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by i_think_so 43 days ago
I hate that AI has stolen my emdashes and I can't use them without looking like slop. But I will die defending markdown as my preferred note taking format. They're not taking that away from me.
4 comments

I felt like this with the word delve. Seemed like nobody had ever heard the word before, and that the only possible way it’d be written was if an llm did it - but it’s just a nice word.
Delve was used a lot in corporate writing. A lot of the so-called "whitepapers" that businesses like to publish to show how smart they are were ingested in training models.
the premiere golang debugger is called delve. Also you must not hang out w/ many ttrpgers.
I mean I use it and then it seemed like everyone was acting like it it was a weird llm only word.
How about not caring about what people on the internet say about your writing using emdashes?

They are a false positive signal for identifying AI texts anyway.

It's not what they say, it's what they click on.

Unfortunately, in a place like this, if a bunch of people falsely accuse you of being a slop spreader your karma drops like a rock.

Can you imagine how hard it is to start up a new Reddit account lately? Even in a small and isolated community of niche enthusiasts just getting to the point where your posts aren't auto-modded takes serious effort. One stray emdash and you can lose it.

Ask me how I know.

Oh yay, I'm in HN jail again. "You're posting too fast." Faster than once per 30 minutes? Sigh.

Without markdown I don't even know who I would be anymore.
Em dashes aren’t stolen, it’s still clear from the overall voice of the text if it’s AI written or not.

At least, in reasonably long sections of text. I find it can be hard to tell one way or the other in shorter texts (like comments)

Just on HN alone I think I've seen roughly 3948538902748750897520938 mentions of emdashes when others were complaining about slop in the past 2 months. It might as well be the unofficial slop logo. Folks are treating it like a dead giveaway.

I feel like a school friend of mine has been taken from me.

It’s just people who don’t read books outing themselves. Ignore.
Even bookz aee ruined for me now. I was reading careless people and hate all the emdashes even though in a book it's just normal
The real dead giveaway is that the writing is bad.
Indeed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47921359

and the comments above it