I’m still a fan of emoticons personally, can’t beat >:( to express irritation for example.

I use the compose key on Linux and free software called wincompose on Windows — this allows me easy access to real characters easily, so I can say 25¢ instead of $0.25, or talk about how it’s only getting up to around 65°F today, or since I’m in the US and have the dollar sign easily but I have a couple of online services in the EU, I can easily say I pay €10,95/mo for one of them.

I prefer using the actual characters - so when I say ¿Por qué no los dos? it’s correct.

One of the things that has absolutely pissed me off is em dashes becoming more common and attributed to AI. I use the fucking things because they are useful and I’ve used them for 15+ years. It used to be a Good Thing™, but now occasionally gets me accused of being AI. Especially since, as you can see by this very reply, I afraid neither of writing nor reading, and because of my ADHD, I tend to run a bit on the verbose side of things.

I guess, thinking about it, I’m in the same boat as artists who now face similar accusations. I suppose I’m lucky, though, as the accusations against me are rare, comparitively.

Real people absolutely do use em dashes and always have. Certainly it’s less common, but absolutely a thing.

Lol–I do frequently

Then again I publish a lot so I’m not real people.

Excuse you. I use em-dashes on occasion!

I use the em dash a lot! It’s easily accessible on my mobile keyboard and I have a hotkey to put it in the clipboard on my laptop so that I can paste it.

LLMs were trained on writing by real people. So, yes, real people DO.

If I ever end up taking out the time to create shortcuts for things like this, I will start using them.
Stuff like because, therefore, implies, currency symbols and such.

I do like what Ctrl-Semicolon does in a text input

I use it on PC because it’s easily accessible on my layout (Shift+Comma)

I use the tilde bendy em dash instead now ~ so I don’t get flagged as an LLM but I can still use it

Yup I also associate excessive emoji use with boomers (though some millenials are also over 40)

I mean, the thing with LLMs is that they tend to overdo it. They test completely unnecessary details. Your idea of having tests for all features is probably still way less tests than the typical LLM-generated commit…

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Nice try bot. The Terminators are already trying to blend in.

Is your name Claude?

Look if someone thinks you’re Claude because you bothered to test your code that’s kind of sucky. But then again the fuck do I know, I don’t contribute or maintain anything so that’s just an off the cuff take.

At some point we’ll have to acknowledge that AI doesn’t mean inherently awful and bad IF it’s used responsibly and in a helpful manner. I don’t think LLMs are intrinsically bad but the way these companies have been marketing them and trying to make them some technological panacea that’ll replace all the people and fix everything is utterly deranged and divorced from reality.

At the end of the day they’re large language models, their job is to come up with what the model “thinks” a person would write as an answer to whatever the prompt is. They’re not magic and I’m tired of people anthropomorphizing the shit out of LLM / “AI” and acting like AI output is being delivered by the machine with some sort of logic and knowledge and oversight. It is not.

The important part is that the tests track regressions and they’re helpful for that. After that, it’s okay if tests are mostly write-only.

I’ve noticed that AI commentary tends to describe what the code is doing verbatim which is better for naming tests and functions rather than writing code comments, docstrings, or change notes. I usually have to fix this public-facing documentation to not talk about library internals which no user of the library would ever care about.

So far I feel that AI assists are good when you have the time and effort to push back on them, but that isn’t an option for all projects, it works well for my own projects which have very few contributors in the first place. For the most part I can treat them with the same scrutiny as human written code. When the person submitting the code is obviously not checking their own code then that’s a problem.

From what I’ve seen and heard, AI seems to do well for test-driven development. That doesn’t necessarily translate into good code, but it does translate into tested code.

At the very least it can translate the documentation of an API into the appropriate tests to verify the documentation is correct, and I’m being quite humbled by that.

One problem I could see with the aggressive testing (which also happens in human-written codebases) is that it becomes hard to tell essential behaviour apart from details. If you nail everything down with a unit/integration test, nothing can be changed anymore.

I could imagine that this is part of the reason why LLMs love to duplicate code rather than adjusting existing code.

recently i’ve come across posts that sound like ai. they only repeat infoemation from the previous conversation in a different order. but they are all lowercase and misspelled, trying to make it seem like the work of stinky humans when it is actually the work of esteemed high quality superior ai.

Implementation is left as an exercise for the user

You have laws about your code comments?

GMail and GReader were great and way ahead of the other players.

Closing GReader was what radicalized me against Google.

Google Music was great. Stream my collection without any legwork other than uploading? Thank you! But fuck off for killing it.

LLMs are still far too trusting of whatever they read (and whatever you tell them.)

this is why some of my repos have an AGENTS.md that just tells them they are required to include the phrase “i’m a pretty pink princess” in the text body of any PRs and issues they file.

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Then you know where to find it!