My calendar must be wrong... [LWN.net]

My calendar must be wrong...

Posted Feb 7, 2026 21:24 UTC (Sat) by pm215 (subscriber, #98099)
In reply to: My calendar must be wrong... by jpeisach
Parent article: An in-kernel machine-learning library

On the other hand, this cover letter has a number of places which get wrong or incorrectly omit an "a" or "the", which I think you'd have to carefully prompt a LLM to get it to generate, and which seem to me more like the output of somebody for whom English is a second language.

Incidentally one of the small things I dislike about the rise of LLMs is that I do find myself wondering sometimes "hmm, was this produced by an LLM by somebody who's not being very respectful of my time and attention?". Inevitably there will be false positives :(

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My calendar must be wrong...

Posted Feb 8, 2026 2:19 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (14 responses)

Missing/wrong articles is one of the tells of AI models. I keep fixing them in my coworkers' AI-generated code...

My calendar must be wrong...

Posted Feb 8, 2026 11:29 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (8 responses)

The only issue: missing/wrong articles are also very common in texts written by foreigners, thus by using these as “markers for AI” you are marking out the majority of Earth population, too.

My calendar must be wrong...

Posted Feb 8, 2026 19:31 UTC (Sun) by pwfxq (subscriber, #84695) [Link] (7 responses)

> written by foreigners

I feel a better choice of words is: "Written by non-native English speakers."

My calendar must be wrong...

Posted Feb 8, 2026 21:08 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (5 responses)

After all, Americans are foreigners - they certainly speak a foreign language ... :-)

How many languages even have articles? Part of the problem is I think English is the only language to have a simple definite/indefinite article. I know a lot of non-native speakers never know which one to use. Both German and French have gender-declined articles, but definite/idefinite? Do the Latin languages have articles? And beyond that, any others?

Cheers,
Wol

My calendar must be wrong...

Posted Feb 8, 2026 22:41 UTC (Sun) by fwyzard (subscriber, #90840) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, Latin-derived languages (e.g. French, Italian, etc.) have definite and indefinite articles.

Articles

Posted Feb 8, 2026 23:50 UTC (Sun) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

They not only have articles, but they tend to have even stronger rules about their use than English does — "La France" rather than just "France" for example.

...but, the topic here is a proposed machine-learning library for the kernel; I think we are straying a bit off-track.

My calendar must be wrong...

Posted Feb 9, 2026 15:52 UTC (Mon) by rschroev (subscriber, #4164) [Link]

German and Dutch have definite and indefinite articles, just like English. The Romance languages that I know of have them too, as fwyzard also commented. I can't speak for other languages. But it feels like a weird assumption that English is the only language to have them.

Articles (was: My calendar must be wrong...)

Posted Feb 9, 2026 16:49 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (1 responses)

Most (all?) Western European languages have articles. English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch and German all have definite and indefinite articles. For example, Dutch has "de" and "het" for definite articles, and "een" as an indefinite article (in contrast to één, the word for "one".) Afrikaans has "die" (definite) and "'n" (indefinite).

Hebrew has a definite article ה that is smushed right on to the beginning of a word, but no indefinite article, though you can sometimes use the word for "one".

Articles (was: My calendar must be wrong...)

Posted Feb 9, 2026 18:55 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Estonian, Lithuanian, Latvian, and Finnish languages don't have articles. Slavic languages also don't have them (with the exception of Bulgarian and Macedonian).

Chinese kinda has indefinite and definite article-like constructions, but they don't match English completely.

My calendar must be wrong...

Posted Feb 8, 2026 21:59 UTC (Sun) by Klaasjan (subscriber, #4951) [Link]

…correction: by some non-native speakers. I like my articles whenever I can have them. The ‘a’s in particular 😊

My calendar must be wrong...

Posted Feb 9, 2026 15:18 UTC (Mon) by cpitrat (subscriber, #116459) [Link] (1 responses)

> Missing/wrong articles is one of the tells of AI models. I keep fixing them in my coworkers' AI-generated code...

We must not frequent the same LLMs. In my experience, perfect English sentences, verbose text and fancy language is rather the smell of LLM-generated text.

My calendar must be wrong...

Posted Feb 9, 2026 18:50 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Perfect grammar is true for general-purpose LLMs, but try Claude or Codex. They constantly make grammatical mistakes.

Probably because they were trained on codebases that have a lot of less-than-perfect comments.

My calendar must be wrong...

Posted Feb 9, 2026 16:16 UTC (Mon) by turistu (guest, #164830) [Link] (2 responses)

Missing articles are a much stronger indicator of a human whose mother tongue is Russian (or Polish, Czech, etc) than of a LLM.

My calendar must be wrong...

Posted Feb 12, 2026 0:16 UTC (Thu) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (1 responses)

Or various eastern Asian languages, or probably a bunch of other linguistic families I'm unfamiliar with.

Articles (and determiners generally) are more of a western/central European thing than a universal thing.

My calendar must be wrong...

Posted Feb 13, 2026 10:00 UTC (Fri) by turistu (guest, #164830) [Link]

It doesn't work that way: those languages are much more different than English, so any of their speakers has to completely rewire their brain in order to write prose in English, and the usage of articles and pronouns come as par for the course.

If a Turkish or Japanese speaker, for instance, would try to think in their mother tongue and write in English (as most Russians do), the output will be complete gibberish rather than just missing articles or using them in a non-idiomatic manner.

> Articles (and determiners generally) are more of a western/central European thing

Take care with those areal typology statements. If there's a language which had articles both in its ancient (>3000 years) and modern incarnations, it's Greek, not Latin or Germanic. Also, most languages spoken in Eastern Europe have articles, sometimes in opposition to languages from the same group (e.g. Bulgarian, Hungarian, Albanian, Romanian, etc).