If software is eating the World, what does it mean when only a small self-selected group of people understand that software?
Do we gain more by having more people understand software? Do some risks get mitigated? I'd argue yes on both counts. And that's why I encourage people to get their kids to poke around with Scratch and maybe some Python. It's why smart people doing liberal arts degrees at Harvard still want to go and do CS50.
Cars are the primary mode of transportation but we don't expect everyone to be car mechanics. Some people pride themselves on being able to change their own oil and fix minor issues, which is admirable, but is obviously never going to be the norm.
Most people don't want to learn to code because it simply doesn't interest them as a subject, a perfectly valid way of living your life.
I'm not suggesting everyone becomes a professional software engineer.
So, no, not everyone needs to be a car mechanic. But everyone who wants to drive a car needs to learn how to drive it safely, and would benefit from checking the oil, tire pressures, and knowing something about how their car worked to keep it in good, safe working order. If the only people who know all those things are professional mechanics, we're in a worse place.
Not everyone is a mathematician but everyone learns Maths. And now a lot more people use Maths in their day to day lives as a result.
Most professionals work with data but have low technical literacy. Imagine if most professionals could just query databases themselves. In a generation or two it could be made possible.
Lots of admin work could be automated away if the person that understands the domain did it. Excel is a great example because its really hard to do complex stuff in yet non devs do it all the time. Decent APIs and some AI could make that way easier.
I think you've made a fundamental mistake. Whether or not someone understands software is not based on their job title or their desires. Nor does typing to an anthropomorphized language model expand the understanding of software. It may provide the material necessary to help someone learn, but learning is a change in behavior as a result of experience. You must fail at something in order to prevail. Using LLMs to work around failures without understanding how they occurred and why those failures were possible will not provide learning, but instead prompt the same behavior: Asking an LLM. Same behavior, same result.
I am not against people understanding software. I never argued to have "a small self-selected group of people understand that software".
However "learning to program" and "understanding software" is not the same thing. Learning to program helps one to better understand software, but it's not a necessity or requirement of it.
"Everyone needs to learn" vs "People who needs to interact with software needs to better understand it" are very different points on the "understanding software" axis.
I always know when we're in an interesting point of a change when people are tripping over language to describe things.
It seems to me that everybody has a slightly different expectation of what vibe coding is, and what to expect from it. Same with AI generally. On the one end you get people insisting its going to change the World, and on the other you get "vibe debt" references and, well, this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/qWJUWinWWnQ
My experience is that all AI today is good at helping experts be more productive by giving them first draft artefacts that might need editing, and sometimes that editing is extensive, sometimes maybe nothing.
That's it.
They are not "doing the job", they're assisting the job. People who expect AI to "do the job", are setting themselves up for failure, whether its filing paperwork in courts [0], writing book reviews [1], or writing software [2].
Sure you can use midjourney to produce some artwork for you, but if an artist used it, they'd be able to make it even better and fix it up in all sorts of ways, so maybe you will still need to pay the artist, they will just take less time and maybe lower their unit price of work.
If you are an expert at software engineering, and you are using AI, your job is changing, but it's not going away. I think every mature conversation about current agentic coding practices acknowledge this. And I think people who are getting good at this will be more productive, and they will get more done, but they're not going to be getting their job done in 4 hours and taking the rest of the week off, because they're just going to try and add more value to get paid more, or even just to keep their jobs. That's the treadmill of free market capitalism.
The "vibe coding" stance tries to counter this, but doesn't acknowledge the limitations of the technology. I think it can be taken in one of two ways: ignore the code and be surprised at what comes out and have fun with the results, which I think is fine for a hobby, you do you; or, ignore the code because you don't need to understand it, and let's get rid of all the expensive developers, and hey, what could possibly go wrong in this production stack, which I think is going to end very badly for all involved.
While today the expectation of vibe coding with current technology is as ridiculous as me saying I'm going to replace my lawyer with a bot and YOLO it [3], I am not sure that will hold forever, or for the rest of my career, or for even the next year. The only way to find out is for experts to try it, and qualitatively and quantitatively assess the results. I'd love to see a vibe coding index which periodically tries to get apps of increasing complexity built and then assess the results, and we track this over time. At some point maybe we'll get through a tipping point, and we can have conversations about what that means.
I think we might need a better term for it though, that isn't AI-assisted development (as the intention is that its not assisting you, it's doing it). Natural language programming? Entirely Generative programming?
