Totally fair — and thank you for the honest feedback.
I’m actually Japanese, and while I try my best, English isn’t my strongest skill. I do rely on AI to help write and translate at times.
Ideally, I’d work with someone fluent to help polish things. But for now, OS Yamato is a side project I build in the margins of a full-time job — so I’m doing what I can solo.
If the project grows, I’d love to team up with others who can help shape the language and communication more clearly. Really appreciate your understanding!
That would be incredibly helpful — thank you!
If you notice anything especially awkward or unclear in the wording, I’d love to hear it. I’m always open to learning and improving, especially as this project reaches more people.
I’m always trying to improve both the UX and the way I present OS Yamato in English. It’s a solo project, but thanks to feedback like yours, I can keep polishing and refining it step by step.
It doesn't to me. I can tell AI writing because it has irrelevant details that don't add facts or colour to the story, but this doesn't have any of that really. The tangents come across as human, not AI doing a bad impression of human.
Things like em-dashes are a really bad way to detect AI because they can be good grammar and improve text readability, same with curly quotes. I use them all the time in my writing, and I wouldn't be surprised if this iOS dev feels similarly as Apple platforms have emphasised this stuff for years.
Humorously, after re-learning about em-dashes due to their use by AI (an otherwise forgotten part of high-school English), I started using them more often in my writing. They really do look nicer!
As an academic I’ve always used “delve”, too, so at this point I guess my writing is going to be flagged as AI a lot…
I do note that some of the AI slop I’ve received from students include other fancy Unicode characters (superscript numerals, variant Greek letters, blackboard bold R, etc.) that are difficult to type, and which especially would not be used in e.g. code comments. em-dashes at least can be produced by certain word processors or text IMEs automatically, whereas many of these others require specifically looking for the character.
> some of the AI slop I’ve received from students include other fancy Unicode characters... that are difficult to type...
This is the bit I'd still caution against. Yes AI does this, but also writing in some software will correct 1/2 to ½, writing in tools that support MathJax will give you nice greek letters, etc. At university I spent days setting up nice LaTeX setups so that I could get good looking documents, including documents that didn't immediately appear to be LaTeX authored.
I think it's best to focus on the content, the writing quality, whether it targets the right audience, and whether it answers the question or just features a lot of words in the right ballpark. Focusing on the specific words and mechanical features of the text is going to catch out the wrong students, and it's going to be harder to justify from your perspective because you can't score a student badly for using an esoteric unicode character.
Since you know the tells of LLM generated text, you'll know that this is a classic: No X. Just Y.
Proxyman -- pick your poison.
And if you're from PureGym reading this—let's talk.
There's a mixture of em dashes joining words and double hyphens spaced between words, suggesting the former were missed in a find and replace job.
"And if you're from [COMPANY] reading this[EM DASH]let's talk" is a classic GPT-ism.
It's like the API is saying "Hey buddy, I know this is odd, but can you poll me every minute? Thanks, love you too."
Shame Notifications: "You were literally 100 meters from the gym and walked past it"
It's just a ZIP archive with delusions of grandeur
Clear examples of fluff. Not only do these fail to "add facts or colour to the story", they actually detract from it.
I agree with you that em dashes in isolation are not indicative, but the prose here is dripping with GPT-speak.
OP here! Appreciate you actually pulling examples instead of just dropping "this is AI".
> There's a mixture of em dashes joining words and double hyphens spaced between words, suggesting the former were missed in a find and replace job.
The em dash conspiracy in the comments today is amazing -- I type double hyphens everywhere, and some apps (e.g a Telegram bot I made for drafts, or the macOS' built-in auto-correct) replace them with em dashes automatically–I never bother to edit those out (ok, now this one I put here on purpose).
> It's just a ZIP archive with delusions of grandeur
> Clear examples of LLM fluff that don't "add facts or colour to the story".
Yeah, no that's fair enough, should've known better than to attempt humour on HN.
I've got to say though, pkpass is a ZIP archive, and no ZIP archive should require one to spend 3 hours to sign it.
I enjoyed the humour.
(We’re heading towards a sad world if any attempt at levity in an article is interpreted as evidence of LLM usage by critical killjoys.)
Edit: total random thought: something in your prose shouted ‘Brit’ to me very quickly. Is it possible that part of this is simply cultural differences in humour and writing, and over-interpretation of subtle differences as evidence of LLM use?
Or do LLMs just write in a subtlety more British style because, well, Shakespeare and Dickens and Keats and Milton? Or does ChatGPT just secretly channel PG Wodehouse?
Authors use humour as a form of connection with their audience. It's a way of saying hey I'm a human and I have the same human experiences as you dear reader. Take the first paragraph for example:
> Wednesday, 11:15 AM. I'm at the PureGym entrance doing the universal gym app dance. Phone out, one bar of signal that immediately gives up because apparently the building is wrapped in aluminum foil
It says, "Hey I'm a human who goes to the gym and experiences the same frustrations as you do". Now imagine for a second this paragraph was written by AI. The AI has never been to the gym, the AI doesn't feel impatience trying to pass through the turnstile, the AI has never experienced the anxiety of a dodgy internet connection in a large commercial building. The purpose of any humour in this paragraph is completely undermined if you assume it was actually written by AI.
So please don't conflate being anti-LLM with being anti-humour. It's just the opposite. We want humour because we want to feel a connection with our fellow humans and for the same reason we should also want writing that comes from a human, not a machine.
