alt Hacker NewsI feel you. I've been using en-dash in my writing for decades, but finding myself removing them now for fear of being mistaken for an LLM. (They tend to use em-dash, but I don't think people are going to distinguish between – and —.)
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Before the LLM craze I didn't even know — was specifically different than just -, and I used it in the same way. But now I notice specifically when people use either, and when people use -- instead.
That is what I mourn the most. They were my punctuation get-out-of-jail free card.
I didn’t love them enough to figure out how to type them without doing two dash’s in Word and then backspacing out of one and hitting space again — but damnit, I miss it.
em-dashes and en-dashes are used for completely different purposes, so why would they be confused?
Do you think pre-AI writing is going to become really valuable because it is free of any AI assistance? If we all start using AI to assist in writing, then pre-AI writing may become important, similar to pre-atomic steel (i.e., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel)