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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2645 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.

FUTO Keyboard has this as well, plus swipe typing, minus Microsoft selling your input data. Worth checking out. I can just long-press H and the em-dash is the first symbol option.

It certainly looks promising, but looking at the reviews suggest it's not as polished as SwiftKey, especially in swipe typing and autocorrect. SwiftKey has a very useful clipboard manager I can't do with too, and I'm not particularly fussed about the privacy concerns.

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