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AlexandrByesterday at 6:41 PM1 replyview on HN

I think that's fair. Em-dashes are pretty innocuous and I think technically correct regardless. What bothers me is all the filler in AI writing that just makes it longer and harder to read. I'm actually not that bothered by the idea of AI writing, but don't waste my time and patience with all these "not X, but Y" digressions thrown in for flavour. Get to the bloody point.


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thewebguydyesterday at 7:09 PM

I suspect the filler comes from RHLF and the amount of web marketing content that was ingested. "Not X, but Y" is all over marketing copy, as is the triad of concepts "By doing X, Y, and Z...." because it mimics TED-talk style rhetoric, it gets rated highly because people think it sounds profound. So optimizing for what appears to be helpful ends up just creating a bunch of corporate-speak sounding garbage.

Plain, direct language gets selected against during post-training leaving us with slop.