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Comment by notpushkin | Hacker News Reader

> The URL is the app

LLM-speak is a huge turn off to me (and a lot of other people here, from my interactions), so the fact that your submission title is AI-generated is... sorry, I have no words. I don’t even care that much about the code, but please write prose by hand, in your own voice, if you want us to read it.

Edit: rephrased the last sentence. Also, here’s my take on the title:

> Show HN: Bigwords.page – turn any screen into a sign, controlled by the URL params

View on HN

Let me guess, you saw the `–` and thought "Clearly no human uses the em dash. It must all be AI".

I looked over the website and their github page and saw no indication of AI usage. I'm not saying it wasn't used, but unless you have actual evidence, then please point it out.

That’s an en-dash – and I use those myself. (I’ve experimented with em-dashes—brefly—but it doesn’t look good to my eye in English.)

It’s all by the vibes, I don’t have any concrete proof. FWIW, the comment seems at least hand-edited, so maybe it’s just this “the [A] is the [B]” trope that has triggered me. If the rest of it is readable, then I apologize, but still: that’s a bad title, please don’t use this – unless you’re writing a LinkedIn post.

---

Edit: here’s another LLMism example from another HN user: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49996255

I always get en and em confused. They are all just dashes to me :-).

The "Nothing else: no lists, tables, links, quotes, images or rules" is from the docs indicating that these things are not supported.

I, too, was confused for the longest time, but the secret is in the names.

En dash is the width of an “n”. Em dash is the width of an “M”, so a little wider.

Not unlike how in the trades, a tee is T-shaped, a wye is Y-shaped, a delta is Δ-shaped. Spelled-out letters aren't always geometric metaphors, but it's a thing.

Then you've got the first syllable of Ω (omega) being a homophone of Ohm, for what that's worth. From there we have ℧ (mho) for conductance... It's all quite clever. But I digress; I'll get back to emceeing and deejaying, cueing these elpees after a quick pee, okay?

Different fonts use different lengths (sometimes en dash is the width of an uppercase “N” instead of lowercase, sometimes it’s half of the em dash which itself is `1em` which may or may not equal the width of the “M”...) But it’s a good way to remember that indeed, yeah!

> I always get en and em confused

Yeah, it’s somewhat a typography-nerdy thing :–) (gosh that looks terrible probably; edit: actually it’s surprisingly fine)

> indicating that these things are not supported

Of course, but it does sound a bit unnatural IMO. Then again, I’m going by the vibes here.

> (I’ve experimented with em-dashes—brefly—but it doesn’t look good to my eye in English.)

I saw what you did there.

After enough time spent reading LLM speak, I’ve found its phrasing and particularities subconsciously work into the way I write as well, entirely by hand.

It’s not always AI. It could be a human ;) I really despise LLM-written writing too; but I think it’s nice to be not super paranoid about it.

Agreed. I've noticed the same too. I'm afraid we've probably already reached the time where text written by humans sounds llmish

For me (not the OP) I see the patterns 'The X is the Y', 'Every X is a Y' (both of which are there) and llm-sense tingles. Add in Not A, B, C or Z and I'm increasingly convinced it's LLM generated text.

OP didn't quote the part with the em dash, they quoted the part with the "The X is the Y", which is a common LLMism.

It's also a concise and accurate description of the service. All this gnashing of teeth over "could've been AI-generated" is overblown and tiresome.

> It's also a concise and accurate description of the service.

If it was a clever expression that does get the idea across, I would be okay with it. “The API is the UI” is of similar form and I love it. It’s simple, catchy, and it does convey a meaning: designing an API is just designing a UI for developers.

“The URL is the app” makes literally no sense without additional context? I’m not sure this is a “concise and accurate description of the service”. I did take a guess [1] and I was correct, but that was after I’ve seen the examples.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49997420

> “The URL is the app” makes literally no sense without additional context?

Yes exactly - it's one of those sentences that only makes sense to people who already know what it was intended to mean, because they know how it's intended to be parsed without having to puzzle over it. For the rest of us, it's pretty meaningless.

Regarding the LLMism, I didn't click on this submission when I saw it on HN last night, because I'm sick of seeing "The X is the Y", and an LLMish title tends to imply yet another piece of vibecoded slop.

My man, that web design is absolutely pure Claude. But hey that’s ok, the app is a good idea and works well, I have no issue with that. Clearly the person making it knows how to structure a web app and make it usable and it shows it’s not just slop. This is good use of AI coding

not that

>I'm not saying it wasn't used, but unless you have actual evidence, then please point it out.

I posted a detailed reply to your comment with lots of examples and HN's new slop filter just killed it... due to overabundance of slop.

:-)

I recommend turning on showdead to read it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50002280

I think you’ve been resurrected now :)

This isn't human writing. This is blustering, bloviated Claudespeak we have seen a thousand times over. Try Opus 5 and its ilk sometime and maybe you'll see it too.

The initial commit:

https://github.com/SpeakingOfBrad/BIGWORDS.PAGE/commit/d5a11...

The highlights:

    The URL is the whole display: no accounts, no login, no backend.

    Nothing else: no lists, tables, links, quotes, images or rules.

    Underscores inside words are left alone, as in standard Markdown, so names like Home_Guest_5G, snake_case or first_name@example.com show exactly as typed. Only an underscore at a word boundary starts or ends emphasis.

