Comment by zephyrthenoble | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zephyrthenoble | Hacker News Reader

Always interesting (in an informative way) to see people "defending" em-dashes from my personal perspective. Before you get mad, let me explain: before ChatGPT, I only ever saw em-dashes when MS Word would sometimes turn a dash into a "longer dash" as I always thought of it. I have NEVER typed an em-dash, and I don't know how to do it on Windows or Android. I actually remember having issues with running a program that had em-dashes where I needed to subtract numbers and got errors, probably from younger me writing code in something other than an IDE. Em-dashes always seem very out of place to me.

Some things I've learned/realized from this thread:

1. You can make an em-dash on Macs using -- or a keyboard shortcut

2. On Windows you can do something like Alt + 0151 which shows why I have never done it on purpose... (my first ever —)

3. Other people might have em-dashes on their keyboard?

I still think it's a relatively good marker for ChatGPT-generated-text iff you are looking at text that probably doesn't apply to the above situations (give me more if you think of them), but I will keep in mind in the future that it's not a guarantee and that people do not have the exact same computer setup as me. Always good to remember that. I still do the double space after the end of a sentence after all.

Well, (some) people on HN definitely used them before ChatGPT. https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo...

(And as #9 on the leaderboard, I feel the need to defend myself!)

Unfortunately this table doesn't show us where the em-dash users are coming from and if they are native speakers.

It's not that it doesn't exist in my native language, but I don't remember seeing them very often outside of print books, and I even know a couple typo nerds.

Maybe I'm totally off, and maybe it's the same as double spacing after a '.'. I had not heard of this until I was ~30 and then saw some Americans writing about it.

Maybe I'm weird, but one of the first things I've always done when setting up emacs is to enable Typo mode (or Typopunct) for writing modes, which handles typing en and em dashes and "smart" quotation marks in a fairly natural way.

I actually checked HN's comment data corpus to see if em dash usage rose after AI adoption became more widespread. I was kind of shocked to see that it did not.

Its overuse is definitely a marker of either AI or a poorly written body of text. In my opinion, if you have to rely on excessive parentheticals, then you are usually off restructuring your sentences to flow more clearly.

I actually got punked during a demo because I wrote some terminal commands and stored them in the macOS notepad and didnt notice it had changed -- to —.

When I copy and pasted them in it failed obviously so... yeah. If you have terminal commands that use `--` don't copy+paste them out of notepad.

Shift+Win/Option+-. And holding - gives you en/em dash on iOS and Android. Personally I love using em dashes so this whole AI thing is a real disaster for me.

Just a reminder that our experience does not necessarily invalidate someone else's experience.

Eg, I was typing Alt-0151 and Alt-0150 (en-dash) on the reg in my middle school and high school essays along with in AIM. While some of my classmates were probably typing double hyphens, my group of friends were using the keyboard shortcuts, so I am now learning from this "detect an LLM" faze that there's a vocal group of people who do not share this experience or perspective of human communication. And that having a mother who worked in technical publishing who insisted I use the correct punctuation rather than two hyphens was not part of everyone's childhood.

In Microsoft Word, double hyphens convert to em dashes. Seems to be the case on the iOS keyboard as well.

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