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Yesterday on LinkedIn I saw a microwaved burrito take. You know: scalding hot on the outside, unpleasantly tepid once you bite in. This take included a list of surefire ways to identify AI-generated writing. One of those items?

“those funny long dashes without spaces”

I have to paraphrase, because I immediately closed the tab and muttered incoherently to myself for several minutes.

I think they were talking about the em dash. Maybe they were joking? Seriously—ok maybe half-seriously—this is one way neurodivergent folks get trapped and filtered out by the more mundane folks running the show. If you love the richness of language, you aren’t human.

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Installed Ruby on the most recent EndeavourOS¹ install so I could run my script that adds a post to my site’s primary Hugo iteration as I work on a Gatsby iteration of the site so I can convincingly claim knowledge of React² when talking to recruiters during this year’s interminable Job Search so I can get a new job and maybe get back on ADHD meds and maybe occasionally focus on one thing at a time and—um—where was I?

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In Tim Heaney’s introduction to From Perl to Rust:

Having to know everything at once makes it hard to teach Rust as well. It seems like no matter where we start, we are always touching on concepts that we haven’t covered yet. This is quite the opposite of Perl, where it’s fairly easy to learn as we go. But perhaps making this one assumption— that we all know Perl— will help us navigate the complexities of Rust. I don’t know if this is going to work, but I thought I’d try it.

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Took part in the crowdsource thing for Domesticate Your Badgers: Become a Better Writer Through Deliberate Practice by Michael Warren Lucas. Now I got my PDF and it’s time to start studying.

The genius of the blog was not in the note-taking, it was in the publishing. The act of making your log-file public requires a rigor that keeping personal notes does not. — Cory Doctorow, The Memex Method

Even my little personal blog forces a helpful layer of structure compared to my regular thinking.

John Gruber – the creator of Markdown – commenting on Markdown editors and their trend towards hiding the syntax

Maybe I don’t know much about Markdown, but my understanding is that the whole point of it is to provide a syntax where the most common HTML tags for prose can be replaced by simple punctuation characters that are meant to be visible to the writer.

A joke so dry you’ll need a glass of water when you get it.