Removed by mod
Oh. Exactly the sentiment I came to share. Felt the pressure to stop using them, just to avoid looking like a bot. ~'s my fave character. Bot appropriated. :/
Rebel. Start using triple em dashes⸻see?
Removed by mod
(╯°□°）╯︵┻⸻━⸻┻
deleted by creator
It could be a haiku. They don’t need to be 5-75 syllables. It’s more about an observation or a moment of clarity/realisation. The first two lines set up a concept or image, and the third line closes out the thought, usually with contrast. Just have to structure it properly.
I really love the emdash,
I’m very—very—upset ai ruined it for me.
Cunts.
5-75
You have been reading much longer haikus than I have 😜
That’s how you know that comment isn’t ai. No dash.
timetoproveourhumanitybyrejectingallpunctuation
backtoancientHebrewAramaicandKoineGreekwegoandwewilljusttaketheinterpretationambiguityhit
c/unexpected_agglutinative_language
I once tried to write a haiku,
Whose syllables were out of skew.
The words started flowing;
I just kept on going,
A Limerick will just have to do.
Oh, that reminds me: is Haiku still a slop-free OS?
Removed by mod
Yeah, they’re based
Cold dead god-damned hands
Im pretty indifferent to them and I’m still mad AI ruined them.
The em dash thing annoys me because I actually used em dashes a lot in my own writing. Now I’ve had to change how I write to keep people from assuming I’m using generative tools for writing.
In the plus side, our mayor loves my writing style because he thinks staff should be using AI for everything.
Same.
Seems there were indeed a lot of us who loved it, and have now lost it.
I used to like the punch of “It’s not just ___, it’s ___” but I’ve pretty much removed that from my vocabulary.
Same, I would use that construction pretty frequently. Or “it’s X not Y”.
But now, it’s not just trite, it is triggering.
I’m trying to stop using “for bonus points, ____”. I don’t have any bonus points left to give out.
Oh god yeah this and bullet points
I’m going to start using “for bullet points, ____” and see if anybody notices.
Same, except “fucks sake”.
I’m entirely out of fucks.
I never even heard of an em dash until I started reading about AI. I was just using hyphens everywhere I was apparently supposed to be using em dashes. I am a stickler for grammar and correct punctuation (except for punctuation inside quotes which my internal programmer won’t allow me to do the American way) so I’ve started using em dashes – and now people think I’m an AI.
That’s no —, it’s two hyphens playing pretend!
Some Markdown renderers interpret two dashes as an en dash and three as an em dash, so on some Lemmy clients, that might show up as a real en dash.
inb4 AI resurrects the tab v. spaces debates but between how many dashes equals an em dash.
Wait, what’s the rule for punctuation inside quotes? I don’t think I’ve ever noticed a regional difference.
In the US, the punctuation is supposed to be inside of the quotes, even if that punctuation wasn’t actually part of what’s being quoted. So if somebody says “your mother sews socks that smell,” the quoted partial bit would be typed as “your mother sews socks.” In Britain it would be “your mother sews socks”. The difference might not be really obvious visually; it’s whether that period (which is required to end the sentence) is before the end quote or after it. Apparently programmers in the US (like I used to be) have gravitated towards the British style because with string variables (which are generally delimited by quotes) you can’t be farting around with adding phantom punctuation inside the quotes, even if it is grammatically correct here.
I’m I’m not mistaken, the reasoning for this goes back to the printing press era. The comma or period would be on the same type block as the quotation mark; dealing with individual blocks for , or " was too fragile or fiddly. So they had blocks for ," and ." that were used regardless of sentence structure
Oh. That’s pretty neat. My favourite bit of typesetting lore :- this combination is known as the dog’s bollocks in some circles.
They’re useful—especially to avoid over-using other punctuation such as semicolons; I also use them to avoid back-to-back sentences with exclamation marks!
They’re useful. Especially to avoid over-using other punctuation such as semicolons. I also use them to avoid back-to-back sentences with exclamation marks!
There you go. It’s easier, clearer, and less pretentious.
Okay, but you’ve just created a sentence fragment, which is fine unless you were trying to use complete sentences.
Fragments are wrong in elementary school grammar, yes. In the real world, they’re used by Charles Dickens and other sophisticated writers intentionally.
Did I not say “which is fine”?
Fuck, dashes, embrace, Hegel.
