Comment by mmooss
11 hours ago
The problem is not the Internet but the author and those like them, acting like social network participants in following the herd - embracing despair and hopelessness, and victimhood - they don't realize they're the problem, not the victims. Another problem is their ignorance and their post-truth attitude, not caring whether their words are actually accurate:
> What if people DO USE em-dashes in real life?
They do and have, for a long time. I know someone who for many years (much longer than LLMs have been available) has complained about their overuse.
> hence, you often see -- in HackerNews comments, where the author is probably used to Markdown renderer
Using two dashes for an em-dash goes back to typewriter keyboards, which had only what we now call printable ASCII and where it was much harder add to add non-ASCII characters than it is on your computer - no special key combos. (Which also means that em-dashes existed in the typewriter era.)
On a typewriter, you'd be able to just adjust the carriage position to make a continuous dash or underline or what have you. Typically I see XXXX over words instead of strike-throughs for typewritten text meanwhile.
Most typefaces make consecutive underlines continuous by default. I've seen leading books on publishing, including iirc the Chicago Manual of Style, say to type two hypens and the typesetter will know to substitute an em-dash.
How is the author the problem? What is the problem, in your view?