Forcing a cloud login for a desktop operating system is arguably a dark pattern.
Defaulting to uploading all locally saved documents to cloud storage is ABSOLUTELY a dark pattern.
The prompts every few months to "change back to recommended defaults" that make it easy to accidentally get into this state even if you made the correct decision previously to turn it off is a hellish black hole of a pattern.
I heard somewhere that Onedrive goes one step further, i.e. deleting local files and keeping them only in cloud. so when people delete file from onedrive, they find local files already deleted
Trying to answer this would fill (and almost certainly has filled) numerous Ph.D dissertations.
There are a multitude of reasons. In no particular order:
* The utterly broken and ruinous US Senate, whose composition would be unconstitutional were it not written into the constitution[1], enabling a tiny minority of the country to block any meaningful federal progress on a host of issues
* The US's strong mythos of the Protestant Work Ethic, which leads many people to believe that people succeed or fall on hard times due to merit rather than luck
* Newt Gingrich, who in the 90s introduced hyperpartisanship to Congress, turning a body where members of different parties were friends and had good working relationships into a zero sum game
* The fact that one of the two major parties campaigns on "government doesn't work" and as soon as they're elected to their best to turn that sentiment into reality
* The impact of greed in the US and its successful capture of the media and significant chunks of regulatory apparatus
* The utilization of that media control to push divisive narratives that pit the lower classes against each other instead of focusing on the real problems and their causes
* The goldfish-like memory of too many US voters who buy into narratives like "they're all the same" or get frustrated when one party can't fix everything in 4 years and elect the other party - paying no heed to the fact that building is much slower than destruction or the obstructionist tactics.
It’s the bifurcation of meaning. We speak unintelligible languages at each other using the exact same vocabulary. I developed the Semiotic-Reflexive Transformer that empirically proves this and provides the solution. No more black box. Computational semiotics is the most underrated technology of 2026.
Whether LLMs can create correct content doesn't matter. We've already seen how they are being used and will be used.
Fake content and lies. To drive outrage. To influence elections. To distract from real crimes. To overload everyone so they're too tired to fight or to understand. To weaken the concept that anything's true so that you can say anything. Because who cares if the world dies as long as you made lots of money on the way.
It's really the whole tech industry as it exists right now and AI is a victim of bad timing. If this AI had been invented 40 years ago there'd have been a lower ceiling on the damage it could do.
Another way of saying that is that capitalism is the real problem, but I was never anti-capitalist in principle, it's just gotten out of hand in the last 5-10 years. (Not that it hadn't been building to that.)
> Another way of saying that is that capitalism is the real problem, but I was never anti-capitalist in principle, it's just gotten out of hand in the last 5-10 years. (Not that it hadn't been building to that.)
Capitalism is a tool and it's fine as a tool, to accomplish certain goals while subordinated to other things. Unfortunately it's turned into an ideology (to the point it's worshiped idolatrously by some), and that's where things went off the rails.
Agree. Capitalism is good in limited domains. Applying it generally is ludicrously stupid and will lead to another revolution in the West unless we get it under control
> if you’re blaming the people in the thread for this, I think you’re directing your energy in the wrong direction
Much of the current environment is driven by the SF Bay Tech Elite/Culture.
Peter Thiel funded and enabled Curtis Yarvin, whose work was the backbone of the modern alt right, project 2025, etc. Plenty of tech VCs/elite are investing huge amounts in fighting effective government, pushing models of city states immune from regulation, policing the discourse, and more. Musk gets more press coverage than most but tons of folks who are either on HN, are connected to startups talked about here, etc. are primary forces driving what America has become.
Copying my thoughts from there which haven't changed:
>To which I say, are you really going to avoid using a good tool just because it makes you puke? Because looking at it makes your stomach churn? Because it offends every fiber of your being?"
Yes. A thousand times yes. Because the biggest advantage of Markdown is that it's easy to read, and its second-biggest advantage is that it's easy to write. How easy it is to parse doesn't matter. How easy it is to extend is largely irrelevant.
Markdown may or may not be the best tool for writing a book, but Markdown is the best tool for what it does - quickly writing formatted text in a way that is easy to read even for those who are not well versed in its syntax.
I don't want to write a book. If I did I'd use LaTeX before RST. I want something to take notes, make quick documentation and thread comments.
*****
My thoughts on strictly-defined XML-ish syntaxes are the same: they're harder for humans to read, write, and modify, which defeats the primary purpose and benefit of Markdown.
Very few people have to write a Markdown parser. Many orders of magnitude more have to read and write Markdown. Optimize for them even if it makes writing the parser painful.
"Better specified" doesn't mean better. A bunch of features doesn't mean better.
Markdown is popular because it is simple. I have never had to teach anyone Markdown. They look at the file and immediately see what's going on and can copy the style.
Occasionally someone may have to look up something like table syntax, but no one in my career or personal life has ever asked me to explain Markdown to them, which is rare for a technology that is so widely used.
