So there’s something I need to get off my chest, and if I post it on my LinkedIn it would be career suicide at my level.
In a company, the largest line item by far is usually payroll. I have been at a number of companies that are trying to cut costs and don’t care if you come up with the correct amount via other OpEx categories, they want headcount reduced because “it’s so much”.
So along comes the promise of a computer bot that understands the normal person and also:
- Does not require sick/vacation time
- Does not take FMLA
- Does not want a bonus/profit sharing/equity
- Don’t have to pay unemployment taxes, Medicare or SSI
- Does not require them to spend money on health insurance
- Will not form a union
- Wont ever file a lawsuit for any number of reasons
- Will work 24/7
And this right there is the exact reason so many CEOs are salivating at the idea of AI. Not for worker efficiency, not for any number of “positive” benefits they may taut, but they finally have a glimpse of the chance to rid themselves of one of the largest headaches that they perceive in a company.
On my keyboard—I can’t speak for yours—I have a single key I hit that lets me type combination characters like ≠, æ, ¬, à, é, š, ç, °, œ, etc.
Perhaps—and this is just me spitballing this—those of us who have to do international communications have a keyboard layout that makes this kind of stuff easy?
Nah. Must be AI.
You utter berk.
Or - perhaps - there’s no good reason to have three kinds of dash marks. It’s snobbery. Just use the hyphen for everything.
99% of people either can’t tell the difference or won’t care, and it’s still a good enough shortcut. If my boss starts sending me emails with em dashes - I know that fuck doesn’t even know what they’re for - why shouldn’t I assume AI?
If your boss suddenly switches the way they write into a style with heavy use of em dashes—and if you have reasonable grounds to believe that your boss didn’t start taking a writing course—then it is perfectly rational to assume they’ve used a tool that is known for inserting em dashes everywhere. The category error occurs when you assume that everybody who uses em dashes is using AI to write. That is lazy thinking (and that’s the most polite way I can put it; the more accurate way would be far more insulting) driven, likely, given your call to “snobbery” above, by a profound insecurity.
As to that snobbery, there’s a whole lot of punctuation that’s unnecessary by this standard. Why do we have so many different ways to indicated a pause in writing? Colons, semi-colons, commas, ellipses, … WTF use is all that junk? And why do we have exclamation points!? Or question marks, for that matter? We can get by without all that crud, right. For example in that previous sentence you knew it was a question without me marking it. And I eschewed commas in the previous sentence but it was clear what i mean just like in this one. Why should we have any punctuation other than periods. It’s not necessary. It’s just pure snobbery.
Did that sound stupid to you? Did that make you think I was either taking the piss or profoundly ignorant?
Guess what your rant about “three kinds of dash marks” sounds like to people who use them …
I am impressed. I’m still a plebe — who has to use three hyphens.
(And this is how I found out that three hyphens in Markdown = an em dash!)
ETA: Oh, wow, you can make an en dash – with two hyphens! Mind. Blown.
Yes. Markdown has some coding to let you enter en and em dashes. (Apparently it’s sufficiently important a feature that they put it in there. Weird that.)
But that’s unfortunately not good enough when you have to Énŧèr ştůff like this. (That double-f is a single character, note.) At that point you use a better keyboard layout.
And 连输入汉字都别想！ (Don’t even ask about entering Chinese!)