People can hide their biases (or claim they can set them aside, which will often be acceptable during jury selection), and in a county with 30k people you're gonna run into people who recognize you at the grocery store a lot. This certainly wouldn't have been a pressure-free scenario.

It can be quite hard to get a jury to go against a locally powerful large employer in a small town.

Mostly because when I see an em dash now, I assume that it was written by AI, not that the author is one of the people who puts enough effort into their product that they intentionally use specific sized dashes.

AI might suck, but if the author doesn't change, they get categorized as a lazy AI user, unless the rest of their writing is so spectacular that it's obvious an AI didn't write it.

My personal situation is fine though. AI writing usually has better sentence structure, so it's pretty easy (to me at least) to distinguish my own writing from AI because I have run-on sentences and too many commas. Nobody will ever confuse me with a lazy AI user, I'm just plain bad at writing.

> assume

There's your trouble. The real problem is that most internet users are setting their baseline for "standard issue human writing" at exactly the level they themselves write. The problem is that more and more people do not draw a line between casual/professional writing, and as such balk at very normal professional writing as potentially AI-driven.

Blame OS developers for making it easy—SO easy!—to add all manner of special characters while typing if you wish, but the use of those characters, once they were within easy reach, grew well before AI writing became a widespread thing. If it hadn't, would AI be using it so much now?

As someone who frequently posts online- with em dashes- I wonder if I am part of the problem with training llms to use them so much- and am going to get punished in the future for doing so.

I also tend to way overuse parenthesis (because I tend to wander in the middle of sentences) but they haven't shown up much in llms so /shrug.

If you’re judging my writing so shallowly, I don’t think I’m writing for you.

> If you’re judging my writing so shallowly, I don’t think I’m writing for you.

No, you are writing for people who see LLM-signals and read on anyway.

Not sure that that's a win for you.

"Seeing LLM-signals" == "reading shallowly", so I think I covered that case.

Or you're writing for the people who haven't deluded themselves into thinking that they're magical LLM detectors, which definitely does seem like a win.

> Or you're writing for the people who haven't deluded themselves into thinking that they're magical LLM detectors, which definitely does seem like a win.

What delusion? The false positive rate just on HN alone is so low it's not even a rounding error.

I don’t think I’m judging shallowly- there is no em-dash on a standard keyboard. The one way it ends up in real writing is if you use a typesetting program like LaTeX, or Word changes an en-dash with auto formatting, or the user consciously interrupts their writing flow to insert the character with a special keystroke combination or by pasting it in. The proportion of people who do any of those things in writing for the web is quite small. The number of clearly AI written posts with em-dashes is quite large. So large, that I immediately suspect AI writing when I see an em-dash and I rarely see countering evidence that suggests the author is human but meticulous about how they write.

> there is no em-dash on a standard keyboard. The one way it ends up in real writing is (…)

Then you proceed to list multiple ways to do it, but neglected to mention that by default on Apple operating systems they are inserted automatically when typing “--“. It’s something you have to explicitly turn off of you don’t want it. On Apple mobile operating systems you can also long press the hyphen to get the option. Em-dashes are trivial to type.

Both of the examples you gave both fall under "a special keystroke combination," which I did list. Typing "--" is two keystrokes compared to one for an en-dash.

The iOS example isn't just "long press the hyphen" it's "press the [123] button, long press the hyphen, and slide your finger over the em-dash" compared to "press the [123] button, long press the hyphen" for the en-dash.

If you're going to argue at least be genuine. I didn't say it was hard to type an em-dash, I showed that every way to get an em-dash into your writing takes an extra step. Taking an extra step compared to other characters means it isn't trivial.

For someone writing publication quality work, em-dashes appear and if I see an em-dash in a book I don't assume AI writing. But for comments on the internet or a blog posts that aren't meticulous everywhere else, an en-dash is a pretty good signal that the work is AI generated. When people are writing, needing an extra step to insert an em-dash is disruptive to most people's train of thought.

> I didn't say it was hard to type an em-dash

Neither did I say you said that. I only said they are trivial to type. Which they are. I do it all the time, and it doesn’t interrupt my train of thought any more than a comma. I also do the keyboard shortcuts for things like “smart quotes” and apostrophes (’). For some of those I even have my own special snippets in Alfred, like typing "" produces “” with the caret in between. I can’t even tell you what the exact shortcuts for those are without looking at my fingers, because they are so ingrained in my muscle memory. I know I’m far from alone in that.

> But for comments on the internet or a blog posts that aren't meticulous everywhere else, an en-dash is a pretty good signal that the work is AI generated.

Provably false.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071722

To be fair, if they don’t know that they probably run Android, and are you even writing for them?

I bet their bubbles are… green. The horror!

A major consideration is that the state holds a monopoly on violence. A single person defending their citizenship with a gun might be morally right, but they will end up physically dead. And a few hundred foreign-born citizens with guns might make the news but will end up equally dead.

Unless a HUGE portion of the country decides to take up arms at the same time, the second amendment isn't going to make the difference. As the administration's policies seems to be affecting individual groups one at a time, I doubt that enough people will be willing to lay down their lives over any single issue.

Bundy is still grazing his cattle on that BLM land to this day.

That seems like a really bad excuse to void responsibility. Consider a cigarette maker:

1. We sell cigarettes to make money

2. The more people crave cigarettes, the more money we can make

3. Should we make cigarettes less appealing to children? Absolutely not, we would make less money. Parents should just stop their kids from buying cigarettes.

Also, people in there last few decades have been using “duty to shareholders” as a way to excuse bad behavior, as if it’s a moral imperative higher than all others. I don’t really see why it would.

