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Comment by tensegrist | Hacker News Reader

is sed s/—/--/ the new meta

offtopic, but it's interesting how large of a discrepancy there is between the length of your comment and how much time i'd have to spend explaining background info to a non-programmer to get them to understand why this is funny

why is it funny? it seems like a sincere question

The way it's written is funny, I find. But I'm a programmer...

And as GP wrote, it would take a substantial amount of time to explain to a normie (infinite I'd say, but let's not despair).

I have used "--" as a lazy-man's emdash for decades at this point. Once I heard that people started assuming text that uses emdashes was written by an LLM I got worried that people were going to think that I'm an LLM, but then I realized the LLMs use the real unicode emdash character, while I just use two regular ASCII-zone hyphens. Whew.

(Also I just learned that ASCII 0x2d/unicode U+002D is more properly called a "hyphen" [well, "HYPHEN-MINUS"], not a "dash".)

well, that was my point, that people have seemingly begun replacing — with -- or --- in llm-generated comments recently

this is maybe the fifth time i've seen this happen on hn in the last few weeks

hardly new, I've used it before advent of llm popularity, and I wasn't alone

It should be THREE hyphens for an em-dash!

In theory, yes, endash would be "--" and emdash would be "---", but oof, the three hyphens looks like way too much in normal text. So I've always used "--".

I've always used it.

My keyboard has -.

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