Comment by observationist

Right, just saying things like that -- aren't immediately apparent unless they're pointed out to you. The extended palette of alt+123 keycodes, unicode characters, stuff like that requires "exotic" macros or keypresses to type out. Despite decades of extensive experience with writing, writing software, programming, etc, I never crossed paths with em-dashes. They were a niche thing prior to AI making them a thing. I basically thought they were a font or style choice prior to ChatGPT. Most people wouldn't have a clue unless they went through classes that specifically trained on the use of emdashes.

I like them as an AI shibboleth, though -- the antennae go up, and I pay more attention to what I'm reading when I see it, so it raises the bar for the humans that ostensibly ought to be better at writing than the rest of us.

Edit: Interesting. I tried using -- and it doesn't work for me. I'd have to go change settings somewhere, or switch the browser I'm using to elicit an em-dash. I don't think I've ever actually written one, at least intentionally, and it wasn't until today that I was even aware of hyphen-hyphen.

Edit again: I had to go into system settings and assign a compose key — after that, I can now do em-dashes. Having degrees° will be nice, too, I guess.