Remember my words: The em dash will be skynets fall!
Emdashes on this chart are the Jaws theme of vibeshittification.
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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?
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.
People slowly learned to use their keyboards for proper typography?
That was a good one.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
I’ve been using linux for 18 years, but since reviewing the Open Slopware list I’ve been making a lot of changes.
FreeBSD ticks almost every box I need it to. It runs Plasma, it runs Steam/Proton (through a thin compatibility layer that enables a lot of other linux software), it can be set up immutably and has superior containerization natively via jails…
But there is no support for changing voltage or clock rate on any amd gpu (maybe any gpu at all) and no driver support for my newer amd gpu at all.
It honestly feels like how linux used to feel back in the day 😅
I don’t think I’m gonna jump ship just yet. The recent ai code fiasco that happened in the linux kernel (race condition, regression, vacation) was averted by the team of talented human developers who reviewed Linus’ code. I am choosing to have faith that it will be ok for a while… given there are few alternatives.
That being said, I think I might finally be ready to hop on the fuck-sysyemd train. I was able to look past the megalomaniacal tendencies of the dev because the tools were so convenient, but the AI PRs and code review pushes me over the edge. I am gonna configure a daily driver in Artix soon.
feels like how linux used to feel back in the day 😅
…
I am choosing to have faith that it will be ok for a while… given there are few alternatives.
There are many alternatives, if you’re keen for “feels like how linux used to feel back in the day”.
I nostalgically fetishise similarly… and look to the likes of wildly alternative kernels (e.g. ironclad, not just hurd), and graphics servers (e.g. pheonix, not just xlibre), etc. … And then there’s nostalgic fetish beyond that, to 8-bit, to ceefax, to basic, to rubber keys… XD maybe not all so practical or wise-learning.
Last I tried, BSD didn’t like the WiFi on my laptop, so it’s currently a no-go for me.
Gonna survive on Linux for now, but at least I know I have a potential refuge elsewhere.
can you elaborate on the recent fiasco you mentioned? I totally missed the news on that
Linus admitted he uses LLMs sometimes, so now the most trustworthy developer in the history of computers is now being shat on and raged about by people who probably couldn’t write a hello world app in any programming language. They’re just parroting the idea that Linux is vibecoded now, but it isn’t, and if anything they should be heartened by the recent decision to raise the bar for kernel contributors. Instead, they’re pretending Linus and other contributors aren’t trustworthy at all, based solely on a desire to feel outrage. When people correct them on these lies they’re spreading, no one ever admits they are wrong and stops spreading it, they just don’t respond to comments like that and continue writing them elsewhere.
Tldr; people are stupid.
You didn’t answer the question at all.
I take it you’re another outrage junkie who cannot help but tell everyone the kernel is vibecoded. Your feedback is only valuable in that it communicated that
Completely incorrect.
Linus introduced a race condition and a regression with a AI generated code, then handed off fixing the problem to someone else because he was going on vacation.
Fiasco might have been an exaggeration, but it’s still pretty lame.
Not what happened. I’m not digging it up but this story has been debunked repeatedly
Literally you got hit with an linux mailing list saying this is what happened?
Those words don’t make sense
(you’re welcome to just point folks to a debunking)
People are welcome to stop spreading the falsehoods. In every thread where this is said (including this one), the truth is pointed out but those spreading it couldn’t care less. Just scroll. Others are pointing out the details here just like every other place.
Yeah there’s 240 comments here. I’m not shoveling through that.
pretty lame
lame /lām/
adjective
Disabled so that movement, especially walking, is difficult or impossible.
:/
This is why dictionaries list more than 1 definition and you shouldn’t stop at the first one:
- weak; inadequate; unsatisfactory; clumsy.
a lame excuse.
- Slang: Sometimes Disparaging and Offensive. awkward, dull, stupid, or uninteresting.
- Slang: Sometimes Disparaging and Offensive. out of touch with modern fads or trends; unsophisticated.
People who write this dictionary should listen to the public more maybe. Lame doesn’t mean what you wrote for at least 25 years.
Great
This doesn’t make me nervous at all…
nothing to be nervous about, its literally software engineering and project management 101, programmer writes code reviewer catches bugs, nothing goes to production. this happens all the time, has happened in the linux kernel way before LLMs were a thing
It shouldn’t, because it’s a lie.