Cigarette companies were not penalized for making addictive drugs or doing generally immoral but technically legal things. They were penalized because the USA had set a minimum age for smoking cigarettes, and they were marketing directly to people who could not legally buy their products, and there was conclusive proof that they were targeting minors with their ads.

The DIRECT comparison from my previous comment would be if a country set a legal age requirement for accessing social media, and then you could hold the social media companies if they continued marketing to them. But for now, no such law exists in the USA. Social media has not been regulated like tobacco, because Congress has abdicated its responsibility to regulate these companies.

Many people don't remember, but in early 2020 just prior to COVID shutting the world down the US and Iran were near war- the US even assassinated one of Iran's important military commanders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Qasem_Soleima....

Most people worldwide don't remember, but Iran is most certainly aware that Trump was president when that happened too. Most US presidents tried to find some balance with Iran, but Trump seems to want to be an antagonist.

I remember and was a bit taken aback when it occurred. Soleimani while being linked to a terrorist org was also assisting the US military at the time. There must have been something going on behind the scenes that was never documented or I never read because he was one of our assets.

> how is ownership established if there is no single source of truth?

Oh, boy, let me tell you it is very disconcerting to pay a title company to do a search of legal records on a property, and the only guarantee they offer in some states is that "we didn't find anything suspicious but there is no guarantee that someone from the past won't pop up with a better claim to ownership. You can't hold it against us if that happens." How is it that most people making the biggest purchase of their lives are going along with that? I'm definitely not okay with it, but sometimes you can't buy property without accepting it- no title company will offer a stronger guarantee.

For details, I'm talking about how in some states the Special Warranty Deed is the standard for real estate purchases: https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/what-is-a-special-warrant.... A title company will guarantee that the current seller hasn't entered any agreements that might legally obligate you (such as offering the property as collateral for an outstanding loan), but they are very clear that actions of previous owners are not included in this guarantee. So there is no single source of truth- we just hope that we're not part of the tiny percentage where the special deed is insufficient.

Edit: for context, there is a distinction between title insurance and the deed itself, but the title company is only offering insurance on the deed, so if the deed only covers the previous owner then the insurance only covers that too.

  > You can't hold it against us if that happens

No, what you describe is the entire purpose of owners title insurance. The idea that it “only covers previous owner” is false, it covers a wide variety of title defects.

I was getting ready to debate you, but I'll admit that I'm mostly wrong about title insurance.

Special warranty deeds only cover the current seller, but title insurance can defend against prior ownership claims. I will note that just because title insurance guarantees they will defend against ownership claims, they don't guarantee it will be settled in a particular way. There's a theoretical possibility that an agreement can't be reached that keeps you in the house you thought you bought legally- like in this story the buyers got their money back but didn't keep the house that wasn't theirs https://www.thetitlereport.com/Articles/Title-Insurance-at-W...

> I will note that just because title insurance guarantees they will defend against ownership claims, they don't guarantee it will be settled in a particular way.

Of course, insurance doesn't guarantee you won't have a covered loss. Insurance compensates you if you have a covered loss.

When I've purchased real estate with title insurance, the offer from the title company has been pretty specific about what risks are covered, what risks are specifically not covered, and what the dollar limits are for covered losses. There's a lot of paperwork involved in purchasing real estate, but the title report and the title insurance offer are worth taking the time to read.

I've read the terms of title insurance and no, you can't hold them liable if it turns out you don't get the property as intended. It's basically useless.

It makes sense that you can’t hold an insurer liable for the very thing they are selling you insurance against. The insurance exists to make you whole if you, e.g. pay earnest money and then someone disputes your title.

You might have written software that is "done" if you compile it with a single compiler version and don't use any OS hooks/APIs and don't care if future changes breaks your software. I.e. it's done if you think that people will stop needing to use it at some point in the future.

A tool like sudo can never be done because it integrates with the constantly updating OS and will always need maintenance.

Thoughts:

1. What in the circular funding? This feels more like a financing scheme founding it under X/Twitter and then spinning it over to SpaceX. I suspect some debt is disappearing or taxes aren't getting assessed because of this move.

2. The only thing harder than harnessing "a millionth of the sun's power" on Earth would be launching enough material into space to do the same thing. And that's not even a reason for SpaceX to own an AI company, at least not at this point. The current AI isn't going to help with the engineering to do that. Right now hiring 20-somethings fresh out of college is way cheaper and SpaceX has been very successful with that.

quick edit: dang, I even got point 1 backwards. xAI owns X/Twitter, and that means that SpaceX now owns X/Twitter as well as an AI company. Super suspicious that SpaceX could actually think that buying the social media part (a significant portion of xAI's value) would be worth it.

I wouldn’t bet on it. If the baseband modem has access to location data then it could send it without the OS being able to intervene. I don’t know about Pixels, but many devices are highly integrated now that I would want some real thorough and specific research before I trusted that an OS could block the modem from sending location data.

A common approach to research is to do literature review first, and build up a library of citable material. Then when writing your article, you summarize the relevant past research and put in appropriate citations.

To clarify, there is a difference between a bibliography (a list of relevant works but not necessarily cited), and cited work (a direct reference in an article to relevant work). But most people start with a bibliography (the superset of relevant work) to make their citations.

Most academics who have been doing research for a long time maintain an ongoing bibliography of work in their field. Some people do it as a giant .bib file, some use software products like Zotero, Mendeley, etc. A few absolute psychos keep track of their bibliography in MS Word references (tbh people in some fields do this because .docx is the accepted submission format for their journals, not because they are crazy).

> a bibliography (a list of relevant works but not necessarily cited)

Didn't know that there's difference between bibliography and cited work. thank you.

Yes but you should read your bibliography.