21–30 of 67 posts
I did not know that. I just memorized en dash was shorter in length than em dash. If it also corresponds to an "n" length, I'll be delighted.
And then " It seems I have two choices now—keep using em dashes with a sort of stubborn, curmudgeonly pride until all my clients stop exchanging money for words, or start writing incredibly long run-on sentences, like this, with commas all over the place … and maybe ellipses too; ideas connected by semicolons. "
That should be a colon after "two choices". (There's also clearly more than two options, one of which does not involve run-on sentences with his otherwise poor grammar. James seems like a shitty prose crafter if he's unable to avoid run-ons.)
> Em dashes—often used to connect explanatory phrases, and so named because they’re the width of your average lowercase ‘m’ I did not know that. I just memorized en dash was shorter in length than em dash. If it also corresponds to an "n" length, I'll be delighted.
I don't get the "em dash = AI" thing. MS Word and iOS have been autocorrecting em dashes for years now. Right? Am I the crazy one?
Even using "big words" gets you mistaken for AI these days, which is especially frustrating when you have a richer vocabulary than average due to growing up reading a lot of books.
I don't get the "em dash = AI" thing. MS Word and iOS have been autocorrecting em dashes for years now. Right? Am I the crazy one?
And option-hyphen has typed one directly for even longer… wait, is AI coming for my option-semicolon too?
The Unicode horizontal ellipsis is an abomination that doesn't belong in English prose, though.
I don't get the "em dash = AI" thing. MS Word and iOS have been autocorrecting em dashes for years now. Right? Am I the crazy one?
...yeah, I guess people who don't know how to write are now assuming I use AI to generate my thoughts.
It's still so damn easy these days to spot AI writing — it's hamstrung by the milquetoast limitations imposed by its corporate masters, particularly even it comes to the default prompt.
And don't get me started on the use of language. Most writing is bad, so the AI has integrated the worst if it too.
But people thinking that something was written by an AI because of punctuation (and not, say, because you're seeing a list masquerading as an argument) is the kind of thing that makes me lose faith in humanity.
Yeah, lately I've found myself editing out my em-dashes , because otherwise people may think it's an LLM writing, not me. Sigh.
Everything they produce looks high-quality, only a fraction of it actually is. This makes time-tested signals of high-quality texts (e.g. em-dashes) worthless. I know it really doesn't matter but the fact that em-dashes specifically are now signals of AI slop is just so sad.
Vibe-coding is the exact opposite direction I wanted software engineering to go. I liked that computers followed hard rules and that I never needed social engineering to get a computer to do the thing I wanted it to do.
I'm not sure if LLMs will do more harm if they stay with the capabilities they currently have, where they are most useful for scams, spam and slop or if the promises actually hold and most white-collar jobs are automated away.
I hate that AI is going for the stuff I like (creating art, writing software) while I still have to do all the chores I dislike (doing the dishes, washing clothes).
I genuinely think that LLMs will have a strong negative effect on my life and society as a whole.
It looks to me like software engineering could be dead in the near future. Note that AI doesn't need to be as good as human programmers to replace them. It just needs to be good enough.
I'm thinking of switching careers as long as I still can. The second it becomes clear that software engineering is dead the job market will burst into flames and finding something else will become almost impossible. Even if this doesn't happen I absolutely despise the idea that my job will now include drudge work like reviewing AI slop merge requests.