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Comment by Retr0id | Hacker News Reader

For calibration purposes, I offer you a pre-LLM README I wrote that includes an em-dash* followed by "No X, No Y, No Z": https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/stelf-loader

*actually a hyphen but it's functioning as an em dash.

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"Hyphen functioning as an em dash" is an expected human thing as it's what's easy to type. It's specifically an actual em dash which got bulldozed, much to the dismay of those who bothered to put the unicode character in.

If you read The Mac is Not a Typewriter in 1992—thus burning Option-Shift-hyphen into your typing patterns for life, along with a dogmatic love for serif body fonts—you're the real victim here.

Or those of us that use a full featured editor when writing md!

This reminds me of another em dash+AI related topic: I've noticed LLMs have an extreme bias towards spaces around the dash while people can go either way with it.

There's something similar in Microsoft Word, Ctrl-Alt-Minus on the numpad.

I remember that being how you shut off turbo mode on your XT clone in DOS.

Also cycles between resolutions on X servers where enabled.

I prefer the double dash "--", but Microsoft products will convert this to a proper em-dash if you press space afterwards, I think...

Double should map to endash, tripple for em.

Was always one of the first things I would change in Word's autocorrect settings whenever I started with a company-provided installation.

A lot of the LLM bots on HN (and elsewhere) will find-and-replace their em dashes with hypens in an attempt to evade detection.

Precisely, anything to remove AI smells in favor of natural looking text.

My point is I don't consider em dash vs hyphen to be a strong signal either way, humans and bots alike use both interchangeably.

A signal is not the same thing as a guarantee. Both of your points so far, i.e. your provided text & that bots often bother to replace em dashes to avoid detection, actually support that it is a signal though.

The stronger signal is the grammatical structure, not the specific glyph used.

The stronger yet signal is both combined! This glyph, that emoji, a given sentence structure, that formatting, a certain phrase. The more you notice -> the stronger the signal, the more you miss/discard -> the weaker the signal.

and we will now hold you responsible!

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