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I miss using em dashes

bassi.li

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Re: I miss using em dashes

#71

Post by chipsrafferty »

buu700 wrote: post #19

I 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…

Your opinion is not necessarily one I agree or disagree with, but I feel that you've dismissed the entire article due to one part of it.

I think there is a very interesting discussion to be had over how LLMs are actively changing the way we write, or even speak.

Re: I miss using em dashes

#72

Post by smohare »

ggm wrote: post #22
kelseyfrog wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I mean over-update in a Bayesian capacity. As in, they are updating their prior probability using evidence to arrive at the posterior probability.

"I don't often jargon, but when I do jargon I jargon like Chuck Norris"

[dead]

Re: I miss using em dashes

#73

Post by leviathant »

wpollock wrote: post #32
JKCalhoun wrote: post #11

I'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 eventually gave up on this, but I always favored it because a period with two spaces after it very clearly designated the end of a sentence, as opposed to something like an abbreviation. It made parsing English just a little bit easier.

Re: I miss using em dashes

#74

Post by paulpauper »

buu700 wrote: post #19

I 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…

Just use double single dashes--like this. Instead of a long—dash.

Re: I miss using em dashes

#75

Post by chipsrafferty »

floxy wrote: post #61
buu700 wrote: post #19

I 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…

>If you picked a random person off the street and asked for their thoughts on em dashes, you'd probably get a blank stare. But the people you will reach online will be online, and not some random person-off-the-street. The average person on the street will give the same blank stare on the topic of compilers, regular expressions, black-holes, or robotics, but I still want to read about those topics. And if I want an L…

But because the average person on the street would give blank stares about compilers, we can conclude that compilers aren't important /s

Re: I miss using em dashes

#76

Post by bigstrat2003 »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #11

I'm not sure why people let others change them. I keep punctuating like it's the 20th Century.

I agree. Reminds me of a few years back, when I got a Red Hat baseball cap which is (obviously) red. I had people telling me "oh no you can't wear that, MAGA hats ruined that". To which I say, balderdash and poppycock. I refuse to let others' mistaken assumptions dictate my behavior. If someone sees me wearing a RHEL hat and hates me because they assume I'm a Trump supporter, that's their problem, not mine.

Re: I miss using em dashes

#77

Post by layer8 »

throw0101c wrote: post #55
wpollock wrote: post #32

Earlier 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.)

> In the 20th century, there were two spaces after an end of sentence period. (I still do that.) Only if you used a typewriter. I was using (La)TeX in the twentieth (1990s), and it defaulted to a rough equivalent of 1.5 spaces (see \spacefactor). Two ('full') space characters were added because of (tele)typewriters and their fixed width fonts, and this was generally not used in 'properly' published works with proport…

> Two ('full') space characters were added because of (tele)typewriters and their fixed width fonts

I could never agree with this, because monospace fonts are already adding extra space with the dot character, which is much narrower in proportional fonts. That fact alone makes the visual gap already similarly wide as it would be in typeset proportional text. Adding a second space makes it much too wide visually (almost three positions wide). It looks like badly typeset justified text.

(I understand why people are doing it, I just don’t agree on aesthetic grounds.)

Re: I miss using em dashes

#78

Post by buu700 »

lmm wrote: post #52
buu700 wrote: post #19

I 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…

> Eventually, as models and their users both improve, we'll collectively realize that trying to reliably discriminate between AI and human writing is no different than reading tea leaves. We should judge content based on its intrinsic value, not its provenance. There are zillions of words produced every second, your time is the most valuable resource you have, and actually existing LLM output (as opposed to some theo…

Putting aside the claim that "LLM output [...] is almost always not worth reading"[1], the whole issue here is that this supposed ability of determining whether or not content is AI-generated doesn't exist. Is it really a valuable life skill to decide whether or not you want to read something based solely on its density of em dashes?

Of course there are cases where you can tell that some text is almost certainly LLM output, because it matches what ChatGPT might reply with to a basic prompt. You can also tell when a piece of writing is copied and pasted from Wikipedia, or a copy of a page of Google results. Would any of that somehow be more worth reading if the author posted a video of themselves carefully typing it up by hand?

1: You're assuming a specific type of output in a specific type of context. If LLM output were never worth reading, ChatGPT would have no users.

Re: I miss using em dashes

#79

Post by anon84873628 »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #38
bigyabai wrote: post #3

I don't miss the em dash. Take away my hyphen and I'll be angry; but replacing em dashes with semicolons was personal policy since high school.

...someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think you're using the semicolon correctly; it sounds wrong to me, at least. I think you'd need to either take out the word "but" (which would cause the sentence to no longer make sense) or, well, change the semicolon to an em dash.

For sure, that's like the exact opposite of why to use it: "A semicolon is used to join two closely related independent clauses (complete sentences) that are not connected by a coordinating conjunction."

Re: I miss using em dashes

#80

Post by llamavore »

Cadwhisker wrote: post #63

I'd switch to semicolons, but I need to re-read this book to be sure I'm using them correctly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eats,_Shoots_%26_Leaves

I 100% agree. I hear a lot of pushback from em dash lovers on the semicolon; if you can learn to love an em dash, you can learn to use and love a semicolon.

Remember, meaning is based on common usage, so now em dash is slop-nonymous, semicolons can take on a more casual vibe.

For example: I love pizza — it's my comfort food.

Can just become: I love pizza; it's my comfort food.

For asides: I love pizza — especially pepperoni.

Can just become: I love pizza (especially pepperoni).

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