That depends. Your interpretation is “em+en+em”. But another, potentially wittier interpretation is “em in em”, i.e., you split an em-dash into two en-dashes and put an em-dash inside.
I think we're getting at the heart of your misunderstanding. You seem to feel that we're running out of codepoints in Unicode (the “limited number of shelves” analogy). This could not be further from the truth. Although the number of codepoints is technically finite, it is extremely large (over a million) compared to how many we need (currently only 160,000 are defined, and for obvious reasons the rate of new additions is slowing down). The Unicode roadmaps main page[0] displays only 5 of the 17 available planes because the remaining 12 (each 65,536 codepoints large) have not yet had any characters assigned to them whatsoever.
The comment about your keyboard is ironic given the nerd forum we're in. The em and en dashes live on my keyboard alongside the hyphen because I'm a techie and I know how to put them there. My Android keyboard has them too and I didn't even need to put them there myself.
I'm in my 40s and I also prefer to call people on Discord, Telegram, Signal or (if no other option available) WhatsApp. The phone dialer is just inconvenient, while the above-mentioned chat apps have all the contacts listed and easy to access. There's also a slight worry about being charged for every phone call and every SMS and having to worry about your phone plan and texting plan separately from your data plan; maybe that's not a thing anymore but it used to be really worrying, so it gives me more peace of mind to only have to worry about the data plan and nothing else.
I was on LiveJournal a long time ago and I distinctly remember seeing Facebook, when I first tried it after everyone couldn't stop talking about it, as an unviable alternative precisely because it didn't show exactly what you subscribed to without filtering or manipulation. So either the algorithmic timeline was always there, or it was introduced early on before Facebook got big.
I think it should be illegal period. Advertisement is deliberate manipulation by exploiting known psychological vulnerabilities in humans. It's a despicable thing to want to do intentionally. It should be a criminal offense.
> When I compare what I’ve seen in my life so far, I don’t think anything comes close (for better and worse) to even one of those things.
I dunno, I personally consider the internetification of the world to be on a level with the developments you've listed. We've transitioned a lot of things away from the real world into cyberspace: banking, shopping, postal communication... and now even recent technologies such as radio and TV are being replaced by it. I don't know how old you are, but I've lived through that and it has been quite a ride — for better and worse, as you say.
Nevertheless, I agree that little has changed since. Maybe this puts you at < 20 years of age? I don't want to be presumptuous.
Did anyone notice how the article goes on and on about making AI accessible to the billions of people in the world, but then in the same article says this:
> Your agents need to be sovereign. Your company must own and control the agents’ identities, permissions, memory, skills, artifacts, and audit trails. Those assets must be portable, governable, and inaccessible to anyone you have not authorized.
That's not very open, now is it? In fact it sounds like the author assumes that all 8 billion people in the world will all be running their own company, and they will all still be competing in a game of capitalism.
> Is that specified or does it always just assume it isn’t really being put in charge of things for real?
I think it's neither, and it's interesting that those are the only two possibilities you thought of. I think the article is implying that it figured it out on its own.
The button to place an order should 100% be idempotent. There's one order you're constructing in your shopping cart, perhaps with an internal ID, and the irreversible “commit” button should place that order, not create two separate orders.