The vibration of the pager has a sound all its own | Hacker News Reader

The vibration of the pager has a sound all its own

notyouremergency.com

18 pointsmooreds10 comments

This really needs an editor.

It starts off great, with a compelling story about responding to a roadside emergency, but then it veers off the interstate and meanders through the countryside. The paragraphs — they compound. The em-dashes — they multiply. Words upon words and I still don’t know what the author is trying to say. Something about a system for responding to corporate pseudo-emergencies. I guess.

I’m a writer. I get what a preface is for. And I get why an executive coach writes a book (and it ain’t the royalties). But please, please: hire a development editor. Preferably one not named Claude.

(PS: emdashes are supposed to be used—as a copyeditor once told me—without spaces on either side. It’s one of the ways you can tell the true lover of the emdash from an LLM.)

Notice that the space rule is not so in Spanish (the RAE ---the Spanish Royal Academy--- states in its rules that it must be separated from the main text on both sides but not from the explanation).

https://www.rae.es/ortograf%C3%ADa-b%C3%A1sica/uso-de-los-si...

> emdashes are supposed to be used—as a copyeditor once told me—without spaces on either side.

But we've all seen the pages where the hyphenator is clueless about them and creates these massive superlong "words" that screw up paragraph formatting.

> It’s one of the ways you can tell the true lover of the emdash from an LLM

Quite apart from this tiresome and unreliable LLM detector, it’s also a way tell an American from a Brit. We Brits use spaces (and endashes).

I would avoid sentences of the form "It's not A. It's B." It reads very LLM-like.

That's because it was written by an LLM.

Wow, a whole book written in the style of a self-promoting ChatGPT-generated LinkedIn post!

Real leaders don’t describe themselves as “leaders” ten times in as many paragraphs. The self-aggrandizement in describing your corporate career really undermines the attempt at humility when talking about your EMT work.

> Real leaders don’t describe themselves as “leaders” ten times in as many paragraphs.

This is one of the easier ways to weed out LLM texts, they tell you what to think

Idk, I think lots of middle managers wrote this way before LLMs.

> "Then I run the XABCs, a rapid field assessment protocol"

It seems like every time I read about first aid procedures, there's something new since I last learnt it. This is the first time I've seen the X at the start. TBH, I'm still trying to remember if you do rescue breaths or not while doing CPR

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