Amin, minor deity of the legume realmJul 14, 2025
I will repeat this as many times as I need to: no matter how terrible you think your writing is, I would far rather read it than anything that came out of an LLM.
Show threadPaul Wilde    Jul 14, 2025

@amin Reading articles written by AI can be interesting — spotting AI articles can be fun for some people.
It's not just that they sound robotic or remove all personal associations, there's lots of other ways to tell such as:

  • use of em-dashes (often overuse of them)
  • use of "It's not just", "not only" sentence structures
  • lists of three

(This post was written by a human, in an attempt at satire in the tone of AI)

P.S. I agree. I'd always prefer to read an article full of poor spelling and grammar than a dull and robotic supposed fact dump

Show threadPaul Wilde    Jul 14, 2025

@amin i recently pointed out to one of my clients that an article they had "written" and put in their newsletter was clearly written by AI

It contained 14 em-dashes. Don't get me wrong, em-dashes have a purpose, but when they said "no I typed them" I responded, "OK, type me an em-dash now on your keyboard"
Long story short, they couldn't.

Show threadthedoctorJul 14, 2025
@paul @amin Is there a semantic purpose to an em-dash, as opposed to other kinds of dashes? I never use any myself.
Show threadPaul Wilde    Jul 14, 2025

@thedoctor my understanding is it can be used similar to how we sometimes use a comma today to put a sort of footnote in the middle of a sentence.

@amin made a great example when pointing out I used an em-dash in my first post

It was used a lot in history, just not so much these days. If AI is good for one thing though, it's for bringing the em-dash back

Show threadthedoctorJul 14, 2025
@paul @amin And other dashes are used for different purposes?
Show threadPaul Wilde    Jul 14, 2025

@thedoctor
Yep, the article in @amin 's post goes through a few of them

I use them all wrong so I'm not going to even try to summarise 🤣

Show threadsotolfJul 14, 2025
@paul @thedoctor @amin I just remember that they are called en-dash and em-dash because the - is the lenght of an n and the em-dash is the length of an m :)
Show threadAmin, minor deity of the legume realmJul 14, 2025

@sotolf @paul @thedoctor

Yes!

"em" is a valid unit in CSS, btw, and one of the most useful. It represents the height of a capital letter M in the font size of the element. "rem" ("root em") is the height of a capital letter M in the root element (<html>).

Show threadPaul Wilde    Jul 14, 2025

@amin @sotolf @thedoctor Woah... I use CSS em all the time and did not even make this connection!

mind blown!

Show threadAmin, minor deity of the legume realmJul 14, 2025

@paul @sotolf @thedoctor

My favorite CSS sizing units, in order:

  • fr
  • vw/vh
  • ch
  • rem
  • em
  • %
    …
    …
    …
    …
    …
  • px
Show threadsotolfJul 14, 2025
@amin @paul @thedoctor Why does it have that many? :/
Show threadAmin, minor deity of the legume realmJul 14, 2025

@sotolf @paul @thedoctor

They all do/mean different things. 🤷

Show threadsotolfJul 14, 2025
@amin @paul @thedoctor It shows that it's created by americans, everything to not use the metric system :p
Show threadPaul Wilde    Jul 14, 2025
@sotolf @amin @thedoctor dammit, I was about to do this same joke! 
Show threadsotolf
@paul @amin @thedoctor Well, you could do the " why is it lacking banana and football field" joke :p
Jul 14, 2025 at 8:05amWeb
Show threadAmin, minor deity of the legume realmJul 14, 2025

@sotolf @paul @thedoctor

Each quotation mark you used there was actually the shorthand for the inch unit.