He claims to be concerned about free speech.

How many journalists has your boss murdered?

    • dracc@discuss.tchncs.de
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      32
      arrow-down
      10
      ·
      2 days ago

      Normal people don’t use it while typing. They’d use a normal dash, tops. AI loves using the em dash even where it doesn’t fit.

        • Warl0k3@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          22
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          2 days ago

          Of the ~3.3 million characters you have typed on lemmy, 133 of them have been an emdash.

            • Warl0k3@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              16
              arrow-down
              1
              ·
              edit-2
              2 days ago

              I scraped all their comments directly from their user page with a selenium script, dumped them into a text file and opened that in Libre Office.

              … I am elegance personified. Someone hire me to work on your codebase.

            • Warl0k3@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              9
              ·
              edit-2
              2 days ago

              It looks like there’s been 1 emdash out of the ~306,100 characters you’ve typed on lemmy.

              (I’m having some trouble with the API (I am spamming the hell out of it to get these numbers so I should probably stop…), I may be missing some of your comments.)

              • canihasaccount@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                2
                ·
                2 days ago

                I don’t use them on my phone (android), but I use them whenever I type on a word processor. Word, LibreOffice, or any every other office suite most academics and scientists use (Google Docs being the exception, though idk anyone who uses Google Docs after undergrad) automatically converts punctuation with two dashes sans spaces–like this–to an em dash. Google Docs converts to an en dash. Not saying he’s using a word processor, just saying why they show up so much in longer forms of writing.

                More relevant to this post: My wife uses an iPhone, and her phone automatically converts two hyphens sans spaces to an em dash. It’s completely possible he’s using an iPhone, which makes em dashes trivially easy to use.

                It’s a good grammatical tool. Were my phone able to do the automatic conversion, I’d use it in basically every Lemmy post I write. Please don’t contribute to the perception that proper use of good punctuation means AI.

                  • canihasaccount@lemmy.world
                    link
                    fedilink
                    arrow-up
                    1
                    ·
                    14 hours ago

                    Yes, it should be quite clear from my comment that I can’t type em dashes on my phone. I only use Lemmy on my phone.

                    Were you to scrape my published papers–either published up until now or published before 2020–you’d see evidence that I have to forcibly edit my writing down to a rate of one or fewer em dashes per two sentences. My grad students joke about how frequently I use them.

        • chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          8
          ·
          2 days ago

          Don’t even have to long press hyphen — doubling a hyphen will get autocompleted to an em dash. I don’t even know how to type two hyphens in a row without iOS converting it to an em dash.

      • Dasus@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        5
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        1 day ago

        I’ve used it long before LLM’s were a thing.

        Just because most people don’t use them doesn’t mean “people don’t use them” — or else the LLM wouldn’t have put them there in the first place

        I went through the trouble of learning the alt+0151 on windows and will certainly keep using it

      • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        1 day ago

        I used to use it all of the time when I still had Windows and used alt codes

        Some of us read books.

        • AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          1 day ago

          I never used it in windows (what kind of idiocy is having to use alt codes anyway?) But I use proper characters in Linux all the time as they’re only a compose sequence away.