The Rise of Whatever

I disagree with many of the points on LLMs (but broadly agree with 80% of the post). But regardless of agreeing or not, it was a pleasure to read this because it's beautifully written, the arguments are solid, it makes you think, and the website has a personality, which is rare nowadays.

I clicked halfheartedly, started to read halfheartedly, and got sucked into a read that threw me back into the good old days of the internet.

A pity that the micropayments mentioned in the post never materialized, I'd surely throw a few bucks at the author but the only option is a subscription and I hate those.

It is a nice read but something tells me it’s AI generated due to the frequent em dashes so I wouldn’t place all bets on it being entirely human written.

Edit: I apologies, the author has pre-gpt posts that use em dashes so likely it’s part of their writing style.

It would be a monument to hypocrisy if this piece with this specific content were AI-generated.

Color me naive but honestly I'm pretty sure it's not, though. We all tend to be worse at distinguishing AI from human text than we think, but the text sounds genuine to me and transpires an author with a quirky personality that seems difficult to imitate by an LLM. And that could include using em dashes.

Some people just like em dashes—myself included. You can find em dashes in articles written by the author before LLMs became a thing.

This strikes me as written by someone who would bother to put in em dashes themselves.

Eevee writes well but this is not one of her better posts IMO. Too many micro-digs at people who are white or straight, too much of the Twitter/Bluesky tone where you drop a snark bomb on the heckin' evil du jour and then just move on. If anything I'd say this has a lot less personality than older posts I remember.

If you use a nice enough writing tool it will do en/em and any other dash for you semi automatically anyway. Even Word does it when AutoFormat is turned on. Although it normally chooses the En-dash (U+2013) instead of the Em-dash (U+2014), this also depends on your language.

I disagreed with a _lot_ of what they said. But I really hope the author doesn't suffer the indignity of reading this comment.

I've been accused of being an LLM before — I got over it pretty quickly.

100 times this

I know many people come to the comments before they decide if they want to read the article. For these people I would like to point out that

- there are zero digs of any kind about sexuality in this piece

- the only reference in the text I can possibly find that someone might have considered a "micro-dig at people who are white" is

> This is the driving force behind clickbait, behind thumbnails of white guys making 8O faces, behind red arrows, behind video essayists who just read Wikipedia at you three times a week like clockwork, [...]

To me this feels more like it's identifying a specific thing than a "micro-dig", but opinions may differ.

> Too many micro-digs at people who are white or straight, too much of the Twitter/Bluesky tone where you drop a snark bomb on the heckin' evil du jour and then just move on.

I'd really like to know why tubgirl spam raids are bad but unicorn weiners are not; I don't really see much difference between the two, TBH.