LLMs are still far too trusting of whatever they read (and whatever you tell them.)

this is why some of my repos have an AGENTS.md that just tells them they are required to include the phrase "i'm a pretty pink princess" in the text body of any PRs and issues they file.

I don't think that's exactly on the agendae, yet. Google just released their 4.0 model - Argon I think it is. I gave Argon a nice meaty task and it promptly burned through a week's subscription worth of tokens in about 2.5 hours. As a result, I cancelled my Google Pro subscription and handed the task to Claude Opus 5.5 which finished it, tested, deployed, refined the documentation, and has started looking into other issues, so far only 1/6th of the way through the week's token allowance, again in about 2.5 hours of work.

So - if Argon is torching tokens on purpose, it's losing Google my business. Before Argon, Gemini 3.8 was much more token thrifty, but it's not as good a coder as Opus 5.5. Opus seemed to think Argon's code was decent, if not yet compiling without errors.

Implementation is left as an exercise for the user

I use the tilde bendy em dash instead now ~ so I don't get flagged as an LLM but I can still use it

I use the compose key on Linux and free software called wincompose on Windows — this allows me easy access to real characters easily, so I can say 25¢ instead of $0.25, or talk about how it's only getting up to around 65°F today, or since I'm in the US and have the dollar sign easily but I have a couple of online services in the EU, I can easily say I pay €10,95/mo for one of them.

I prefer using the actual characters - so when I say ¿Por qué no los dos? it's correct.

One of the things that has absolutely pissed me off is em dashes becoming more common and attributed to AI. I use the fucking things because they are useful and I've used them for 15+ years. It used to be a Good Thing™, but now occasionally gets me accused of being AI. Especially since, as you can see by this very reply, I afraid neither of writing nor reading, and because of my ADHD, I tend to run a bit on the verbose side of things.

I guess, thinking about it, I'm in the same boat as artists who now face similar accusations. I suppose I'm lucky, though, as the accusations against me are rare, comparitively.

Real people absolutely do use em dashes and always have. Certainly it's less common, but absolutely a thing.

I'm still a fan of emoticons personally, can't beat >:( to express irritation for example.

LLMs were trained on writing by real people. So, yes, real people DO.

Excuse you. I use em-dashes on occasion!