Most nutritionists would today argue that is far too simple a model. Your body does not metabolize all calories in the same way. The role of your microbiome in terms of metabolization was barely understood at all only 50 years ago, and we're only now starting to get a handle on it.
If it were a case of "calories in, calories out", all the experiments down by food technicians to understand what is happening in the brain when you consume certain flavors (they were literally getting people to taste soda in an MRI scanner decades ago), would not be an efficient use of time and the food industry would collapse.
If you eat 2000 kCals of lettuce, your body is going to do very, very different things to eating 2000 kCals of potato fries, including how it stores or consumes energy in that moment. Importantly, what your body does is likely going to be very different to what my body does. 10% of the population can stay slim while over-eating crap, because they are genetically lucky. A %age of the population will struggle to stay at a healthy BMI even if they eat mostly salads and fruits.
This isn't radical new age voodoo: the best science available today tells us the calories in/out model isn't anywhere near nuanced enough to help educate people on eating healthily and managing their weight.
Tim Spector has written some material on this, and I've been reading Camilla Stokholm's book recently. It's all quite interesting, and very different to what I was taught when growing up.
I'd also do some digging on ultra-processed foods - it might stop you thinking overweight people are just doing it to themselves. They're not.
Everywhere I look around myself I see the same thing: people move very little (compared to our ancestors) and they eat often, and they eat a LOT (compared to our ancestors, of course). Sure, eating processed crap influences this in a negative way, but I think parent poster is on the point: eating in moderation and exercising more is the way...
You are going on tangents (food effects on brain, microbiome, genetics). I would be very surprised if you could find a significant amount of people for whom "Eat less, move more" would not result in lower body fat over time. The fact that some people won the generic lottery and can afford to eat more and move less does not change the fact that "Eat less, move more" works for the vast majority of the population.
> If you eat 2000 kCals of lettuce, your body is going to do very, very different things to eating 2000 kCals of potato fries, including how it stores or consumes energy in that moment.
I don't really think so. The only meaningful difference regarding the content of macronutrients is right at the start: you would have to eat about 20kg of lettuce to get there, which would overload your digestive system several times over.
If you hypothetically somehow managed to bypass this small issue, the main difference would be low fat content of lettuce compared to the fries. Bud the body can adapt to that.
I read some years ago - IIRC the letters pages of BYTE, which dates it - about a critical factory control system in a company somewhere running on an IBM XT. The MFM drive had started to show some errors, so they got in touch with IBM, who being IBM, did not have any drives in stock (they'd stopped making them 15 years previously), but could retool a manufacturing line and make some. They offered to do it for $250k/drive. The company paid up.
That was cheaper at that time, than modernising that system. But it's clearly not long-term scalable.
I've heard of S/360s in KTLO mode in basements keeping banks running. Teams of people slowly crafting COBOL to get new features in at a cost of thousand of dollars a day each, and it "still works". But from a risk point of view, this is also ridiculous.
Safety critical systems have different economics. Yes, you can keep the floppy systems going, but the cost of keeping them going is rising exponentially each year, and at some point a failure will cost one or more airliners full of civilians and the blame will be put on not having a reasonable upgrade policy.
Sometimes you have to fix things before they stop working, or the cost is not just eyewateringly expensive in terms of dollars, but of human lives too.
IBM mainframes can run software written in the 1960s without modification. There’s no reason anyone would keep using an obsolete mainframe, and IBM usually leased them anyway and would refuse to support obsoleted machines.
You clearly don’t know what has been happening in the World of S/360 (and similar), support contracts in recent years.
Costs are rising heavily. IBM sold off most of that business, to people who don’t really want it as the skill base to support it is retiring and it’s too expensive to easily replace. This has been going on for a couple of decades, but it’s now gaining more and more pace.
I spend far too much time thinking about and building code for trading on betting exchanges, which isn't quite the same, but there are parallels.
Most experts agree that the hard definition of efficient markets (that all information is baked into a price immediately), doesn't hold, but the soft definition (that the price will veer towards true value), does hold. The big question is how quickly does it get there?
That means there is potential to make money (if it takes n minutes, and you are able to trade at n/2, and exit at n, you're going to make money). Insider traders can make the most money, but there is also money to be made on much longer trends too, I think.
Most of the super smart people throwing money at algos and hardware are specialising in HFT to try and trade at very high speed. They are typically not looking at much longer trends. That means there is perhaps more exploitable value for the individual in longer trend spotting compared to shorter term trends. (Note, I don't mean technical analysis when I talk about trends.)
