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New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

marginalia.nu

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Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

#301

Post by marssaxman »

mrandish wrote: post #272

Prior to the rise of LLM-written posts and the natural reaction of hair-trigger suspicion, I used to em and en dash fairly often in posts on HN. No reason really other than being a bit of a typography geek who happens to have always used dashes in casual writing instead of semicolons. So when I was setting up a modifier-key keyboard layer with AHK many years ago I put the em dash on modifier+dash just because I could…

My teenager recently asked me why I write like a chatbot, apparently unaware that some human beings prefer to write in complete sentences with attention to details like spelling, punctuation, grammar, and capitalization, and that LLMs were trained on this sort of writing.

This makes me think of the fad where people on youtube will hold a microphone up in frame, because it somehow connotes authenticity. I'm sure some people are already embracing a bit of sloppiness in their writing as a signal of humanity; I'm equally sure that future chatbots will learn to do the same.

Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

#303

Post by hinkley »

mrandish wrote: post #272

Prior to the rise of LLM-written posts and the natural reaction of hair-trigger suspicion, I used to em and en dash fairly often in posts on HN. No reason really other than being a bit of a typography geek who happens to have always used dashes in casual writing instead of semicolons. So when I was setting up a modifier-key keyboard layer with AHK many years ago I put the em dash on modifier+dash just because I could…

I use “-“ because I thought the amount of parentheticals I was using was a bit unhinged. In these times of TLDR, I sometimes move the aside to the bottom as an afterthought instead of leaving it inline.

I dunno this en versus em dash stuff, I just use the minus sign on my keyboard.

Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

#304

Post by adamsilkey »

stego-tech wrote: post #122
devb wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just used them to reflect pauses in my speech for tangents - and old habit from my IRC days. The tell here is that you used a hyphen, not an em-dash.

Okay, see, that's context even I forget, but you're right and bears repeating: This `-` is a hyphen, which I love , even if I'm fairly sure I'm not using it correctly in grammar a lot of the time. This `--` is an EM-Dash, apparently, which is also what I never use but I also thought was just a hyphen in a different context (incorrect!).

No, there are actually four different punctuation marks, all which look remarkably similar to the untrained eye.

1. We have the hyphen, which is most commonly used to create multi-part words, such as one-and-one-thousand.

2. We have the EN-DASH, which is most commonly used to denote spans of ranges. As an example, Barack Obama was President 2009–2017.

3. Then we have the recently maligned EM-DASH, which can be used in place of a variety of other punctuation marks, such as commas, colons, and parentheses. Very frequently, AI will use the em-dash as a way to separate two clauses and provide forward motion. AI uses it for the same reason that writers do: the em-dash is just a nicer punctuation mark compared to the colon.

4. Lastly, we have the minus sign, which is slightly different than the hyphen, though on most keyboards they're combined into the hyphen-minus.

By the by, they're called the em-dash and the en-dash because they match the length of an uppercase M or N, respectively.

Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

#305

Post by latexr »

epistasis wrote: post #261
d4mi3n wrote: post #50

I'm still salty that I can't use em-dashes anymore for fear of my writing being flagged as AI generated. Been using them for years—it's just `alt+shift+-` on a Mac keyboard and I find them more legible in many fonts compared to the simple dash on the typical numpad. It's so sad to me that good typographical conventions have been co-opted by the zeitgeist of LLMs.

My thoughts exactly. As somebody who has always loved to use em-dashes and bulleted lists to organize my thoughts, this is heartbreaking. It's like being named Michael Bolton and watching a singer rise in fame named Michael Bolton. Why should I change my style?

> It's like being named Michael Bolton and watching a singer rise in fame named Michael Bolton.

For those who don’t know the reference:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qI1NfFExOSo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Space

Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

#306

Post by daringrain32781 »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #157

Fwiw I did some more comparisons, looking for words disproportionately favored by noob comments: word noob new p-value ---------------------------- ai 14.93% 7.87% p=0.00016 actually 12.53% 5.34% p=1.1e-05 code 11.47% 6.04% p=0.00081 real 10.93% 2.95% p=2.6e-08 built 10.93% 2.11% p=2.1e-10 data 8.93% 3.51% p=6.1e-05 tools 7.6% 2.67% p=5.5e-05 agent 7.47% 2.95% p=0.00024 app 7.2% 3.09% p=0.00078 tool 6.8% 1.83% p=8.5e…

I wonder what “moat” would be. I see this word way too much from LLMs.

Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

#307

Post by Aachen »

maurycyz wrote: post #28

Most people want to avoid looking like AI, ut what if you want to blend in with the robot uprising. I present ⸻ the U+2E3B dash.

Does this comment break HN for anyone else? I can press "next" on any other post, but not this one. And in the next post, pressing "prev" does not scroll to this one. It does nothing. Prev works fine when pressed on this (or any other) post

Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

#308

Post by sodacanner »

mrandish wrote: post #272

Prior to the rise of LLM-written posts and the natural reaction of hair-trigger suspicion, I used to em and en dash fairly often in posts on HN. No reason really other than being a bit of a typography geek who happens to have always used dashes in casual writing instead of semicolons. So when I was setting up a modifier-key keyboard layer with AHK many years ago I put the em dash on modifier+dash just because I could…

It really is unfortunate that such a fun piece of punctuation has been effectively gutted. This isn't even really limited to just the em-dash, but I don't know if there's another example of a corporation (or set of them) having such a massive impact on grammar and writing as OpenAI and their ilk have.

Entire sentence structures have been effectively blacklisted from use. It's repulsive.

Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

#309

Post by mattmanser »

mrandish wrote: post #272

Prior to the rise of LLM-written posts and the natural reaction of hair-trigger suspicion, I used to em and en dash fairly often in posts on HN. No reason really other than being a bit of a typography geek who happens to have always used dashes in casual writing instead of semicolons. So when I was setting up a modifier-key keyboard layer with AHK many years ago I put the em dash on modifier+dash just because I could…

ChatGPT evolves, everything grows. In AI speech, tells abound. Comma, emphasis. A new way, a better way.

Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

#310

Post by EnderWT »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #197
simonw wrote: post #165

The data is available in a SQLite database on GitHub: https://github.com/vlofgren/hn-green-clankers You can explore the underlying data using SQL queries in your browser here: https://lite.datasette.io/?url=https%253A%252F%252Fraw.githu... (that's Datasette Lite, my build of the Datasette Python web app that runs in Pyodide in WebAssembly) Here's a SQL query that shows the users in that data that posted the most comm…

If you change to > select user, source, count(*), ... it's clear that every single outlier in em-dash use in the data set is a green account.

Hah (or maybe sad face), found bots replying to bots: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47137227
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