It contains multiple instances of classic ChatGPT phrasing, em-dashes, smart quotes, things that you simply never saw before 2020, etc. One of these in isolation and yeah okay it's an unfounded accusation, but I don't understand how you're all not seeing how many posts on HN now are AI.
> em-dashes…things that you simply never saw before 2020
I’m sorry but this is patently false. Apple devices have been autocorrecting two hyphens into a em dash since as long as I can remember and I personally used them all the time before LLMs were a thing and absolutely saw them online. I try not to use them now because people will annoyingly call me out for using ChatGPT when I’m not.
I think Apple devices also default to “smart quotes” if I understand what you mean by that. For example I’m typing this on my iPhone and I get this quote character automatically when I tap the double quote button on the default keyboard: “
If I want straight quotes I have to long press the quote button and explicitly select it: "
I think on macOS it’s the opposite for quotes, but macOS will absolutely autocorrect double hyphens to em dashes.
> I don't understand how you're all not seeing how many posts on HN now are AI.
There’s a also a big difference between using AI to reformat/clean up your text, especially for non-native English speakers and a bot just spamming LLM replies, but none of your “gotchas” can discern the difference…
I didn't say em-dashes were never seen before 2020. Re-read the sentence. It's a list - "em-dashes" and "things that you simply never saw before 2020" are two items in that list. But even assuming I meant em-dashes, it's interesting to compare how frequent they were a few years ago versus now. Take the most upvoted HN submission (8 years ago):
There is on instance, an obvious copy-paste. Now go to any from the current top list. I count 10+ per submission, even on submissions with much lower post counts that the Stephen Hawking one.
But I'm not going around policing em-dashes or smart quotes and calling people out for using them. It's more like when someone gets a bingo in ChatGPT phrasing and style idiosyncrasies then it becomes suspicious and I'd hate to think I'm here talking to bots (I've already left many subreddits because for AI slop).
I've seen highly rated posts on HN that might as well have started with "You're absolutely right!"
>I think it would suit you to do the same, now that you’ve acknowledged it.
I'm struggling to see why you think I acknowledged that my accusation was unfounded when I explained exactly why I think it's valid. It's clearly AI and I would bet my life on that post having been at least edited by ChatGPT.
>What did you hope to achieve with the accusation?
Plenty of online spaces are now full of bots posting and replying to other bots with the occasional human engagement. Some subreddits I used to post on are practically useless now with all the AI spam. Dead internet theory etc. If I wanted to talk to a bot I would use AI directly without pretending I'm discussing something with humans.
> I'm struggling to see why you think I acknowledged that my accusation was unfounded when I explained exactly why I think it's valid
You literally wrote “yeah okay it’s an unfounded accusation”.
I hope you can see why I thought that was an acknowledgement?
Sure I don’t want bots any more than you do, but I also don’t think it changes anything to blindly accuse anyone you think sounds like an LLM.. I mean, bots don’t self-destruct if you call them out or anything.
Engaging with bots likely just amplifies the problem (by causing them to respond), rather than just downvoting their posts.
This was my exact experience - loved it as a backend developer wanting to build simple frontends with minimal JavaScript (and I still recommend it for many use cases) but when I then tried HTMX to build a more complex application I found that the complexity that would normally be handled by a JavaScript framework ultimately grew and shifted to the HTML and, surprisingly, the backend as well.
For example, error handling in complex forms. When you have React handling errors you simply return a 400 JSON response with fields and reasons, or some other error message, and React decides what to do depending on the context, which it knows. When this responsibility is moved to the backend you now need to track the request location, state etc. and find the right fragment, which very quickly turned the code into a mess.
I think the choice of backend is also important. I suspect that Java (Spring Boot) made using HTMX much less pleasant than it would have been with something else, especially when it comes to templates and routing. Using Java for HTML templates (Thymeleaf or any of the other popular libraries) is something I will never do again.
Edit:
The analogy with jQuery is interesting. I feel the same way about HTMX now as I did about jQuery ten years ago. I used to plug jQuery into every project even if it was just to select elements or whatever, but whenever I used jQuery entirely over the frameworks that were popular at the time (Ember, Angular) I ended up with way messier code.
> When this responsibility is moved to the backend you now need to track the request location, state etc. and find the right fragment,
Maybe not? I'm just returning a 422 JSON response with fields and reasons and I have a tiny bit of JavaScript in the frontend that just plugs them in to the form with the built-in Constraint Validation API.
> I suspect that Java (Spring Boot) made using HTMX much less pleasant than it would have been with something else, especially when it comes to templates and routing.
>Don’t get me wrong—having “the name” on my resume now meant I could get at least one chance at an interview about anywhere
Never mind, it's been written or at least edited by ChatGPT.