51–60 of 188 posts
The scraper bots probably read it and now it is ever so slightly altering the weights in some massive AI model. That's not nothing.
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It's a terrible side effect of AI that regular people using em dashes in honest writing are labelled as AI. I have a deep love for em and en dashes--you can see heavy usage in my writing that's 10 years older than chatgpt. My love for the dashes hasn't gone, but now I use a double dash instead so I am not immediately labelled as an AI.
Ha ha, now labeled as old — when on a typewriter it was common to use two dashes as a fake em dash.
I don't want to break his streak, what it is about ?
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You can type "--" in most writing software and it will turn into an em-dash. On a Mac, this includes TextEdit by default, or literally every text input field if you enable the "smart dashes" setting. I can type — right now in my web browser with two presses on my ordinary laptop keyboard and no memorizing character ID numbers, not exactly rocket science. If you're using Word or other fancy word processors, you don't…
> Have all the people parroting "dash means it was written by ChatGPT" never used a word processor? Probably not, this is "HACKER" News, if I type two n-dashes on a website, I EXPECT two n-dashes, otherwise things like HTML comments would break the page.
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It's a terrible side effect of AI that regular people using em dashes in honest writing are labelled as AI. I have a deep love for em and en dashes--you can see heavy usage in my writing that's 10 years older than chatgpt. My love for the dashes hasn't gone, but now I use a double dash instead so I am not immediately labelled as an AI.
At least avoiding the "it's not just that X, it's Y" style that AI loves is easy enough!
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It's not that hard. Period (.) ends the sentence, comma (,) breaks up the sentence. If the next sentence is closely related, end the sentence with a semi-colon (;). For every other type of break--especially those that resemble the natural and chaotic shifts of thought we all have--use an em-dash. (Oh, and put text you want to be optionally skipped in parenthesis.) Em-dash is probably the most natural punctuation; it…
It may be due to AI proliferation, or the culturural bias I have, but I increasingly find em-dashes jarring . As you point out, authors use them for the "natural and chaotic shifts of thought we all have" and when there are lots of these shifts it feels like I have to keep track of multiple conversations at once. For example, in the article we have: If your goal is to have other people read—and hopefully enjoy—your w…
Writing a blog is like talking in the town square. Except because it’s digital, we seem to forget how communication works. If you just start talking in the town square, you’re standing alone talking. Sure a person who passes by might pause, but the odds you’re saying something really relevant to them are low, so they’ll move on. The whole question of how you get in front of the right people and tweak your message bas…
I think that's not due to algorithmic intervention of product design etc., I think people are just tired. The novelty of shouting at strangers on the internet has worn off - how many internet fights have we gotten into that did nothing in the end except waste time? It's only worse with a coin flip's chance of the other person being an LLM. We're all tired.
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It's not that hard. Period (.) ends the sentence, comma (,) breaks up the sentence. If the next sentence is closely related, end the sentence with a semi-colon (;). For every other type of break--especially those that resemble the natural and chaotic shifts of thought we all have--use an em-dash. (Oh, and put text you want to be optionally skipped in parenthesis.) Em-dash is probably the most natural punctuation; it…
It may be due to AI proliferation, or the culturural bias I have, but I increasingly find em-dashes jarring . As you point out, authors use them for the "natural and chaotic shifts of thought we all have" and when there are lots of these shifts it feels like I have to keep track of multiple conversations at once. For example, in the article we have: If your goal is to have other people read—and hopefully enjoy—your w…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s just less literate people feeling the need to out themselves.
It has nothing to do with literacy, the em-dash simply is not on the standard US QWERTY keyboard. This means that people who purposefully use it, either have to copy-paste it from somewhere or (if they-re on Windows), use "Alt + 0 1 5 1". This is very obviously not a natural behaviour that 'literate' people use when they write.
A lot of people who care about typography/grammar have spent a moment to learn to do this. Once learned, you can use it for the rest of your life.