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New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

483 pointsby todsacerdotitoday at 2:37 PM400 commentsview on HN

Comments

podgorniytoday at 4:20 PM

Poor poor those typography-savvy people who did set a special keyboard in order to type "proper" dashes. I know you are there, I know your pain.

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antireztoday at 4:15 PM

https://news.ycombinator.com/classic is every day more compelling.

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dvhtoday at 6:34 PM

I wonder if some people here considered me ai at some point

Rooster61today at 4:16 PM

I would like to formally petition that the tech world at large replace "em-dash" with "clank" in all correspondence

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zippyman55today at 4:28 PM

I think they will remake the Japanese horror film Matango but instead of fungi, it will be those that use EM dashes to survive.

technotonytoday at 5:42 PM

Why? What's the incentive/value to commenting here with AI?

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reducesufferingtoday at 6:47 PM

It has been obvious since ChatGPT that the internet, including HN, will be flooded with AI generated commentary, drowning out real peoples' voices (soon undetectable). How this is surprising to anyone is a mystery.

artemonstertoday at 8:38 PM

whats the point of botting comments on HN? can someone explain?

iambatemantoday at 4:47 PM

TBH, I learned about how to use em dashes from the AI controversy and now I find them really useful.

I just hope my writing carries enough voice and perspective that people respond, even if there's an em dash or two.

5o1ecisttoday at 4:21 PM

As an AI language model, I am not able to perform dashes.

adamtaylor_13today at 7:38 PM

AI has taken this from me—I will never forgive.

But seriously, I loved the em-dash and now every time I use it (which is too often) I have to wonder if my words will immediately be written off.

patjensentoday at 4:18 PM

10x more likely to use EM-dashes -- built in Rust?

kklisuratoday at 7:26 PM

Off-topic, tangentially:

Can we generate a huge amount of code, just compilable code, which is essentially just a trash. We seed the github, bitbucket, etc. and pollute the training grounds.

izuckentoday at 7:29 PM

I feel a sort of disappointment in how easily languages got swindled. There is seemingly no winning angle this time. This is the most doomed I've ever felt.

eisa01today at 4:24 PM

Good thing I prefer en-dashes :)

OutOfHeretoday at 4:35 PM

The fear is that AI-generated comments will collectively promote an agenda, often a political or exploitative agenda, on a scale that humans can't match or hope to counter.

What could help is a careful clique hunting algorithm to accurately identify and delete the entire clique.

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baxuztoday at 4:22 PM

I have "—" bound to AltGR/right option + "-" for a decade now and I don't intend to stop using it.

https://practicaltypography.com/hyphens-and-dashes.html

I will not allow my good practices to get co-opted as AI "smoke tests".

FergusArgylltoday at 6:42 PM

This user [0] is clearly a bot and has been shadowbanned but some of it's comments get vouched because they're pretty good. I don't see how you solve that problem!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=octoclaw

almostheretoday at 6:24 PM

Troll farms hastily adding to their init prompts "don't use emdash when writing comments"

bediger4000today at 2:44 PM

This is pretty damning. It would be interesting to see if new accounts collect karma at any rate whatsoever.

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mm0lqftoday at 4:15 PM

doesn't really mean anything, Mac randomly autocorrects dashes to em-dashes (caused me a world of pain once when it did that in a GUID in a config file)

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CrzyLngPwdtoday at 4:15 PM

It's a predictable outcome, and it will get worse.

What will/can HN do about it?

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nubgtoday at 6:12 PM

Check my history, I get downvoted to hell everytime I truthfully point out AI slop.

burnt-resistortoday at 6:33 PM

Something about correlation and causation of magic gotcha signals. Text may appear generated to a reader but there's no smoking gun evidence that can disambiguate fact from hypothesis. Even intuition isn't evidence.

Perhaps there needs to be some sort of voluntary ethical disclosure practice to disclaim text as AI-generated with some sort of unusual signifiers. „Lower double quotes perhaps?„

meindnochtoday at 4:24 PM

Anyone have a lobste.rs invite?

bitwizetoday at 4:13 PM

How many of those are bots and how many of those are "fuck you, clankers" humans—like me?

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emilsedghtoday at 6:47 PM

dang, you should consider this an existential threat to hn.

I hate myself for saying this, but HN should consider closing new registrations for a while until we figure out what to do with this.

throwaway613746today at 5:53 PM

[dead]

co_king_5today at 4:22 PM

[flagged]

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taerictoday at 4:18 PM

Wow. This made me laugh far harder than I would have thought it would. Just wow.