I’ve just been using en dashes this entire time, was once accused of being a bot because I used them, and as a result I found out that I was using dashes improperly — and should instead use em dashes.
I think putting spaces before and after the em dash is incorrect, but I’m not sure. I do it because I think it just looks better visually.
I also think it’s incorrect—I don’t do it.
I don’t advise changing the way you write. It’s a skill you need to flex, and unless you’re using em dashes incorrectly then you should be able to find ways of differentiating yourself from AI without fundamentally changing how you communicate.
Idk, just food for thought. Fuck anyone that tries to say I use AI to write — they can eat a bag of dicks.
As an actual human who uses em dashes — or usually, two or three hyphens that turn into an em dash in Markdown — I feel personally attacked.
aren’t those regular dashes? em dashes seem just a bit longer
I will usually just use one (1) hyphen for that purpose - in the much same way that I will use "…" instead of “…” - because I like to upset typography nerds.
Have you tried using the dedicated triple dot character (…) instead of three separate dots (…)? It’s a life changer
They said they do it to ‘upset typography nerds’ — likely they tried…
I’m upset now
on mac if you type three dots it autocorrects it to the triple dot character…
deleted by creator
Bless your — illiterate — heart.
Confidently incorrect. Read a book now and then.
Sure. You can totally avoid them. Just by using very basic sentences. The same is true for a lot of puctuation.
But that doesn’t make your sentences planned better but is simply a sign of limiting yourself by avoiding any complexity.
What does this say about how LLMs plan their sentences?
Microsoft Word also appears to autocorrect dashes into em-dashes. I’m not sure it’s because of copilot since I noticed around 2024, but a bunch of documents I use at work, drafted/revised in 2021, are full of them.
Word has been doing that for decades and I’ve always hated it and turned it off
Same, but I’m unlikely to use them in comments
Found the bot
You can get a lot done when you’ve got 29 months in a year
?
The weird US American Date scheme is not used in most of the world.
I wish. Am European. I know one person that voluntarily uses their date and time formats. For reasons I will never comprehend.
He or she must enjoy the endless confusion and friction in the interaction with others. That said, some idiotic IT systems use the US format to. Causes a lot of problems.
I’m in the US and have had problems with C-level douches misreading dd-mm-yyyy dates in some system we had that logged in that format and freaking out (and also missing that the log time stamps were in UTC-0, causing further confusion/freakout)
Anyway, this is part of why I always use yyyy-mm-dd, because nobody will confuse that date string for any other date, and everyone who can understand dates at all will be able to read it.
D/M/Y > M/D/Y
There is only YYYYMMDD
Because one lives the other should not long live Y-M-D
ISO 8601 is the only correct way.
It’s close, sure, but actually no. That standard currently requires the letter T (and no white-space) between date and time when both are present, and, frankly, that’s ugly and a space should be allowed.
An old version of the standard allowed the space, and GNU’s coreutils seem to have carried on the tradition, so I’m not alone in thinking this.
OP’s graph uses slashes.
Dashes would remove all the confusion.
No because it’s the global format that typically uses periods.
D.M.Y (normal)
Y-M-D (superior)
M/D/Y (mental illness)Mixing up the formats and denominators makes this mess even worse.
The dates below the graph
deleted by creator
Pretty much only in the US.
Yeah sorry about that, was the default format in my spreadsheet software and I didn’t think to change it
Man, I miss when Linux felt like a refuge. It’s always been flawed of course but now it feels like everyone in positions of influence are embracing the awful
It’s getting harder to justify the inconvenience of going off the beaten path if that path is turning into the same slop as the commercial ones.
The Linux Foundation has unfortunately become a commercial shithole, run by a clusterfuck of Silicon Valley VCs. When I see the kinds of garbage AI projects that are being shoveled into it every day, I lose more and more respect for it.
Look for yourselves: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/projects
And it’s sad to see Linus falling into their lock and step. I respect him for a lot of things, but when it comes to AI, he’s sadly just wrong.
Holy fuck, that is a lot of AI hype projects.
For me most of the projects at the bottom link to “Page not found” Confluence pages…
The beaten path is sloppifying a lot faster than the alternatives and where management gets angry if you don’t use AI.
True, and for most things you get a choice, in contrast to Windows/MacOS. But if the kernel itself slides down this path there’s not a lot you can do unless you’re willing to sacrifice enormous amounts of time and effort.
