How about en dash usage? Has that been used as a similar false indicator?

thomasm6m6 7 days ago | parent | next [-]

OpenAI’s o3 was big on en dashes—one time it produced a Deep Research result containing >200 of them. I’m not aware of any other LLM using them commonly, though. I’d guess humans use them even less often; I don’t think Apple auto-inserts en dashes, and very few people (myself being one) are pedantic enough to bother.

On the other hand, I don’t think o3 was ever a common choice among people copying from LLMs, so en dashes remain infrequent regardless.

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aspect0545 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

In German en dashes are more common than em dashes. I’ve been using them regularly for at least 20 years, both in German and English texts. I never liked it when people just threw in ordinary hyphen instead of an en dash, but few people note the difference.

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JimDabell 6 days ago | parent [-]

Yes, this is regional – British usage tends to be an en dash surrounded by spaces, where American usage tends to be an em dash with no spaces.

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lostlogin 6 days ago | parent [-]

All this has me thinking. Is the em-dash like an accent for machines?

	▲	JimDabell 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		I’m not sure about accent, but I have described their intense overuse of certain things as a verbal tic before.

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ascorbic 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

They're very easy to type on a Mac though (opt+-). I've always used spaced en dashes without realising that that is the more common British style. Unspaced em dashes just look wrong to me.

	▲	rectang 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		Unspaced em dashes look wrong too me too in most web contexts, but I think it’s typography-dependency and they look good in serif text when very large and heavy compared to other elements.

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7 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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