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Comment by bonsai_spool | Hacker News Reader

> The AI writing doesn’t help.

Why do you say there is AI writing?

The writing style.

Anything that anyone ever writes from now on has people coming out of the woodwork to accuse it of being AI-written. I too bemoan what the written word is coming to, but I am also so over the Slop Police, and wish they would just keep the conclusions of their sleuthing to themselves from now on.

I appreciate that some sites state explicitly whether AI was used in content creation. I wish it were the social norm.

I think this is the optimal outcome of the “Slop Police.” Normalization of these acknowledgements. Transparency is good, like a journalist declaring whether they have vested interests.

I usually give the benefit of the doubt, and regret accusing this article. It's the articles and comments that are obviously AI and score 100% on Pangram that I still feel should be called out, because the writing is hard to understand and the underlying message rarely makes good insight or discussion.

> So today we're going public not with a big shiny announcement, but to tell the whole story straight. Honestly? We're genuinely terrified, and we need your help.

> Flipper Zero and Flipper One operate at different protocol layers [below a graphic with features like "Power Bank". Do they know what a "protocol layer" is or do I not?]

> Flipper One isn't an upgrade to Flipper Zero — it's a completely different project with its own goals.

And lots of em-dashes.

But looking closer, I actually suspect it’s not AI, the author just integrated LLM-isms into their style.

So the em-dashes is the new AI taletell? I mean, I have noticed them, but never thought it was such a characteristic.

New telltale? I mean this in the most polite way but have you been living under a rock? Its been a clear sign people have been more than noticing since at least 4o back in mid 2024.

Indeed. Looking back at the previous blog posts by this author from 2020 shows the same isms. Maybe AI trained on these posts instead of the other way around.

> But looking closer, I actually suspect it’s not AI, the author just integrated LLM-isms into their style.

I think his native/first language is Russian -- em dashes are widely used (e.g. most definitions start with it, look at any Wikipedia article), quite a lot of people learn how to type proper em dashes and do so even in casual chats (a bit of self-proclaimed elitist sign).

edit: actually switching languages on Wikipedia and it almost seems like some USSR influence -- Ukrainian, Belarusian, Georgian, Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Uzbek and Tajik language pages start with em dash. Turkmen, Kyrgyz and Lithuanian uses eN dash. Armenian, Estonian and Latvian don't start with dash.

For non-ex-USSR countries/titular languages I found only Polish to start with eN dash.

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