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Comment by jbaber | Hacker News Reader

Y'know, I've been writing double dashes and having them converted into em dashes about 50% of the time on whatever platform I'm using for decades. It's bizarre that this is suddenly supposed to be a shibboleth.

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Have you ever considered you might be an LLM?

Apparently the new ageist insult beyond "boomer" is "double-spacer" -- people who were taught in school to always follow the period at the end of a sentence with two spaces when composing the next sentence. If you went to elementary school after the internet became widespread, you are not likely to have been taught that. So double-spacing has now also become a shibboleth, albeit indicating the typist's age, distinguishing early millennials and Xers, who are now entering middle/old age, from the younger generations.

> Apparently the new ageist insult beyond "boomer" is "double-spacer

Says who? I've seen "boomer"everywhere but it's the first time I've heard about that one.

Right? I've never associated "double-spacer" with boomer. Maybe anally retentive? Someone who is trying too hard? The only thing I associate with boomers is ALL-CAPS writing. Which I assume is a holdover from typewriter days. But I kind of like ALL CAPS. It conveys some level of importance to the message.

It's not about trying, but people who learned double spacing when it made sense (monospace environments) and never unlearned when it didn't matter anymore (variable width typesetting). It's very age specific and a bit culture specific.

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