alt Hacker NewsEm dashes are amazing
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and here i thought "option -" was an em-dash, but no, it's an _en_-dash.
Why the hell did they bury this thing three key-presses down on any keyboard???
I do indeed mis-using dashes.
This is a great read — really — a truly great one — it really is.
Appositives are my favorite.
Now, when someone sees an em dash, they automatically think, "It’s AI-generated." It’s a pity that AI indirectly created this hysteria.
I love it, it's in the style of the good old "The bile blog", a Java blog of the Web 1.0 era that was using a very colorful language.
i like em dashes too, and i've started using double dash -- to signify readers i'm a person
Nice language
funny. I was just texting someone this morning and using emdashes — and thought to myself... oh no.
Melancholy ellipsis...
writes an anodyne wall of text about his obsession with particular elements in a character table - ends with:
PS: if you want personalised advice from me on how to use punctuation correctly, you can now get it for $175/hour.
humans sometimes ...
ps: sasha, if you want me to read your future regurgitations you can now get that for €175/minute (limited availability, only skimread mode for now)
Spaced en dashes are far more common internationally. Em dashes are primarily a US American tradition.
> But also, maybe consider not giving a fuck about what someone on the internet think? Are you really that easily swayed by a rando’s opinion?
Endorsed. This post gets my vote. Two thumbs up vote.
I feel like people only look at the form and ignore the substance of the content. Honestly, as long as the content itself is well written and the em-dash is used correctly, I don't think it really matters.
When I first learned about em-dashes, I was told they were a mark of sophisticated, intellectual writing. But now people say they sound like AI. Is that really a bad thing?
It's strange to see sophistication become low-class just because AI uses it. It makes me think that form is really about who the author is, not the form itself.
In that sense, I'm not sure what it even means to be 'human-like.' Being human-like just feels like an illusion that people who want to believe in it keep insisting on
> But also, maybe consider not giving a fuck about what someone on the internet think?
If I'm writing something, typically I want to share my thoughts with other people and get their feedback. It won't work if they dismiss my writing because of some superficial stylistic choice, without even trying to engage with the ideas that I'm trying to express.
I was definitely hooked up on pace of the writing and it was a lot of things that I would agree. Definitely — fucking great — something to read.
>There is no greater joy in life than typing a sentence, realising it needs a clarification, a caveat, an addendum — but in the same sentence, not a new one — and, guess what, the em dash is right there for you.
this is several sentences bound together in a rat king and furthers my theory that the use of more exotic punctuation like em dashes is the linguistic equivalent of a code smell. It may do the job, but it strongly indicates that your writing would benefit from rephrasing the entire sentence.
iOS settings-> general->keyboard
Turn off smart punctuation.
Saves bytes.
Regarding the AI-perspective of the emdash being commiserated here...
As a few have pointed out, many writers have been using it usefully since long before the blight.
The current state of revolt is probably a phase though, as models will learn to account and adjust for the litany of literary crimes they've been committing. In some ways we are fortunate to have such easy signals to work with while, already, false positives are becoming almost as common as actual positives, indicating it might not be long before we just can't tell anymore. Which would suck, but then we'd have to adjust the nature of our complaints to something more profound, something more... insidious, something.... Maybe Woodrow Wilson? [0]
It's not only the emdash that threatens the quality of our dialog and linguistic welfare — it's many principles, such as the the Rebuttle>Reframe>Prescribe structure of this very sentence. Once is a lot, but multiple instances of this structure in a single comment would be worse than swallowing a double hyphen sideways.
The LLM is methodical, deliberate, unhurried — in a way that rewards the vigilance, attention and patience required to spot compulsions, such as the Rule-of-Three seen here.
It's important to catch and worth noting each instance of filler-transition that adds little information while working toward word-counts.
Undoubtedly, if we want to make our world safe for the emdash once again, we certainly should not overlook overused intensifiers posing in places where real work should be.
While such examples can be found in legitimate human-written texts, they can also be found in LLM generated texts, and this Reflexive false balance style sentence is suggesting we just can't always be sure.
Consider a person suffering generic example syndrome, where instead of naturally recalling a situation from actual memory, an example might be synthesized from some statistical category, seeming a bit out of place.