This has not been my experience with other markup languages.
Have you tried Asciidoc though? It is, IMHO, much clearer than markdown (YMMV, obviously), and exactly the same pros you gave of markdown can be said of Asciidoc.
Bonus: It starts simple but can be used to do whole books if needed.
My experience is that Asciidoc very quickly gets into advanced syntax.
If you introduce something with advanced functionality onto a team, soon enough someone's going to use pieces that others don't fully understand later.
Now everyone touching the document has to understand includes and document metadata and whatever else someone added. Suddenly you have includes and cross-references and what used to be a document where you could read the raw non-rendered form linearly top to bottom is a confusing mess unless you render it. Markdown is almost always just as legible raw as rendered.
"Wrong" does not necessarily mean "against the standard". It means "against common usage and good team practice" in this context.
It's "allowed" to use raw pointers, malloc, and any number of things in C++ code. In general, if you do any of them in a modern codebase you're doing it wrong.
Yes, it's obviously "against common usage" given HTML support exists specifically for less common features that Markdown does not support. Like tables, which are supported by some implementations but not all, and iirc not even all Markdown variants that support tables use the same syntax for them. The only way to be 100% sure is to use HTML. Of course you wouldn't do that if you just have the file on Github, but in general HTML is supported in Markdown for a reason.
Plenty of shortsighted people have done things that are stupid in the long term for short term gains. It's the modus operandi of the US economy since 1981.
I don't believe that the people who train models have a secret way of identifying and filtering out bot-generated content that no one else (email spam filters, search engines, etc.) have identified. I do believe that they feel their models need to have up-to-date information on a variety of topics that require regularly ingesting new data. So no, I don't think they have a good way to avoid their inputs rotting from their outputs.
And what do you mean about short term gains? If you are training a model, and you see model collapse, where's the short term gain? I don't get it.
The incentive for the person who trains a model, even in the short run, is for them to avoid model collapse.
> I don't believe that the people who train models have a secret way of identifying and filtering out bot-generated content that no one else (email spam filters, search engines, etc.) have identified.
Huh, why would they need a secret filter? A filter is only one way thing you can try. You can also look into using different models, different training, making your approach more resistant to model collapse; training multi-modal models, using approaches to economise on training data; and thousands of other ideas I can't think of in thirty seconds.
> So no, I don't think they have a good way to avoid their inputs rotting from their outputs.
You lack imagination. People can be remarkably clever if its in their (short term!) interest to find solutions.
After years of claiming the government couldn't help people, Ronald Reagan was elected and Republicans have been working hard to make that statement more true ever since. A big part of that was deregulation of the financial markets.
That same year, Jim Welch became Chairman and CEO of General Electric. He juiced the stock prices by selling off the company's prize jewels, real estate, and future, and for a while (before the utter collapse of the company) artificially raised the stock price so high that executives around the country copied him, and and an entire industry of vultures like Mitt Romney started private equity firms to cannibalize healthy companies for their personal profit.
It's not that simple. LLMs were trained on lots of writing, and the "LLM voice" resembles in many ways good English prose, or at least effective public communications voice.
For years, even before LLMs, there have been trends of varied popularity to, for lack of a better word, regress - intentionally omitting capitalization, punctuation, or other important details which convey meaning. I rejected those, and likewise I reject the call to omit the emdash or otherwise alter my own manner of speaking - a manner cultivated through 30+ years of reading and writing English text.
If content is intellectually lacking, call that out, but I am absolutely sick of people calling out writing because they "think it's LLM-written". I'm sick of review tools giving false positives and calling students' work "AI written" because they used eloquent words instead of Up Goer Five[0] vocabulary.
I am just as afraid of a society where we all dumb ourselves down to not appear as machines as I am of one where machine-generated spam overtakes all human messaging.
i think it depends on what is meant by "good" or "bad". llmism may not be substantive writing, but it's approachable writing. a McDonald's lunch of familiar prose with likewise nationwide popularity and nutritional value.
One of the most common criticisms is the use of the emdash. This is a classic bit of English prose that is not problematic except as a stereotype used to dismiss writing for form rather than for content.
Let's grab a few books off the shelf (literally).
Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has four emdashes on the very first page:
> It is also the story of a book, a book called THGTTG - not an Earth book, never...
Isaac Asimov's classic The Last Question: three emdashes on the first page (as printed in The Complete Stories, Volume I)
> ...they knew what lay behind the cold, clicking, flashing face -- miles and miles of face -- of that giant computer.
Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves: Three emdashes on page 1
> Much like its subject, The Navidson Record itself is also uneasily contained -- whether by category or lection.
