Tangent: the thing I find most annoying about ChatGPT's use of em-dashes is that it never even uses them for the one thing they're best suited for. ChatGPT's em-dashes could almost always be replaced with a colon or a comma.
But the true non-redundant-syntax use of em-dashes in English prose, is in the embedding into a sentence of self-interruptive 'joiner' sub-sentences that can themselves bear punctuated sub-clauses. "X—or Y, maybe—but never Z" sorta sentences.
These things are spoken entirely differently than — and on the page, they read entirely differently to — regular parenthetical-bearing sentences.
No, seriously, compare/contrast: "these things are spoken entirely differently than (and on the page, they read entirely differently to) regular parenthetical-bearing sentences."
Different cadence; different pacing; possibly a different shade of meaning (insofar as the emotional state of the author/speaker is part of the conveyed message.)
But, for some reason, ChatGPT just never constructs these kinds of self-interruptive sentences. I'm not sure it even knows how.
Personally, I do not see the distinction here between the two sentences, but your last paragraph got me thinking: should we be using parenthetical, self-interruptive clauses? When we are speaking extemporaneously, we may need them, but when writing, could we rearrange things so they are not needed?
One reason I came up with for doing so is to acknowledge a caveat or answer a question that the author anticipates will enter a typical reader's mind at that point in the narrative.
If that is the case, then it seems to me that when an author does this, they are making use of their theory of mind, anticipating what the reader may be thinking as they read, and acknowledging that it will likely differ from what they, as the author, is thinking of (and knows about the topic) at that point.
If this makes any sense, then we might ask if at least a rudimentary theory of mind is needed to effectively use parenthetical clauses, or can it be faked through the rote application of empirically-learned style rules? LLMs have shown they can do the latter, but excessive use might be signalling a lack of understanding.
> These things are spoken entirely differently than — and on the page, they read entirely differently to — regular parenthetical-bearing sentences.
> No, seriously, compare/contrast: "these things are spoken entirely differently than (and on the page, they read entirely differently to) regular parenthetical-bearing sentences."
Those are spoken the same way, they read the same way, and they mean the same thing.
They do mean the same thing, but they have different moods. With the em-dashes it's self-interjection that foregrounds the detour, but with parentheses it's, well... parenthetical.
Aside: it's probably just style (maybe some style guides call for the way you did it), but using em-dashes for this purpose with whitespace on each side of them looks/feels wrong to me. Anyone know if that's regional or something?
Not universally. I disagree, they read differently to me, and I'd say them differently.
Parentheses to me always feel like the speaker switching to camera #3 while holding a hand up to their mouth conspiratorially.
Em dashes are same-camera with maybe some kind of gesticulation such as pointing or hands up, palms down, then palms up when terminating the emdash clause.
Is this maybe a thing like how only designers are aware of kerning? These read / sound very different to me, and to everyone I've brought up the subject with (who admittedly are in a certain bubble of people who either write professionally, or "do things" with their voices, or both.)
• The length of the verbal pause is different. (It's hard to quantify this, as it's relative to your speaking rate, which can fluctuate even within a sentence. But I can maybe describe it in terms of meter in poetry/songwriting: when allowed to, a parenthetical pause may be read to act as a one-syllable rest in the meter of a poem, often helpfully shifting the words in the parenthetical over to properly end-align a pair of rhyming [but otherwise misaligned] feet. An em-dash, on the other hand, acts as only a half-syllable rest; it therefore offsets the meter of the words in the subclause that follow, until the closing em-dash adds another half-syllable rest to set things right. This is in part why ChatGPT's favored sentences, consisting of "peer" clauses joined by a single em-dash, are somewhat grating to mentally read aloud; you end up "off" by a half-syllable after them, unless you can read ahead far enough to notice that there's no closing em-dash in the sentence, and so allow the em-dash-length pause to read as a semicolon-length pause instead.)
