Comment by einsteinx2
Comment by einsteinx2 2 days ago
> em-dashes…things that you simply never saw before 2020
I’m sorry but this is patently false. Apple devices have been autocorrecting two hyphens into a em dash since as long as I can remember and I personally used them all the time before LLMs were a thing and absolutely saw them online. I try not to use them now because people will annoyingly call me out for using ChatGPT when I’m not.
I think Apple devices also default to “smart quotes” if I understand what you mean by that. For example I’m typing this on my iPhone and I get this quote character automatically when I tap the double quote button on the default keyboard: “
If I want straight quotes I have to long press the quote button and explicitly select it: "
I think on macOS it’s the opposite for quotes, but macOS will absolutely autocorrect double hyphens to em dashes.
> I don't understand how you're all not seeing how many posts on HN now are AI.
There’s a also a big difference between using AI to reformat/clean up your text, especially for non-native English speakers and a bot just spamming LLM replies, but none of your “gotchas” can discern the difference…
I didn't say em-dashes were never seen before 2020. Re-read the sentence. It's a list - "em-dashes" and "things that you simply never saw before 2020" are two items in that list. But even assuming I meant em-dashes, it's interesting to compare how frequent they were a few years ago versus now. Take the most upvoted HN submission (8 years ago):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16582136
There is on instance, an obvious copy-paste. Now go to any from the current top list. I count 10+ per submission, even on submissions with much lower post counts that the Stephen Hawking one.
But I'm not going around policing em-dashes or smart quotes and calling people out for using them. It's more like when someone gets a bingo in ChatGPT phrasing and style idiosyncrasies then it becomes suspicious and I'd hate to think I'm here talking to bots (I've already left many subreddits because for AI slop).
I've seen highly rated posts on HN that might as well have started with "You're absolutely right!"