Wow yeah it's so fluid to read

The data presentation is the best I've ever seen in an article - important parts poppong out is an equivalent of a live seminar where the speaker points on slides and elaborates on things, but here you can also read in your own pace or go back.

Nonsense like this is why I find it regretful that English became the lingua franca

It was that you could use quoted punctuation to punctuate a sentence, but you shouldn't quote anything that's not part of the quote. For example, you wouldn't say

The first word of that popular birthday song is "happy."

This would suggest that the first line goes "Happy. Birthday to you" whereas you could just finish after the quote: first word is "happy".

Also, compare

He said "hello"?
He said "hello?"
He said "hello?"?

All mean different things, although that last one does look very odd.

I have not known Kenyans to be huge sycophants

I only recently learnt about how em-dashes had a separate name, thanks to its popularisation by people trying to detect LLMs.

Earlier, I just thought of them as just a longer dash and I used them when manually writing (often made them longer than 2 characters), but just used a normal dash when typing.

What's stupid about people saying only LLMs use emdash and the sentence lists of threes, is that's exactly how we learned to write throughout our Canadian highshool curriculum.

And if you read dialog or narratation in books, its full of emdash asides in sentences.

Yeah, and it's still an ongoing problem, sadly.

[British] I'm fairly sure I was taught to put the full stop before the closing quote, but that's perhaps only for dialogue?

Back in the early days, my friend and I were surprised to find the same two part character names appearing each of our AI dungeon games.

Fascinating stuff, and it makes sense that a more rigid, rules-based version of English would be both taught in ESL schools and learnt by an LLM.

If I start a sentence, "The cat sat on the...",

Me: "mat"

your brain, and the AI, will predict the word "floor."

Oh. I'm not sure that's the best example, as that particular phrase is something many children encounter when learning to read.

Also, British English would close the quotes before the full stop (aka period) finishes the sentence - is that something he's picked up since school or is that something that's changed since the Kenyan model of perfect English was set?

This man is a fucking hero. He’s got the concept built just right; I’ve been trying to slap it together much more awkwardly, for years.

I’m not a robot, I’m just following the rules of the language I learned.

Yeah, that's sad.

And he's correct. AI "detectors" as he describes are both wrong, useless, and doomed to fail.

But there are better ways to get hints. Specific models tend to overuse certain tokens: they'll pick the same character names for a story, or overuse certain phrases, and if you play when them long enough you start to recognize "oh, that's an OpenAI" model, or "this is dry like Nvidia Nemotron," or whatever.

See EQBench's slop profiles: https://eqbench.com/

But, ultimately, the way to fix this is to go back to trusted sources and citations.

Woah.

There is an interesting (as usual) two-page discussion on try and in Webster's Dictionary of English Usage. A snapshot is enclosed; apologies to visually impaired people (I'll try to attach a text later). Some of the takeaways:

The use of try and in contexts where try to would be possible has been subject to criticism since the 19th century. The issue continues to enjoy great popularity, although a number of usage commentators, including Fowler 1926, Evans 1957, and Follett 1966, are on record as recognizing that try and is an established standard idiom. Copperud 1980 remarks about one complicated attempt to differentiate between try and and try to, "This proves nothing but the lengths to which the wrongheaded will go to make nonexistent points."

[...]

The use of and between two verbs where to might be expected (to would seem unlikely in some of the constructions) is an old one in English. The OED [Oxford English Dictionary] has examples back to the 16th century; the Middle English Dictionary has examples as far back as the 13th. The verbs most often used in this construction in past centuries were begin, go, take, and come — the last three of which are still so used. Try did not appear as try and until the 17th century, when our familiar sense of the word was first established. Interestingly, the earliest example for the "make an attempt" sense in the OED involves the try and construction, so try and may actually be older than try to.

[...]

A popular misconception among those who disparage try and is that the construction has only recently become widespread [...] But try and has actually been common in print for about a century and a half, as the following garland of examples amply shows. You will observe that most of the examples are not from highly formal styles; many are from speech and fictional speech and from familiar letters: [...] These examples show that try and has been socially acceptable for these two centuries but that it is not used in an elevated style.

[...]

The judgment of try and in Fowler 1926 remains eminently sensible today: "It is an idiom that should be not discountenanced, but used when it comes natural."

The Concise Oxford English Dictionary states the following under "usage":

Try can be followed by either to or and in sentences such as "we should try to (or try and) help them". However, some traditionalists regard try and as incorrect, while try to is seen as more appropriate in formal writing. The construction try and is grammatically odd in that it cannot be inflected for tense (e.g. the sentence "she tried and fix it" is incorrect). For this reason try and is best regarded as a fixed idiom used only in its infinitive and imperative form.

You can read about this curious turn of phrase on the Yale Grammatic Diversity project.

"Try and" is grammatically poorly constructed, but it's actually not quite synonymous with "try to." The meanings of the two phrases are (likely not coincidentally) different in the same sense that the phrases themselves are different - "try and" is sort of informal and casual, while "try to" is a bit more formal and precise.

For instance - you and a friend are moving some boxes, some of which are heavy and/or awkward enough that it takes both of you to move them.

Regarding one box, you say, "I'm going to try and pick it up." The implication then is merely that you're going to check to see if it's something you can carry by yourself.

If, on the other hand, you say, "I'm going to try to pick it up." That carries more of an implication that you're going to make a concerted effort - not just that you're going to check quickly if it's feasible, but that you've established it as a goal toward which you intend to invest effort.

but it doesn’t make any sense

It's a contraction of two thoughts:

1. Try

2. Do it like this

Try to

Is telling someone a different way might help.

There's differences but in spoken language we don't pick words consciously all the time. So don't dwell on the minute differences

Hard to say. Could be either as I wouldn't expect grammar to be fully correct in a fast food establishment, especially if it's temporary.

If cards are not accepted at the register, cash only is appropriate. However, of the.kiosks don't allow cash, then cash can only be used there.

If it's the former, it would be easier to say no card payment at register, or change the word order to 'Only cash taken at register' If it's the latter a comma would help: 'Cash, only at register'.

Cash,

Ah yes. I forgot about self-checkout some how. lol

Nah it means they accept both, but cash isn’t accepted at the self-service kiosks. So the only way to pay with cash is at the register.

It means they only accept cash.

No idea why they have to specify at the register. Where else could you pay?

I would assume: cash payment available only at register. That's the only way that makes sense to me, you can pay with a server using a card but they would have to go to the till to get cash for change.