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Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 4, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Has everyone else been seeing this kind of cadence, short sentences and contrasting statements? I keep seeing this and thinking AI. How do others see it? Do you think it's suddenly become more prominent too?

The plan was smart:

•ISVs to move rifle squads quickly

•LRVs to give Cavalry squadrons mobility and sensors

•M10 Bookers to restore firepower to the dismounted fight. It wasn’t perfect, but it made the IBCT relevant again.

Now the Army has canceled the M10. The LRV is nowhere in sight. And what’s left? An “MBCT” concept with no protected firepower, no recon platform, and a few light vehicles. This isn’t transformation. It’s disarmament.

The M10 solved a real problem. So did the LRV. Killing the platforms without replacing the capability isn’t reform. It’s regression.

It screams AI to me. I've used most models enough on writing, both fictional and not, to know some of their hallmarks. The bit you've highlighted makes me groan a little every time I catch it in the wild.

It's not that there aren't real humans who write that way, but these days, my money is on an LLM.

I rarely use ChatGPT compared to Claude or Deepseek so I can't recognize it that well, it felt a little Deepseek to me but then Deepseek is a fair bit like ChatGPT and one hardly expects US military commentators to use Deepseek. Deepseek gives me stuff like:

Silence.

Then—pandemonium.

Or:

The road to the Black Tower was long.

And her vengeance?

Beginning.

Slop!

I primarily use Gemini, but in my experience it's endemic to all LLMs (except maybe Claude, but I hardly use that these days). It's not as glaring as em-dashes, but I still notice.

Praying Altman releases that fine-tuned model designed for creative writing someday. The demand is clearly there.