I’m more of a semicolon enjoyer myself.
I load my commas into a 10 gauge shotgun and fire them at the page.
Try the interrobang‽
They serve different functions; they need not compete for your love.
Me; too.
I still double space after a period, because fuck you, it is easier to read. But as a bonus, it helped me prove that something I wrote wasn’t AI. You literally cannot get an AI to add double spaces after a period. It will say “Yeah, OK, I can do that” and then spit out a paragraph without it. Give it a try, it’s pretty funny.
So… Why don’t I see double spaces after your periods? Test. For. Double. Spaces.
EDIT: Yep, double spaces were removed from my test. So, that’s why. Although, they are still there as I’m editing this. So, not removed, just hidden, I guess?
I still double space after a period, because fuck you, it is easier to read. But as a bonus, it helped me prove that something I wrote wasn’t AI. You literally cannot get an AI to add double spaces after a period. It will say “Yeah, OK, I can do that” and then spit out a paragraph without it. Give it a try, it’s pretty funny.
Web browsers collapse whitespace by default which means that sans any trickery or deliberately using nonbreaking spaces, any amount of spaces between words to be reduced into one. Since apparently every single thing in the modern world is displayed via some kind of encapsulated little browser engine nowadays, the majority of double spaces left in the universe that are not already firmly nailed down into print now appear as singles. And thus the convention is almost totally lost.
Double spaces after periods can create “rivers.” This makes text more difficult to read for those with dyslexia. Whatever is used as a text editor is probably stripping them out for accessibility reasons. I suppose double spaces made sense with monospaced fonts.
https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/paper-format/accessibility/typography#myth4
HTML rendering collapses whitespace; it has nothing to do with accessibility. I would like to see the research on double-spacing causing rivers, because I’ve only ever noticed them in justified text where I would expect the renderer to be inserting extra space after a full stop compared between words within sentence anyway.
I’ve seen a lot of dubious legibility claims when it comes to typography including:
- serif is more legible
- sans-serif is more legible
- comic sans is more legible for people with dyslexia
and so on.
This is because spaces typically are encoded by model tokenizers.
In many cases it would be redundant to show spaces, so tokenizers collapse them down to no spaces at all. Instead the model reads tokens as if the spaces never existed.
For example it might output: thequickbrownfoxjumpsoverthelazydog
Except it would actually be a list of numbers like: [1, 256, 6273, 7836, 1922, 2244, 3245, 256, 6734, 1176, 2]
Then the tokenizer decodes this and adds the spaces because they are assumed to be there. The tokenizer has no knowledge of your request, and the model output typically does not include spaces, hence your output sentence will not have double spaces.
Seriously, I was em dashing on a goddamn typewriter, the fuck am I gonna change it now.
In the end, it won’t matter. Being able to write well will be like riding a horse, calligraphy or tuning a carburetor. They will all become hobbies, a quirky past time of rich people or niche enthusiasts with limited real-world use.
Maybe it is for the best. Most people can’t write for shit (does not help that we often use our goddamn thumbs to do most of it) and we spend countless hours in school trying to get kids to learn.
Science fiction has us just projecting our thoughts to other without the clumsiness of language as the medium. Maybe this is just the first step.
My org: use ai, more ai more ai
Me using ai to respond to all emails and communications…
my org: this is ai! Unacceptable! Lazy!
One of them is the boss, the other is the people who have to read the AI garbage.
Just use AI to read the garbage!!
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t lol
I like to falaffel a word into my posts every now and snorkel just to increase hallucination rates in case i’m being used to train one.
It’s hard to win because it might just catch on and then bam everyone’s doing it including the AI and that’s just how we talk now
I will never stop using them. Fuck AI. I won’t let it take the joy of nice, legible formatting away from me.
Yes! Yes exactly! Bite my ass, I ain’t stopping. I love em dashes. Em dashes are life! I have five pubbed books and fuck it they’re full of em dashes!
Absolutely wonderful tool they are and I refuse to think otherwise. Don’t look at my books if you don’t like em.
The lack of em dashes in this response is disappointing.
Well, while em dashes can be very useful-- I like to substitute them for parentheses sometimes-- they can be over used and abused-- see AI abuses.
Ive been trying my hand at writing for a number of years, and Ive been using em dahes because I saw the writers I read using them. Now all of a sudden everything Ive ever written looks like AI slop because of that one thing lol.
Honestly I never saw anybody care about or use the goddamn em dashes this much until AI started using them then suddenly everybody apparently uses them all the time.
Like come on, no you don’t.
I think people just don’t like being told what to do. Like, there are a lot of behaviors you can trace back to someone just being personally aggrieved that they ought to change anything.
That said, if anyone else is reading, the em dash is a clue that you use to diagnose with—you don’t have to stop using it.
I used them a lot in college. Glad I graduated in 22 right before AI took over.
This shit drove me wild when I was using ChatGPT more frequently. It’d be like “do you want me to re-phrase that in your voice?” and then type some shit out that I’d never say in my damn life. The dashes were the worst part
So you are in fact the opposite of this meme.
Excellent use of that reference!
ChatGPT is a no talent assclown
All you have to do is remind these people the reason LLMs use em dashes so much is because humans do.
I’ve used double hyphens for em dashes, because I’ve never bothered to figure out how to do it in Linux. I was a graphic designer for many years, and had a bunch of ASCII Alt codes memorized, but they don’t work in Linux, for whatever reason. I don’t really need them anymore, so I haven’t worried about it. So, I suppose the double hyphens shows I’m human, and definitely not a robot.
E: One way in Linux is Ctrl-U 2014: —
