“One Student One Chip” Course Homepage

I’m guessing a good chunk of the page is AI generated - em dashes and random emojis.

Some folks actually were taught to use em-dashes as part of their normal writing, especially if you've taken a technical writing course.

I dislike that people think you're an AI if you're using proper typography. :(

Automatic translation, for sure, as evidenced by this sentence in the two's complement section:

In fact, complement is a concept in counting systems, and the Chinese term for it is "complement".

Just writing multiple paragraphs with compound-complex sentences makes people think you're an AI. :(

It might be "proper" but I never liked it.

Many proper uses of the em-dash put two words visually together—despite being parts of two distinct units separated by the em-dash.

I much prefer using a normal dash with a space on each side - like this.

Given "AI" is over 50% of all content now, even if you flip a coin chances are pretty good some article contains slop.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrTrOCQZoQE

The Ubuntu repositories curate both the legacy and more modern logisim fork:

sudo apt-get install logisim

sudo snap install logisim-evolution

Microcap 12 is also still available from the archive.org web cache, was made free, and runs in Wine64 just fine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230214034946/http://www.spectr...

Microcap will handle both Analog and Digital simulations.

KiCad now also supports Spice, and reports it should import the free LTSpice libraries. I have yet to find a use case for the kicad sim option... so YMMV.

https://www.kicad.org/discover/spice/

Best of luck, =3

Statements like this always feel a bit rude to me—as a Chinese, I use em dashes (in Chinese texts) on a daily basis and insert them in English texts when I see fit.

A bit of background: Em dashes “—” (or, very often, double em-dashes “——”) are to Chinese texts what hyphens “-” are to English texts. We use them in ranges “魯迅（1881－1936）”, in name concatenations “任－洛二氏溶液（Ringer-Locke solution）”, to express sounds “呜——”火车开动了, or `“Chouuuuuuuuu”, starts the train' in English, and in place of sentence breaks like this——just like em dashes in English texts. They are so commonly used that most Chinese input methods map Shift+- (i.e., underscores “_”) to double em-dashes. So, as a result, while I see many English people have to resort to weird sequences like “Alt + 0151” for an em-dash, a huge population in the world actually has no difficulty in using em-dashes. What a surprise!

As for this article, obviously it was translated from its Chinese version, so, yeah I don't see em-dashes as an AI indicator. And for the weird emoji “” (U+1F54A), I'm fairly certain that it comes from the Chinese idiom “放鸽子” (stand someone up, or, literally, release doves/pigeons), which has evolved into “鸽了” (pigeon'ed), a humorous way to say “delayed, sorry!”.

[0] https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/标点符号用法

Totally agree, I don't think em dashes are a particularly useful AI tell unless they're used in a weird way. Left to my own devices (as a native English speaker who likes em dashes and parentheticals), I often end up with at least one em dash every other paragraph, if not more frequently.

On another note, it may be useful to you to know that in most English dialects, referring to a person solely by their nationality (e.g., when you wrote "as a Chinese") is considered rude or uncouth, and it may mark your speech/writing as non-native. It is generally preferable to use nationalities as adjective rather than nouns (e.g., "as a Chinese person"). The two main exceptions are when employing metonymy, such as when referring to a nation's government colloquially (e.g., "the Chinese will attend the upcoming UN summit") or when using the nationality to indicate broad trends among the population of the nation (e.g., "the Chinese sure know how to cook!"). I hope this is considered a helpful interjection rather than an unwelcome one, but if not, I apologize!

Most AI tells are like this. I have been taught in marketing training to list things in pairs of three, because that's punchy, sufficiently succinct and very memorable. Now this is strongly associated with AI

After all AI didn't pick up these habits out of nowhere - all the tells are good writing advice and professional typography, but used with a frequency you would only see in highly polished texts like marketing copy

This comment has become more robotic than the thing it criticises. People use em-dashes and emoji all the time! They are easy to type. On Apple operating systems you can even make em-dashes accidentally by default by simply using two hyphens. Those by themselves aren’t sufficient to detect LLM writing, please stop propagating that wrong idea. And emoji?! Human communication over the internet is littered with them, they’re insanely popular and have their own jargon and innuendos.

> referring to a person solely by their nationality (e.g., when you wrote "as a Chinese") is considered rude or uncouth

I don’t think that applies when referring to yourself, as the parent did.

Thank you! It would indeed require extra effort for me to notice issues like this, and it is very nice of you to have pointed it out!

Speaking of personal devices, I also have a dedicated key binding for en dashes “–” (because, well, I already have a whole tap layer for APL symbols, and it costs nothing to add one more). Since we're on HN, I believe many people here can easily do that if they wish to, so I too don't think en/em dashes are very telling, especially on HN.

(...and of course we have an xkcd for it: https://xkcd.com/3126/ )

Totally agree with this view. Why use an extra character when we already have a dash - just to add a pixel or two on either side. How an em-dash visually connects two words is not pleasant either, I prefer to have a space between them. For writing English, the ASCII character set is plenty.