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Comment by aleph_minus_one | Hacker News Reader

> Based on his tweets, Josef seems like a guy incapable of coming up with his own original thoughts.

Rather: Josef Průša is not a native English speaker (his mother tongue is Czech).

I observe this for myself: a lot of my original thoughts are hard to translate into English because they are deeply intertwined with how the German language is built.

From my observation in particular native German speakers are prone to this phenomenon (that their original thoughts are quite intertwined with how their native language works). I had this discussion with educated English, Turkish and Russian native speakers, but they honestly told me that for them this relationship between their mother tongue and their original thoughts is not similarly marked.

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> Rather: Josef Průša is not a native English speaker (his mother tongue is Czech).

Are you joking? Guy has been tweeting in English for almost two decades, that’s not the problem.

Here's the frequency of the " - " pattern in tweets by "josefprusa"

  2020:  8 / 761 tweets  = 1.1%
  2021:  5 / 533 tweets  = 0.9%
  2022:  9 / 597 tweets  = 1.5%
  2023: 21 / 450 tweets  = 4.7%
  2024: 57 / 725 tweets  = 7.9%
  2025: 23 / 390 tweets  = 5.9%
  2026: 15 / 136 tweets  = 11.0%

> Are you joking? Guy has been tweeting in English for almost two decades, that’s not the problem.

I think you deeply underestimate how deep your thinking can be convoluted with your native language that you grew up with:

I very often have discussions with native speakers of other languages about how I can translate some specific German phrases/thoughts into their mother tongue. They often have to admit that their native language simply has no "pattern" for this, or that the phrase is based on cultural assumptions that do hold in Germany, but not in the country where the language that I want to translate my phrase to is commonly spoken.

> Here's the frequency of the " - " pattern in tweets by "josefprusa"

What do you want to tell with this?

> What do you want to tell with this?

It's a common llm-ism. It makes clear this person is capable of speaking english without chatgpt and makes a case that the chatgpt voice patterns are in fact as claimed by GP evidence of a lack of original thought.

Also, you just don’t get LLM-isms at this rate if you’re simply using them for translation. (From the common commercially available products)

it also depends on your language proficiency. i am a native german speaker, but my english is fluent. i think and dream in english too i guess. which means i am not translating any more.

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