Showing compassion to one person doesn’t deserve criticism for not saving everyone.

I'm responding to the claim that it's uncommon for someone in prison to have a good heart.

Purporting that to be a "claim" would be - in my opinion - an incredibly disingenuous reading of the poster's comment. Remember the HN commenting guidelines: "Assume good faith."

That is the good faith reading. The comment isn't open to interpretation. What could the meaning be if not that Preston is an uncommon example of a prisoner?

What does shopping at Costco have to do with anything? They sell lots of "whole foods". Tons (literally) of fresh raw protein, veg, grains, etc.

I associate it with pre-packaged food. My mistake. I’ve only been there once.

Is it ironic that my AI detector is ringing alarm bells at this comment (both its overall cadence, as well as it’s particularly unnecessary use of an em dash)?

Is the em-dash ever "necessary"? It was beloved by nerds on the internet long before there was any whisper of LLMs on the internet. What do you think chatbots are imitating if not humans who also use it?

It was only ever inserted by word processors for me.

No one typing with a regular keyboard would ever bother, certainly not with the HN input box.

> It was only ever inserted by word processors for me.

Surely you still intended to type an em-dash if this happened—word on windows (as I presume you intend to refer to with 'word processors') only replaces '--' with '—'.

>No one typing with a regular keyboard would ever bother, certainly not with the HN input box.

You press 'option', 'shift', and '-' (on a mac with the default US english layout, anyway). Why would you assume nobody would use a basic element of writing (in English, at least)? It's just a long-press on the iphone.

I think there are cases of people using keystroke expanders to automate the -- to em-dash conversation outside word processors. Not so common among technical folks, though, for postfix operator reasons.

The comment we're talking about doesn't read like AI to me because of the use of parenthetical asides, although that just means I haven't seen a LLM that tends to use parentheses heavily.

I never saw a human use it in something different from literature. That's where I think the chatbots got it.

I use it sometimes, although I'll probably stop now that I keep hearing it's too associated with ai. It's easy to enter though on Mac it's just option shift hyphen

I write for a living and read literature at university. I find it odd that you’ve never encountered an em dash in common writing.

> I never saw a human use it in something different from literature.

This is nuts! Do you not read much prose written by other humans?

I have and had a reddit addiction since my early teens and I read a lot of whatever I can on the internet.

Books and scientific papers are the only places I see it used

And it makes sense that the AI is prioritizing it as these sources should weigh more

Some non-English speakers sometimes throw whatever they wrote in English into a chatbot to correct the text, just in case.

why are people insisting that an em-dash is exclusive to llms somehow, when on a mac it's super easy to type dash, en-dash and em-dash — just type dash, option + dash or shift + option + dash. I got used to defaulting to em-dash (even if incorrectly) and now I'll be categorized as an llm for that?

Yes, is the simple answer to your question.

Not AI-written. Personally, I love em dashes and semicolons.