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Comment by notpushkin | Hacker News Reader

That’s an en-dash – and I use those myself. (I’ve experimented with em-dashes—brefly—but it doesn’t look good to my eye in English.)

It’s all by the vibes, I don’t have any concrete proof. FWIW, the comment seems at least hand-edited, so maybe it’s just this “the [A] is the [B]” trope that has triggered me. If the rest of it is readable, then I apologize, but still: that’s a bad title, please don’t use this – unless you’re writing a LinkedIn post.

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Edit: here’s another LLMism example from another HN user: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49996255

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I always get en and em confused. They are all just dashes to me :-).

The "Nothing else: no lists, tables, links, quotes, images or rules" is from the docs indicating that these things are not supported.

> I always get en and em confused

Yeah, it’s somewhat a typography-nerdy thing :–) (gosh that looks terrible probably; edit: actually it’s surprisingly fine)

> indicating that these things are not supported

Of course, but it does sound a bit unnatural IMO. Then again, I’m going by the vibes here.

I, too, was confused for the longest time, but the secret is in the names.

En dash is the width of an “n”. Em dash is the width of an “M”, so a little wider.

Not unlike how in the trades, a tee is T-shaped, a wye is Y-shaped, a delta is Δ-shaped. Spelled-out letters aren't always geometric metaphors, but it's a thing.

Then you've got the first syllable of Ω (omega) being a homophone of Ohm, for what that's worth. From there we have ℧ (mho) for conductance... It's all quite clever. But I digress; I'll get back to emceeing and deejaying, cueing these elpees after a quick pee, okay?

Different fonts use different lengths (sometimes en dash is the width of an uppercase “N” instead of lowercase, sometimes it’s half of the em dash which itself is `1em` which may or may not equal the width of the “M”...) But it’s a good way to remember that indeed, yeah!

> (I’ve experimented with em-dashes—brefly—but it doesn’t look good to my eye in English.)

I saw what you did there.

After enough time spent reading LLM speak, I’ve found its phrasing and particularities subconsciously work into the way I write as well, entirely by hand.

It’s not always AI. It could be a human ;) I really despise LLM-written writing too; but I think it’s nice to be not super paranoid about it.

Agreed. I've noticed the same too. I'm afraid we've probably already reached the time where text written by humans sounds llmish

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