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Comment by fazgha | Hacker News Reader

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Does your friend have an iPhone? The default iOS keyboard has automatically converted double dashes into an emdash for at least seven years now.

I think Google docs does this too, which drives me up the wall when I'm trying to write `command --foo=bar` and it turns it into an M-dash which obviously doesn't work.

https://joeldueck.com/manually-type-punctuation.html

https://joeldueck.com/ai-is-right-about-em-dashes.html

On a Mac, it's alt-dash in case you weren't being facetious

Extra pedantic: that’s the en dash, the em dash is option-shift-hyphen

TIL! Thank you

Technically option-shift-dash. option-dash is an en-dash.

Em dashes are used often by LLMs, because humans use them often. On mac keyboards its easily typed. I know this is oversimplifying the situation, but I don't see the usefulness of the constant witch-hunting for allegedly LLM-generated text. For text we are long beyond the point, where we can differenciate between human generated and machine generated. We're even at the point, where it gets somewhat hard to identify machine generated audio and visuals.

I might not be able to spot ALL AI generated text, but I can definitely spot some. It's still kind of quirky.

LLM output has its quirks, but human output can be much quirkier. To me, the most obvious tell of AI is a lack of quirks.

Yeah, I agree with you. I'm so tired of people complaining about AI-generated text without focusing on the content. Just don't read it if you don't like it. It's another level of when people complain how a website is not readable for them or some CSS rendering is wrong or whatever. How does it add to the discussion?

The problem is that there’s infinite “content” out there.

The amount of work the author puts in is correlated with the value of the piece (insight/novelty/etc). AI-written text is a signal that there’s less less effort and therefore less value there.

It’s not a perfect correlation and there are lots of exceptions like foreign language speakers, but it is a signal.

Those who are convinced that every other poster is secretly AI can just not engage with those comments then.

As it is, it just adds noise. Much more so than AI-written comments themselves, at least here on HN.

On Windows it is Alt+0151. Harder to use than on Mac but definitely possible, I frequently use it.

On recent versions Shift+Win+- also work, and Win+- produces en dash.

AltGr+-

Why, can't make it work?

I just type -- and jira fixes it.

I use Compose - - - on Linux and my cellphone (Unexpected Keyboard). Mac is Alt-_.

I really despise that people like you ruined em dashes for the rest of us who have enjoyed using them.

Honestly responses like this should just be straight blocked by the moderators. They are so super lame and go directly against the rules.

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