Comment by retsibsi

Sounds like you see me as an untrustworthy source, so all I can suggest is that you look into this yourself. Search for "--" in pre-LLM forum postings and see how many hits you get.

Here are my pre-2020 HN comments, with 3 double hyphens in 8 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21768030

Note that I wasn't searching directly for the double hyphen, which doesn't seem to work -- the first result just happened to contain one. If I'm covering for the Anthropic guy, I could be lying about the process by which I found that comment, but I think you should at least see this as sufficient reason to question your assumptions and do some searches of your own.