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I miss using em dashes

bassi.li

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Re: I miss using em dashes

#151

Post by buu700 »

rsynnott wrote: post #138
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.

Honestly it is currently _good enough_. It's obviously imperfect, like ~all heuristics, but its false positive rate should be fairly low.

"Should be fairly low" isn't a safe assumption without robust data to back that up. I think it's more likely to be unacceptably high. Dashes are standard punctuation marks available through Android/iOS/macOS keyboards, and automatically inserted into text by common tools like Microsoft Word — not some obscure Unicode character. What's next, are we going to start flagging any text that ends in a question mark as "AI-generated"?

Re: I miss using em dashes

#152

Post by TremendousJudge »

perilunar wrote: post #143
marcus_holmes wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

yeah but writing an essay over the course of a week and over the course of two hours are entirely different experiences -- and the first one is the one that's usually useful in post-graduate life

Re: I miss using em dashes

#153

Post by NoGravitas »

SoftTalker wrote: post #42
campbel wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For me, learning the difference between em-dash, en-dash, and hyphen, and what each of them was supposed to be used for was a side-effect of learning LaTeX.

Re: I miss using em dashes

#154

Post by NoGravitas »

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…

Because I learned to type on a typewriter, I always ended every sentence with a period and two spaces. But LaTeX was kind enough to not care whether I put one or two spaces, and gave me the right proportional spacing regardless.

Re: I miss using em dashes

#155

Post by NoGravitas »

leviathant wrote: post #73
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.)

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.

Indeed, Emacs has historically used the double space at the end of a sentence to provide movement and cut functions operating on sentences.

Re: I miss using em dashes

#156

Post by dgfitz »

buu700 wrote: post #146
dgfitz wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Prompt engineering isn’t hard to master, weeks to months tops. That is the point. LLMs are at the top of the s-curve.

Assuming prompt engineering is hard, assuming that LLMs are going to continue to make any kind of substantial leap without _any_ evidence other than blind faith, is as close to believing in a religion as it gets. Having blind “faith” in this house or cards, saying things like “when things continue to advance” without any evidence that there will be any advancement, is absolutely insane.

I’m having a hard time believing you needed me to spell that out.

Re: I miss using em dashes

#157

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

the_af wrote: post #150
SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Then it's stupid and you're going to have an inevitable failure. Hopefully without any expensive sounds, so don't put LLMs in charge of heavy machinery or medical devices.

Re: I miss using em dashes

#158

Post by buu700 »

dgfitz wrote: post #156
buu700 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Prompt engineering isn’t hard to master, weeks to months tops. That is the point. LLMs are at the top of the s-curve. Assuming prompt engineering is hard, assuming that LLMs are going to continue to make any kind of substantial leap without _any_ evidence other than blind faith, is as close to believing in a religion as it gets. Having blind “faith” in this house or cards, saying things like “when things continue to…

Define "hard to master". I use LLMs all the time, sometimes as a writing assistant, and have never had the problem of trying to pass off a GPT response to a single one-line prompt as my own words. I haven't found LLMs hard to master.

An 80-year-old who barely uses computers and still types full sentences into Google (or who struggled for years to unlearn that habit) might find LLMs hard to master. Someone with poor written communication skills might find LLMs hard to master. Shockingly, it turns out that different people have different skills and life experiences.

I never used the word "faith". I'm not sure why you feel the need to make up a straw man to attack rather than respond to my comment as written, or why you feel the need to repeatedly insult me and accuse me of bad faith. It sounds like you're more interested in trying to win some perceived argument than engaging in constructive discussion.

Re: I miss using em dashes

#159

Post by the_af »

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #157
the_af wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Then it's stupid and you're going to have an inevitable failure. Hopefully without any expensive sounds, so don't put LLMs in charge of heavy machinery or medical devices.

I think you misunderstood.

What we're discussing is whether a set of heuristics to determine whether something is the output of a human or an LLM are "stupid", not whether we should put LLMs in charge of critical work. It's not the LLMs we're talking about, but the heuristics to detect them.

The person you initially replied to claimed the heuristics (to detect LLMs) are not stupid if they are shown to work (by detecting LLMs). The person they were replying to claimed such heuristics were useless.

Re: I miss using em dashes

#160

Post by jachee »

j16sdiz wrote: post #51
jachee wrote: post #35

The real AI tell for me is that it—generally speaking—spaces them incorrectly. An em dash that’s not a sudden interruption shouldn’t have any spacing around it.

AP Style have spaces around it. It is an interruption to me and I think that little pause is intentional. if the author wants no pause they should have used parentheses

By “not a sudden interruption” I meant something getting cut off mid word.

Also, the AP Style guide is hardly relevant when it comes to most writing—especially creative writing.

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