offtopic, but it's interesting how large of a discrepancy there is between the length of your comment and how much time i'd have to spend explaining background info to a non-programmer to get them to understand why this is funny

why is it funny? it seems like a sincere question

The way it's written is funny, I find. But I'm a programmer...

And as GP wrote, it would take a substantial amount of time to explain to a normie (infinite I'd say, but let's not despair).

hardly new, I've used it before advent of llm popularity, and I wasn't alone

It should be THREE hyphens for an em-dash!

In theory, yes, endash would be "--" and emdash would be "---", but oof, the three hyphens looks like way too much in normal text. So I've always used "--".

I've always used it.

My keyboard has -.

I have used "--" as a lazy-man's emdash for decades at this point. Once I heard that people started assuming text that uses emdashes was written by an LLM I got worried that people were going to think that I'm an LLM, but then I realized the LLMs use the real unicode emdash character, while I just use two regular ASCII-zone hyphens. Whew.

(Also I just learned that ASCII 0x2d/unicode U+002D is more properly called a "hyphen" [well, "HYPHEN-MINUS"], not a "dash".)

well, that was my point, that people have seemingly begun replacing — with -- or --- in llm-generated comments recently

this is maybe the fifth time i've seen this happen on hn in the last few weeks