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Comment by bflesch | Hacker News Reader

It's fine to criticize a comment that looks like AI in a thread where someone complains about AI.

The sentence has exactly same meaning if they'd use a single "-" as well. I don't know which browsers have <textarea>s where double "--" is turned into emdash, but on the systems I'm familiar with one needs to go certain lengths before an emdash appears.

Emdash does not magically appear, and it seems some people love playing with the AI connotation.

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On MacOS it's Shift + Option + Hyphen.

On mobile it's long-press the hyphen on the keyboard.

On Windows I use https://cemrajc.github.io/em-n-en/ so that ==- is turned into it system-wide.

On recent Ubuntu versions, you can set up Compose Key, for example with Caps Lock: https://www.danielkossmann.com/how-to-get-em-dash-ubuntu-lin...

I've long been an em-dash user and enjoyer and hope that using it stops becoming such a signal for AI text.

Honestly, the whole, ooh em-dash means it must be AI meme makes me want to use them like I always have more.

On iOS you don't have to do anything, -- gets autocorrected to an em-dash. This has been in iOS for almost 10 years IIRC.

It's important to remind ourselves that there is no such thing as a human who writes like AI. AI uses literary devices that humans have used for centuries, and that just because a bit of text has an em-dash, or certain tropes, doesn't mean it's LLM generated text. Yes, LLMs over-use those tropes but we can't keep calling out whats effectively just classical rhetoric as a definitive measure for detecting LLM generated text.

In a world where double quotes are incredibly overloaded in meaning, the multiple types of dashes (including hyphens and double hyphens) do seem excessive. But em dashes are widely used and are a pretty commonly prescribed style. I use em dashes in more formal writing and double hyphens in comments here just because it's incrementally easier.

I type punctuation deliberately, and have done so for over a decade. A Compose key is a wonderful thing. Curly quotes, em dashes, en dashes, minus signs, narrow no-break spaces and quite a lot more—I type them because that’s what I mean.

You will find more than a few here on HN that type what they want rather than what standard keyboards make easiest.

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