logoalt Hacker News

TacticalCoderyesterday at 10:28 PM1 replyview on HN

> LLMs are here to stay. The "hacker spirit" doesn't require being a Luddite and rejecting LLMs ...

You've got it all wrong. I pay three AI subscriptions and I use LLMs every day, for various tasks.

I know models are here to stay (not just LLM ones). At least 12 computers at home (well counting the Pis and NUCs as computers) and at all times at least half of those turned on. And more VMs than that (and agents running into those VMs).

I'm all but a luddite but this doesn't mean I don't find itprofoundly lame when such a venerable institution as Phrack can't even bother to write one page of text without using a LLM.

Also they use a monospaced font and there's ONE fucking non-ASCII character in the entire prose that appears several times: the em-dash from LLMish.

Now I wrote (and typeset) books: I can tell you about various types of dashes and spacing characters (in both english and french). I'm not saying we shouldn't be using em-dashes. But when you use a monospace font to look old-school cool using ASCII art, then maybe you could have removed that one LLMish artefact and use, I dunno, two minus signs like in the good old days?

They didn't even bother to replaced these em-dashes.

Here's what Gemini (on purpose) has to say about the text:

There is exactly 1 unique non-ASCII character in the provided text (see what I'm doing here? I'm using a LLM):

The Em Dash (—): Used throughout the text (e.g., "2025 — 40 years", "Dead—Long Live", "criminals." — The").

All other characters—including the quotes (", '), ellipsis (...), and formatting symbols (|, =, -)—are standard ASCII characters."

Why, just why? Why are ellipsis ASCII ... ? Did they replace the Unicode ellipsis codepoint with three ASCII dots? They forgot to replace the em-dash?


Replies

stackghostyesterday at 10:36 PM

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

I can't think of any comment less interesting and more tangential these days than yet another screed about LLMs using em dashes or particular speech patterns. Seriously who fucking cares

show 2 replies