Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I miss using em dashes

bassi.li

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 167 posts

Re: I miss using em dashes

#141

Post by red-iron-pine »

buu700 wrote: post #87
floxy wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Approximately everyone is online. What percentage of those people do you think are even familiar with the meme that em dashes == LLM assistance, much less feel strongly enough to complain or attack you over your punctuation choices?

seen it commonly on many large / front page reddit threads.

Re: I miss using em dashes

#142

Post by zvr »

wpollock wrote: post #62
throw0101c wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Good to know! I am reminded of using *roff in the 1980s. Punctuation such as periods at the end of lines marked end of sentences, and nroff would insert two spaces in that case. In HN, you can force two spaces between sentences. But only in code blocks.

vim still does it, when joining lines.

Re: I miss using em dashes

#143

Post by perilunar »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #118
bee_rider wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use them occasionally and have never been falsely accused of being an LLM. The stakes are a bit different for students unfortunately, who who’ll have their writing passed through some snake oil AI detector arbitrarily. This is unfortunate because “learning how not to trigger an AI detector” is a totally useless skill. Generally, I don’t think we need AI detection. We need dumb bullshit detection. Humans and LLMs ca…

I think this is a passing phase - academia and the education system will have to adapt to the fact that LLMs exist and will be used, and that therefore the essay is no longer a useful artifact as evidence of learning. This is probably a good thing in the long run.

Essays are still useful — they just need to be written by hand in exam conditions. No more take-homes.

Re: I miss using em dashes

#144

Post by dgfitz »

buu700 wrote: post #92
dgfitz wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Eventually, as models and their users both improve I like how this is presented as a given thing that will happen, that models are going to just improve forever. That there isn’t some plateau on “user skill with LLMs” like it’s fucking calculus mixed with rocket science that only the elite users will ever attain full fluency in using. This is starting to read like religious cult propaganda, which is probably scarie…

Are you implying that it's impossible to attain greater proficiency with LLM usage than one would have on their first day opening ChatGPT? The concepts of "Google-fu" and "tech literacy" must also be alien to you.

If you think I’m implying that, English must not be your first language or you’re being intentionally obtuse. Neither would surprise me.

Google fu, before Google fucked everything up, was not hard to learn, and then plateaued. It’s not like it was hard to do, and it’s not like once you figured it out there was this boundless growth potential to keep learning. You learned algebra one. Congrats, that’s all there was to it.

Tech literacy I’m not even going to address, because again either you don’t understand what that means or you’re being intentionally obtuse.

Re: I miss using em dashes

#145

Post by Anthony-G »

My preferred dash is the en-dash – with a space on either side. I find that many people don’t notice the difference between an en and em-dash but a huge amount more just don’t care.

Re: I miss using em dashes

#146

Post by buu700 »

dgfitz wrote: post #144
buu700 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you implying that it's impossible to attain greater proficiency with LLM usage than one would have on their first day opening ChatGPT? The concepts of "Google-fu" and "tech literacy" must also be alien to you.

If you think I’m implying that, English must not be your first language or you’re being intentionally obtuse. Neither would surprise me. Google fu, before Google fucked everything up, was not hard to learn, and then plateaued. It’s not like it was hard to do, and it’s not like once you figured it out there was this boundless growth potential to keep learning. You learned algebra one. Congrats, that’s all there was to…

Feel free to state your point clearly without the juvenile insults, if you have one.

Re: I miss using em dashes

#147

Post by fsckboy »

llamavore wrote: post #112
fsckboy wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also love pizza, it's my comfort food. You see a problem here?

Not at all! Pizza for everyone.

just for the record, i meant "do you see any problem with my use of the humble comma to avoid weird things like em-dash or semicolon" :)

Re: I miss using em dashes

#148

Post by buu700 »

rsynnott wrote: post #139
buu700 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However, I’m not sure why this writing style would become increasingly common? I was basing that on a few factors, off the top of my head: 1. Someone might pick up mannerisms while using LLMs to help learn a new language, similarly to how an old friend of mine from Germany spoke English with an Australian accent because of where she learned English. 2. Lonely or asocial people who spend too much time with LLMs might…

This is all future concerns; if it happens, then people can change their heuristics. There's no point trying to predict all possible futures in everything that you do.

The comment you're replying to isn't related to the topic of heuristics. The first part is explicitly an answer to a question concerning a future prediction.

Re: I miss using em dashes

#149

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

lmm wrote: post #104
buu700 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having good heuristics is a valuable life skill. Presence of standard punctuation is not a good heuristic.

If it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid.

If it's stupid and it works once, chances are it's stupid and you just got lucky.

Re: I miss using em dashes

#150

Post by the_af »

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #149
lmm wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid.

If it's stupid and it works once, chances are it's stupid and you just got lucky.

What if it's stupid, and it mostly works except in some corner cases and until the current paradigm changes yet again?
Post reply on HN