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where is the em-dash key on your keyboard? Yes, I know you can use a shortcut. 99.9% of people don't.

Many editing tools support double or triple hyphen that convert automatically to em dashes. On Android it's trivial to write an em dash (easier than say the percent symbol).

I even have a plug-in that converts some hyphens to em dashes on my blog.

Rendering judgment on someone who published something on their own site without knowing their stack reflects more on you than him.


Not the point, and no it doesn't. 99% of anything published since ChatGPT launched, that contains em-dashes, is suspected AI slop. Very few writers will make the extra effort to manually insert an em-dash - in fact hardly any writers even know how to or where it should be used.

I am merely stating how people now view em-dashes, not how I wish things were.


There was another submission just a few days ago that analyzed em dashes in HN comments pre and post LLMs. The amount of em dashes has not even doubled (i.e. a comment with an em-dash is still more likely to have been written by a human than an LLM).

Sorry, you're just plain wrong.


This whole conversation has lead me to finally configure a Compose key for my Linux desktop.

I used to most-often write the em-dash as two juxtaposed dashes, which was kind of half-assed.

But now, I've repurposed the otherwise-disused right-hand Windows key to be Compose. So I thus get go full-assed with them — at least at home.

Thanks!


"Sorry, you're just plain wrong" that's a bit of a leap, when I'm stating my interpretation of what the general opinion is, not how the world should be. Have you interviewed everyone? (I don't just mean the small subset of everyone who posts on HN).

Your original confident sarcastic statement doesn’t look like “just stating my interpretation”. All counter-arguments are “not the point”, huh.

I see, so people in the non-HN universe aren't abandoning the em-dash where it's actually appropriate, due to massive over-use by chatbots? And despite there being no em-dash key on a keyboard, the appearance of em-dashes in text created by members of the non-HN universe is definitely not cause for suspicion? Why would I be sarcastic /sarc

Level 4 modifier + some key with my custom setup. On Linux in my locale and with an AltGr key you can use Shift+AltGr+hyphen.

You thought I wouldn’t have a reply to that?


I thought you would miss the point. Looks like you did.

I answered your question plainly. What do you want?

What place are you posting on? The place where people make their own operating systems, solder their own electronics, make up their own fantasy realms (world building), make their own markup languages for their own static blogs, make up their own programming languages to solve Advent of Code... but having a disproportinate amount of people who use the Compose key (Linux), have programmable keyboards, configure their keyboard in software, maybe use a plugin to write HN comments in a text editor where they can get certain symbols via `--` or whatever—woah, that’s just an impossibility in your mind.


"Yes, I know you can use a shortcut. 99.9% of people don't." <- this is the point you missed.

Isn't it, at least partially?

What a ludicrous reply, to suggest it should be "socially unacceptable" to believe the Paperclip Maximizer thought experiment might reveal a scenario that is bad for humans overall.


Of course it would be bad for humanity. “Short humanity and long paperclips”, in my reading, is pro-extinctionism. The specter of Daniel Faggella haunts this site and this industry.


> pro-extinctionism

I can only speculate as I didn't write that post, but by my reading they were just stating their belief that AI is likely to lead to human extinction, not that they were happy about that outcome.


How did 40 wells get drilled in the Norwegian shelf last year, and 42 the year before? You can't just make things up.


You probably need to step outside of your US-centric bubble if you are to comment on how university works outside of the US. There was a fairly large clue in the parent comment.


"Often good researchers are bad teachers, and good teachers are bad researchers" is a statement about humans, not a specific country, as far as I can tell. Sure, I happened to use the word "tenure" which is generally used in a U.S. context but you should be able to take a charitable reading of what I said and understand the broader point.


To my knowledge the view is correct for places outside the US.

UK universities do currently hire people to do research and teach. And tenure is based on research not teaching. Teaching is seen as something that funds the operation to an extent. Some are excellent teachers. Some merely provide the material.

It works as is because researchers are not meaningfully impacted by having to do a few hours a week. And student get access to people in touch with the field. But it is not optimal having people who often are not good at teaching and/or don't particularly want to do it, taking lectures and tutorials.


As mentioned in another comment, the US-centric view of how university and professorship work is certainly not the case in Germany.


That is the best explanation I have seen yet of the difference. I'm definitely stealing it...


"Why publish on Substack, a venture‑backed tech platform whose leadership has chosen a permissive moderation policy?" fixed it for you.


"So it makes you feel fuller without adding calories, like GLP-1 drugs"

Nobody really knows how GLP-1 agonists work, but given the other effects (e.g. insulin stability, change in other addictive behaviours etc.) it's definitely not just this.


"One point is that the things that have increased in cost are more heavily regulated/government controlled than the items that haven't."

This is one of the central theories behind Kartik Gada's ATOM concept. He may come across as a bit of crank to some, but he has some interesting ideas.


"Inequality has been going up in the US for a very long time, which means a lot of people are not being rewarded as much as they should."

The second part of your sentence is not necessarily true. It might be true in some or even many cases, but it's certainly not something you can just assert & move on, as if it's a physical law.


I'm just tired of re-litigating this issue. Discuss with your favorite frontier model. Roughly, productivity has been outpacing pay since the mid 1970s, and I wrote about this in another comment here.

There's just so much confusion here. Some people like you don't get why a world where a handful of billionaires own everything is a bad idea. Madness. I think nothing less than another depression will get through to most.


Increased capital investment (e.g. software) could explain productivity not attributable to the employee.

On its face, productivity vs pay isn't a faor metric. I agree that problem exists, but we shouldn't use it to benchmark


> I own your tools therefore I own everything you do with them

Like I said, madness.

It's like slavery was technically outlawed but a lot of America strongly disagreed. And they're posting on HN.


If I lease tools that triple your productivity for the same cost as your wage, how much more do I pay you?

My point is increases in productivity can be caused by capital investment, not totally attributable to the worker. That money has to come from somewhere.

Ideally there's a fair balance. This isn't it but you can't look at the number you referenced blindly.


You're not thinking at a systems level. Check this out - https://data.worldhappiness.report/chart. The US is increasingly a miserable place to live in - in large part because of pay not keeping up with housing/school/medical/etc.

Correct systems-level answer to your question "how much do I pay you" is "as much as it takes to stabilize the US curve". Happiness correlates with financial security, which we won't get if the rich get richer from those capital investments then buy up all the housing.

Fun fact: Fit 2 lines on that data and you can extrapolate by ~2030 China will be a better place to live. That's really not that far off. Set a reminder on your phone.


I don't care if you are tired or not, it's not something you can just assert and move on.

Also, you know nothing at all of my opinion on whether "a handful of billionaires own everything" is a bad idea or not. All you know about me is I don't agree with you that rising inequality AUTOMATICALLY means some people haven't been rewarded as much as they "should", whatever that means. Reading comprehension, combined with not assuming others' POV, for the win.


Dude go figure it out yourself, it's not that hard. I remember discussing inequality with friends in 2014, and probably knew about it since Occupy Wall Street (2011). Or earlier. At this point if you still don't get it, with a billionaire in office, surely it's on you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_Wall_Street

I got what I needed from here, I'm out.


lol, the arrogance of youth.... I think the point I'm making might be too subtle for your young, idealistic brain.


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