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Comment by stackghost | Hacker News Reader

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

I can't think of any comment less interesting and more tangential these days than yet another screed about LLMs using em dashes or particular speech patterns. Seriously who fucking cares

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The other thing is who really knows if it was human or LLM. I think I have been accused of writing like an LLM.

With em dashes in particular, a human would have to go to explicit effort to use a non-ascii character. I like a good em-dash myself, but I just use a hyphen because I'm not going to go to the effort of using a character that's not on my keyboard in a blog post or comment. Using em dashes, especially in an otherwise monospace retro-computing theme, is a sure sign of llm output.

I have a keyboard macro set up so typing “—-<space>” yields “—”. I set this up like a decade ago and it’s just habit now.

That evidence is laughable.

I learned about em-dashes from one of clients who used them. She used Microsoft Word it took a chord key sequence but was in her skill set. I think it was shift-option hyphen.

I think using em-dashes to detect LLMs reveals the divide between computer science and liberal arts.

This is hardly a tangential annoyance to be annoyed by low effort slop.

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