As a fellow .li domain enjoyer - hats off :)
I miss using em dashes
41–50 of 167 posts
Re: I miss using em dashes
#42I wouldn't worry about it. A year ago the red flag du jour was "delve"; this year it's em dashes; next year it'll be something else. In any case, this is a very online topic that I assume only a vocal minority are hung up on in the first place. If you picked a random person off the street and asked for their thoughts on em dashes, you'd probably get a blank stare. Eventually, as models and their users both improve, w…
100%. I use em-dashes a decent amount and plan to continue. If someone wants to incorrectly assume it was AI writing so be it.
Same. Years ago I took the time to learn the difference between an em-dash, an en-dash, and a hyphen and I'll continue to use them regardless of what AI does.
I don't use AI in my writing. If I were still in school would I be tempted? Probably. But in work and personal writing? Never crosses my mind.
Re: I miss using em dashes
#43Doesn’t notion and a bazillion other tools turn two dashes into em-dash?
I think two dashes get turned into an en dash, not an em dash. Em dash is wider.
Re: I miss using em dashes
#44I'm not sure why people let others change them. I keep punctuating like it's the 20th Century.
> I'm not sure why people let others change them. I keep punctuating like it's the 20th Century. In the 20th century, there were two spaces after an end of sentence period. (I still do that.)
I've been called out on this by coworkers in code review. It's mildly infuriating.
Re: I miss using em dashes
#45I'm not sure why people let others change them. I keep punctuating like it's the 20th Century.
> I'm not sure why people let others change them. I keep punctuating like it's the 20th Century. In the 20th century, there were two spaces after an end of sentence period. (I still do that.)
Very annoying how HTML changes your two spaces into one space.
Re: I miss using em dashes
#46I still use em dashes -- I just do it poorly and throw in lots of typis.
well thats embarrsing
Re: I miss using em dashes
#47Same, it's one of the few alt codes I've committed to memory ALT+0151 in Windows.
Re: I miss using em dashes
#48Now that AI has ruined the emdash for punctuation enthusiasts like us... I've been thinking of switching to the double emdash (⸺) and worst case, fellow humans, there's always the triple: ⸻
The triple is kind of hilarious. Really emphasizes the pause
Speaking of pause. I like double period for pause.. it’s like a more polite and shorter pause than the DOT DOT DOT that screams awkwardness and doubt.
But I agree that triple em-dash for pause is not half bad either. I could see it becoming a thing, with how it goes the opposite direction and is so over the top :)
Re: I miss using em dashes
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm not sure why people let others change them. I keep punctuating like it's the 20th Century. In the 20th century, there were two spaces after an end of sentence period. (I still do that.)
I've been called out on this by coworkers in code review. It's mildly infuriating.
These are the moments that I need to have a confrontation about not bringing up unimportant things. The person who wrote the comment intended to communicate things about the code. The person who brought up the punctuation could change if if they really wanted to, if it was actually productive work. It's about "catching" someone else and having a reason to nip them on the ear. Review like that is what belongs in the garbage.
Re: I miss using em dashes
#50People over-update when they see an em-dash. If you compute the posterior probability, you'll realize that seeing an em-dash hardly shifts the probability that text is AI generated.
You might even realize that the AI is using the em-dash precisely because of how often it was used in the training text.
That's a fair point. I'll admit that LLM em-dash usage likely matches its prevalence in the corpus. However, online message boards and chat is a subset of that corpus that may have a significantly different distribution of em-dash prevalence.
This is necessary nuance that I'll have take into consideration. Thank you.