I’m kind of done with this passion, I’ll be investing more of my time into yard maintenance and my boat.
I imagine there’s been quite an effort by commercial interests to influence the direction of this path
Get used to it. Large groups of users will probably start transitioning from MS given the current state of digital security vulnerabilities and geopolitical vulnerabilities MS is.
deleted by creator
Oh dang
Personally the only part I have seen is documentation is now vibe coded, where in the past, it was autism coded.
As long as it’s short, sweet and to the point and not prose.
“This function doesn’t return an
int*, it returns achar *.”
As someone that uses AI at work because 1. this is a run-out-the-clock situation, and 2. I don’t give a fuck and would like to be at my desk as little as possible, it feels weird and hypocritical to expect no AI in all of the software around me as well.
With that said, if I still had any semblance of passion for writing code, which I do not, anything I worked on for the OSS community would be fully devoid of AI usage. But I’m mentally at a point where I’d rather move to a cabin and use computers less and less with each passing day.
There’s also a huge difference between someone like Linus Torvalds, who understands code better than most people on earth, using AI supervised to increase productivity, and Timmy off the street having chatGPT build something he has no clue how it works or what code even does.
Vibe coding isn’t just using AI. It’s using AI to do things you don’t understand in the first place.
there’s a lot of wilful ignorance around that last point
There’s also a huge difference between someone like Linus Torvalds, who understands code better than most people on earth, using AI supervised to increase productivity, and Timmy off the street having chatGPT build something he has no clue how it works or what code even does.
disagree. there’s no difference between the car mechanic or the politician pouring oil into the river. They’re both horrendous. sure, one of them might have a reason for doing so, but that reason isn’t a good reason.
Both things are going on at the same time, as Torvalds and Timmy are both paying Sam Altman to pour oil into the river as a byproduct of the service he’s providing. For something as important as the Linux kernel, it wasting fewer CPU cycles as a result of LLM-aided optimisation work might even be net beneficial for the environment once you take into account that it’ll affect billions of computers for years to come. If the end product is shitty, though, there’s no question that it wasn’t worth the environmental damage.
It would have to use trillions of fewer cpu cycles to do that. Currently scientists estimate it at 8 cups of water consumed for every 100 word prompt. What developer do you know that consumes 8 cups of water a day much less every thirty seconds. A developer can sit there and think with their own mind, computer doing nothing, while an LLM consumes thousands of gallons of water and kilowatts of electricity to do the same thing.
It only needs to save a few hundreds of seconds on one computer, or one second on a few hundreds of computers, or a tiny fraction of a second on the number of computers that actually run Linux to save trillions of cycles. A trillion cycles isn’t very many at all. A hundred-word prompt on a frontier model running on GPUs in a datacentre burns much more power than a trillion cycles on a CPU, so for a large Linux kernel patch, trillions is the wrong number by many orders of magnitude. There are also a lot of computers spending a lot of time running Linux, so it kind of balances out. There’s only one Linus Torvalds, and he’s very busy, so it’s likely that if he’d not used an LLM to get this work done, it simply wouldn’t have happened, even if someone had been willing to fund a different human to do it.
Either way, the original point of the post was that LLM-generated code is always shitty (even when it’s not immediately obvious to whoever’s responsible for it that it’s shitty) and so having any amount of it already makes things worse, even ignoring the huge environmental cost. With that context, it is the case that there’s a huge difference between Timmy and Torvalds as Torvalds is famous for having very high standards, so if he’s using it, he might be able to make something that isn’t shitty.
I didn’t realize you were talking about performance in the kernel, which I think will be incredibly hard to measure. That that’s usually the main focus of enterprise investment into Linux, so I very much doubt that an LLM is coming in and making improvements there, but maybe it’s happening. As far as I can tell all the latest things are security scans, which usually will result in worse performance since the goal isn’t speed but safety.
This comment chain is specifically referencing a single LLM-assisted patch that Linus Torvalds posted to the mailing list for review a few days ago that solves a longstanding performance problem that interacts with enough things parts of the kernel that there are only a handful of people in the world qualified to deal with it, and that none of them have had the time to investigate and fix properly until just now. https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/linus-torvalds-posts-his-first-llm-assisted-patch-to-the-linux-kernel-after-issuing-clear-pro-ai-directives-the-bossman-makes-use-of-ai-tooling-himself
100%. There’s a difference between asking AI to do things that you yourself don’t understand, and using it as a quicker route to something you already know as an engineer. The difference is that the engineer knows when to halt the agent or push back to do something properly. I don’t make AI dabble in languages I don’t already know myself.
