this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2025
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Today I Learned

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Local councils were banned from setting up their own municipal bus companies.

A new law just lifted the ban ๐Ÿ‘

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/mps-agree-overturn-ban-councils-183323072.html

https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/new-era-of-better-buses-landmark-bus-bill-becomes-law/200478/

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[โ€“] AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net 12 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I broadly agree, but we've got to take context into account. It seems extremely unlikely to me that OP is using an LLM here:

  • The post body is short and to the point;
  • OP's post history looks plausibly human to me;
  • lemmy is a small platform that doesn't tend to have LLM slop;
  • The topic isn't one I associate with LLM bots (if OP was trying to sell us on something, for example, I'd be more dubious).

Sometimes it's wise to give someone the benefit of the doubt

[โ€“] kilgore_trout@feddit.it 2 points 12 hours ago

I see what you did here.

[โ€“] njm1314@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

What about the Post history looks plausibly human? Six hour old account, no comments, and five posts. Nothing about that looks plausible human. Not necessarily has to be a bot, but clearly nothing about that indicates a person.

I hadn't noticed how new the account was, which definitely does weaken this point as evidence towards being a human, but aside from that, there isn't anything particular that sets off alarm bells for me; their posts are primarily concerning recent news, but they're not overly focussed on any particular news topic.

With the advent of LLMs, I've found that there's a spectrum of spam-posting: a more conventional bot account tends to have a high volume of posting, and you can usually see there's a particular angle they're pushing due to all or the majority of posts concerning a particular topic or issue; some accounts that read as less "botty" may have a human controlling what's being posted, but using an LLM for the content of the posts or comments. Those are the two main archetypes I tend to see, but like I say, it's a spectrum. OP doesn't have a high posting volume, and the body of each post is quite small; there doesn't seem to be any particular purpose to the account โ€” it seems more plausible to me that this is just a human using emojis occasionally.

I suspect I'm somewhat biased here; LLM generated text tends to be heavy on both em-dashes and semicolons, both of which I chronically overuse. I sympathise with people who are wary of potentially LLM generated content, but I worry about the risk of this wariness becoming excessive hypervigilance