    Code is shown exactly as typed. Nothing inside backticks is treated as formatting, a slide break, {countdown} or an escape, which makes it the easy way to show passwords and codes with symbols in them. A code span has to open and close on the same line. Browsers may write a typed backtick as %60 in the address bar; both forms work.

    All fonts ship with the site, each next to its license file. A font is only downloaded, from this site, when a display uses it.

    Screen wake: with wake=on (the default) the viewer asks the browser to keep the screen on. It asks again whenever the tab becomes visible. Browsers without support ignore it.

    The viewer can be embedded anywhere (OBS, dashboards); the editor and docs can't. HSTS is left to the TLS-terminating reverse proxy. The app reads all state from the URL fragment, so / serves every display. /editor and /docs are their own files (editor.html, docs.html); anything else is a real 404.

    img-src stays open because displays show images from any host. Inline styles are needed for the runtime @font-face rules and style attributes. A snippet, so 404 responses get these headers too.

    Exercises the canonical URLs, social cards and sitemap, which are only built when SITE_URL is set. The smoke test reads it too.

Don't get me started on the docstrings and code comments.

I think “The URL is the app.” Is AI generated and it weakens the title but that’s ultimately only so important.

You are classifying well and optimizing poorly.

Wait how is "The URL is the app" LLM-speak? Genuine question, sounded fine to me when I read it, not sure what a better way to phrase it would be

It's LLM speak because it's wrong, but pithy. The app is the app, and it lives on the server. The URL just contains the content of the sign.

It's LLM speak because it's wrong, but pithy.

That's all marketing.

I’ve read it as “the URL is the UI”... sorry; I mean, you can change URL params (remotely) to control the app. It is a good idea perhaps (if you have the means to open a URL remotely), but evidently the title does not get the idea across. (Maybe I’m also wrong, I haven’t read the docs yet :)

it's marketing speech, following the rules of how to make memorable slogans that have been around for decades and in many different formats. Elevator pitches, explain it to me like I'm five, keep it simple, stupid, and so forth. It sounds like an LLM because LLMs learned from the digested wisdom of a million marketers. It may be an LLM produced it or it may just as well be someone who has cracked a marketing textbook some time in their life or hell, has watched the full run of Mad Men and thought, now what is a pithy way to express the selling point of this thing?

on edit: That said, I would probably have said "Turn Any Screen Into A Sign with Just A URL!"

I thought they meant the outputted javascript is embedded in the url, like a bookmarklet. But looking closer, it clearly isn't.

“The [A] is the [B]” (and variations with “the” replaced with “your”) is screaming LLM to me. It’s been used by real people too, but it sounds very corporate, and is not something I’ve seen used to describe a personal project before LLMs.

It must have been used by humans before LLMs, because where do you think they learned it?

The network is the computer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Network_is_the_Computer

The training data set is a huge corpus of text from a wide variety of styles and time period. A human writer knows to adjust their writing style to fit their intended audience. A skilled LLM user knows to direct the LLM to generate in the appropriate style. A naive LLM user doesn't, so that's how we get this uncanny valley ick, where the text feels wrong.

All the marketing materials that got used for training. Marketing speak is not my cup of team.

It was always corny except in very specific cases.

It has been used before LLMs. I have no idea why LLMs prefer it, though.

LLM apophenia is so widespread in HN that it's becoming quite sickening.

This is like asking "how do you know a cat is a cat and not a dog?". If you've seen enough samples, you recognise the pattern.

Yeah, the issue here is that the URL is not the app.

This is basically a differently-shaped https://github.com/antonmedv/textarea

Cool idea, but agree that fixing actual mistakes in the title is a worthwhile use of time.

Donald Knuth once said "Jon Bentley probably hit the nail on the head when he once was asked why literate programming hasn’t taken the whole world by storm. He observed that a small percentage of the world’s population is good at programming, and a small percentage is good at writing; apparently I am asking everybody to be in both subsets."

Get off your high horse. Not everybody studied to write prose, not everybody was born American to begin with. If LLMs helps programmers get heard - good. That's probably the best usage for them anyway.

I haven’t studied to write prose either. I have studied English since when I was a kid, but I still make mistakes sometimes, and that’s okay.

LLMs turn your own voice into uniform corpo-speak. It is usually not an improvement, and it certainly doesn’t help you get heard – you’ll blend in with hundreds of other projects with the same-looking landing page, same tone of voice, same kilometres of docs that nobody read before putting up, and you’re basically playing a game of chance here. It’s like TikTok for programmers.

Ten times out of ten, I’ll prefer broken English over Claudish. Speak in your own voice. Don’t be afraid.

Indeed. I would much prefer to read someone's poor English over their fluent LLM.

> If LLMs helps programmers get heard - good

It does not, it does the opposite. It gets the programmer ignored.

Comments like "don't say this, this is LLM-ism" are the things that help the programmer get heard, whether she isn't good at English or she was just lazy and used LLM to generate text.

it doesn't help programmers be heard, it helps LLMs be heard. Just publish the thing with your own words, what matters is if they are genuine, not that they sound exactly like everybody else.

Cry me a river with your pretentious bs

Reply on news.ycombinator.com