I felt a lot like that too. I still do, but this helped me a lot:
Bookmarking this one for later. Thanks! It’s hard not to feel like my entire field has been cheapened. We spent so long perfecting our craft, only for it to to be completely devalued with speed as the main focus.
The bright side is that AI will never be as good as me when it comes to CSS. I’m still the go-to CSS person at work, despite folks having AI tools at their disposal.
Thank you for linking that talk. I wasn’t expecting something that deep and also funny. I concur with your recommendation wholeheartedly.
It’s valid to feel that way working in software, but try to hold space also for the fact that computing is ‘the means of production’ in the information age, and how it is made and who controls it is inherently political.
No, coding should be done to garner clout, so eventually when I start my shitcoin, I can rugpull more people! /j
I don’t give a fuck and would like to be at my desk as little as possible
I always had this stance and found it weird when people resisted. Your boss’s boss’s boss’s boss is telling you to work half as much? Whether you think that the output is half as good quality or not why the fuck aren’t you JUMPING at the chance to do that.
It’s coming after your job. Why would I want to feed my output into the machine breathing down the back of all our necks? I like what I do. A carpenter isn’t going to be happy working in a factory where chairs are made by robot arms. I’m not gonna be happy working in a slop factory
Standing in the Mississippi won’t dam it
Your comment was that people should be jumping at the opportunity to use it. I’m telling you why people aren’t. Efficicecy is a different thing. Maybe it might be ore apparent to you if you were to say the same thing about outsourcing to oversees rather than outsourcing to AI.
Whether you think that the output is half as good quality or not why the fuck aren’t you JUMPING at the chance to do that.
Two reasons actually.
-
Most people want to be productive in some way. Even if you don’t like your job very much, its a much bigger mental burden to sit around and do nothing than it is to actually work.
-
You employer isn’t going to pay you the same rate for half as much work done. It is that way now cause they have no idea what the actual productivity will end up being, but once the numbers are stable they will save as much money as possible. You will either be lucky and will work just as much as before with more but worse output, or you will be fired.
-
It’s not just Linux, it’s GNU + Linux
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as GNU + Linux, is in fact, Linux
What is the accelerating rise of m-dashes from approximately 2014-2019 about? That trend apparently continued until very recently, even slowed down a bit, before exploding at some point in 2025 or 2026 for obvious reasons.
Does anyone have a theory?
People slowly learned to use their keyboards for proper typography?
That was a good one.
If the graph is not just using made up data, then it also measures absolute em-dashes, not em-dash density, so possibly could be an increase in interest in contributing to the kernel?
By a factor of roughly 10-fold? Maybe. It could indeed be a measure of overal absolute contribution. But post 2025 that could be influenced by m-dash density especially.
No, the comment I responded to was about the ~2014 uptick, not the recent one.
The recent one is obviously AI one way or another. Absolute contribution rate is higher due to AI as well.
Yeah sure, no I am not surprised about post 2025. My question was indeed about the post 2014 uptick.
I assume it’s due to phone keyboards.
I don’t think a lot of kernel devs are programming on their phone
That’s why the number was low before.
The OP graph is just absolute count on the y axis, so I also assumed it was basically measuring LoC, but looking at this chart, the em-dashes do appear to be definitely more of a modern phenomenon compared to raw LoC:
Maybe some policy/tooling change around 2014? A guess is perhaps something to do with allowing UTF-8 in source files, but that’s a pretty long shot.
Looking at that, the lines of code cannot really be the full story. M-dash count really just appears to rise from 2014 onwards.
I wonder how many em dashes are real vs interpreted.
I love an em-dash, but I have never typed one on purpose; they are all just two minus in a row and I use them wrong – with a space around (*inspect source to see that lemmy translates for me). I abuse them like I abuse semicolons. They are a typographical tick that indicates a pause or pivot when I translate my thoughts to text.
