"We have been waiting 20 minutes!"
"You're absolutely right, and I apologize. We will try to schedule better in the future."
I have never said it to someone with whom I was having a regular discussion.
OTOH, I used to overuse em dashes because the Mac made proper typesetting possible. It used to be the sign that someone had read the very useful The Mac is not a Typewriter by Robin Williams.
and it says "You're absolutely right, and I apologize. I have fixed the issue now"
They were trained on you, mate.
I wonder if this does apply to the same magnitude in the real world. It's very easy to see this phenomenon on the internet because it's so vast and interconnected. Attention is very limited and there is so much stuff out there that the average user can only offer minimal attention and effort (the usual 80-20 Pareto allocation). In the real world things are more granular, hyperlocal and less homogeneous.
1. People who live in poorer countries who simply know how to rage bait and are trying to earn an income. In many such countries $200 in ad revenue from Twitter, for example, is significant; and
2. Organized bot farms who are pushing a given message or scam. These too tend to be operated out of poorer countries because it's cheaper.
Last month, Twitter kind of exposed this accidentally with an interesting feature where it showed account location with no warning whatsoever. Interestingly, showing the country in the profile got disabled from government accounts after it raised some serious questions [1].
So I started thinking about the technical feasibility of showing location (country or state for large countries) on all public social media ccounts. The obvious defense is to use a VPN in the country you want to appear to be from but I think that's a solvable problem.
Another thing I read was about NVidia's efforts to combat "smuggling" of GPUs to China with location verification [2]. The idea is fairly simple. You send a challenge and measure the latency. VPNs can't hide latency.
So every now and again the Twitter or IG or Tiktok server would answer an API request with a challenge, which couldn't be antiticpated and would also be secure, being part of the HTTPS traffic. The client would respond to the challenge and if the latency was 100-150ms consistently despite showing a location of Virginia then you can deem them inauthentic and basically just downrank all their content.
There's more to it of course. A lot is in the details. Like you'd have to handle verified accounts and people traveling and high-latency networks (eg Starlink).
You might say "well the phone farms will move to the US". That might be true but it makes it more expensive and easier to police.
It feels like a solvable problem.
[1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/x-new-location-transpar...
[2]: https://aihola.com/article/nvidia-gpu-location-verification-...
I do and so do a number of others, and I like Oxford commas too.
> What if people DO USE em-dashes in real life?
They do and have, for a long time. I know someone who for many years (much longer than LLMs have been available) has complained about their overuse.
> hence, you often see -- in HackerNews comments, where the author is probably used to Markdown renderer
Using two dashes for an em-dash goes back to typewriter keyboards, which had only what we now call printable ASCII and where it was much harder add to add non-ASCII characters than it is on your computer - no special key combos. (Which also means that em-dashes existed in the typewriter era.)
If AI would cost you what it actually costs, then you would use it more carefully and for better purposes.
There may be some irony to be found in this human centipede.
I’ve definitely been reducing my day-to-day use of em-dashes the last year due to the negative AI association, but also because I decided I was overusing them even before that emerged.
This will hopefully give me more energy for campaigns to champion the interrobang (‽) and to reintroduce the letter thorn (Þ) to English.
Instead of modifier plus keypress, it's modifier, and a 4 digit combination that I'll never remember.