• The voicing of the last word before the opening parenthesis / first em-dash starts is different. (paren = slow down for last few words before the paren, then suddenly speed up, and override the word's normal tonal emphasis with a last-syllable-emphasized rising tone + de-voicing of vowels; em-dash = slow down and over-enunciate last few words before the em-dash, then read the last syllable before the em-dash louder with a overridden falling voiced tone)
• The speed at which, and vocal register with which, the aside / subclause is read is different. (parens = lowest register you can comfortably speak at, slightly quieter, slightly faster than you were delivering the toplevel sentence; em-dashes = delivery same speed or slower, first few syllables given overridden voiced emphasis with rising tone from low to normal, and last few syllables given overridden voiced emphasis with falling tone from normal to low)
• The voicing of the first words after the subclause ends is different. (closing paren = resume speaking precisely as if the parenthetical didn't happen; second em-dash = give a fast, flat-low nasally voiced performance of the first one or two syllables after the em-dash.)
To describe the overall effect of these tweaks:
A parenthetical should be heard as if embedded into the sentence very deliberately, but delivered as an aside / tangent, smaller and off-to-the-side, almost an "inlined footnote", trying to not distract from the point, nor to "blow the listener's stack" by losing the thread of the toplevel point in considering it.
An em-dash-enclosed interruptive subclause should read like the speaker has realized at the last moment that they have two related points to make; that they are seemingly proceeding, after a stutter, to finish the sentence with the subclause; but that they are then "backing up" and finishing the same sentence again with the toplevel clause. The verbalization should be able to be visualized as the outer sentence being "squashed in" to "make room" for the interruptive subclause; and the interruptive subclause "squashing at the edges" [tonally up or down, though usually down] to indicate its own "squeezed in" beginning and end edges.
Note that this isn't subjective/anecdotal descriptions from how I speak myself. These are actually my attempt to distill vocal coaching guidelines I've learned for:
• live sight-reading of teleprompter lines containing these elements, as a TV show host / news anchor
• default-assumed directorial expectations for lines containing elements like these, when giving screenplay readings as a [voice] actor (before any directorial "notes" come into play)
I'm not a native speaker, I don't do work with my voice, and my English writing is confined to work – almost always with other ESLs – and short comments on the Internet; but what you write feels correct.
> Drilling the average student on trying to make their language superficially “smarter” is a comically bad idea, and is indeed the opposite of what almost all of them need.
I mean, it seems like it could work if you get to follow it up with a "de-education" step. Phase 1: force them to widen their vocabulary by using as much of it as possible. Phase 2: teach them which words are actually appropriate to use.
The author of the article has a woodworking business (linked on the bottom of their homepage: https://gospodaria.com/). So they do need fast turnaround times for profitability.
However, as they mention, they do this work from home, and they don't really have a good setup for VOC protection. From the article:
> In the winter months I carve indoors and have to finish the pieces indoors as well, and the horrible solvent smell fills my house for a whole day.
A jury-rigged fume hood will work if you're doing one item at a time, but it doesn't work if you're doing work in batches.
(I get the impression that the best next step for the author, would be to consider building themselves a humidity-controlled drying shed, which would live at least a few feet from their building's air envelope. Doesn't need to be anything fancy; build an ordinary shed, and then get the small-space HVAC equipment from e.g. a marijuana grow-tent supplier.)
I think they mean big-D "Distributed", i.e. in the sense that a DHT is Distributed. Decentralized in both a logical and political sense.
A big DynamoDB/Spanner deployment is great while you can guarantee some benevolent (or just not-malevolent) org around to host the deployment for everyone else. But technologies of this type do not have any answer for the key problem of "ensure the infra survives its own founding/maintaining org being co-opted + enshittified by parties hostile to the central purpose of the network."
Blockchains — and all the overhead and pain that comes with them — are basically what you get when you take the classical small-D distributed database design, and add the components necessary to get that extra property.
