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Comment by petcat | Hacker News Reader

Sounds cool.

Aside, I hate the fact that I read posts like these and just subconsciously start counting the em-dashes and the "it's not just [thing], it's [other thing]" phrasing. It makes me think it's just more AI.

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If there is one person who likes to hear himself talk too much to use AI, it's got to be Stephen Wolfram.

It's like Stephen Wolfram, only now there is 10x more of it...

If you go back to a random much older post you’ll find emdashes aplenty.

e.g. https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2014/07/launching-mathem...

Plot twist - AI reasoned that Stephen Wolfram actually was the smartest human and thus chose to emulate his writing style.

Well, he writes often enough, for long enough, and being who he is, he's got to be a large part of everyone's training data.

You're absolutely right!

The other day I formatted a sentence out loud in the "it's not just x it's y" structure and immediately felt gross, despite having done it probably a million times in my lifetime. That was an out-of-body feeling.

When I notice that I change it to "it's y, not just x" just to catch others off guard :).

Oh no! Now it's going to be in the training dataset :'(

In George Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language," [0] one of his primary recommendations for writing well is to "Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print."

"It's not just X, it's Y" definitely seems to qualify today. It's a stale way to express an idea.

I hadn't revisited that essay since LLMs became a thing, but boy was it prescient:

> By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms [and LLMs], you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself ... But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent — and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.

[0]: https://bioinfo.uib.es/~joemiro/RecEscr/PoliticsandEngLang.p...

Thank you for sending this, I've read it through twice and it's already affected how I approached some writing I did today. Even just forcing myself to think "what is another way to say this?" feels like it activates a different part of my brain that goes "well, what were you really trying to say in the first place?", and it's humbling when my mind comes up blank to that.

It reminded me of this comment I saw earlier[0] referring to a situation where Werner Herzog essentially cache-busted a Reverend, who was brought to tears when he could no longer reply with the templates that kept him stoic before. Maybe we stand to lose more than our voices to the machine if we're not thoughtful.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47119373

LLMs use the em-dash excessively but correctly. This post is littered with them in places they don't belong which makes it look decidedly human, as if written by someone who believes that random em-dashes make their writing look more professional, while actually having the opposite effect.

It's Stephen Wolfram, mathematician and computer scientist. This is how he portrays himself https://content.wolfram.com/sites/43/2019/02/07-popcorn-rig1...

Somehow I don't think "trying to make my writing look professional" is very high on the priority list.

> This post is littered with them in places they don't belong

Does he speak the same way - pausing for emphasis?

There are dozens of us that used them before AI! Dozens!

If you really want to know: more than one emmy-dash per paragraph is probably excessive.

> LLMs don’t—and can’t—do everything. What they do is very impressive—and useful. It’s broad. And in many ways it’s human-like. But it’s not precise. And in the end it’s not about deep computation.

This is a mess. What is the flow here? Two abrupt interrupts (and useful) followed by stubby sentences. Yucky.

Idk about the grammatical correctness of the punctuation, but I really enjoyed reading his writing. Never read something by him before, it was genuinely refreshing, specially given it was a glorified ad.

It's a conversational writing style.

I just read it in Morgan Freemans voice and it sounded pretty great.

The em-dash metric is silly. Some people (including me) have always used them and plan to continue to do so. I just pulled up some random articles by Wolfram from the before-LLM days and guess what: em-dashes everywhere. One sample from 2018 had 89 of them. Wolfram has always written in the same style (which, admittedly, can be a bit self-aggrandizing and verbose). It’s kinda weird to see people just blowing it off as AI slop just because of a —.

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