AI never uses em dashes in a pair like this, whereas most people who like em dashes do. Anyone who calls paired em dash writing AI is only revealing themselves to be a duffer.
In my limited text generation experience, LLMs use em-dashes precisely like that, only without spaces on the sides and always in pairs in a single sentence. Here some examples from my Gemini history:
"The colors we see—like blue, green, and hazel—are the result of Tyndall scattering."
"Several interlocking cognitive biases create a "safety net" around the familiar, making the unknown—even if objectively better—feel like a threat."
"A retrograde satellite will pass over its launch region twice every 24 hours—once on a "northbound" track and once on a "southbound" track—but because of the way Earth rotates, it won't pass over the exact same spot on every orbit."
"Central, leverages streaming telemetry to provide granular, real-time performance data—including metrics (e.g., CPU utilization, throughput, latency), logs, and traces—from its virtualized core and network edge devices."
"When these conditions are met—indicating a potential degradation in service quality (e.g., increased modem registration failures, high latency on a specific Remote PHY)—Grafana automatically triggers notifications through configured contact points (e.g., Slack, PagerDuty)."
After collecting these samples I've noticed that they are especially probably in questions like explain something or write descriptive text. In the short queries there is not much text in total to trigger this effect.
Yes, the LLMs have made great progress in that regard. It wasn't too long ago that the majority of dashes seen in LLM material could have been commas, periods, or nothing at all with no loss of tone or meaning, and almost none were used to offset parenthetical phrases. It was nearly exclusively an overdramatic flourish. And now look at them. They're growing up. Just makes you want to squeeze them until they pop.
It's worth noting that you mean excellent in terms of prior AI output. I'm pretty sure this wouldn't be considered excellent from a "human made art" perspective. In other words, it's still got a ways to go!
Edit: someone needs to explain why this comment is getting downvoted, because I don't understand. Did someone's ego get hurt, or what?
It depends, if you meant from a human coding an SVG "manually" the same way, I'd still say this is excellent (minus the reflection issue). If you meant a human using a proper vector editor, then yeah.
Indeed. And when you factor in the amount invested... yeah it looks less impressive. The question is how much more money needs to be invested to get this thing closer to reality? And not just in this instance. But for any instance e.g. a seahorse on a bike.
I think you mean "prestigious" rather than "major accomplishment". You're right, there was a small period of time when it was. However, that window didn't quite align with "best time to do YC" (several years prior to such prestige) nor with "best time to be doing YC" (the prestige embellishes your resume, which is useless if you're otherwise occupied).
It's interesting to me that YC has managed to dilute this prestige to a large extent. I don't think it's an inevitable result of scale: look at Google. I think "Xoogler" prestige has diminished, but it's not nearly as bad as what has happened to the YC label.
My theory is: YC never figured out their formula. The whole formula is essentially Paul Graham, who had a knack for trusting his gut (and sometimes his wife) when everything else in his "system" was saying NO.
Once they lost that, they had to rely on what was left, and it simply wasn't competitive anymore. It's like Apple in their John Sculley era. While Sculley is credited with growing Apple's revenue from $800 million to $8 billion, his approach created a "mess of dull SKUs" that eventually confused customers and diluted the brand.
They also have a (bad) habit of removing access to bookface for all the founders who aren't "active", decimating their network and in some ways discarding valuable knowledge around what didn't work.
I don't know, man. I'm at a point where not even the tangible effects on me that the policies and decisions some members of my family endorse are enough to get them to think twice.
I can sit right in front of them and describe the problems I'm now dealing with and point out the exact legislative changes that caused them and it's like their brains turn off until the subject changes. More than happy to pray for me, though.
Do you think there's a possibility that while they may love you and sympathize with your struggles, they recognize that with any policy some people will be negatively affected?
The idea is to have political policy that minimizes harm and maximizes benefit, for the most people.
Is it possible that this is the way they are viewing it, and that perhaps you are the one who isn't thinking critically because you're being directly negatively affected?
Definitely reasonable to question oneself in this way. But realistically, if someone is unwilling to engage with you about policies that negatively affect you, but instead offer their prayers, that "perhaps..." is working overtime.
Normally I'm pretty good at extending intellectual generosity. But for them, it's at the level of voting for a candidate who supports cuts to Medicaid and then wondering why it's suddenly infinitely harder for me to get through to anyone about assistance (not even for myself, for them) following staffing cuts.
"This isn't what I voted for" is a common utterance. They can't help themselves, so I do my best to help, while they undercut my options to help them.
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