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1. Embed this notice
   Matthew Lyon (mattly@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 26-Apr-2026 04:26:38 JST Matthew Lyon

   < your essay is good but you obviously used an LLM to write it – look at all those em dashes!

   > a: it was published in 2015. Here's the discussion on Hacker News to prove I didn't backdate it

   > b: those are en-dashes, not em-dashes. You imbecile. You absolute tool.

   • Embed this notice
     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Sunday, 26-Apr-2026 04:27:41 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     @mattly I’ve uttered b before and I’ll utter it again :)

   • Embed this notice
     draNgNon (drangnon@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 26-Apr-2026 05:10:14 JST draNgNon

     in reply to

     @mattly I confess I have increased my use of em dashes in my writing in the last 18 months or so just to be a butt

   • Embed this notice
     artemist (artemist@social.mildlyfunctional.gay)'s status on Sunday, 26-Apr-2026 05:12:09 JST artemist

     in reply to

     @mattly can't figure out how to type an em-dash? it's easy 一 enter your chinese IME and type "yi".

   • Embed this notice
     artemist (artemist@social.mildlyfunctional.gay)'s status on Sunday, 26-Apr-2026 05:12:13 JST artemist

     in reply to

     @mattly one can always tell that my essays are not LLM-generated ⸻ i use three-em dashes.

   • Embed this notice
     draNgNon (drangnon@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 26-Apr-2026 06:09:58 JST draNgNon

     @mattly (writes and deletes Very Very Long reply which makes it obvious I am still burned out) at Google we were always encouraged by document word limits and style guidance to use semicolons instead of conjunctions. it was the most egregious for performance evals.

     I don't recall ever seeing an em dash used

   • Embed this notice
     Solitha (solitha@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 26-Apr-2026 06:17:38 JST Solitha

     in reply to

     @mattly If I may...

     > c: are you even passingly aware of the fact that AI was trained on human writing?

   • Embed this notice
     Solitha (solitha@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 26-Apr-2026 13:02:33 JST Solitha

     @mattly Aw, I missed the *swoosh* of it over my head.

     Somehow I never heard of either until the advent of LLMs. Typing classes, honors English... not so much as a whisper of these esoteric things.