Giving up the emdash hurts the English majors, but I have a challenge for all Markdown jockeys, myself included:
To signal your humanity, you must forswear the bullet point.
Discussion
Loading...
@mttaggart You can pry them from my cold, dead wordprocessors. Say that again, and I'll create a whole new bullet point, just to shoot AI with
Context: I was set off by this slopshack. Obviously machine-generated, with a seeming allergy to paragraphs. Every article is like this.
https://otecosystem.com/best-20-ot-security-controls-to-protect-industrial-operations/
@mttaggart I'd like to call attention to AI slop's choice of New Jersey as a better indicator.
2 media
@badsamurai @mttaggart I knew New Jersey wasn't real.
Is @chillybot even real?
@mttaggart I spent the afternoon working on my exam solutions. I put lots of bullet points in, indicating how many points the graders (markers, in UK-speak) should award for each kind of answer: if this, then this many points, and so on. I challenge (with a moderate amount of seriousness only) anyone to provide me a clearer way to do this.
Perhaps I should do an itemized list with different symbols for the bullets. (A numeric list, à la \enumerate, would be very confusing.)
@nxskok I think there's a fair distinction to be made between, like, functional writing and "prose." Obviously itemized lists have a place. Blog posts and articles often can do without, and when a post is chock full of them, I now have every reason to doubt its human provenance.
@mttaggart We need a dislike in Mastodon just so I can react accordingly to this
@mttaggart Something something my cold dead fingers
@mttaggart fuck you take it from my cold dead hands
@NosirrahSec 2A doesn't protect these bullets
@mttaggart NOO, I can't give up the em dash for bullet points, I'm just used to it
@johntimaeus @mttaggart @scottwilson that's a quite specific usecase
@mttaggart @johntimaeus @scottwilson
I taught academic writing, and paragraphing as part of that. I'm kind of amazed that people could do ten years of schooling and still not have a grasp of the paragraph.
Organizing your ideas is (as you know) an important part of writing, and I think it's an issue with the 'free pass' that we give to folk using AI to 'plan' an essay - they bypass developing that core skill.
Does make for a little ugly when you're listing the STIG requirements for separate file systems:
/, /boot/, /root/, /var/, /var/log/, /var/log/audit/, ....
Double column bullets has its place.
@johntimaeus @scottwilson You think leaning into summarization is gonna help with that?
Make paragraphs great again.
He did have an audience with an attention span longer than a methed up fruit fly
@cR0w @scottwilson No GIFs, but a medical prescription for booze so win some lose some
@scottwilson Winston Churchill did this without a single bullet point. I think we can probably survive.
We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”