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Not only am I losing my livelihood to AI – now it's stealing my em dashes too
- mrbonner 1y agoI didn't even know the em dash or how to produce them until now! FYI: in a Mac, you use Shit + Option + - (the minus) to create the em dash.
- cs702 1y agoYeah, lately I've found myself editing out my em-dashes, because otherwise people may think it's an LLM writing, not me. Sigh.
- Freak_NL 1y agoIn Dutch I have the luxury of being able to use the semi-colon in a similar capacity — useful to avoid the em-dash stigma I suppose — but I refuse to relinquish it in English. Fortunately, I can always just point to evidence of prior use here: https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderboard-v2.html https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo...
- number6 1y agoIt is time for an emdash manifesto
- 9rx 1y agoI started purposefully using the more often in hopes that someone would confuse it as being written by an LLM.
- giancarlostoro 1y agoNah, go the opposite direction — post with em dashes. Let them think you're AI, till they realize people are posting it to spite the "its AI bro" remarks.
- dragonwriter 1y agoPost with em-dashes, sure—just don’t set them open when setting off parentheticals. If – for that em-dash use – you want to set dashes open, use en-dashes instead.
- oneeyedpigeon 1y agoSome subreddits now force you to do this. I've been typing three hyphens as a petulant show of passive aggression.
- psunavy03 1y agoJust proves that the majority of Reddit mods are morons.
- muldvarp 1y agoYeah, I used to like technology. I don't anymore. LLMs just seem like they were purposefully built to annoy me personally. I dislike pretty much everything about them: Everything they produce looks high-quality, only a fraction of it actually is. This makes time-tested signals of high-quality texts (e.g. em-dashes) worthless. I know it really doesn't matter but the fact that em-dashes specifically are now signals of AI slop is just so sad. Vibe-coding is the exact opposite direction I wanted software engineering to go. I liked that computers followed hard rules and that I never needed social engineering to get a computer to do the thing I wanted it to do. I'm not sure if LLMs will do more harm if they stay with the capabilities they currently have, where they are most useful for scams, spam and slop or if the promises actually hold and most white-collar jobs are automated away. I hate that AI is going for the stuff I like (creating art, writing software) while I still have to do all the chores I dislike (doing the dishes, washing clothes). I genuinely think that LLMs will have a strong negative effect on my life and society as a whole. It looks to me like software engineering could be dead in the near future. Note that AI doesn't need to be as good as human programmers to replace them. It just needs to be good enough. I'm thinking of switching careers as long as I still can. The second it becomes clear that software engineering is dead the job market will burst into flames and finding something else will become almost impossible. Even if this doesn't happen I absolutely despise the idea that my job will now include drudge work like reviewing AI slop merge requests.
- beej71 1y agoFuck that. I'm using the correct punctuation every time. Anyone using em dashes as anything other than the lowest possible AI signal is just robbing themselves. And if they do it en masse, spammers will just put a dirt simple filter on their AI output and fool them all again.
- newscombinatorY 1y agoI understand getting triggered by em dashes in a comment section - nobody uses them like that, right? But in an editorial piece? That's where you expect to see them. At least that's what I thought...
- JadeNB 1y agoYou can check out the HN em dash leaderboard to see that people definitely do use them in comments. (I was pleased to come in at #16.) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071722 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071722
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- everdrive 1y agoOne more reason unformatted text is superior -- the double dash doesn't get autocorrected into an em dash.
- harvey9 1y agoThis is exactly the kind of filler article that AI can replace.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 1y agoI don't get the "em dash = AI" thing. MS Word and iOS have been autocorrecting em dashes for years now. Right? Am I the crazy one?
- addaon 1y agoAnd option-hyphen has typed one directly for even longer… wait, is AI coming for my option-semicolon too?
- naniwaduni 1y agoOption-hyphen usually produces an en dash—the em dash is on option-shift-hyphen. The Unicode horizontal ellipsis is an abomination that doesn't belong in English prose, though.
- FabHK 1y agoWhat's wrong with the ellipsis? Ensures that it doesn't get distributed across two lines. And with a proper proportional font it looks just fine.
- wildpeaks 1y agoEven using "big words" gets you mistaken for AI these days, which is especially frustrating when you have a richer vocabulary than average due to growing up reading a lot of books.
- pixl97 1y agoIn general forums it's quite often like you've been stuck in an episode of Idiocracy. If we extrapolate the current trajectory it feels like we'll be communicating online with grunts and emojis in a couple of years.
