| ▲ | zamadatix 2 hours ago |
| "Hyphen functioning as an em dash" is an expected human thing as it's what's easy to type. It's specifically an actual em dash which got bulldozed, much to the dismay of those who bothered to put the unicode character in. |
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| ▲ | edbaskerville 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| If you read The Mac is Not a Typewriter in 1992—thus burning Option-Shift-hyphen into your typing patterns for life, along with a dogmatic love for serif body fonts—you're the real victim here. |
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| ▲ | zamadatix 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Or those of us that use a full featured editor when writing md! This reminds me of another em dash+AI related topic: I've noticed LLMs have an extreme bias towards spaces around the dash while people can go either way with it. | |
| ▲ | rzzzt 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | There's something similar in Microsoft Word, Ctrl-Alt-Minus on the numpad. |
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| ▲ | galleywest200 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I prefer the double dash "--", but Microsoft products will convert this to a proper em-dash if you press space afterwards, I think... |
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| ▲ | Retr0id 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| A lot of the LLM bots on HN (and elsewhere) will find-and-replace their em dashes with hypens in an attempt to evade detection. |
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| ▲ | zamadatix 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Precisely, anything to remove AI smells in favor of natural looking text. | | |
| ▲ | Retr0id 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | My point is I don't consider em dash vs hyphen to be a strong signal either way, humans and bots alike use both interchangeably. | | |
| ▲ | zamadatix 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | A signal is not the same thing as a guarantee. Both of your points so far, i.e. your provided text & that bots often bother to replace em dashes to avoid detection, actually support that it is a signal though. | | |
| ▲ | Retr0id 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The stronger signal is the grammatical structure, not the specific glyph used. | | |
| ▲ | zamadatix 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The stronger yet signal is both combined! This glyph, that emoji, a given sentence structure, that formatting, a certain phrase. The more you notice -> the stronger the signal, the more you miss/discard -> the weaker the signal. |
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