[twosdai]

Like the emdash, whenever I read: "this isn't x it's y" my dumb monkey brain goes "THATS AI" regardless if it's true or not.

[aiahs]

For me it's the "why this matters", "why this works", etc

[TheTaytay]

Ugh - yes. I’m seriously close to writing a chrome extension just to warn me or block pages that have that phrase…it’s irrational because there are so many legitimate uses, but they are dead to me.

[bangaladore]

Another common tell nowadays is the apostrophe type (’ vs ').

I don't know personally how to even type ’ on my keyboard. According to find in chrome, they are both considered the same character, which is interesting.

I suspect some word processors default to one or the other, but it's becoming all too common in places like Reddit and emails.

[signal11]

If you work with macOS or iOS users, you won’t be super surprised to see lots of “curly quotes”. They’re part of base macOS, no extra software required (I cannot remember if they need to be switched on or they’re on by default), and of course mass-market software like Word will create “smart” quotes on Mac and Windows.

I ended up implementing smart quotes on an internal blogging platform because I couldn’t bear "straight quotes". It’s just a few lines of code and makes my inner typography nerd twitch less.

[int_19h]

Word (you know, the most popular word processor out there) will do that substitution. And on macOS & iOS, it's baked into the standard text input widgets so it'll do that basically everywhere that is a rich text editor.

[deathanatos]

> According to find in chrome, they are both considered the same character, which is interesting.

Browsers do a form of normalization in search. It's really useful, since it means "resume" will match résumé, unless of course you disable it (in Firefox, this is the "Match Diacritics" checkbox). (Also: itʼs, it's; if you want to see it in action on those two words.)

[signal11]

I’ve been using em-dashes since high school — publishing the school paper and everything. I remain slightly bemused by people discovering em-dashes for the first time thanks to LLMs.

Also, “em-dashes are something only LLMs use” comes perilously close to “huh, proper grammar, must’ve run this by a grammar checker”.

[Latty]

I started using them when I discovered the compose key and it became easy to type them, but I've genuinely considered stopping using for this reason.

[yawnxyz]

the problem with this is that people are adapting their REAL SPEECH to this pattern, so people are actually saying this in real conversations

(we do this all the time; eg. a new popular saying lands in an episode of a tv show, and then other people start adopting it, even subconsciously)

[pawelduda]

it's the <<<<gold-standard>>>> for spotting LLMs in the wild

(that's what Gemini would say)

[lucacasonato]

I can confirm Ryan is a real human :)

[zamadatix]

Is there a chance you could ask Ryan if he had an LLM write/rewrite large parts of this blog post? I don't mind at all if he did or didn't in itself, it's a good and informative post, but I strongly assumed the same while reading the article and if it's truly not LLM writing then it would serve as a super useful indicator about how often I'm wrongly making that assumption.

[Bnjoroge]

couldnt agree more. It's frankly very fatiguing