And do not forget sentence length clustering around a mean, which humans have a tendency to naturally avoid.
Frictionless surfaces might also hint the involvement of LLMs, where the final structure may be suspiciously clean of normal human quirks.
Of course, the ultimate question here isn't even being asked, and the emdash is not a registered trademark of LLMs. It's not about whether we should fear using them, or even their value — it's about this Symmetrical closing that despite being written by a human (maybe subhuman) has strong patterns of an LLM.
0. “Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men's views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.”
Wilson went a bit farther than might have an LLM. But who knows, the future may bring new rules, perhaps even a rule of 6.
from TFA:
> Em dashes can be used instead of brackets in a sentence — like this one for example — and you can just type your shit and keep going. Brackets are for people who raise their hand in meetings and say: “this might be a stupid question”. A parenthetical is whispering: “Sorry, don’t mind me, I’ll be quick”. Em dash kicks the door open and announces itself. Use brackets when you are embarrassed by your own thought.
Literally had me laughing out loud.
And then this bit:
> As for semicolons, semicolons are neat, they are like the coolest punctuation mark after the em dash — the fundamental indecision compressed into a single punctuation mark — you are neither starting a new sentence nor you are, exactly, continuing an existing one. You are just… piling your stuff together. I am always happy when I find a place for the little guy semicolon. But, again, most cases where you could use one are better off served by the em dash as well.
couldn't help but remind me of the following Kurt Vonnegut quote:
> Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.
:D
Em dashes = Stop reading immediately. Its 99.9% AI generated, and i wont be offering my time to that.
I also love them - makes spotting AI written content easier. People debated implementing complex algorithms how to watermark AI content - but luckily AI just settled on it by itself.
(sorry for a bit of gaslighting)
I was introduced to em and en dashes reading Knuth's book on typesetting (the original one, before the TeX book series). Perhaps LLMs were too...
> “But what would people think of my writing if I ever used an em dash? What if someone points one out in my writing?”. Bitch, please.
Hell yes, and ROFL. I’m tired of em dashes being cited as evidence of AI.
Four words: Comic Sans Em Dashes!
I've used dashes in typeset works ever since I learnt how to do them in (La)TeX (---). You don't usually put spaces around them, though.
There are actually four different "dash" type things in TeX: a hyphen, an en dash (for ranges like "10--20 pages"), em dash (---), and the minus symbol ($-$).
It's interesting that an article extoling the virtues of the em-dash isn't using them correctly. They don't get spaces around them.
I mean I feel the same way about the stink that's on em-dashes now, but they are kind of a lazy writing habit.
Another AI slop post — so hot these days.
I still use them unapologetically. I don't give a shit about your AI purity tests, thank you.
He uses the word fuck so much that his argument must be true
I think Em-dashes are fucking useless and confusing.
(We don't particularly have anything against profanity but here it seemed gratuitous so I've taken fucking out of the title above.)
The economy may collapse and the job market rendered irreparable but the real victims of the AI boom are the em-dash and the sparkle emoji
If someone accuses you of using AI because of em-dashes, reply with something condescending like "I'm sorry you were poorly educated, but some of us can and do read books." It does wonders to put jackasses in their place.
It annoys me that recently people seem to propagate the wrong use of em dashes. There is no space—an em dash is practically never typeset with spacing. You use an en dash in European typesetting – they have spaces, which your typesetting system hopefully adjusts to sane values. They're not like the spaces between words.
At least, that's how I learned it. Everyone seems to disagree and write em dashes with spaces nowadays.
em dashes are the best thing to track if the content is AI written, lol
in order to inform people that im not a bot/llm i -- outside of giving up on autocorrect -- use two dashes instead of one solid line because LLMs were using them a lot.
unfortunately microsoft (specifically outlook) and libreoffice have chosen to replace them with a proper em dash even if you turn off autocorrect which is bonkers-levels of infuriating.
if i turn off something it /should be turned off/, not just be kinda turned off; y'know?
> on Mac, for example, it’s simply Option + Shift + Hyphen
And on Windows it's Alt + 0151 on the numeric keypad, which means you a) must have a numeric keypad and remember the number, or b) must use the emoji search. And on Linux it's weird too.
Em dashes are therefore Mac user garbage. The correct replacement is --