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scandox

> I'm sincerely sorry for publishing something that has allowed you to feel this way.

What fresh hell is this? If this is human then I wish it was AI

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> something that has allowed you to feel this way

Sorry buddy, next time I won't ask for permission. I don't care what you allow.

Given the title I thought this was just ridiculous:

> I do not care about your taste.

But taste is all that we have left.

And then this:

> If this posts has offended you, then it tells more about you than it does about me.

So the author can't take any criticism.

> and this post will go down as my not-the-proudest, however, I take your criticism to heart—although not personally—and strive to improve.

I just do not understand why people - even when actively denying LLM usage - use the fucking em dash.

I don't care if it is the "right" thing to use there. The character has been associated with slop. Why do you keep using it without even just acknowledging that you did.

Just use any other character - like I am doing right now.

It must be AI indeed. Humans cannot be this dense.

___

Oh god I just saw the annotations on the side

> A fair pushback I got:

Dude. Why. Oh god. Why do you talk like claude. I want to believe you. I really do, but hell. Even claude could likely tell you that you sound like claude.

Oh my god.

> I just do not understand why people - even when actively denying LLM usage - use the fucking em dash.

Because they are literate? Unlike the "em-dash means AI" illiterate crowd?

I'm not going to change my writing because some idiots who never read a novel or heard about typography think only AI does that.

I just do not comprehend how that can be the hill people choose to die on.

Like.. I get it. It's wrong. It feels wrong to give the AI nonsense just an inch and all.

But in the grand scheme of things, it's just highly ineffective dogmatism that makes people unheard, miserable and just further increases struggle.

Which people are free to do, in the same way that I am free to purposefully drop a massive hammer on my foot just to make some kind of statement. Hurts me a lot, rest of the world stays entirely indifferent.

Avoiding em-dashes is not going to save you from being blind-sided by slop.

If you stop doing something right, because of fear, then the terrorists win.

I can see why you're saying that but

a) Using some other horizontal line is not in the class of "wrong" that would warrant this sort of reaction. You're debating the pixel count. Not the object. The aspect ratio of it.

b) If you're acting out of fear that's dumb, yes. If you however simply pick your battles for efficiency, that's not "the terrorists win". That's "you win" instead of "you loose due to attrition".

I've also consulted with the LLM regarding the "class of wrong" thing, because I thought it might be not quite clear.

So what I meant by that is that it's not giving up actual words or dumbing down your sentences. Just swapping out a character that is practically indistiguishable for the untrained eye.

Hell, whole classes of social engineering attacks rely on that very property.

I know I know. "Wehret den Anfängen". Slippery slope.

But those are insane as a default reaction to everything.

___

I get it. SV sucks. HN sucks. The world sucks. Can't let it also take this little thing. If it can take all the big things, then at least it won't take this tiny tidbit.

Emotionally, I get it.

But that's not how you make rational decisions. Nor is it how we would win.

Typography is not related to literacy. If you’re going to insist on em-dashes at least choose the right word.

Only times i've ever used the emdash was to signal sophistication. It's not like it makes the text any more understandable. Of course some people may have more practical reasons to use it, and there's nothing wrong with more or less conscious status signaling, it's probably unavoidable. But every status signal that's cheap to fake is going to get faked, and that's exactly what happened. Now you don't even have to know about its existence to use it, and in the effect it has shifted to signal low cultural capital. In a few years it will probably get RLHFed out of the default LLM tone. Next step is also already happening: people countersignaling by consciously still using it, showing that they can afford it, because they're unmistakably not pushing AI slop.

Th emdash is not something I use ever (before or after AI slop), but telling people not to use it because it’s associated with slop is not the way.

It’s like when people tried to tell everyone to stop using the ok symbol with their hands because a small group of hateful fucks pretended it meant something else. It only switches meaning if you let it, and stop using it yourself.

What happens when AI adopts something else? Do we give that up too?

With all of that said, this guy is definitely AI lol. He’s gotta be trolling us by doubling down.

I mean you would stop using the OK Hands thing when trying to communicate with a group that has for (possibly arbitrary) reasons decided that that symbol is bad, and thus anything you say is bad, right?

At least temporarily until you got synced up with that group?

There is a place for the strategy of just continuing to use something and push through the noise there, but the em dash is not in that place. Common perception of it has too much momentum you cannot overcome like that, which - at the time of writing - makes it a bad choice.