Would I recommend you get into market making and HFT? Not without an eight figure sum to get started.
Would I recommend you get into value investing and looking at the long-term? Sure, just remember that diversification is good for a reason, and you might struggle to beat an index - most professionals do. If you enjoy it though, you might find it a good way to make your retirement savings grow, perhaps even a living.
Would I recommend you get into day trading? Probably not, but that doesn't mean there aren't successful day traders sat at home making a living trading on margin. It's hard work, and if you're smart enough to make it pay, you're probably smart enough to make more money doing something more productive for society instead.
I also don't think most people are smart enough to make money (important note [1]), if they try and work out by "thinking". Don't try and move from first principles. Learn from successful people, who aren't full of BS. The vast majority of people on YouTube and selling books are not successful. There are real success stories out there, you need to filter a lot to find them, but they exist. Use them.
[1] Your question was if people can "outperform" the market. You don't need to outperform the market, you don't need to be optimal, you "just" need to make enough money to meet your goals, and preferably more than you would get just from leaving your money in an index tracker. That's not the same thing. If you're trying to perfectly enter/exit trades and "beat the market", you're dead before you get started.
This is a good start. I have a registered code, I can update it whenever I move house, online ordering becomes easier, great.
As people have indicated in thread already, the current implementation is easy: a website frontend just needs to be able to resolve it to the physical address.
I think there is value though in carriers saying "no, wait, I'll do the lookup when I am ready to deliver!", because then I order something today with a 3-month lead time and if I move house, the delivery "follows me" to my new location.
Going further, I might want to specify my home address as the default, but for items under 2kg delivered 8am to 5pm on weekdays, please deliver to my place of business. If I'm in hospital for a prolonged stay, I may want to redirect to a friend or family member.
I actually expect some of the rapid delivery networks to get a bit more like this - I predicted with friends about 5 years ago at some point your Amazon delivery is going to be in a locker on the back of a self-driving vehicle. You (and everyone else in the street), will get a notification that its outside for the next 30 minutes - miss it, and it'll go get delivered to a nearby pickup site. Imagine if there was dynamic routing so that the parcel just "finds me" if I'm at work, or a bar after work... obviously I might want choices and options and so on, but I think the idea of parcels just going to where you sleep, whether you are there or not, is going to look quaint in 30 years time.
[edit: there's also a nice bit of privacy going on here the later the lookup happens - if nobody at the e-commerce site knows where I actually live, that information can't be leaked]
Poland adopted parcel lockers on a massive scale, and they mostly solve that problem. It's such a good idea; I'm really surprised other countries haven't followed suit.
They're absolutely everywhere. Your tiny village might not have a grocery store, a school or an ATM, but it probably has a locker. Where my parents live (a village of ~2000 people), they have three. The vast majority of people have at least one in walking distance.
Before they became so popular, we used to do sign-on-delivery, leaving mail on your doorstep didn't become a thing here until covid. This made mail much harder to steal, but required you either to have somebody who would stay home all day, or to hunt down which neighbor got your package for you.
I do that all the time. So does my wife. Especially if she has a baby stroller to use.
Or we just pull by the locker on our way somewhere, it takes just 2 minutes.
So do our neighbors who do the same. That's how I buy all my house chemicals, electronics, diapers. That's how I got a bulky coffee machine as well.
Multilockers are great too. Wife does a lot of tiny clothes transactions (both buy and sell), so it's great to have 4-5 things in one locker, picked up instantly. All is in an app, but can be a text message as well.
It's insane how big that revolution is. My elderly mom confirms. I can't possibly imagine that someone would actually say it's not convenient after seeing how it actually works. The only failure I see here is that it would be hard in a high crime rate areas. That is something technology can't really change easily.
Really heavy deliveries will be. A system that lets you specify a certain weight cutoff for location to deliver might be useful, but even then sheer quantities can be an issue.
I get anything valuable coming from a major delivery service (DHL, FedEx, UPS, US Postal Service) sent to my office. They're already stopping there (it's a hospital with plenty of doctors' offices in their attached tower, lots of stuff is delivered daily), someone can sign for it and lock it up. I have a key to get into my office whenever I need to, and if it's during the day I can borrow a cart or a dolly/hand truck to take it to my car. Can usually rustle up a spare cart even in the off hours. Done it for almost 20 years.
If it's a TV or something else large (appliances, furniture, etc.), it's going to be a custom delivery anyway, so I'll pick a time that I know I'll be home.
> Parcel lockers are yesteday's technology in comparison.
They're still wonderful for small deliveries, which are maybe 95% of everything I order. You can even redirect them or reschedule them easily, since a lot of it is based on web based systems that you can access with the code they send you and additional verification.
I actually had my computer case ship to a pickup point instead of a locker near me, so I could just go there when I had free time after work and haul it back to my apartment in the city (was like a 10-15 minute walk). It ended up being cheaper than getting it delivered to my door and was functionally identical to a package locker, just with a person verifying the code and giving me the larger item. It seems like some of those locations are in convenience stores, others in gas stations over here, a bit more relaxed than traditional delivery, for which I have to be present at a time I don't know exactly.
For the big items (such as a ladder, or a lawnmower or something for the countryside, or new fridge or stove for the apartment), there is still courier delivery, which brings it to your door, or can help you carry it upstairs if needed, though obviously more expensive and not worth it for anything but the bigger items.
I think all of those methods compliment each other nicely. No reason to scoff at one method if it helps others be more efficient: split up the load, less awkward logistics of the courier needing to talk with each individual recipient to make sure they'll be there in like 15 minutes after the call, but instead being able to take a lot of the less expensive small packages and just put them in the locker and letting the people sort the rest out themselves, handling a bunch of those packages in one go.
I even shipped my old GPU to some friends across the EU with DPD and the process was similarly simple - I just prepped the order online, put the info sheet on the package and put it in the package machine. They received the GPU a few days later. Fewer queues than a postal office.
The amazon lockers work fairly well (and I often use them when traveling to avoid the headache of trying to ship something to a hotel.) But I have to say, I don't really understand why you feel they're game changing. You mention that parcel lockers "mostly solve that problem", but I don't really see how they solve any problems in the GP comment. For example, I don't see how they solve the problem of "I want to order something that will arrive in 6 months but I might move between now and then". (won't your package just go to a locker that's possibly very far away from you now?) It feels to me like the main problem lockers solve is preventing mail theft.
The lockers in Poland can be used for both receiving and sending items. It's a massive QoL improvement in many ways over old school:
- you can receive things while you're not at home, don't have to carefully plan to be there for the courier (who then misses initial date and you need to do it again next day). It works 24/7 so you can pick up your stuff in the middle of the night if it's more convenient. You have 48hrs to pick up.
- you can send things, also 24/7, so no need to go to a blessed place between 9am and 5pm during week and queue. You can send your item Sunday evening, no problem
- the costs are also very reasonable. I sent a parcel from Poland to France for 7€ this month.
- you don't actually need to print anything nor even write the address. The courier opens the box, and they print a sticker with destination address.
- I believe it increases throughput because the courier doesn't have to stop at 100 places per day, they stop at lockers and unload N packages at once in every locker. Higher throughput -> shorter delivery times and lower costs
I’m familiar with postal services both in Poland and Japan and I like the Japanese solution even more - most of the new buildings have package lockers operated by the building owner and independent from the delivery service. Everyone could put the packages there and my building would notify me about a waiting package when I entered.
That's actually rad, but... it's not that different from making current mailboxes bigger. In PL in large buildings those are on ground floor, next to each other. If you make them bigger you only need to add notifications to match that.
> You (and everyone else in the street), will get a notification that its outside for the next 30 minutes - miss it, and it'll go get delivered to a nearby pickup site.
That sounds terrible from just about every perspective. What about people who work during that 30 minutes? Or who have mobility concerns? What about a parent who's young child just fell asleep? Should they all have to go to the pickup site? And let's not kid ourselves, it's not going to be nearby. Especially if you live in a rural area. And how do you open the locker when you get there? Do you need another app that tracks your every movement? No thank you, please just leave the package at my door.
I am not sure about your particular area, but all those concerns have been solved for me. If I get package in my local mailbox (which is always nearby), I get a key to the delivery box dropped into my mail box. If the package doesnt fit there, I get message like "box 5 code 123456" if it is at self pickup site, or I go to the post office - which are both 5 minutes drive, but for box of such size I would need to drive even to my local mailbox.
I will prefer any of those options over my package having to sit in the rain or on the snow.
I tend to agree. As I understand it it's the final mile that balloons the cost and in my view a neighborhood collections box is just a micro-optimization. Same with mass dropoff box truck. You're already driving a vehicle with my package nearby just deliver it at that point.
