It's so sad to me that good typographical conventions have been co-opted by the zeitgeist of LLMs.
If you'd like more tips on writing I'd be happy to help.
Edit: I take that back. I'm going to print and frame this comment. It stands on its own well enough, and I'm the only one who's going to see it.
Second Edit: Took a bit to get it formatted in a way I liked, but I have officially placed an order for my local Walmart photo center
Well, I haven't always—just for maybe 20 years.
This wouldn't be an issue if mobile users or Windows users were exercising it too, but it's just Mac owners and LLMs. And Mac owners are probably the minority of instances where it is used.
so now, i just use double dashes for everything.
(shit, i wonder when llms will start doing this instead of normal em)
Then came LLMs, and there was so much talk of them using em dashes. A few weeks ago, I finally decided it's time and learned the difference. (Which took all of 2 minutes, btw.) Now I love em dashes and am putting them everywhere I can! Even though most people now assume I'm using AI to write for me.
I defer to Merriam-Webster and/or Harbrace (rather than TCMoS) on punctuation usage.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/em-dash-en-dash-how-...
Magical signal panacea searching is ultimately fruitless. Other ways to make bot interactions more difficult, there are policy and technological obstacles that could be introduced. For example, require an official desktop or mobile app for interaction. And then for any text copy-pasted, demarcate it. And throw an error message for any input typed inhumanly-fast. Require a micropayment of like $0.10 to comment. While these things would break the interaction style and flexibility for a lot of innocent human users, these would throw big wrenches into some but not all vulnerabilities of bot interactions.
Most think that it came from TeX, which had -- (for an en dash) and --- (for an em dash, although I don't think I have ever observed it out in the wild outside TeX), but in fact, the habit well predates TeX and goes all the way back to typewriters where typists habitually hit two hyphens in a row to approximate an em dash. The approximated em dash was described in hard-copy manuscript preparation rules such as The Chicago Manual of Style.
So, if you have ever used a typewriter or TeX, you can claim an even richer than 20 years’ heritage of using the em dash.
It's like being named Michael Bolton and watching a singer rise in fame named Michael Bolton.
Why should I change my style?
For those who don’t know the reference:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_S._Jones>
(No, not that one.)
Office Space jokes aside, you shouldn't. I think it's very important to be yourself and refuse to let people pressure you into changing for no good reason. I am not an em dash user myself, as it's a pain to generate when there's no key on the keyboard for it. But if I were, you best believe I wouldn't change my style one bit. People can accuse me of being an LLM if they wish, but that's no skin off my back.
Here since 2010 in this account, I use em-dashes.
It's easy—and effective—to type using “Opt Shift -” on a Mac.
Oh yeah, left and right “curly quotes” as well, and the occasional …
> It's so sad
Don’t forget «’» — but ain’t nobody got time for that!
A few more to reclaim typography: https://howtotypeanything.com/alt-codes-on-mac/
Unless you're talking about restructuring your sentences to allow for a semicolon; that's fine.
For example that semicolon could have been an em dash, but I don't think it's the type that LLMs over favor.
But anyways, you can't really control how people see your stuff, if you're human I think the humanness will come through anyways, even if you have some particular structure or happen to use em-dashes sometimes. They're so easy to prompt around anyways, that the real tricky LLM stuff to detect by sense and reading is the stuff where the prompter been trying to sneakily make them more human.
If AI was writing like everyone else we wouldn't be talking about this. But instead it writes like a subset of people write, many of them just some of the time as a conscious effort. An effort that now makes what they write look like lower quality
Say what you want about marketing-isms of your typical LLM, they have been trained and often succeed at making legible, easy to scan blobs of text. I suspect if more LLM spam was curated/touched up, most people would be unable to distinguish it from human discourse. There are already folks commenting on this article discussing other patterns they use to detect or flag bots using LLMs.
(Until a few years ago I probably mostly only saw them in print, and I suppose it just never occurred to me that I liked them in particular vs. just the whole book being professionally typeset generally.)
But now, I have to be so picky about when I use them, even when I think it's the perfect punctuation mark. I'll often just resort to a single hyphen with spaces around. It's wrong, but it doesn't signal someone to go "AI AI AI!!"
I turned to my friend and said "They've co-opted the structure of effective language!"
And I will still use them -- fully aware that some people will complain about AI and whatnot.
(Disclaimer: the use of em-dashes doesn't prove this was AI-generated — I can assure you I wrote this myself.)
(I know it's a bit low effort, but if ever something called for "based" it's this.)
I've typeset books (back in the QuarkXPress days, before Adobe's InDesign ruled the typesetting world) and never bothered with em-dashes. Writing online is, to me, a subset of ASCII. YMMW.
But the one thing I don't understand is this: how comes people using LLM outputs are so fucking dumb as to not be able to pass it through a filter (which could even be another LLM prompt) that just says: "remove em-dashes, don't use emojis, don't look like a dumb fuck".
Why oh why are those lazy assholes who ruin our world so dumb that they can't even fix that?
It's facepalming.
Em dashes, semicolons, deftly delving. It’s all just so…facile. We might as well tell ourselves we can tell it’s shopped from the pixels, having seen some shops in our day.
This is the first time I've ever heard the character ";" referred to as such. It's always been "semi-colon" to me, is this a region/culture difference?
I'm not saying you're wrong, I find it interesting.
i call it a super comma when its separating a list with commas within the sets.
so if i am listing colors like green, blue, red; foods like apple, orange, strawberry; and seasons like winter, summer, fall.
it's one use case for an em-dash, because whatever you have inside it has commas in the phrase.
square and rectangle situation. a supercomma is a subset of semicolon.
I would have assumed it's a synonym for apostrophe. super-comma <-> upper-comma, with super meaning upper, like in superscript.
Em-dash matches how I speak and think-- frequently a halt, then push onto the digression stack, then pop-- so I use them like that.
Em-dash matches how I speak and think (frequently a halt, then push onto the digression stack, then pop) so I use them like that.
Em-dash matches how I speak and think, a halt, then push onto the digression stack, then pop, so I use them like that.
Em-dashes keep everything on the same level of importance in my brain.
Commas don’t feel as powerful. To be fair to the comma I’d probably do this:
Em-dash matches how I speak and think: A halt, then push onto the digression stack, then pop. So I use them like that.
Edit: I accidentally used an em-dash in the word em-dash. Interestingly HN didn’t consider changing the dash to be a change in my text so didn’t update it. I had to make a separate change and take that change out for my dash change to stick.