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- Hacker News
- LLMs use em- dashes because they appear in the training set. In other words, humans use them a lot. Such a weird issue to be adopted as an indicator of robot text.by gumby
- Llms use them a lot more than humans, including this blog post.
Like all slop. There's a reason it's called slop and it's not because of restraint
by Bolwin - Everyone unintentionally telling on themselves as not being big readers.by pohl
- AI ruined them for me. I used to use them all the time. Now, whenever I do, I get called out for using AI.by akaike
- 99 percent invisible did a whole episode about this! https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/658-the-em-dash/by Haul4ss
- Don’t let the haters win.by jimbokun
- It sounds like people ruined them for you — it isn't AI calling you out for using them.by quantummagic
- I'm going back to em dashes after this post, and anybody who calls me out is getting a link to it -- they can suck it up.
That said I've only been on Linux for 25 years so I still haven't figured out how to actually get em dashes and have to resort to the double minus like up there.
by troyvit - Same. Em dashes have been around a lot longer than AI. Let’s take ‘em (pardon the pun) back!by drob518
- I had a throwaway Reddit account get banned from a local subreddit because I used an em-dash when asking: "Do you have an alternative to Facebook — e.g. a mailing list?" The mods' full response when I asked about it was: "AI".
And it really couldn't have been anything other than the em-dash because I've been deleting the account's comments when they were about a week old so there were no previous comments to draw any conclusions from.
I don't care though, I've been using em-dashes since the late '90s making me partly responsible (along with all the other em-dashers) for LLMs being so fond of them, so I'm not going to stop just because of them.
by lillesvin - Same. It is really annoying to write something and have someone say, “just so you know, em dashes makes it obvious it was written by AI.” You know how else uses em dashes? People who know how to write.by etempleton
- This post is so self-consciously dependent on inserting em dashes everywhere that it kinda supports its own counterargument. If you're going to make a case for em dashes enabling more fluid writing and more distinctive voice, then you ought to actually use them that way.by ryukoposting
- If you are at all interested in punctuation---and especially the em-dash---I highly recommend Nicholson Baker's essay "Survival of the Fittest" in the NYRB:
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1993/11/04/survival-of-the-...
I have always loved---and used---the em-dash, and after reading this essay in The Best American Essays 1994, sometime around 1995, I finally felt justified in my affection.
by mainland - > I have always loved---and used---the em-dash [...]
I have always loved—and used—the em-dash [...] ;)
by taegee - Troglodyte here... I never use em dashes, never use semicolons, overuse ellipses and commas.by icedchai
- Ellipses are garbage outside of dialog, and even there readers dislike seeing them frequently.by CuriouslyC
- You have ellipses… on my iOS, “…” have become one triple-dotby cwmoore
- I love ellipses, it really captures that even when writing Rust documentation my mood is existential and disaffected... like a new grad in the pool, slowly burning under the noon sun on an inflatable lounger, too dazed and decadent to tap even a finger for their next paloma.
//! This is mission critical, don't remove...
- LLMs abuse em-dashes by putting them in places where a comma would be more appropriate. Especially as the separator before the last item in a list (in place of an "Oxford comma"). Classic LLM-speak em-dash mistreatment is something like, "This design brings performance, power — and speed."
They also like to use em-dashes excessively, especially in bulleted lists, to separate a topic from a comment in each list item.
Avoid those and you're fine. They aren't good writing style anyway. Used well, em-dashes are good!
by rafram - Em dashes—if properly used—are really useful.
They help convey that I am so smart—and I think so fast—that I have to constantly interrupt myself.
But—and I think this is important—it’s really easy to overuse them.
by snowwrestler - Ah, so my constant interrupting myself is a sign of intelligence? That's great news.
But seriously, trying to express the spider web of thoughts in my head as a linear string of words is really difficult for me and that doesn't make me feel very smart.
by jayknight - At some point in middle/high school I realized that teachers were very impressed by em dashes and semicolons; I started using both constantly.by CollinEMac
- Funny - the ChatGPT app on mac uses a font that doesn't differentiate between any dash.
I use dashes in place of commas, semicolons, colons, and brackets all the time - I just use the standard keyboard dash. Why the heck should I bother learning some stupid key combination to make the dash longer? I highly doubt that the vast majority of readers even know that there are different dashes with different uses. When I learned about it, I decided to be a conscientious objector because using - vs — and assuming I can tell the difference is inane (because it is font based).
(ironically, the HN text editing dialog shows - as ~.8 of the length of — whereas on the site it shows as ~.25 of —)
- Wie shood I bothr lerning two spel wen teh vass majarrity ov reedrs can stil reed dis commnt?by ryandrake
- Test: 'There is no greater joy in life than typing a sentence, realising it needs a clarification, a caveat, an addendum, but in the same sentence, not a new one, and, guess what, the comma is right there for you. You want to package things neatly together, and the comma lets you do exactly this. Commas make writing feel like you are assembling lego bricks.'
I like using commas for spacing though em dashes do the same thing and avoid the run-on police?
by koolala - I think you demonstrated exactly why avoiding em dashes like the plague makes for hard to read sentences.by helboi4
- Yeah. They also use em dashes to repeat a word with emphasis, something that is done much better with parentheses and italics.
> And also occasionally — occasionally — one just needs a random dramatic pause.
> And also occasionally (occasionally) one just needs a random dramatic pause.
I know which one I'd rather read. Though, frankly, I'd prefer neither and I'm trying to remove this kind of thing from my own writing.
by ryukoposting - I just thought of the most annoying blog in the world. Individual spacing between words, depending on how thoughtful you want the pause to be. And by "individual" I mean a different floating point number denoted amount of em each. em > em-dashes. Or put differently, em dashes em-dashes.by customguy
- It's a bit like 2 space indention versus 4 or 8 space. I find the em-dash example pretty compelling because visually relaxes my eye more than commas do — similar to how prefer at least 4 space indention over 2.
(Unrelated: The alt-code for em-dash on Windows is Alt+0151. I just typed my first manual em-dash wow exciting.)
by url00 - Your first sentence is a perfect example of why emdashes need to exist. The comma is overloaded, since it can be used both as a list separator and for parenthetical asides. But that first sentence starts using them as a list separator, and then inserts a parenthetical aside into the list. Emdash wins this test.by pohl