What I want is cheaper shipping if they drop it off at a post office or something. For example on Amazon I see it as an option but only ever as a "carbon-reduction" vs just delivering to my front door. I know it's cheaper - pass on those savings to me.
The irony is that in many cases, it'd take less carbon for them to deliver to your front door than it would for you to get to the post office -- if they're already delivering to someone else near you, their extra distance traveled might be a block or so (or 0 if they were going to drive past your house anyway).
For delivery-to-post-office to be more carbon-efficient than them delivering to your house, the inequality (additional distance you need to travel to get to post office / your mpg) < (additional distance they need to travel to get to your house / their mpg) must be true. If you were gonna drive past the post office anyway, or your vehicle is significantly more efficient than their delivery van, then it might pencil out. If you're making an extra trip, it probably doesn't make sense.
> No thank you, please just leave the package at my door.
With where I live now, yes. I've had a previous address with about a 15% package-theft rate within the first 2 hours of package delivery. In this situation I started to use lockers instead of straight to home.
I think this type of delivery system (mobile lockers to stationary lockers) would be a hit in areas with high levels of package theft.
> I think there is value though in carriers saying "no, wait, I'll do the lookup when I am ready to deliver!", because then I order something today with a 3-month lead time and if I move house, the delivery "follows me" to my new location.
The downside for carriers is that costs are unpredictable. Will they be shipping it a few miles or to the other side of the country?
The downside for the person ordering is that there is a race condition that makes it difficult for you to know where the thing will get delivered to. Perhaps you changed your location two days ago, and you are expecting a piece of furniture sometime soon. Did the furniture delivery process kick off before or after you changed your address?
My mailbox is full of junk mail and it’s hard to make them stop. It’s not even addressed to me, just the mailbox location. The design pattern to “unsubscribe” or block the junk sender is also useless. Surely there must be a strong political lobby in the US who don’t want to prevent junk mail. It’s so wasteful and ridiculous (literally tons of paper) and I’ve resigned to this fact of life in my country.
Marketing mail is a significant (maybe 25%) portion of the USPS revenue and very profitable. They have a strong disincentive to reduce the stream of junk mail going to your home.
>I actually expect some of the rapid delivery networks to get a bit more like this - I predicted with friends about 5 years ago at some point your Amazon delivery is going to be in a locker on the back of a self-driving vehicle. You (and everyone else in the street), will get a notification that its outside for the next 30 minutes - miss it, and it'll go get delivered to a nearby pickup site. Imagine if there was dynamic routing so that the parcel just "finds me" if I'm at work, or a bar after work... obviously I might want choices and options and so on, but I think the idea of parcels just going to where you sleep, whether you are there or not, is going to look quaint in 30 years time.
Inpost - logistics startup in Poland managed to put lockers everywhere and you just receive sms when the parcel is there and you have 48h to pick it up
You can go whenever you want - simple and effective as hell
> at some point your Amazon delivery is going to be in a locker on the back of a self-driving vehicle. You (and everyone else in the street), will get a notification that its outside for the next 30 minutes
I'm reminded of the Taipei refuse trucks that play Fur Elise to remind you that it's the five-minute window in which you can put your bins in the street.
I'm not very optimistic about delivery improving, because it's a three-sided market. You don't get to choose which courier the sender uses, but you're really their customer.
The third-party seller never gets your address. They hand the package over to the delivery company with a code, the delivery company is the only one who knows what that code means. Japanese delivery companies already offer this service, since a lot of people don't like to publish their address.
> I think there is value though in carriers saying "no, wait, I'll do the lookup when I am ready to deliver!", because then I order something today with a 3-month lead time and if I move house, the delivery "follows me" to my new location.
Around here the Post already knows how to do this (I assume it's similar elsewhere), it's also used for government-related matters. But I guess other carriers do not.
I expect the overall results to be negative soon enough though : consider the issues USians have to endure with how (ab)used is their Social Security Number.
Computer Shopper was basically 900 pages of adverts with some editorial and reviews here and there to make people want to subscribe.
BYTE was a little less obnoxious about it, and the quality of the writing was superb. I got it occasionally as a teenager in the UK and always looked forward to it, because the information density was insane. I have the "Best of BYTE" book, and often dip into it as a comforting, sentimental read. I really do wish a magazine like it existed today.