- dingnuts 1y agohonestly I'm just trying to break the addiction this site and Reddit have intentionally foisted upon me; I'm fairly certain you're all bots, and I hate it here, but I compulsively take out my phone and navigate to this site anyway. that's why my username means "idiot"
- zajio1am 1y agoSo it is not AI who forces the author to not use em dashes, but AI haters.
- srcreigh 1y agoThis is silly. AI generated pieces will have em dashes edited out too. My protest is to use em dashes more. Why not? They’re great. Who cares if AI also uses them.
- dfxm12 1y agoWhy are em dashes great? —Fixed width font preferer
- kbrkbr 1y agoAnd where are they?
- srcreigh 1y agoThere's one in this reddit comment, explaining about my pxe server project! https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1nqer0c/i_made_a_tool_to_easily_try_out_install_linux_its/ng7tpb5/ https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1nqer0c/i_made_... There's more, but, sadly, they were written as just -.
- bogeholm 1y agoI suppose my writing is safe for a bit longer; I like my semicolons.
- VoodooJuJu 1y ago[dead]
- echelon 1y ago> Em dashes—often used to connect explanatory phrases, and so named because they’re the width of your average lowercase ‘m’ I did not know that. I just memorized en dash was shorter in length than em dash. If it also corresponds to an "n" length, I'll be delighted.
- Sindisil 1y agoPrepare to be delighted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash#En_dash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash#En_dash
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- miltonlost 1y agoOk... that title should have a comma, not an em dash. If you're going to complain about having them being removed, you have to use them properly at least. And then " It seems I have two choices now—keep using em dashes with a sort of stubborn, curmudgeonly pride until all my clients stop exchanging money for words, or start writing incredibly long run-on sentences, like this, with commas all over the place … and maybe ellipses too; ideas connected by semicolons. " That should be a colon after "two choices". (There's also clearly more than two options, one of which does not involve run-on sentences with his otherwise poor grammar. James seems like a shitty prose crafter if he's unable to avoid run-ons.)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Freak_NL 1y agoThere is, of course, quite a bit of tongue-in-cheekiness in that article.
- miltonlost 1y agoOh, I get the joke with the second part about the a run-on sentence and intentionally making that grammar mistake; mostly I don't like his hyperbole there and an either-or (the best jokes are the accurate ones). It's mainly the title I loathe for its poor usage of an em dash, which to me doesn't seem to be in on the joke.
- xxs 1y agoI like ellipses, they are best to convey my train of thought.
- Freak_NL 1y agoAlthough overuse of ellipses leads to text which generates the impression that the writer is constantly sighing. I find that exasperating and tiring to read.
- miltonlost 1y ago
- iagooar 1y agoAs a non-native English speaker, I will not be mistaken as AI for a while. Occasionally, I will introduce a small typo just to make sure people don;t think this is AI.
- baobabKoodaa 1y agoi like youre thinking
- pwdisswordfishz 1y agoAI makes typoes all the same.
- some_guy_nobel 1y agoI've never seen one?
- deadbabe 1y agoJust blatant aicism at this point. How else are AI supposed to speak? In blocky digital fonts only?
- Freak_NL 1y agoOh please, yes. And AI voices must sound like Twiki. Let's keep the world sensible.
- paultopia 1y agoI’m an academic—LLM-detectors can pry the em dashes from my cold dead hands.
- bitwize 1y agoI've started using em dashes in—among other places—my HN posts, just to spite the clankers. Or is this just Wintermute manipulating my behaviors for its own ends?
- binary132 1y agoI guess you’ll just have to find a different status signal.
- Simulacra 1y agoI don't know if it's language or a different era, but I've not really used an em dash. I just use a dash. - versus -- and I did not really start seeing it until LLM's.
- lesser-shadow 1y ago[dead]
- OnionBlender 1y agoWhere did people in this thread learn to use em dashes? I feel like my English teachers failed me.
- mvdtnz 1y agoYour em dashes never added any extra information to 99.999% of readers. No one cares and neither should you.
- sorcercode 1y agoi have started to reclaim my em dashes by adding spaces around them. if you notice most AI text tacks them on right next to the sentence fragment. add surrounding spaces to the dash ! it's grammatically correct (but typically uncommon). visually looks more balanced to boot!
- rcarmo 1y agoThis em dash thing has become a meme of sorts, and a pain for anyone who actually writes for a living and/or uses iOS/macOS and it’s automatic formatting.