In Dutch I have the luxury of being able to use the semi-colon in a similar capacity — useful to avoid the em-dash stigma I suppose — but I refuse to relinquish it in English.
Fortunately, I can always just point to evidence of prior use here:
Yeah, I used to like technology. I don't anymore. LLMs just seem like they were purposefully built to annoy me personally. I dislike pretty much everything about them:
Everything they produce looks high-quality, only a fraction of it actually is. This makes time-tested signals of high-quality texts (e.g. em-dashes) worthless. I know it really doesn't matter but the fact that em-dashes specifically are now signals of AI slop is just so sad.
Vibe-coding is the exact opposite direction I wanted software engineering to go. I liked that computers followed hard rules and that I never needed social engineering to get a computer to do the thing I wanted it to do.
I'm not sure if LLMs will do more harm if they stay with the capabilities they currently have, where they are most useful for scams, spam and slop or if the promises actually hold and most white-collar jobs are automated away.
I hate that AI is going for the stuff I like (creating art, writing software) while I still have to do all the chores I dislike (doing the dishes, washing clothes).
I genuinely think that LLMs will have a strong negative effect on my life and society as a whole.
It looks to me like software engineering could be dead in the near future. Note that AI doesn't need to be as good as human programmers to replace them. It just needs to be good enough.
I'm thinking of switching careers as long as I still can. The second it becomes clear that software engineering is dead the job market will burst into flames and finding something else will become almost impossible. Even if this doesn't happen I absolutely despise the idea that my job will now include drudge work like reviewing AI slop merge requests.
Fuck that. I'm using the correct punctuation every time. Anyone using em dashes as anything other than the lowest possible AI signal is just robbing themselves. And if they do it en masse, spammers will just put a dirt simple filter on their AI output and fool them all again.
Nah, go the opposite direction — post with em dashes. Let them think you're AI, till they realize people are posting it to spite the "its AI bro" remarks.
Post with em-dashes, sure—just don’t set them open when setting off parentheticals. If – for that em-dash use – you want to set dashes open, use en-dashes instead.
Sigh.