Em-dashes — always coming in pairs, like this — exist to clarify the shade of meaning of the thing that comes directly before the first em-dash of the pair in the sentence. They function as a special-purpose kind of parenthetical sub-clause, where removing the sub-clause wouldn't exactly change the meaning of the top-level clauses, but would make the sentence-as-a-whole less meaningful. (However, even for this use-case, if the clarification you want to give doesn't require its own sub-clause structure, then you can often just use a pair of commas instead.)
ChatGPT mostly uses em-dashes wrong. It uses them as an all-purpose glue to join clauses. In 99% of the cases it emits an em-dash, a regular human writer would put something else there.
Examples just from TFA:
• "Yes — I can help with that." This should be a comma.
• "It wasn’t just big — it was big at the right age." This should be a semicolon.
• "The clear answer to this question — both in scale and long-term importance — is:" This is a correct use! (It wouldn't even work as a regular parenthetical.)
• "Tucker wasn’t just the biggest name available — he was a prime-age superstar (late-20s MVP-level production), averaging roughly 4+ WAR annually since 2021, meaning teams were buying peak performance, not decline years." Semicolon here, or perhaps a colon.
• "Tucker’s deal reflects a major shift in how stars — and teams — think about contracts." This should be a parenthetical.
• "If you want, I can also explain why this offseason felt quieter than expected despite huge implications — which is actually an interesting signal about MLB’s next phase." This one should, oddly enough, be an ellipsis. (Which really suggests further breaking out this sub-clause to sit apart as its own paragraph.)
• "First of all — you’re not broken, and it’s not just you." This should be a colon.
Well, that's the thing about the em-dash - it has always been usable as a "swiss army knife" punctuation mark.
Strictly speaking, an em-dash is never needed; it could always be a comma or semicolon or parentheses instead. Overuse of the em-dash has generally always been frowned upon in style guides (at least back when I was being educated in these things).
Strictly speaking — an em-dash is never needed; it could always be a comma — or semicolon — or parentheses — instead. Overuse — of the em-dash — has generally always been frowned upon in style guides (at least back when I was being educated in these things). ——
Aw man, I was always an avid user of it. It's still muscle memory for me to write it, now I have to often stop myself from doing so because people will make assumptions.
I must have missed something: why are people moving from OpenAI? Since they released gpt-5.3-codex I'be been using it and claude with opus-4.6 and Codex has always been better, more accurate, less prone to allucinations. I can do more with a 20$ OpenAI pland than with a Claude Max 100
More specifically OpenAI has agreed to be used for domestic mass surveillance and for autonomous (no human in the loop anywhere) drone attacks. ChatGPT will decide which building to destroy, and then it will be destroyed.
This is cool but also it requires people to be quite knowledgeable about VCs, I know a lot of VCs but can say there was still a good amount that I didn't know there which means I won't vote for them. Also, this should be a ShowHN, no?
We undoubtedly have the best grounding model and framework / harness to get medium - long horizon tasks done, please do try it out for yourself and let us know, we love to talk to our users
How much do we think that number is? I don't think we can determine it from the number of downloads it went down by? I prefer absolute numbers to percentages
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