I can imagine a human manuscript editor turning punctuation like a comma into an em-dash when it makes sense, but I can’t imagine a developer ever specifically typing out one – with the need to either know or look up the unicode for it. The only relevant place would be a comment, but even then IDE’s are not generally known for their tendency to replace typed characters with something else.
Maybe some tool in the pretty-print/code-formatter ecosystem added that as a feature? But
var--is so common that I can’t imagine that’d be a good idea, even in a comment.They probably write code in Microsoft Word
I used to write websites in Notepad. It was kind of like digital Amishness.
At least notepad won’t fuck with your formatting for you
Absolutely insane ide choice. Wonder if visual studio tries to add those too.
It, thankfully, does not
For pedantry’s sake:
Two dashes –
--– in Markdown is usually rendered as an en-dash – more common in British-adjacent styles and usually surrounded by spaces.Three dashes—
—in Markdown is rendered as an em-dash—more commonly associated with American styles and usually (though not always) without spaces.Hah. Neat!
For pedantry…
My understanding was that en-dash was a range, and em-dash was a change in topic or a parenthetical, so I’ve been using the wrong one but for the right reason. This may be an American style distinction, though. Time to jump into a new rabbit hole.
I’ve always just used a hyphen for ranges, without having any idea whether that makes me a philistine. A quick search says that, like most of this, it varies depending on who you ask.
Good luck in your rabbit hole!
Emdashes on this chart are the Jaws theme of vibeshittification.
—
—
—
———
————
——
——
———— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— ——
Recursive self—emprovement
No, that’s just using an em dash wrong in the place where a hyphen belongs.
Hyphem
Tap for spoiler
All become em—dash
-, –, —
Fun fact… on a monospace font they all have the same size but different heights
High fun?
It’s probably about to drop off. Opus 5.5 isn’t outputting em dashes in work produced anymore
It’s been replaced by the overuse of confusing
foo's own [implied noun]phrases.Just saying…
:%s/\s*—(\s*)/, /gI can still detect LLM output from vibes alone, like awful emoji usage.🐱
Can we have this divided by the total number of commits?
Unpopular opinion: I don’t mind the use of AI by devs if it makes their work easier. As long as the devs are pros who understand whats going on and uses it to optimize their workflow, fine go ahead.
Where I don’t whant AI is, first, in anything creative. I want art to be abother humans sharing their emotions and perception of the world, ever if it’s sometimes poorly done, boring, or plainly bad. I have zero interest in art created by a machine, no matter how perfectly executed it is. The promise of AI was to make our life easier by optimising the boring and repetitive stuff so we can make fun and interesting things, not the other way around.
In this case it is doing the work instead of them. We are increasingly going to have code running critical systems that no person has even bothered to look at.
I hate to tell you this, but the code running most critical systems out there is already completely fucked.
Most people assume that just because software developer has been a degree for the last few decades that everything has been rewritten by professionals, but there are a crazy number of systems still running 3-5 decades from when they were first created. A vast majority of this shit was written before “programmer” was a profession or a degree. So, everything was written by some person who had a job doing something that had nothing to do with computers, but either dicked with computers as a hobby, or was forced into it because no one else wanted to do it.
People point at Y2K as the point when everything had to be rewritten and replaced, but most Y2k solutions just involved patching the software and nothing else. All that shit is still out there and running.
And let’s be frank, every profession has people that are just aren’t capable but seem to stay in it no matter what. For every bad waiter you have ever dealt with, there is a developer who is just as shit at their job.
And that is on top of companies who just don’t give a fuck and who knowingly put shit software out because it is more profitable to cheat people than provide what they promised.So, don’t worry about AI causing some great collapse. We were already well on our way there without AI.
True, but we have to know AI is making it wayy worse. The same people who were barely getting by, are now using AI to write softwares that’ll be used for years to come. And other people that don’t have developer experience and aren’t good themselves don’t have any idea and really trust those developers because “they make things happen” like “magic”. Previously they’d take a lot more time to make something work, it’d be shitty, but it’d be obvious for any developers that come after them. Now detection is hard, and the volume has increased.
All devs are shit? What a piss poor take.
You must be a viber with no XP.
I really hope you don’t code like you read. If so, I pray no one lets you near anything even slightly important.
That’s why I mentioned that I want real devs looking at the code.
We have to ride it for long enough so that a microkernel inevitably becomes the better option.
Maybe L4? IDK, but it’s something that makes this kind of choice irrelevant.
