On the rare occasions I used Word to write things in the past, it would replace dashes with em-dash.

I normally use dashes when writing, never bothered myself with writing an em-dash properly otherwise.

Markdown is ubiquitous in the kinds of places Hacker News visitors also tend to visit, like GitHub, various ticketing and project management systems like Jira, note takers like Obsidian and Notion (or an approximation of Markdown).

I've used `--` for years in place of an em-dash, which markdown renders as an actual em-dash.

The objective of RL changed circa 2024.

The 3.5-4o era models were trained by RLHF primarily to write in a way that's pleasing to humans.

Starting with o1 the focus switched to reasoning, coding and benchmarks. If you remember when GPT-5 came out it introduced a new "colder" writing style (which was partly intentional) which made a certain subsection of Reddit Very Upset that Sam Altman had killed their AI boyfriends and they forced him to reinstate the warmer 4o.

The artificial default voice of modern models is optimized for reasoning efficiency rather than understandability. Unfortunately the artificialness has a tendency to leak out into the output tokens because reasoning tokens and output tokens are all still just tokens. You can prompt recent models to write in a more understandable style and they do a fairly good job of it, but it's not the default anymore, which means you will have to keep re-prompting it.

I don't think it's an unfixable problem, Anthropic in particular are just not very motivated to fix it because Claude is much less popular for chat than ChatGPT is.

It doesn’t quite make sense at face value by itself. It’s too condensed and takes some effort to parse out what it’s actually getting at. It’s not communicating why the change was made. It’s just a shiny way of saying the words without actually helping me easily understand what’s happening, what’s changing, why, etc.

In plain English, maybe it’d be more like “Package specifiers for git repositories should no longer include the HTTPS/SSH protocol. Instead, reference the repository name, and pnpm will resolve it through HTTPS. If SSH is still needed, add an override in your global git settings”

If you spend all day talking to Claude then its mannerisms begin to grate on you like fingernails on a chalkboard.

There's nothing wrong with the English per se, it's grammatically correct, it just sounds so "Claude". Claude talks using pithy word soups that lack the niceties and structure of human writing.

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A non-native speaker most likely writes more 'understandable' English than the weird convoluted Claude style.

FWIW though, you can ask an LLM to write in 'Simplified Technical English' (see: https://www.asd-ste100.org/), which at times reads like its written for a child, but it is much better for inclusion of non-native speakers.

> Should OSS maintainers start hiring professional translators?

The world existed before 2022.

This is a recent degradation; they've been writing blog entries for years.

As a non native English speaker I can also attest to this trade being extremely demanding of English fluency:

> public static void DoTheThing(Configuration config)

Isn't something you can not understand and still function as a software engineer. Yes, some schools and universities teach in other languages, but the entire ecosystem from code to documentation to articles is nearly almost always in English.

Ditto. I've started to wonder if the real problem with many of these complaints about LLM writing is actually reading comprehension.