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The Programmer Identity Crisis

(hojberg.xyz)
270 points imasl42 | 5 comments | 21 Oct 25 16:47 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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protontypes ◴[21 Oct 25 17:08 UTC] No.45658345[source]▶
Whenever I see an em dash (—), I suspect the entire text was written by an AI.
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psunavy03 ◴[21 Oct 25 17:11 UTC] No.45658389[source]▶
That says more about your lack of writing skills and understanding of grammar than AI.
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happytoexplain ◴[21 Oct 25 17:23 UTC] No.45658565[source]▶
That's simply not true, and pointlessly derogatory.

This article does not appear to be AI-written, but use of the emdash is undeniably correlated with AI writing. Your reasoning would only make sense if the emdash existed on keyboards. It's reasonable for even good writers to not know how or not care to do the extra keystrokes to type an emdash when they're just writing a blog post - that doesn't mean they have bad writing skills or don't understand grammar, as you have implied.

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1. johnisgood ◴[21 Oct 25 17:28 UTC] No.45658674[source]▶
Pressing "-" and a space gets replaced by an emdash to me in LibreOffice. No extra keystrokes required.
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2. benji-york ◴[21 Oct 25 17:53 UTC] No.45659117[source]▶
I don't think the character is that uncommon in the output of slightly-sophisticated writers and is not hard to generate (e.g., on macOS pressing option-shift-minus generates an em-dash).
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3. Kerrick ◴[21 Oct 25 18:41 UTC] No.45659847[source]▶
In fact, on macOS and iOS simply typing two dashes (--) gets autocorrected to an em dash. I used it heavily, which was a bit sloppy since it doesn't also insert the customary hair spaces around the em dash.

Incidentally, I turned this autocorrection off when people started associating em dashes with AI writing. I now leave them manual double dashes--even less correct than before, but at least people are more likely to read my writing.

4. Izkata ◴[23 Oct 25 02:27 UTC] No.45677514[source]▶
That's an en dash, not an em dash. An em dash is longer and as far as I know Libreoffice doesn't have a built-in way to make one (though you may have added it to the autocorrect settings yourself).

en dash: https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+2013

em dash: https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+2014

Edit: Ah, Libreoffice does have a built-in autocorrect for em dash, but you have to type this:

  :---:
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5. johnisgood ◴[23 Oct 25 21:15 UTC] No.45687287[source]▶
Thanks! I did confuse the two despite knowing of both.

So ":---:" does work for the em dash? I thought something with fewer keystrokes work, too, at least I remember the em dash from less, but perhaps I just typed it so quickly I did not realize it was indeed ":---:".