Live data from Hacker News

Em dashes are amazing

psychotechnology.substack.com

161–170 of 330 posts

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#161
post #41
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people only look at the form and ignore the substance of the content. This is largely because most people are incapable of thinking critically and evaluating substance. So they regress to indirect markers of good writing, and the whole thing becomes a game of signaling. The rot is so deep, many popular resources on writing focus more on style and presentation than focusing on the substance of writing. And even when…

> This is largely because most people are incapable of thinking critically and evaluating substance. No, with AI it's because it's MUCH faster than evaluating substance, and fast ways to weed out AI slop are desparately needed, since it can be produced so quickly.

It's also infinitely more error-prone. All form-based heuristics are horrible for detecting AI because the one thing AI is damn near perfect at is writing like an actual human.

It's the thing it was trained to do. The entire decades-old architecture has exited for specifically that purpose. That second "L" in "LLM" is "language" for a reason.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#163
post #55

I did not know option + shift + hyphen produced an em dash. I've always used a double hyphen as a stand in -- as I did just now. LLMs don't do it and I haven't been accused yet. Though, more likely, I'm not popular enough for people to notice! The overemphasis by critics on punctuation and "this not that" is tiring. I don't really know how to describe LLM writing but it has the same qualities as flat soda. Some autho…

double dash is the place to be -- all the em dash goodness, significantly less AI accusing.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to have ripped music that had em dashes in the filenames. But several music players displayed a question mark for it. So I replaced them all with a hyphen.

Very interesting. The media tracks may've been em dashed during prod. Spotify seems to use this format "Artist — Album".

I ripped music from both CDs and Internet radio (not Spotify). I remember there were definitely em dashes in those from Internet radio, but I'm not sure whether they also occurred in those from CDs — those filenames probably came from an online DB. Of course the Internet radios might have ripped the music in the same way.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#165
I love the author's attitude. In my writing, I'll probably consider using en dashes ("-") in place of em dashes ("—") in the way he describes.

While it technically won't be grammatically correct, it'll get the benefits he describes in the article while also not being accused of being AI-generated.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#166
from TFA:

> Em dashes can be used instead of brackets in a sentence — like this one for example — and you can just type your shit and keep going. Brackets are for people who raise their hand in meetings and say: “this might be a stupid question”. A parenthetical is whispering: “Sorry, don’t mind me, I’ll be quick”. Em dash kicks the door open and announces itself. Use brackets when you are embarrassed by your own thought.

Literally had me laughing out loud.

And then this bit:

> As for semicolons, semicolons are neat, they are like the coolest punctuation mark after the em dash — the fundamental indecision compressed into a single punctuation mark — you are neither starting a new sentence nor you are, exactly, continuing an existing one. You are just… piling your stuff together. I am always happy when I find a place for the little guy semicolon. But, again, most cases where you could use one are better off served by the em dash as well.

couldn't help but remind me of the following Kurt Vonnegut quote:

> Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.

:D

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#168
post #77

You might think em dashes are amazing—but there is something three times better⸻the "three-em dash" (U+2E3B). Why this thing exists, I do not know. Unicode people seem to like making bad decisions, like Han unification and emoji sprawl.

I’m curious, what is the objection to Han unification?

Only know the discussion superficially, but from what I understood, the problem was as follows: Chinese Hanzi, Japanese Kanji and Korean Hanja scripts have the same historical roots (Han) and still look very similar when you write them — however, they are fully separate scripts with different use of letters and optical differences that are important.

However, when encoding them into Unicode, the consortium suddenly discovered the importance of being frugal with character IDs and only defined a single "Han" sequence of characters for all three scripts. You need to select a matching font to actually display the text in the script that's intended.

This makes using those characters an unnecessary hassle and also came over as a cultural faux-pas to some (essentially like encoding Greek Eta, Latin H and Cyrillic En as the same character, because they look similar and the scripts have a common history)

It also looks a bit hypocritical when Unicode otherwise goes the opposite way and has the space to encode dozens of variants of the Latin alphabet or — as we see here — several categories of dashes. (Edit: Han unification was done when Unicode was still 16 bit, so there were real space constraints — so no hypocrisy actually)

See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#170
post #33

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.

Everyone unintentionally telling on themselves as not being big readers.
Post reply on HN