And yet... It doesn't! Stop posting arguments like this.

Not be Microsoft, mostly.

you know feedback is being requested, you could put a little more quality into it, pretend they dont know what has ever been said about them before.

pretend your a manager, and you have to approach an employee about thier hygiene.

But it's true. Microsoft's reputation is in the toilet. After everything from the ICC sanctions to the AI spam in Windows to this month's Patch Tuesday incident, everyone knows to avoid Microsoft products like their life depends on it.

But if you want an actionable idea here's one: make it a hundred times cheaper, or free. People use Oracle Cloud because it's free, even though Oracle is even worse than Microsoft. If you want people to use it, you know what to do.

That's not the complaint at all - the complaint is that, because of the anti-stalking measures added at the original launch, the AirTags can't be used to track stolen items because the thieves will be notified that they are being "stalked".

That belief is not shared by law enforcement. But all the same, they'll refuse to help you anyway.

Could you be any more patronizing? Maybe there's a few people you haven't alienated yet.

I don't like or use Tiktok, but clearly it provides some value to the people who do. Telling people to stop using it without even attempting to address what benefit (perceived or actual) it provides is self-defeating advice.

It's because "AI" is the new "Crypto". Useless for everything, but everyone wants to jam it into everything.

Farming. The only industry where you can make a loss year after year, and for some reason people keep doing it.

Keep a couple days water and food on hand, go up to the pub, have a pint, and wait for this all to blow over.

With how much modern cars rely on electronics, I would not try to drive during such an event.

It’s ok - The Winchester is within walking distance.

Omg i watched this yesterday!

Solar flares are only dangerous to very long conductors.

so cancel the limo?

That's a safety feature. It prevents you from drinking and driving if you go to a pub during a solar flare. :)

No one would drive to the pub anyway. Better walking back home…

Valid. I think I have such an ingrained different set of assumptions (a pub being just another kind of place for food, and "going to" anything involving a form of transportation) that that didn't even occur to me.

They mean the same thing to 99.999% of the population.

If nobody used em-dashes, they wouldn’t have featured heavily in the training set for LLMs. It is used somewhat rarely (so e people use it a lot, others not at all) in informal digital prose, but that’s not the same as being entirely unused generally.

Microsoft Word automatically converts dashes to em dashes as soon as you hit space at the end of the next word after the dash.

That's the only way I know how to get an em dash. That's how I create them. I sometimes have to re-write something to force the "dash space <word> space" sequence in order for Word to create it, and then I copy and paste the em dash into the thing I'm working on.

Option shift - in macOS (option - gives you an en dash).

Windows 10/11’s clipboard stack lets you pin selections into the clipboard, so — and a variety of other characters live in mine. And on iOS you just hold down -, of course.

Alt-0151 on the numpad in Windows.

Long-press on the hyphen on most Android keyboards.

Or open whenever "Character Map" application that usually comes with any desktop OS, and copy it from there.

You can Google search "em-dash" then copy/paste from the resulting page.

Ctrl+Shit+U + 2014 (em dash) or 2013 (en dash) in Linux. Former academic here, and I use the things all the time. You can find them all over my pre-LLM publications.

I do—all the time. Why not?

I also use en dashes when referring to number ranges, e.g., 1–9

I didn't know these fancy dashes existed until I read Knuth's first book on typesetting. So probably 1984. Since then I've used them whenever appropriate.

Except for Emily Dickenson, who is an outlier and should not be counted.

Seriously, she used dashes all the time. Here is a direct copy and paste of the first two stanzas of her poem "Because I count not stop for Death" from the first source I found, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47652/because-i-could...

  Because I could not stop for Death –
  He kindly stopped for me –
  The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
  And Immortality.

  We slowly drove – He knew no haste
  And I had put away
  My labor and my leisure too,
  For His Civility –

Her dashes have been rendered as en dashes in this particular case rather than em dashes, but unless you're a typography enthusiast you might not notice the difference (I certainly didn't and thought they were em dashes at first). I would bet if I hunted I would find some places where her poems have been transcribed with em dashes. (It's what I would have typed if I were transcribing them).

Here is an image of the original manuscript page:

https://www.edickinson.org/editions/1/image_sets/12174893

Dickinson's dashes tended to vary over time, and were not typeset during her lifetime (mostly). Also, mid-19th century usage was different—the em-dash was a relatively new thing.

When I type in English and needs an em dash, I simply switch to the Chinese IME.

Except for highly literate people, and people who care about typography.

Think about it— the robots didn’t invent the em-dash. They’re copying it from somewhere.

My impression of people that say they’re em dash users is that they’re laundering their dunning kruger through AI.

Tell me you never worked with LaTeX and an university style guide without telling me you never worked with LaTeX and an university style guide.

Approximately no one writes internet comments or even articles in LaTeX.

But many have built their writing habits about LaTeX typing, and a – or even an — are hardcoded into their text editors / operating systems, much like other correct diacritics and ligatures may be.