No, I had considered Microprose, Kitfox, Hooded Horse. I reached out to some but I should have been reaching out a year or two ago. I didn't think I would need one, I still don't think I NEED one... But would have been nice. But I just set a release date as a kick in the butt to get this thing shipped, which pretty much burns the boats of signing a publisher. I think it is better this way though. If it fails it fails. But Michael and I get to keep whatever proceeds are made and we get to do things our way at our pace. But there's other games such as Speculator that also need revamped. I kinda want Hackjack Games to be a remastering game studio, a land of misfit games of sorts. Maybe I'll be more open to having a publisher in the future.
Professionally typeset books. Designers have been typing it—and the other dashes—manually using modifiers+hyphen on Mac since 1984. You can type them—plus the bullet character—today on iOS by doing a long press on the hyphen key.
I’m not talking about the em-dash, which is not a great indicator IMO but the horrible overuse of binary oppositions with a kind of false surprise, e.g.:
The problem was not em-dashes — but binary opposition!
That sort of thing.
It is a much clearer marker of llm use than the em-dash. The sad thing is when searching for info on this the most convincing reply in search was generated by an LLM, which went on at length about why LLMs do this as some sort of consequence of their internal structure. I have absolutely no idea if that’s true — it really sounds a bit trite and exactly the kind of thing LLMs would confidently assert with no basis. I would want to hear from someone working in LLMs, but their blogs are probably all generated by an LLM nowadays. So this conundrum is a good example of a question where LLMs actively work against clear resolution.
This is in my view the most insidious damage word generators are inflicting on our culture — we can no longer assume most writing is honest or well-meaning because amoral LLMs fundamentally are not wired to make that distinction of true and untrue or right and wrong (unlike most humans) and many people will use and trust what they generate without question, polluting the online space and training data until everything is just a morass of half-known facts sprinkled with generated falsehoods that are repeated so often they seem true.
How do we check sources when the sources themselves were generated by LLMs?
My personal feel (completely subjective) is that during RLHF humans are incredibly sensitive to this pattern, especially when talking about personal or emotional issues. Any reply in the form of "it's not you, it's them" is such a dopamine hit that the LLMs started applying it for everything else.
The em-dash meme, if it's actually a thing, I find really annoying. That's the style in a lot of places and for a lot of people with or without spaces on either side. It was house style a a few different places I worked over about 25 years. More broadly, I assume LLMs are training on how a lot of people actually write. I'm not changing my writing style because some people will flag it as LLM-generated <shrug>.
I think it's safe to assume they meant it within their specific cultural context. They the symbol has different connotations in other cultures doesn't really change the point being made.
My point is just: if a test for what a symbol ‘really means’ depends on choosing an audience that conveniently erases everyone who uses it differently, that’s not describing intrinsic meaning, that’s describing the author’s cultural bubble and bias.
And on em dashes—most people outside tech circles see no “AI fingerprint,” and designers like myself have loved them since early Mac DTP, so the suspicion feels hilariously retroactive and very knee-jerk. So what if somebody thinks my text here is written by a bot?
> So what if somebody thinks my text here is written by a bot?
Then they might not read it at all. I often zone out as soon as I expect I'm reading slop and that's the reason try to ensure my own writing isn't slop adjacent.
I'm also not sure there is an "AI bubble." Everyone I know is using it in every industry. Museum education, municipal health services, vehicle engineering, publishing, logistics, I'm seeing it everywhere.
As mentioned elsewhere I've seen non-tech people refer to them as "AI dashes."
> if a test for what a symbol ‘really means’
There was no suggestion of such a test. No symbol has an intrinsic meaning. The point GP was about considering how your output will be received.
That point was very obviously made within a specific cultural context, at the very least limited to the world of the Latin alphabet. I'm sure there are other LLM signifiers outside of that bubble.
> I often zone out as soon as I expect I'm reading slop and that's the reason try to ensure my own writing isn't slop adjacent.
And how is this a problem someone else has to address? Some people zone out when they see a text is too long: are we supposed to only publish short form then? I have 10 years of writing on my site, if someone in 2026 sees my use of em dashes and suddenly starts thinking that my content is AI generated that's their problem, not mine.
Too many people are willingly bending to adapt to what AI companies are doing. I'm personally not gonna do it. Because again, now it's em dashes, tomorrow it could be a set of words, or a way to structure text. I say fuck that.
> And how is this a problem someone else has to address?
Where has anyone made the claim that it is?
> Some people zone out when they see a text is too long: are we supposed to only publish short form then?
No, but a good writer will generally consider if their text is needlessly verbose and try to make it palatable to their audience.
> starts thinking that my content is AI generated that's their problem, not mine.
If you want to reach them with your writing then it might become a problem. Obviously the focus on em dashes alone isn't enough but it's undoubtedly one of the flags.
> Too many people are willingly bending to adapt to what AI companies are doing.
It's bending rather to what readers are feeling. It's not following the top down orders of a corporation, it's being aware of how technology shapes readers' expectations and adapting your writing to that.
Technically it’s zoom, and how it functions is dependent on the app. In Finder it used to resize the window to a size that contained all the icons. Clicking it again would revert the window size.
I think it shows how difficult it is to ship a seemingly easy thing inside the Apple machine.
I'm more interested in how or why this bug was approved up be worked on so quickly after it was surfaced, rather than other longstanding and arguably more impactful bugs.
It's because the bug got publicity. Apple marketing prioritizes what does and doesn't get built. Someone saw bad publicity on the front page of HN and requested a fix.
The answer is probably a ho-hum combination of different teams work on different issues, and this one having annoyed one of the devs who could work on it.
reply