I have --- set to autocorrect to —. I've been using it in formal writing for 30 years. When we were in high school, we had a "Dash Party" in English class, where we ate Twinkies and learned about the different dashes.
I would argue that LLMs overuse the emdash more because they overuse specific rhetorical devices, e.g. antithesis, than because they are being too correct about punctuation.
I'm a lifetime member and have enjoyed mynoise.net for many years. It's the best thing I've found for focus and distraction blocking. I have brain.fm, and YouTube music, but I keep coming back to his site because it's just better, more intentional, and more effective for me.
I loved my TI-99/4A. I used to think it was ahead of its time, but now I realize it was from an altogether alternate timeline where we built stuff to work.
This captures something I've been struggling to describe, and "Whatever" is the perfect term for this.
Private Equity & Financialization: Whatever for business
Flood the Zone & Deadcatting: "Whatever" for politics
It's what I think about when I hear all of the "AI is going to eliminate all the jobs." That's just a convenient cover story for "Tax laws changed so R&D isn't free money anymore, and we need to fire everyone."
When almost every drop of wealth is in the control of a tiny number of people, it's not surprising that the world turns into one big competition for ways to convince those people that you have a way for them to sop up the remaining thimbleful too.
That's definitely how we worked at the Sun offices. And since we hoteled, I never knew where I would be sitting. I loved it really. It felt very minimalist and slick.
It's interesting that your experience is different, but in my region and social circles, I haven't seen anyone wear a watch in ten years or more, other than the occasional smart watch. That habit doesn't seem to last long, either. For people I know, watches have turned into fashion accessories for millionaires.
> other than the occasional smart watch. That habit doesn't seem to last long, either.
I'm gonna go on a whim and say the habit doesn't last cause you cannot truly depend on them. My watch never leaves my wrist, it never fails me, it is just a "dumb" one.
I wear a watch. Nothing fancy, but I do have a few of them (and none worth more than 2-£300.) it’s about the only accessory I wear so it’s nice to have some variety. My day to day is a smart watch (and has been for a few years now).
Lots of my circle is similar.
I'm someone who used to use this phrase frequently after reading Feynman, but stopped long ago after realizing how lazy the story was. It became a popular phrase with the same crowd it most closely described. That's about the time people started saying things like "drink the Koolaid" in a positive sense. I guess the real revelation is that Orwell was the prophet of our own little apocalypse.
Of course, someone could argue (analogously to this article) that the problem with the phrase is that the members of the People's Temple in Jonestown didn't drink poisoned Kool-Aid as often thought, but rather a different product called Flavor-Aid.
When I was working for a large US tech company, one of colleagues used that term to their American managers in a positive way (we were Linux people, after all): turned out he didn't know the origin. Significant faux pas!
I hear this used all the time with various meanings ranging from "being fully committed" to "being brainwashed". It usually implies a naive level of (or just misplaced) zeal but I feel like folks rarely mean the suicidal/homicidal part which can make the phrase quite shocking if you actually think about what is being said. Language and culture are weird.
I would argue that LLMs overuse the emdash more because they overuse specific rhetorical devices, e.g. antithesis, than because they are being too correct about punctuation.