You touch on two interesting, intertwined topics that don't seem connected at first, but they just connected for me.
I'm not sure it's all necessarily about over-commercialization, but it might be over-globalization.
We're obviously going through a timeline of the US trying to roll back globalized supply chains, and we don't know how that will end, but the one benefit it gave Americans cheap stuff at a cost of that production happening in the US. The benefit of cheap stuff will slowly be eradicated in the name of providing more job security in the US (at least, that's the plan - many are not convinced it makes much economic sense).
Everyone has benefited in some way from globalization (cheaper stuff means more economic utility), but we've also faced economic peril: off-shoring work means there is less work available near by. This is obviously true of blue collar work, but I think most people in the tech industry are familiar with Indian, Eastern European and Philippine companies taking work too.
In most of the West, there seems to have been an assumption that the West would become dominated by "knowledge workers" - all work would move to white collar professional office-bound, screen-based work - while the dirty and hard work of turning base materials into useful products, the blue collar stuff, would move off-shore. Within white collar work, the West would become more "managerial", more strategic, less productive in a tactical sense.
This idea isn't entirely new. Slavery and multiple empires were predicated on similar ideas, and while off-shoring isn't exactly modern slavery, the idea of paying poor people very little money so we can benefit does feel philosophically aligned, shall we say.
It's left us in a place where most people - both in the West and in those countries with off-shored work, and at very work layer from the hardest manual labour all the way up to managerial, perhaps even executive, levels - are worried about their economic future.
How can you have time for hobbies when you're worried about surviving the next 5 years?
This means people are now, more than ever, looking for things that raise their own utility - can I earn more money, and can I buy things cheaper? If you're doing something that doesn't move the needle on one or both of those sides of the equation, you start to feel like you're being left behind and the World is going to eat your lunch, and maybe you and your family too.
In that context, there's not much space for hobbies. Hobbies were a luxury only the affluent could afford hundreds of years ago and as wealth inequality rises again after decades of historic lows, the anxiety is starting to chip away through the middle classes and into the working classes again, so that hobbies won't exist again for many people over the next 20 or 30 years.
And yes, it does harm innovation. Most scientific and technological advancements of the last 500 years were started by people having the time to muck about with things, either as a hobby or as a paid vocation in a research lab or academic setting. That's potentially going away bit by bit. Curiosity has limited value in the future, as it becomes an extravagance few have time or resource for. Many people are subconsciously or even consciously asking themselves: if something doesn't lower a price on things I'm buying or increase the money I can get for what I'm selling, and it can't do that now, why do I care?
I've been thinking about this too. I'll sometimes run across some part of the Chinese internet where people are creating some niche product to sell on aliexpress. It's less about IP and more about the product. They're inherently short lived and typically evolve past the original idea.
One huge advantage they have is its comparatively dirt cheap to make mistakes and turn another revision. With the tariffs, this more than doubles for the American trying to also make things. When mistakes cost 2-3x, less people are going to take risks. We've been so focused on what we can turn into intellectual property that we lose focus on what we can make.
The benefit of less enforced IP is that designs can be taken and iterated on freely while in the world of strong IP, you get what the company has decided is the product.
So we can observe a low-risk, lowish reward system that rewards continuous improvement over stagnation. I have a bad feeling that we're doubling and tripling down on this to move towards a world where we can only access computing through the narrow lens that the IP holders will allow.
I've been thinking along similar lines when I tried to figure out if the obsession with getting something cheaper is a cultural thing, or an actual necessity. I think it's a mixture of both, and I agree that economic anxiety does play a part.
MS Office will insert em-dashes automatically in most documents, so in fact there are a lot of Word docs and Outlook emails that contain them.
I sometimes specifically try and trigger them: if you have a piece of text and go back to insert a hyphen, it won't em-dash until you've followed it with a space, another word and then another space. I now sort of end up doing '- x ' and then backspacing so that the word following the x now follows an em-dash.
They exist to provide clarity. The are not hyphens, or en-dashes, they're em-dashes. The fact that some people have forgotten how to use them (or perhaps not been taught), does not make them "archaic", it makes those people who find them as such to be ignorant of basic sentence structure and punctuation.
I think if you're under the age of 30 and you suddenly start using them, you're showing your GenAI a little too much, but the answer is not to get your AI to stop using them, but for us to teach people why they exist and to use them more often when and where they are appropriate.
And, if you should develop a deeper connection with somebody and you trust them, you can let them know what's going on.
reply