How it will look like in 12 months we shall see, but today, I would advise against using it (without acknowledgement) in texts that talk about AI.

No, that’s my whole point. I would not stop. If someone tries to attribute malice to something I do that has none, I might explain to them how misguided they are, but I’m not going to give in just because someone can’t be bothered to understand context.

I think it’s fine to use as one of many signals to identify AI (not the only) but, again, avoiding its use is not going to solve anything.

> because a small group of hateful fucks pretended it meant something else.

That was a 4chan op designed to make leftists overreact and look stupid. There were also like a dozen other common hand signals with similar contrived meanings, but that was the only one they fell for.

> 4chan op

Yet another successful op I can't explain to many. Here's an OK summary: https://mashable.com/article/ok-hand-gesture-hate-symbol-ant...

I'm being serious here: Looking for em-dashes is a terrible way to "scan" for slop. You need to look deeper than that and if you did, there's clearly a voice there. If you let yourself develop an "em-dash allergy" and think this helps you avoid LLM-slop, you're scanning for the wrong things and it's going to do the opposite for you. Actually stay on your toes and don't become this complacent.

sigh The em-dash is something we've read a lot from GOOD PUBLISHED WRITING so we as human authors tend to emulate what we read as good writing. It's a publishing artifact that's migrated. It's not a sign of the apocalypse. Neither is AI, but hey.

I will continue to use em dashes as I always had, thank you very much.

I couldn't care less if you mistake me for an LLM. That's your problem for being overconfident in your misplaced judgement.

Em dashes are mine. I will use them whether they have been appropriated by LLMs or not. I used to use commas in their place. That resulted in a much more dense post layout and far less readable text.

FWIW I actually use three dashes (-) and my blog's build system transforms those into em dashes. This is not a defense, but nor is "this character is associated with slop" an argument. Yes LLMs use lots of words, phrases and patterns. Would you rather I stop using altogether? I am all for criticism, but please pick something I can actually change and improve without cutting a part of my style for no reason other than "Claude uses it too!"

> This is not a defense, but nor is "this character is associated with slop" an argument.

You're misunderstanding me. It's not an argument. I have no strong opinions about it.

I am telling you how people perceive it. You can (and should!) use that information however you like, but don't mistake this as some sort of opinion thing.

I've observed the world. I believe it operates like this. Feel free to discard if you have data that suggests it operates otherwise.

Don't mistake my delivery of that for personal outrage about you or that unicode character.

I just get very annoyed when I see systems not working optimally with failure modes that to me seem.. dumb.

If you allow me to quote the LLM:

> He isn't trying to police notashelf's writing. He doesn't care about notashelf's writing! He is just a guy who noticed a pothole in the road, pointed it out, and is now watching in pure fascination as people fiercely defend their God-given right to drive their cars straight into it.

Thanks, gemini.

Thank you for clarifying :)

I guess around fourteen years ago—back when I was at high school—I picked up the legendary TeXbook. I was in love and totally beguiled by the great Knuth's Art of Computer Programming; how could it be so beautiful? how could it be so precise? and henceforth as I understood the he had developed that masterwork of TeX to make his book, I immediately went to read it. There, in page four he writes:

I guess around fourteen years ago—back when I was at high school—I picked up the legendary TeXbook. I was in love and totally beguiled by the great Knuth's Art of Computer Programming; how could it be so beautiful? how could it be so precise? and henceforth as I understood that he had developed that masterwork of TeX to make his book, I immediately went to read it. There, in page four he writes:

> Book printing diﬀers significantly from ordinary typing with respect to

> dashes, hyphens, and minus signs. In good math books, these symbols are all

> diﬀerent; in fact there usually are at least four diﬀerent symbols:

> a hyphen (-);

> an en-dash (–);

> an em-dash (—);

> a minus sign (−).

> Hyphens are used for compound words like ‘daughter-in-law’ and ‘X-rated’. En-

> dashes are used for number ranges like ‘pages 13–34’, and also in contexts like

> ‘exercise 1.2.6–52’. Em-dashes are used for punctuation in sentences—they are

> what we often call simply dashes. And minus signs are used in formulas. A

> conscientious user of T E X will be careful to distinguish these four usages, and

> here is how to do it:

> for a hyphen, type a hyphen (-);

> for an en-dash, type two hyphens (--);

> for an em-dash, type three hyphens (---);

> for a minus sign, type a hyphen in mathematics mode ($-$).

So I kept using the beautiful em dash ever since; because that is how the greats do it.

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