This was caught during review, so nothing was “introduced” quite yet. And there’s no indication that Linus wouldn’t have produced a race condition (a notoriously more easy to miss kind of bug) without the use of AI tools.
It’s only being exaggerated so much because he used AI.
I could attribute the race condition just as much to their use of the C language as to AI.
Race conditions I’m pretty sure aren’t language specific. Rust can have them too.
Yes, but the tools provided by Rust:
- Prevent most common ones via aliasing^mutability, Send and Sync marker traits, etc.
- Require explicitly marking the cases not handled by this, e.g. unsafe features require an
unsafe {}block to be used.
Yea he basically said “This seems to work but is slop, lead Dev, make it real.”
That is something I am surprisingly okay with. Quickly figuring out if something is feasible is good, and doing it in a back of the napkin style is the norm, even without LLMs. Of course then you need to do it properly, without falling into the trap of reimplementing the slop.
Race conditions are not unusual, and it was caught during review, so there’s really no problem here.
I recommend you looking at RedoxOS. It’s still not stable, but it’s evolving fast and has an anti-AI instance. Also it’s insanely efficient and optimized.
I use Gentoo with OpenRC btw.
Important software that caught buggy code from Linus at review stage? Riight, we are all gonna die, sure
It’s not just Linux, it’s GNU + Linux
It says Linux Kernel
🟥 Linux Kernel — CORRECTED: NOT GNU/Linux
It’s a joke about common LLM-gen-AI text patterns
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as GNU + Linux, is in fact, Linux
1000 day intervals… Nice. MM/DD/YY… Not nice.
8601 4 LYF
Programmers don’t have gang signs we just recite rfc.
4 EVA
Why even bother with days at this scale?
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
This reads like Haiku
Haiku’s are easy
But sometimes they don’t make sense
RefrigeratorIt 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
Turns out AI learned from humans, who learn from the writings they’re exposed to
It’s an endless cycle, and we’re only in the first revolution
Removed by mod
And to think, I spent all that time learning, striving, to overcome the dyslexic and low-verbal-aptitude hurdles… only to end up looking like the adversary. A-ha! I knew school was anti-human bunk! XD
On the plus side, drunk people would have a MUCH harder time starting arguments…
Removed by mod
Quite the opposite, but I know they can’t type for shit. If they can’t type a coherent message, it’s easy to ignore.
Ya except the internet called everyone grammar nazis for caring.
LLMs are really good at language, it’s their whole thing. If you tell them to make spelling errors, they’ll do it just as easily as they can copy the tone and cadence of MLK or Trump speeches
Also, please no, I’m so bad at spelling
Greta jda
I did that over a year ago. It was always misinterpreting what I was trying to say and fucking it up, so this is honestly way better.
Cold dead god-damned hands
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 *.”
Is that graph actually real/based on data?
Yep, I cloned the git repo and wrote a script to step through commits a week at a time and count the total em dashes in the repo at each point in time
Could you divide this by the total number of lines. That would help tell the rate of change better.
git grep -I '—' master | wc -ljust did a quick check, my graph looks similar.
How does it look for double hyphens? I would expect those to be more common in code comments (before the LLMageddon at least) as an em dash just looks like a hyphen in the typically displayed monospace type.
People are so silly. 700 em dashes… Linux is a big project with contributors from all over the world. People probably use LLMs to redact comments when English is not their native language. And yes, people are using LLMs to help them with submissions but there’s 0 proof that any code made it to the kernel without being reviewed properly. This allergy to anything LLM related makes you all look like vegans - a lot of posturing that has 0 real impact. If you’re so disgusted by AI and can’t tell the difference between AI slop and AI assisted code just stop using computers because there’s no way you will be able to do anything without touching AI in one way or another.
What’s with the stupid comparison with the vegans? Vegans have non zero impact towards environment sustainability and their posturing is entirely valid, more so now, given the state of the world.
Your phrasing tells a lot more about your mindset though. A lot of words, 0 substance.
-signed, a non-vegan with a lot respect for vegans
P.S. I am also not against LLM assistance, but also know AI-bros are not to be trusted. With all the money pouring in and so much slop being pushed onto everyone, they will cash out one way or the other. And who’s going to be left holding the bag of all the chaos they’ve caused?
