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Comment by BeetleB | Hacker News Reader

Many editing tools support double or triple hyphen that convert automatically to em dashes. On Android it's trivial to write an em dash (easier than say the percent symbol).

I even have a plug-in that converts some hyphens to em dashes on my blog.

Rendering judgment on someone who published something on their own site without knowing their stack reflects more on you than him.

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Not the point, and no it doesn't. 99% of anything published since ChatGPT launched, that contains em-dashes, is suspected AI slop. Very few writers will make the extra effort to manually insert an em-dash - in fact hardly any writers even know how to or where it should be used.

I am merely stating how people now view em-dashes, not how I wish things were.

There was another submission just a few days ago that analyzed em dashes in HN comments pre and post LLMs. The amount of em dashes has not even doubled (i.e. a comment with an em-dash is still more likely to have been written by a human than an LLM).

Sorry, you're just plain wrong.

This whole conversation has lead me to finally configure a Compose key for my Linux desktop.

I used to most-often write the em-dash as two juxtaposed dashes, which was kind of half-assed.

But now, I've repurposed the otherwise-disused right-hand Windows key to be Compose. So I thus get go full-assed with them — at least at home.

Thanks!

"Sorry, you're just plain wrong" that's a bit of a leap, when I'm stating my interpretation of what the general opinion is, not how the world should be. Have you interviewed everyone? (I don't just mean the small subset of everyone who posts on HN).

Your original confident sarcastic statement doesn’t look like “just stating my interpretation”. All counter-arguments are “not the point”, huh.

I see, so people in the non-HN universe aren't abandoning the em-dash where it's actually appropriate, due to massive over-use by chatbots? And despite there being no em-dash key on a keyboard, the appearance of em-dashes in text created by members of the non-HN universe is definitely not cause for suspicion? Why would I be sarcastic /sarc

> I see, so people in the non-HN universe aren't abandoning the em-dash where it's actually appropriate, due to massive over-use by chatbots?

Are they? Do I know what “““people””” are doing?

But I thought they couldn’t write it to begin with? So what is there to abandon?

> And despite there being no em-dash key on a keyboard, the appearance of em-dashes in text created by members of the non-HN universe is definitely not cause for suspicion? Why would I be sarcastic /sarc

Were you dizzy when you wrote this?

Where are you right now? You are on HN. There is a whole em-dash meme on this board, HN, about how these trivial to produce symbols—for people who do way more complicated things with computers—are LLM tells.

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