> So please don't conflate being anti-LLM with being anti-humour. It's just the opposite.
I'm not.
I'm trying to analyse, or hypothesise, why this author's particular writing style seemed to trigger people's nascent LLM warning heuristics.
I considered the humour, because, well, other people brought it up. From the surrounding discussion, it seemed that the jocular writing style was one of the points generating suspicion.
Does sound like some people just don't get the humour which is fine, personally I liked it (but then I am british).
British people do tend to have a fairly humorous indirect way of communicating that can take some getting used to for people from other cultures, but that doesn't mean we're all secretly LLMs
FWIW, I found "It's just a ZIP archive with delusions of grandeur" pretty funny and for me it was an example of a human adding (relevant) colour to the content.
I swear some folks have just been normalised to the shit writing that AI does so much that they look for tricks like punctuation rather than just reading the damn text. Although maybe they're just blatting the whole thing into ChatGPT and asking it to summarise, or determine if it's AI generate.
FWIW I enjoyed the article and the humour, and I don't know where the AI conspiracy is coming from – I wish I could get the AI to write copy this good. So thanks, that was a fun read!
There’s no such thing as “AI dashes”. Em-dashes are valid typographical marks which have been employed for literal centuries. The only reason LLMs even used them is because humans do too, as they were trained on that input. It’s your prerogative to not care about proper punctuation, but that in no way indicates that those who do are machines.
I was thinking the same thing -
Went back and re-read it though, and I think it’s more that the author wrote a first draft and then had AI to help spice some stuff up. He either:
1. Used AI to help and doesn’t care if it sounds a little AI generated / actually likes it
2. Didn’t use AI but reads enough AI slop that his writing style is directly influenced by it (scary)
3. Used AI but doesn’t use AI enough to immediately recognize when language sounds like it was generated by ChatGPT and didn’t bother correcting (this is my guess)
There’s a few times I got tripped up because it went from pretty human writing to “holy shit shit that’s ChatGPT I’m going to stop reading,” yet the author would save it with human writing right after.
This is kind of a ramble, but it actually was one of those pieces of writing that I felt was genuine and improved by some of the ChatGPT language rather than just clickbait garbage - I could tell the author was just trying to make it worthwhile and interesting to read, and I honestly really enjoyed it.
"The crown jewel? Your 8-digit gym door PIN is your API password and you most likely didn't set it yourself. The same PIN that hasn't changed since the iPhone 8 was cutting-edge technology."
The counties are administrative and there are bureaucrats who lead the county, but they are not titled, noble Counts and Countesses.
In Sweden, we also have administrative regions translated as counties, which are lead by someone I'd directly translate as "county chief" (as in "chief over this tribe") but they're anonymous bureaucrats a normal person wouldn't know about. (The common translation is the less exciting "governor".)
Not even true for the UK, which does have geographic peerages but they're not really linked to the county boundaries any more.
For some reason, the UK doesn't issue the title of "count", only "viscount". "Marquis" is linked etymologically to "marches", an old type of land allocation boundaries, but again not in practice.
Not that rare in California. Off the top of my head: Sonoma, Napa, Mendocino, Santa Clara, San Mateo, Santa Cruz, Monterey, San Diego, San Bernardino, and Alameda counties all have cities of the same name. Seems rare in most other states though.
It is rare in most states, I believe. It is very common in South Carolina (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_counties_in_South_Caro...), which has counties named things like "Greenville" and "Spartanburg" after their largest cities - it feels to me like those should be "Green" and "Spartan". And then there are states like Georgia where there are counties, and cities with the same name that are in different counties, because the county-namers and the city-namers were pulling their names from the same pool of well-known people but weren't talking to each other.
Also, in California: San Luis Obispo, Riverside, Sacramento, Fresno, Santa Barbara.
SF city and county are actually the same legal entity, not just the same land. It's officially called the City and County of San Francisco, and it's just as unusual as it sounds. The mayor also has the powers of a county executive with both a sheriff's department (county police to run the jails) and police department (city law enforcement) reporting to him; the city government runs elections like other counties; the Board of Supervisors - which is the typical county legislative structure - also serves as city council. (Denver, Colorado works the same way, I think.)
When people outside of LA say "Los Angeles", they're almost always referring to the county. The city of LA is actually quite small.
For "San Diego", it's precisely the opposite - a giant portion of San Diego County is comprised of the city of San Diego, and they're almost always just referring to the city.
And for "San Francisco," the city and the county are basically the same entity and thus have the same borders.
We want this place to be welcoming and friendly, not brutal and mean to newcomers and students. I'm sure you don't want to be that kind of person, or having that kind of effect, in any case.
lol sure i "reinvented it" but the reason I made it in the first place is because my school's whitelist. they whitelisted certain apps (like Python 3.11, for our Comp Sci class) and i've been using that since to get around the whitelist :p
I’m looking for something like this too. Msty is my favourite LLM UI (supports remote + local models) but unfortunately has no MCP support. It looks like they’re trying to nudge people into their web SaaS offering which I have no interest in.
As someone married to a Korean, I am not surprised in the least. Every single one I have met (males at least) drinks like a fish. It is impossible to describe to a westerner just how ingrained the drinking culture is over there.
The entire US and North America is massively more empty relative to almost anywhere else, even most perceptually sparse countries. Many of European countries are 5-10x denser than US.