Apparently Amazon is starting to do something about this. They've recently introduced two filtering toggles:
- a "Premium Brands" toggle, that seemingly filters down to just a hand-curated list of known brands per category
- a "Top Brands" toggle, that seemingly applies some heuristic to filter out listings by companies that haven't accrued enough aggregate "experience points" (some formula like "product-listing-age times product rating", per listing?) across all their listings. Which makes it actively counterproductive to create a new random six-letter fly-by-night brand for each listing, while still allowing new brands to organically "grow into" relevance.
Maybe they could add a filter which removes items from brands with gibberish titles. No, I don't want to buy something from zxutringly or qorduger or any similar nonsense
Define "gibberish title." It's harder than you think!
For example, there's a (Shenzhen-based, but well-established in the US market) 3D printer vendor called "Elegoo." Their name was (apparently...) chosen as an abbreviation of "Electronics with a Googol applications." Does your filter block them?
chinese speakers in particular have a hard time recognizing what kind of names make sense in the english language. mind you, we would have an equally hard time to come up with chinese names that don't sound weird to native speakers.
I don't think they're objecting to the idea of a bench as an ultimate fallback; I think they're objecting to the idea that there isn't, during such "internal layoffs", a default automatic reassignment of all headcount to other teams. In such cases, you would only land on the bench if you refuse the automatic reassignment.
Have you considered dropping by in person to your nearest computer recycler/refurbisher? As a teen I worked at one, and the boxes and boxes of RAM sticks pulled from scrapped machines (usually scrapped due to bad main boards) made a strong impression. They tend to not even put the highest-spec stuff they pull into anything, as refurbished machines are mostly sold/donated in quantity (to schools and the like) and big customers want standardized SKUs with interchangeable specs for repairability more than they want performance. Workers at these places are often invited to build personal machines to take home out of these “too good” parts — and yet there’s so much that they can’t possibly use it all up that way. If someone showed up asking if they could have some DDR3, they might literally just let you dig through the box and then sell it to you by weight!
> at these places are often invited to build personal machines to take home out of these “too good” parts — and yet there’s so much that they can’t possibly use it all up that way.
I work in the refurb division of an e-waste recycling company. Those days are over for now. We're listing RAM that will sell for more than scrap value (about $2 per stick), which is at least 4 GB DDR3. And we got a list of people who will buy all we got.
> And they're effectively saying they've had enough of running call centers, tracing lost parcels, weirdo customers who show up at the factory, running marketing campaigns etc.
When this is a company's core complaint, then the usual strategy for getting out of the D2C business (without losing D2C revenue) is finding a channel partner willing to absorb the dealflow. I.e. turning your B2C channel into a single B2B(2C) enterprise customer.
I mean, to take that one step further, if the underlying process-node technology (e.g. EUV) were nationalized, then you an entire nation-state's budget (and ability to get cheap loans) could be thrown at the problem of rapid horizontal buildout of fab capacity. Economics similar to nuclear power generation.
Exactly. And even if it ultimately doesn't turn a profit (which, who knows, it probably will turn a profit) you've still created a pretty favorable circumstance for chip manufacturers.
There's a reason why basically only Intel does inhouse fabrication and even they have had to rely out outsourcing it.
Tangent: the thing I find most annoying about ChatGPT's use of em-dashes is that it never even uses them for the one thing they're best suited for. ChatGPT's em-dashes could almost always be replaced with a colon or a comma.
But the true non-redundant-syntax use of em-dashes in English prose, is in the embedding into a sentence of self-interruptive 'joiner' sub-sentences that can themselves bear punctuated sub-clauses. "X—or Y, maybe—but never Z" sorta sentences.
These things are spoken entirely differently than — and on the page, they read entirely differently to — regular parenthetical-bearing sentences.
No, seriously, compare/contrast: "these things are spoken entirely differently than (and on the page, they read entirely differently to) regular parenthetical-bearing sentences."
Different cadence; different pacing; possibly a different shade of meaning (insofar as the emotional state of the author/speaker is part of the conveyed message.)
But, for some reason, ChatGPT just never constructs these kinds of self-interruptive sentences. I'm not sure it even knows how.
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