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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2491 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 13, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I have discovered, by dint of fucking around, that SwiftKey keyboard for Android allows me to insert em-dashes with relative ease. I'm torn about using them—on one end, they're more expressive than standard hyphens or semi-colons; but on the other, in this climate, that invites accusations of AI writing.

I'm entirely fine with "it's not X, it's Y" becoming deprecated, it's a rather boring turn of phrase, but I'm still annoyed by the fact that I didn't even notice em-dashes as a distinct option before they went out of style.

Am I truly worried? Uh, maybe? My writing style is distinctive enough that it's not trivial to replicate using an LLM. They absolutely won't do it by default.

I use - and … all the time.

I’m unsure my random thoughts will be picked up as AI.

I use ... all the time

Ok boomer

Goshdarn whippersnappers… they used to have RESPECT for proper punctuation⋮ back in my day the teacher would hit the back of your hand with a ruler if you put spaces inside your ellipses⋱

Using regular dashes is fine, one of the reasons that em dashes are so indicative is that no human ever bothers to use the proper type of dash

Real punctuation:

  • Hyphen-minus: -

  • Ersatz em dash: --

Mental illness:

  • Hyphen: ‐

  • Minus sign: −

  • En dash: –

  • Em dash: —

t. sufficiently mentally ill to use everything but the hyphen

Hot take: If it's not part of ASCII, it's not a real character; Unicode was a mistake.

I'm ok with Unicode to the extent that it is used to contain actual languages. But emoji can fuck right off from my text encoding, especially now that they have been hijacked for political purposes.

I thought I was the only one who felt this way.

ℝ is perhaps the most real character.

UTF-16 and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. But having typographically correct characters and the ability to casually mix languages are very nice.

−10,000 social-credit points for hurting the feelings of the Chinese people.

I had to check the page source to see how you did that. So now I can do arithmetic 7−5=2 and number ranges 1914–1918 and — wait for it — felis‐parenthesis :-)

More of these "HTML named character references" can be found here.

I also use the correct punctuation when writing in LaTeX, though not anywhere else. The mental illness label is accurate, though.

LaTeX users will probably type three hyphens for an em dash.

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