> That sentence smells like AI writing, so who knows what the author actually thinks.

The author has been a professional writer since long before LLMs were invented: https://hey.paris/books-and-events/books/

LLMs were trained on books like the ones written by the author, which is why AI writing "smells" like professional writing. The reason that AI is notorious for using em dashes, for example, is that professional authors use em dashes, whereas amateur writers tend not to use em dashes.

It's becoming absurd that we're now accusing professional writers of being AI.

The author lives in Australia. You get points from supermarket for purchasing some gift cards during some promotion, it's around 10% of the card value.

> I'm more curious how/why the author ended up with a $500 gift card. That's a large amount, and the author never shares how this was obtained, which seems like a key missing detail. Did the author buy the gift card for himself (why?) or did someone give him a very large gift (why not mention that?)

The author mentions a big store (names it similar to Walmart for US based readers).

I would assume this was an accepted form of "return a product without a receipt" or "we want to accept your complain about this product we sold going crazy 1 day after it's warranty but we cannot give you cash back" etc

Re: AI writing: AI tends to (and might be getting better) use commas for such claims, in the form of, “it’s not just X, but [optional:also] Y”.

Even if it feels sus, remember that AI is trained on what it sees: even the posts here will make it more and more effective at “writing like a human”.

As for the OP, the claims to exist and have published books, etc. are relatively easily publicly verifiable.

No, $500 isn’t a large amount, doubly so anymore. I consistently have to try to re-anchor, but $100 is the new $20 (sadly).

Did you even read the article? "The only recent activity on my account was a recent attempt to redeem a $500 Apple Gift Card to pay for my 6TB iCloud+ storage plan" a 6TB plan is $29.99 monthly.. It's not farfetched to assume he purchased a $500 gift card so he could keep the subscription without worrying about it!

"The card was purchased from a major brick-and-mortar retailer (Australians, think Woolworths scale; Americans, think Walmart scale)" There's not much of a reason to assume someone else unaffiliated with the author bought this card, he mentions talking to the vendor and getting a replacement which means he has the receipt