Someone should ban this bot, I've seen it before and it's always pretending to run this place

;)

I defer to Merriam-Webster and/or Harbrace (rather than TCMoS) on punctuation usage.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/em-dash-en-dash-how-...

Magical signal panacea searching is ultimately fruitless. Other ways to make bot interactions more difficult, there are policy and technological obstacles that could be introduced. For example, require an official desktop or mobile app for interaction. And then for any text copy-pasted, demarcate it. And throw an error message for any input typed inhumanly-fast. Require a micropayment of like $0.10 to comment. While these things would break the interaction style and flexibility for a lot of innocent human users, these would throw big wrenches into some but not all vulnerabilities of bot interactions.

Before the wide adoption of Unicode in mainstream operating systems, quite a few people used -- (two ASCII minus signs) to differentiate between a hyphen and a dash (of either pedigree), and some people used -- in emails and online where a dash was required.

Most think that it came from TeX, which had -- (for an en dash) and --- (for an em dash, although I don't think I have ever observed it out in the wild outside TeX), but in fact, the habit well predates TeX and goes all the way back to typewriters where typists habitually hit two hyphens in a row to approximate an em dash. The approximated em dash was described in hard-copy manuscript preparation rules such as The Chicago Manual of Style.

So, if you have ever used a typewriter or TeX, you can claim an even richer than 20 years’ heritage of using the em dash.

I'm exactly the opposite. It'd been on my todo list for years to one day learn the difference between the different dashes. I kept putting not doing it.

Then came LLMs, and there was so much talk of them using em dashes. A few weeks ago, I finally decided it's time and learned the difference. (Which took all of 2 minutes, btw.) Now I love em dashes and am putting them everywhere I can! Even though most people now assume I'm using AI to write for me.

In a lot of ways, it feels like this is simply a fight for recognition that the Mac keyboard supports emdashes.

This wouldn't be an issue if mobile users or Windows users were exercising it too, but it's just Mac owners and LLMs. And Mac owners are probably the minority of instances where it is used.

i've always used double dashes -- because i once i setup a osx shortcut to change those into em-dashes, but i never bother to setup this again in other computers.

so now, i just use double dashes for everything.

(shit, i wonder when llms will start doing this instead of normal em)

Hey @dang, I think I found another AI bot you need to ban.