windrim's comments

On: Ex-FCC Chair Ajit Pai is now a wireless lobbyist

[windrim]

It's an em dash not a hyphen, and has been used that way for a very long time

[johnea → windrim]

Total meme punctuation, never saw one prior to recently.

I've been reading US english for about 60 years. This punctuation is not common outside of modern meme space.

A big part of what makes it suck, is it's lack of distinction from the hyphen. Apparently the big difference is that it's 0.3mm longer 8-/

I'd advocate a semicolon, or parenthesis, or anything else with spaces, because this punctuation sucks.

[dard12 → johnea]

The lack of visual distinction is a valid complaint, but to be fair em dashes have been around for a long time and were used by many classic authors.

It's just more commonly used in literary writing than in technical writing.

[snypher → johnea]

I'm not making this a personal attack, but emdash is everywhere in older texts, and rarely seen in memes, outside of the recent discussion about why AI likes them so much. This almost seems like yelling at the clouds. Your preference is for a semicolon, yet you talk about lack of distinction from other punctuation?!?

[johnea → snypher]

> everywhere in older texts

A) This is just not the case, they've only become popular _because_ of the prevalence in LLM generated slop

B) Even if it were, it doesn't stop them from sucking

Semicolons have a space after them.

Parenthesis have spaces.

English (and most others) is a space delimited language (note the space demarcating that parenthetical statement from the rest of the sentence).

Along with the indistinguishable difference from a hyphen, this adds up to suck.

Let me quote from wikipedia:

In modern Wit all printed Trash, is Set off with num'rous Breaks⸺and Dashes—

This is probably why they mostly stopped appearing after the 1700s...

On: Telegram founder claims Signal has a US government backdoor

[windrim]

FWIW the underlying article[1] is written by Chris Rufo, a prominent right-winger[2]:

[1] https://www.city-journal.org/article/signals-katherine-maher...

[2] e.g. https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/how-a-conse...