Whether we like it or not, em dashes are effectively verboten in online discussions and blog posts if you want people to take you seriously. If the idea that excessive hyphenation is an AI tell gains traction, it too will become impossible to use without ruining your credibility.

What does it mean when prompting SoTA LLMs prone to slop to be concise and precise, with respect to context at hand, not work at all? Anyone benchmarking that?

I read the slop and each has a smell. Each model and company does because the humans behind it have their own taste, smell, and perspective.

The human element cannot be recreated because the human element that created the beast becomes further removed and only the beast remains.

I say beast to provide a tell that what I write is 'human'.

In this example I used the hyphen for comedic effect. But this is a actual sentence I wrote in an older post:

> What's the competition in the gaming-capable pre-built mini-PC category

I think that's probably-satire.

Ah, bummer. Not totally surprising though.

I was riffing off of the meaning from https://noslopgrenade.com/ which made its way around the comments here on HN a few weeks ago.

Because we add humans enjoy variety. I read for entertainment, even technical posts like this one that I have no use for. I often trying to think about what the author may have been thinking when writing, why they introduced concepts in a specific order, what ideas might they have omitted, etc. It's personal and enjoyable. But now, when I detect the familiar writing style of what seems to be a gpt 5 model, that "parasocial" connection dies.

The LLM explained the core concept and features very well. But it was dull and boring to me, as I already have to read this writing style at work pretty much all day every day.

>I don’t have access to my flavor of LLM on the train nor the time or budget to have it do the research and summary for me

Aren't you gonna let the LLM develop for you anyway? Why bother writing and reading a post at all?

> pretending like pre-LLM era blogs were these pristinely well written pieces of art

The point is the effort and care that the writer puts which differentiates it from automatically generated text. That matters because a human can sympathize and that leads to better understanding and greater connection. That's why a post is written.

> Don’t get me started on the mess that was the communication of this particular company or one of their competitors like AWS.

And we criticize those as well. Nothing's changed. Yesterday's bad content is today's slop (plus a mind boggling amount of investment, corruption and environmental side effects).