alt Hacker NewsYeah the (annoyingly) excessive use of colons feels like recent Claude models to me.
Looks like author posted this themselves earlier, and even used Claude for the HN comment:
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progbits • last Sunday at 11:48 AM
In last month or two I noticed semicolons getting used where previously it would be em-dash, in both cases excessively and often incorrectly.
I assumed some of my coworkers added "replace all em-dashes with semicolons" into their CLAUDE.md as a really crappy attempt at hiding their inability to write a single sentence without assistance.
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eth0up • last Sunday at 11:55 AM
"free book" "no paywall and nothing to buy."
Might this not actually be a reasonable purpose for AI? I can tolerate the quirky style and AI signatures for something honest and free.
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I've always used a lot of semi-colons in my writing, especially in my technical writing. So I did a search on this pdf for semi colons, and there are 260 in a 264 page document. I then repeated this for the last book I read, Candide by Voltaire, and there were 507 semi colons in a 189 page book.
This seems like a witch hunt.