Em dashes are amazing

in order to inform people that im not a bot/llm i -- outside of giving up on autocorrect -- use two dashes instead of one solid line because LLMs were using them a lot.

unfortunately microsoft (specifically outlook) and libreoffice have chosen to replace them with a proper em dash even if you turn off autocorrect which is bonkers-levels of infuriating.

if i turn off something it /should be turned off/, not just be kinda turned off; y'know?

If you love em dashes and commas you will also love this https://archive.ph/0dxpW from the newyorker by Mary Norris.

I was never a big reader as a kid, but I fell in love with the New Yorker, much later in life, where I kind of adopted their idea of: "Once you understand them, you can read through long sentences very easily". That is the newyorker style of writing. One falls into two buckets, you love that kind of writing or you hate it. If its the latter, you should adopt em-dashes and commas to improve your writing style.

I love ellipses, it really captures that even when writing Rust documentation my mood is existential and disaffected... like a new grad in the pool, slowly burning under the noon sun on an inflatable lounger, too dazed and decadent to tap even a finger for their next paloma.

//! This is mission critical, don't remove...

I think Em dashes are fine in fiction where you're listening to someone's train of thought or something sudden happens, but they are really annoying in non-fiction.

Apparently the first use of the hyphen disagrees:

> The first known documentation of the hyphen is in the grammatical works of Dionysius Thrax. At the time, hyphenation was joining two pieces of text that might otherwise be read as two separate words by a low tie mark. This was necessary due to the ambiguity inherent in the lack of word spacing. In Greek these marks were known as enotikon, officially romanized as a hyphen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyphen