"Why should I change? He's the one who sucks."
I miss using em dashes
31–40 of 167 posts
Re: I miss using em dashes
#32I'm not sure why people let others change them. I keep punctuating like it's the 20th Century.
> 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.)
Re: I miss using em dashes
#33Just gonna leave this here: https://emdash.fan
Re: I miss using em dashes
#34I'm not sure why people let others change them. I keep punctuating like it's the 20th Century.
Exactly my thought upon seeing this :)
Re: I miss using em dashes
#35The 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.
Re: I miss using em dashes
#36People over-update when they see an em-dash. If you compute the posterior probability, you'll realize that seeing an em-dash hardly shifts the probability that text is AI generated.
You might even realize that the AI is using the em-dash precisely because of how often it was used in the training text.
Re: I miss using em dashes
#37Doesn’t notion and a bazillion other tools turn two dashes into em-dash?
Re: I miss using em dashes
#38I don't miss the em dash. Take away my hyphen and I'll be angry; but replacing em dashes with semicolons was personal policy since high school.
...someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think you're using the semicolon correctly; it sounds wrong to me, at least. I think you'd need to either take out the word "but" (which would cause the sentence to no longer make sense) or, well, change the semicolon to an em dash.
Re: I miss using em dashes
#39I still use em dashes -- I just do it poorly and throw in lots of typis.
Re: I miss using em dashes
#40I wouldn't worry about it. A year ago the red flag du jour was "delve"; this year it's em dashes; next year it'll be something else. In any case, this is a very online topic that I assume only a vocal minority are hung up on in the first place. If you picked a random person off the street and asked for their thoughts on em dashes, you'd probably get a blank stare. Eventually, as models and their users both improve, w…
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.
I agree completely with this as a human reader - but do wonder about the gradual codification of these markers in systems that will have increasingly have LLM detection as a standard feature, as frequently and obviously enabled as spam detectors were on blog comments back when blogs had comments.