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Actually, in an ancient and venerable markup language that's still in wide use in certain not-unimportant communities:

- = hyphen

-- = n-dash

--- = m-dash

You may notice that he didn't use the double or triple hyphen annotations either - which is usually only used in contexts such as latex, where a post-processor goes over the output for display.

I like to use a lazy variant -- it's not a double dash, or a weirdly written plus, it's a an em-dash that says "I don't even have this key on my keyboard, are you actually using alt-codes or what am I missing?". Not with a shout or a whisper, but with the quiet courage of just being -- but not an incomplete representation of a whole, but rather the fullness of that very distillation of honest, simple pragmatism. Not less, just different.

The above isn't slop. It's shit though!

In fact, I'd say it's a dead giveaway for "human impersonating AI impersonating humans". Using the hyphen as an em dash screams