41–50 of 132 posts
Two of the things I love intersect here: good punctuation and engineering documents. AI stole the em-dash from my toolkit. I have memorized a group of useful Alt-codes for engineering documents. They include symbols for diameter, delta, degrees, dot product, and trademark among others. If you're of a certain age, you will remember how useful Alt+255 was for folder naming. At the cusp of the 21st centuries, I added th…
> Historically, the em dash (—) has served as a flexible punctuation mark used by human authors to indicate interruption, emphasis, or sudden changes in thought. I learned about the em dash in high school and adapted it to my writing style very quickly for analysis and opinion documents. It felt natural given the amount of tangents I can go off into, particularly when including analogies for the reader’s understandin…
I was always taught that overuse of the em-dash is poor style. Oftentimes using more specific punctuation (comma, semicolon, colon, parentheses) more clearly communicates the structure of a thought. Em-dashes are a lot more freeform and informal. They communicate a similar tone as when you're speaking and you suddenly stop to mention something that just occurred to you. In this sense, the idea that "em-dash = AI" has…
That's the problem with all the LLM writing tropes, really. When used correctly, they are all helpful writing tools to get your point to the reader. The em-dash, "it's not X, it's Y", "Not X, Not Y, Just Z", "It's worth noting" (I use that one a lot in my own writing), etc.
It's not that the patterns are bad (they aren't), they are just over used.
> Historically, the em dash (—) has served as a flexible punctuation mark used by human authors to indicate interruption, emphasis, or sudden changes in thought. I learned about the em dash in high school and adapted it to my writing style very quickly for analysis and opinion documents. It felt natural given the amount of tangents I can go off into, particularly when including analogies for the reader’s understandin…
It's clearly a joke à la RFC 3514.
> Historically, the em dash (—) has served as a flexible punctuation mark used by human authors to indicate interruption, emphasis, or sudden changes in thought. I learned about the em dash in high school and adapted it to my writing style very quickly for analysis and opinion documents. It felt natural given the amount of tangents I can go off into, particularly when including analogies for the reader’s understandin…
> I learned about the em dash in high school and adapted it to my writing style very quickly for analysis and opinion documents. It felt natural given the amount of tangents I can go off into, particularly when including analogies for the reader’s understanding. Isn't this what parenthesizes are meant for? Together with footnotes, I've always used them like that, but I guess it could also be just a cultural differenc…
Parentheses add emphasis to a sentence or statement. Normally the use of it allows the sentence to be complete with or without it.
Em dashes may also add or increase emphasis but are normally treated as an aside. Think of it as a comment by the author to inject themselves, sometimes in ways which do not form a complete sentence.
For example: When you read this sentence (in your mind) it should feel complete and correct. Perhaps you read in your own voice — something I don’t normally do — or without one at all.
> I don't understand what the issue even is here, and the RFC also doesn't clearly outline it.
The issue is written there but may not make sense unless you know someone who stylistically writes with high-than-average em dash usage. I, for example, get inquiries and comments at work from employees who ask what LLM model I used for “generating these reports” because of the presence of em dashes. They do not believe me when I say not a single word was written by LLMs because, “there’s an em dash. Only LLMs use em dashes!” This is categorically untrue and erodes the authenticity of work from people because of the correlation.
Their aim is to implement a new Unicode character which programs like text editors could inject when a person types an em dash. It attributes to a human being behind the document, typing characters out individually. Actions like copy-pasting text in bulk wouldn’t replace em dashes since it can’t attribute a human as writing it out.
Related: Em dash leaderboard https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071722
Claims Dang is using AI, and that other people are using AI even though most of the flagged post predate popular AI products. Really destroys the whole EM-Dash === AI thing.
which never should have been a thing, because it was obviously wrong
yes AIs is more likely to use em-dash, but that is just one, by itself very insufficient, indicator.
it's like hip size. In average over the populations they are wider for woman. But the effect is too small to classify the gender of a hip bone by it's size. (Like for a specific age range and ethnicity, the difference in median is like 1" or so, while there is a >10" difference between 5%-percentile and 95%-percentile. Varying by gender in difference and exact distribution.) Well I guess em-dash are more an indication for AI then hip size for gender... lol
Two of the things I love intersect here: good punctuation and engineering documents. AI stole the em-dash from my toolkit. I have memorized a group of useful Alt-codes for engineering documents. They include symbols for diameter, delta, degrees, dot product, and trademark among others. If you're of a certain age, you will remember how useful Alt+255 was for folder naming. At the cusp of the 21st centuries, I added th…
never understood why -- => em-dash auto completion is only a think in some subset of application instead of being a standard behavior for (display) text inputs
> Historically, the em dash (—) has served as a flexible punctuation mark used by human authors to indicate interruption, emphasis, or sudden changes in thought. I learned about the em dash in high school and adapted it to my writing style very quickly for analysis and opinion documents. It felt natural given the amount of tangents I can go off into, particularly when including analogies for the reader’s understandin…
$ unicode u+10eac u+10ead
U+10EAC YEZIDI COMBINING MADDA MARK
UTF-8: f0 90 ba ac UTF-16BE: d803deac Decimal: 𐺬 Octal: \0207254
𐺬
Category: Mn (Mark, Non-Spacing); East Asian width: N (neutral)
Unicode block: 10E80..10EBF; Yezidi
Bidi: NSM (Non-Spacing Mark)
Combining: 230 (Above)
Age: Newly assigned in Unicode 13.0.0 (March, 2020)
U+10EAD YEZIDI HYPHENATION MARK
UTF-8: f0 90 ba ad UTF-16BE: d803dead Decimal: 𐺭 Octal: \0207255
𐺭
Category: Pd (Punctuation, Dash); East Asian width: N (neutral)
Unicode block: 10E80..10EBF; Yezidi
Bidi: R (Right-to-Left)
Age: Newly assigned in Unicode 13.0.0 (March, 2020)> Historically, the em dash (—) has served as a flexible punctuation mark used by human authors to indicate interruption, emphasis, or sudden changes in thought. I learned about the em dash in high school and adapted it to my writing style very quickly for analysis and opinion documents. It felt natural given the amount of tangents I can go off into, particularly when including analogies for the reader’s understandin…
> especially when it was once suggested that frequent use could imply neurodivergence Well that explains a lot. Interestingly enough, I've found that I naturally write like an LLM, or rather the LLMs write like I did. I wonder how many other patterns we attribute to LLMs are common in neurodivergent writing just as a result of so much of the training data being areas of the internet where I'd imagine neurodivergence…
It’s a very interesting thought experiment and if we had the data to support exploring it I’d love to see what we could find. I’d imagine that some subject-matter experts would probably be discovered as being neurodivergent to the surprise of nobody but themselves.
(They probably wouldn’t appreciate opening Pandora’s box!)