Vegans have non zero impact towards environment sustainability
Not eating meat or eating less meat has non zero impact. Bragging about being vegan and avoiding things like honey does not.
Effectively nobody “brags” about being vegan. It’s not a stretch to conceive that those who have become vegan due to ethical or climate based concerns might have some motivation to be vocal and convince others to go vegan. The most profound way a person can have an impact on the environment/animal welfare after becoming a vegan is to convince another person to become a vegan.
I know plenty of vegans that will not eat anything “contaminated” with animal products, no matter how those were sources. I also know people who simply avoid animal products. There’s a big difference. Simply limiting consumption of animal products as much possible is normal thing people do out of ethical and environmental concerts. Refusing to eat already prepared dish because it has some animal based ingredient is simply wasteful. Same with LLMs. There’s a difference between AI slop and LLM assisted coding. People who refuse to see the difference are as annoying as overzealous vegans.
If youre interested in context:
After avoiding meat for enough years, contamination with corpses of dead animals or their fluids* becomes very unpalatable.
That might be hard to conceive for a person who views it as tasty food rather than body parts, but so it goes.
I surprised myself recently when i accidentally ordered a chicken burger at a drive through. Nobody would have known if id eaten it. it was already prepared/dead/whatever.
I couldn’t do it. While logically i know its edible, it registered akin to eating bugs or something. So i went without lunch
* ‘dramatic’ vegan language used for clarity on how this is perceived when no longer ‘food’.
I find it hard to believe that people will dislike the taste of every possible animal product from every kind of meat to honey, milk, cheese and medicine derived from animals.
When someone starts viewing food commonly consumed by billions of people in the world and forming part of human diet for thousands of years as disgusting body parts it’s more of psychological issue than a matter of something being unpalatable.
You must work hard to have takes this bad, I applaud you!
Tell me you run out of arguments without saying you run out of arguments.
Science says otherwise.
But also Linus’ Torvald’s position on LLMs is that they’re just another tool, and that there’s no reason to arbitrarily exclude them from your toolkit, no? Not saying I agree with him, but I do think this is his position, and I feel like it would affect how people work on the linux kernel.
How does that affect the way code is reviewed and approved?
You don’t think Torvalds has an influence on that?
Soom we’ll all be on omarchy
You mean involuntarily? Because fuck that guy.
Yes, I mean that Omarchy is AI slop and this meme says that there is more AI in Linux. Let’s use “Omarchy” as a derogative for all AI slop in Linux. Like, “this new update is so Omarchy, I hate it!”
It’s not even close to being similar. Omarchy is not (just) AI slop, it’s fascists slop
The venn diagram of ai slop and fascist slop has a lot of overlap.
True but diluting the war on faschs onto anything AI slop is not gonna help either case.
Fuck omarchy
All my homies hate omarchy
You can get a lot done when you’ve got 29 months in a year
?
D/M/Y > M/D/Y
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.
NO. You need the a character per digit and you always want the leading 0 shown.
YYYY-MM-DD
At least it makes my folders really easy to sort through…
Only if you leave the leading zeros!
…or your file manager is smart enough to do numeric sorting
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.
you should also always specify YYYY-MM-DD because often M and D ignores leading zeros, YY means the 2 digit suffix, and Y… well, i don’t even know what that is but i’m sure it’s something less specific than YYYY
if we’re going to be picky about being clear about things, let’s be truly clear about things
Yep, I do it in every format. Just kept it short for readability.
YYYYY would be something like “The Year of Our Lord, Two-Thousand and Twenty-Six” (or probably just “Twenty Twenty-Six”, but the other is more ridiculous so I’ll go with that)
Y would just be “6” but I can’t think of any context where that would ever be used
There is only YYYYMMDD
sadly for everyone that’s factually incorrect, but the phrase DD/MM/YYYY > MM/DD/YYYY does not preclude YYYYMMDD > DD/MM/YYYY > MM/DD/YYYY
your pedantery is apreciated.
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.
The dates below the graph
What about them? They’re normal dates.
Pretty much only in the US.
Some BS AI “visionaries” keep blurting.
Yeah sorry about that, was the default format in my spreadsheet software and I didn’t think to change it
