to type on macos, iOS, and Android.
Alright then. If you were always using them correctly then you do you
