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Is the em-dash ever "necessary"? It was beloved by nerds on the internet long before there was any whisper of LLMs on the internet. What do you think chatbots a
by MangoToupe 1y ago
Is the em-dash ever "necessary"? It was beloved by nerds on the internet long before there was any whisper of LLMs on the internet. What do you think chatbots are imitating if not humans who also use it?
- Iulioh 1y agoI never saw a human use it in something different from literature. That's where I think the chatbots got it.
- subarctic 1y agoI use it sometimes, although I'll probably stop now that I keep hearing it's too associated with ai. It's easy to enter though on Mac it's just option shift hyphen
- vjulian 1y agoI write for a living and read literature at university. I find it odd that you’ve never encountered an em dash in common writing.
- MangoToupe 1y ago> I never saw a human use it in something different from literature. This is nuts! Do you not read much prose written by other humans?
- Iulioh 1y agoI have and had a reddit addiction since my early teens and I read a lot of whatever I can on the internet. Books and scientific papers are the only places I see it used And it makes sense that the AI is prioritizing it as these sources should weigh more
- XorNot 1y agoIt was only ever inserted by word processors for me. No one typing with a regular keyboard would ever bother, certainly not with the HN input box.
- BryantD 1y agoI think there are cases of people using keystroke expanders to automate the -- to em-dash conversation outside word processors. Not so common among technical folks, though, for postfix operator reasons. The comment we're talking about doesn't read like AI to me because of the use of parenthetical asides, although that just means I haven't seen a LLM that tends to use parentheses heavily.
- MangoToupe 1y ago> It was only ever inserted by word processors for me. Surely you still intended to type an em-dash if this happened—word on windows (as I presume you intend to refer to with 'word processors') only replaces '--' with '—'. >No one typing with a regular keyboard would ever bother, certainly not with the HN input box. You press 'option', 'shift', and '-' (on a mac with the default US english layout, anyway). Why would you assume nobody would use a basic element of writing (in English, at least)? It's just a long-press on the iphone.