Mike-Kelner

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I know an old-school Linux admin who has been successfully running his own email servers for 30+ years - from small private ones to larger corporate setups. For spam detection he uses his own system, and it works surprisingly well even without any LLM (though an LLM could surely make it even better). So the "you can't self-host email" meme was never quite true - it is about willingness and ability to configure everything right.

Mike-Kelner

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About 15-20 years ago the em dash became popular in the Russian web-design community because, surprisingly, it is the proper character to use. Using "-" was a sign of low-quality work. I remember I even wrote a small app in C#, so I could have it on the screen, click a button, and get "—", "«" or "»" in the clipboard ("«" and "»" also mattered, because " is not really a legitimate character in Russian typography).

Mike-Kelner

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This is what puzzles me about the whole topic as well. Why do we need to treat AI texts as anything special? As long as there is a name next to the text, we should care about the message instead of the way it was written. It reminds me of the situation with political ads, when after the main part of a commercial we hear: "I'm John Doe and I approve this message." It doesn't matter who wrote the script of the commercial - John Doe confirms that it is his position, and that is what matters most.

For example, English is not my native language. I can speak, read, write - I have no issue using it for work or everyday life. My own kid only speaks English. But when we talk about writing an article, I would want to polish it. I would want to put my thoughts into a better form, so people may enjoy reading a well-written text which may have some fragments written or edited by AI so it will be simply better. I would use it for additional fact-check. Communication is not a competition in language skills.

I once heard a story told by a journalist. He used to write articles for the NYT from time to time, and the process was like this: he knows English, but the NYT asked him to write in his native language, a very experienced translator produced the English text, and then they polished it together with the editors. Once the article was published, it mentioned only his name — no mentions of editors or translators. Why? Because creating a text is not just writing or typing. Often it is a more complicated process which may or may not include other people or systems. What matters most is whether the author puts their signature at the end or not.

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