291–300 of 313 posts
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I'd rather read "fuck" than "f-word". The latter is like eating dumplings for lent because surely $deity won't see the meat in there.
Cultured people have no need for such words in public discourse so I'd rather not see either of them or the need. People are judged by the words they use.
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My point is just: if a test for what a symbol ‘really means’ depends on choosing an audience that conveniently erases everyone who uses it differently, that’s not describing intrinsic meaning, that’s describing the author’s cultural bubble and bias. And on em dashes—most people outside tech circles see no “AI fingerprint,” and designers like myself have loved them since early Mac DTP, so the suspicion feels hilarious…
> So what if somebody thinks my text here is written by a bot? Then they might not read it at all. I often zone out as soon as I expect I'm reading slop and that's the reason try to ensure my own writing isn't slop adjacent. I'm also not sure there is an "AI bubble." Everyone I know is using it in every industry. Museum education, municipal health services, vehicle engineering, publishing, logistics, I'm seeing it ev…
And how is this a problem someone else has to address? Some people zone out when they see a text is too long: are we supposed to only publish short form then? I have 10 years of writing on my site, if someone in 2026 sees my use of em dashes and suddenly starts thinking that my content is AI generated that's their problem, not mine.
Too many people are willingly bending to adapt to what AI companies are doing. I'm personally not gonna do it. Because again, now it's em dashes, tomorrow it could be a set of words, or a way to structure text. I say fuck that.
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Cultured people have no need for such words in public discourse so I'd rather not see either of them or the need. People are judged by the words they use.
The usage of those words is to accurately convey the speaker's emotion. If you don't see any use in that then that's your problem.
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> So what if somebody thinks my text here is written by a bot? Then they might not read it at all. I often zone out as soon as I expect I'm reading slop and that's the reason try to ensure my own writing isn't slop adjacent. I'm also not sure there is an "AI bubble." Everyone I know is using it in every industry. Museum education, municipal health services, vehicle engineering, publishing, logistics, I'm seeing it ev…
> I often zone out as soon as I expect I'm reading slop and that's the reason try to ensure my own writing isn't slop adjacent. And how is this a problem someone else has to address? Some people zone out when they see a text is too long: are we supposed to only publish short form then? I have 10 years of writing on my site, if someone in 2026 sees my use of em dashes and suddenly starts thinking that my content is AI…
Where has anyone made the claim that it is?
> Some people zone out when they see a text is too long: are we supposed to only publish short form then?
No, but a good writer will generally consider if their text is needlessly verbose and try to make it palatable to their audience.
> starts thinking that my content is AI generated that's their problem, not mine.
If you want to reach them with your writing then it might become a problem. Obviously the focus on em dashes alone isn't enough but it's undoubtedly one of the flags.
> Too many people are willingly bending to adapt to what AI companies are doing.
It's bending rather to what readers are feeling. It's not following the top down orders of a corporation, it's being aware of how technology shapes readers' expectations and adapting your writing to that.
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Exactly this! I love(d) using em dashes. Now they’ve become ehm dashes, experiencing exactly that pause — that moment of hesitation — that you describe
AI never uses em dashes in a pair like this, whereas most people who like em dashes do. Anyone who calls paired em dash writing AI is only revealing themselves to be a duffer.
It's pretty much over for the human-internet. Search was gamed, its usefulness has plummeted, so humans will increasingly ask their LLM of choice and that LLM will have been trained on the content of the internet. So when someone wants to know something about the topic that my website is focused on, chances are it will not be the material from the website they see directly, but a summary of what the LLM learned from…
> "It's pretty much over for the human-internet ... chances are it will not be the material from the website they see directly..." Well, we're here. HN manages to call me back to the community nearly every day with articles I would not have otherwise found by search or AI. No doubt web search just feels inadequate by the qualities of chat initiated search. But the results of chat can lead to websites and books and al…
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I don’t think I’m judging shallowly- there is no em-dash on a standard keyboard. The one way it ends up in real writing is if you use a typesetting program like LaTeX, or Word changes an en-dash with auto formatting, or the user consciously interrupts their writing flow to insert the character with a special keystroke combination or by pasting it in. The proportion of people who do any of those things in writing for…
> there is no em-dash on a standard keyboard. The one way it ends up in real writing is (…) Then you proceed to list multiple ways to do it, but neglected to mention that by default on Apple operating systems they are inserted automatically when typing “--“. It’s something you have to explicitly turn off of you don’t want it. On Apple mobile operating systems you can also long press the hyphen to get the option. Em-d…
The iOS example isn't just "long press the hyphen" it's "press the [123] button, long press the hyphen, and slide your finger over the em-dash" compared to "press the [123] button, long press the hyphen" for the en-dash.
If you're going to argue at least be genuine. I didn't say it was hard to type an em-dash, I showed that every way to get an em-dash into your writing takes an extra step. Taking an extra step compared to other characters means it isn't trivial.
For someone writing publication quality work, em-dashes appear and if I see an em-dash in a book I don't assume AI writing. But for comments on the internet or a blog posts that aren't meticulous everywhere else, an en-dash is a pretty good signal that the work is AI generated. When people are writing, needing an extra step to insert an em-dash is disruptive to most people's train of thought.
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> there is no em-dash on a standard keyboard. The one way it ends up in real writing is (…) Then you proceed to list multiple ways to do it, but neglected to mention that by default on Apple operating systems they are inserted automatically when typing “--“. It’s something you have to explicitly turn off of you don’t want it. On Apple mobile operating systems you can also long press the hyphen to get the option. Em-d…
Both of the examples you gave both fall under "a special keystroke combination," which I did list. Typing "--" is two keystrokes compared to one for an en-dash. The iOS example isn't just "long press the hyphen" it's "press the [123] button, long press the hyphen, and slide your finger over the em-dash" compared to "press the [123] button, long press the hyphen" for the en-dash. If you're going to argue at least be g…
Neither did I say you said that. I only said they are trivial to type. Which they are. I do it all the time, and it doesn’t interrupt my train of thought any more than a comma. I also do the keyboard shortcuts for things like “smart quotes” and apostrophes (’). For some of those I even have my own special snippets in Alfred, like typing "" produces “” with the caret in between. I can’t even tell you what the exact shortcuts for those are without looking at my fingers, because they are so ingrained in my muscle memory. I know I’m far from alone in that.
> But for comments on the internet or a blog posts that aren't meticulous everywhere else, an en-dash is a pretty good signal that the work is AI generated.
Provably false.
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The stub itself. So why not just read the stub? As my other post said there is more value in an article than just the creative idea.
> there is more value in an article than just the creative idea When a human writes it, yes.