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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2559 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 13, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I have discovered, by dint of fucking around, that SwiftKey keyboard for Android allows me to insert em-dashes with relative ease. I'm torn about using them—on one end, they're more expressive than standard hyphens or semi-colons; but on the other, in this climate, that invites accusations of AI writing.

I'm entirely fine with "it's not X, it's Y" becoming deprecated, it's a rather boring turn of phrase, but I'm still annoyed by the fact that I didn't even notice em-dashes as a distinct option before they went out of style.

Am I truly worried? Uh, maybe? My writing style is distinctive enough that it's not trivial to replicate using an LLM. They absolutely won't do it by default.

I wouldn't use em. It's the main thing in the normie pattern recognizer for calling out AI texts now.

I guess I have to agree. How could I not, when just a few weeks back I correctly called out our friendly neighborhood Count for using it? The normies have a point there, few people who aren't journalists or pretentious literary types use them by default.

(I wonder if I could get away with large disclaimers left, right and center saying that these are artisanal em-dashes, produced only by my hands with the assistance of Markov chains at most)

You have to become a pretentious literary type, then.

A faith truly worse than death. I'd rather be a j*urnalist.

Now let’s not be hasty. Surely you have some less evil alternatives such as a high ranking Scientology cult operative, North Korean prison camp guard or perhaps a mass murderer?

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