Good thing I prefer en-dashes :)
New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
61–70 of 643 posts
Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
#62Anyone have a lobste.rs invite?
Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
#63I used to love using em-dashes in my texts, especially in titles. Now I am way too afraid of appearing as using an LLM while I do my best to redact everything by myself :')
Bye bye em-dash, we had a nice run together.
I might start using that⸻one (a bit long...)
Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
#64I had no idea what I was using were called “EM-dashes” until the AI bubble. I just used them to reflect pauses in my speech for tangents - an old habit from my IRC days. Incidentally, some folks reported my stuff for potential AI generation and I had to respond to the mods about it. So that was kinda funny, if also sad to hear that some folks thought I was a bot. I’m a dinosaur, not a robot dinosaur. I’m nowhere near…
> 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.
Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
#65I’ve had this sense that HN has gotten absolutely innundated with bots last few months. Is it possible to differentiate between a bot, and a human using AI to 'improve' the quality of their comment where some of the content might be AI written but not all? I don't think it is.
I don't personally care about the distinction especially since AI usually 'improves' things by making it more verbose. Don't waste tokens to force me to read more useless words about your position - just state it plainly.
Brevity is the soul of wit.
Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
#66As a typography nerd, I’m upset that my pedantism may get me labelled as a bot. (Yes, I just used a typographic apostrophe instead of a straight single quote.)
Yeah, same. I use an extended keyboard layout on my PC. I'm so used to it I have to actively decide against using proper quotes and dashes and whatnot. I don't bother on mobile, though.
Every time someone states they stop reading when they encounter proper typography, I feel attacked.
Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
#67I had no idea what I was using were called “EM-dashes” until the AI bubble. I just used them to reflect pauses in my speech for tangents - an old habit from my IRC days. Incidentally, some folks reported my stuff for potential AI generation and I had to respond to the mods about it. So that was kinda funny, if also sad to hear that some folks thought I was a bot. I’m a dinosaur, not a robot dinosaur. I’m nowhere near…
But the em-dash is a different character. I think even those that use a pause would just opt for - on their keyboard, whereas the em-dash — requires additional work on most (all?) keyboard layouts. It's _not_ more work for an AI though hence why it's a tell.
Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
#68Most 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.
The Big Chungus of dashes. Could this be the character that has the widest rendering?!
Unlikely in non-english languages (I seem to remember some super wide Arabic "single character" ones...?)
Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
#69There is one thing I am the most scared off and that is believing a comment, video, picture is AI generated while it wasnt.
There is no real AI detection tool that works.
When we see something like emd-ashes its simply the average of the used text the models trained on. If you fall into one the averages of a model you basically part of the model ouput. Yikes.
Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
#70I would like to formally petition that the tech world at large replace "em-dash" with "clank" in all correspondence
like bang instead of exclamation point? or dot instead of period? I like it. even though I used to like pointing out the difference between a hyphen and a period.
It makes it much more fun to imagine a room full of robots in overcoats trying to pass off as human, but doing a terrible job due to the audible "clanks" betraying them from beneath the coat.
Spaces like HN then become a cacophony of clankers clanking as their numbers increase