Robert Caro, Master of the Senate: Five emdashes on page one
> Its drab tan damask walls...were unrelieved by even a single touch of color -- no painting, no mural -- or, seemingly, by any other ornament
Other pages 1s:
* Murakami - 1Q84: 1
* Murray/Cox - Apollo: 1
* Meadows - Thinking in Systems: 1
* Dostoyevsky - The Brothers Karamazov (Pevear/Volokhonsky translation): 4
* Caro - The Power Broker: 5
* Hofstadter - Godel, Escher, Bach - 3
Honestly, when I started this post I expected to have to dig deeper than page 1. The emdash is an important part of English-language literature and I reject the claim that we should ignore all writing that contains it.
No one is asking that we reject all prose with emdash. Not all emdash-users are LLMs, but many LLMs are profligate emdash-users, so adjust your priors accordingly.
Secondarily, I think there's a part of the discourse missing: the presence of a syntactic emdash in a sentence on the internet is not itself a strong signal of LLM-writing - but the presence of an actual emdash glyph (—) should raise some eyebrows, esp. in fora that aren't commonly authored in rich text editors (here, twitter, ...)
Before LLMs, the em-dash glyph was a decent tell simply that... the author was using a Mac, because it's a simple and easy-to-remember (or even guess!) key-combo on there. Not that you can't type it on other keyboards, but the Mac one for whatever reason had a combo of users-who-wanted-to-type-it and layout-that-makes-it-easy that resulted in a high proportion of correct em-dash employers being Mac users.
(option-underscore, or option-shift-dash if you prefer to think of it that way)
On iOS, you can type it by simply holding down on the "dash" button then selecting the em-dash from the list of options it presents. It may also correct double-dash to em-dash a lot of the time, not sure.
I have used the correct em-dash everywhere I can for over a decade, which amounts to nearly everywhere.
Well that isn't what I am suggesting. I'm suggesting people ditch x. Reddit. Probably also ditch hn in the next couple months. If you can run a headless agent to post somewhere, just don't bother visiting that site, honestly a great rule of thumb right there.
That should leave you with media sources like nyt and your local library, which seems healthier to me. And maybe it might encourage a new type of forum to emerge where there is some decentralized vetting that you are a human, like verifying by inputting the random hash posted outside the local maker space.
I'm not sure how you can accept the first point but believe the second point. If you believe there is nuance in reddit there is nuance in the news as well. You think a local sports column is manipulating me? The answer is of course no, unless you want to win a gold medal in mental gymnastics trying to equate a sports column to nation state sponsored agit prop.
I hope editorial departments everywhere are taking careful notes on the ars technica fiasco. Agree there's room for some kind of quick "verified human" checkmark. It would at least give readers the ability to quickly filter, and eliminate all the spurious "this sounds like vibeslop" accusations.
There are six emdashes on that page. NONE of them are "it's not X it's why".
> Emails, messages, essays, code reviews, love letters — all suspect.
> We believe this can be solved — not by detecting AI, but by proving humanity.
> KeyWitness captures cryptographic proof at the point of input — the keyboard.
> When you seal a message, the keyboard builds a W3C Verifiable Credential — a self-contained proof that can be verified by anyone, anywhere, without trusting us or any central authority.
> That's an alphabet of 774 symbols — each carrying log2(774) ≈ 9.6 bits. 27 emoji for 256 bits.
> They're a declaration: this message was written by a person — one of the diverse, imperfect, irreplaceable humans who still choose to type their own words.
Clarifications: 4
Continuation from a list: 1
Could just be a comma: 1
"It's not X -- it's Y": 0.
If you're going to make lazy commentary about good writing being AI, please at least be sure that you're reading the content and saying accurate things.
It is largely written by iteration with an LLM! No need to speculate or analyze em dashes :-)
The emoji idea was mine. I like it :-) unfortunately it doesn't work in places like HN that strip out emoji. So I had to make a base64 encoding option.
The goal was to create an effective encryption key for the url hash (so it doesn't get sent to the server). And encoding skin tone with human emojis allows a super dense bit/visual character encoding that ALSO is a cute reference to the humans I'm trying to center with this project!
Oh you think it's stupid? It was an attempt to encode an encryption key that isn't sent to the server in a way that is minimally invasive. The skintone emomis allow pretty high byte density, and also are cute!
Sorry it doesn't meet your needs.
There is irony in having an ai generated humanifesto. Could it be intentional? hmm?
Is there no irony in deriding a project for being potentially LLM generated, when it's goal is to aide people in differentiating?
:shrug:
> RAV4 non-hybrid is around 35 mpg highway. CR-V 34 mpg highway.
....35mpg at 60mph and little traffic, maybe. I can't speak for that specific model, but most vehicles I've driven do significantly worse than advertised.
My Subaru Legacy advertised 27 City, 35 Highway, 30 Combined. In practice I average 25-26 while commuting and on extended highways drives more like 29, still on stock tires.
Defaulting to uploading all locally saved documents to cloud storage is ABSOLUTELY a dark pattern.
The prompts every few months to "change back to recommended defaults" that make it easy to accidentally get into this state even if you made the correct decision previously to turn it off is a hellish black hole of a pattern.
All three are intentional, not incompetent.
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