zlacker

>>giulio+(OP)
"Recent large-scale upticks in the use of words like “delve” and “intricate” in certain fields, especially education and academic writing, are attributed to the widespread introduction of LLMs with a chat function, like ChatGPT, that overuses those buzzwords."

OK, but please don't do what pg did a year or so ago and dismiss anyone who wrote "delve" as AI writing. I've been using "delve" in speech for 15+ years. It's just a question where and how one learns their English.

>>milanc+p6
Same thing as with em dashes. Some of us have been using em dashes from before ChatGPT.

>>diego_+m8
Genuine question, do you actually use the formal emdash in your writing? AIs are very consistent about using the proper emdash—a double long dash with no spaces around it, whereas humans almost always tend to use a slang version - a single dash with spaces around it. That's because most keyboards don't have an emdash key, and few people even know how to produce an actual emdash.

That's what makes it such a good giveaway. I'm happy to be told that I'm wrong, and that you do actually use the proper double long dash in your writing, but I'm guessing that you actually use the human slang for an emdash, which is visually different and easily sets your writing apart as not AI writing!

>>Taek+Nd
I have a Compose key binding in https://github.com/kragen/xcompose which maps Compose Space Minus to "—" with two thin spaces on each side of it, because I prefer the spaces. But HN rewrites the thin spaces to regular spaces, so on HN I just use "—" without the spaces, the way ChatGPT does, which is Compose Minus Minus Minus, and is in the standard Compose key bindings (if you map your keyboard to have a Compose key at all).

Examples within the last week include >>44996702 , >>44989129 , >>44991769 , >>44989444 . I typed all of those.

I never use space-hyphen-space instead of an em dash. I do sometimes use TeX's " --- ".

>>kragen+fB
I use space-hyphen-hyphen-space because I'm always switching between systems and keyboards -- it works well enough.

>>MathMo+n11
Space en-dash space is standard British typography – whereas US uses em-dash and jams the words together on either side of it.

It took centuries for the written word to acquire spaces between words, and then the US decided to jam them back together again.

Curious why folk are using two hyphens "--" instead of en-dash.

>>auxbus+KX2
In LaTeX (and probably smartypants which is another of those bare pre-unicode ASCII to fancy text converters that can get stacked into markdown--but I can't remember if dash handling specifically is in there), "--" is en-dash and "---" is em-dash. The single "-" gives a hypen which is handled differently than an en-dash in typesetting.

So... that's just to say that people who are exposed to the sorts of can't-unsee-it-now typesetting OCD that LaTeX and various popular extension packages within that ecosystem exposes can learn to write write "--" as en-dash.

It's sort of like being unable to return to the blissful state of not being hyperaware that Ariel and Helvetica are different.