Actually (pronounced acktschually) it’s ‘shayz long’ The ‘s’ is usually only silent when it’s the last letter of the word.

The character was created specifically because when we write we use different length dashes to mean different things—subtraction through to a pause for thinking.

The automated test will have no difficulty telling them apart. Are you saying it’s hard looking at the results of this tests? You might need to use a font that makes that easy (I agree many monospaced fonts don’t, but that’s not the character’s fault. Or include a step that replaces en with 2 hyphens and em with 3.

Sad face

It’s more that they used to be shipped 2x4 unfinished, and would be planed smooth on site. Once the equipment and distribution was able to do the planing before it got to the customer, they had so much established practice that the installed timber would be smaller, they had to keep to what people were used to.

2” x 4” construction timber is 1.5” x 3.5” because of industrialisation (not shrinkflation)

The reports on the linked wiki page of the use of things like this as torture aside, is there any research / evidence on how things like this affect people who are treated this way voluntarily?

I’ve seen video of someone volunteering to be waterboarded to show that it’s not that bad if you know what’s happening (spoiler—it was still very bad). I’d assume other kinds of psychological torture would be just as hard to deal with, even with full knowledge and consent.

Finally.

Connections Puzzle #815 🟪🟪🟪🟪
🟦🟦🟦🟦
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟨🟨🟨🟨

Among this chart’s many other issues raised elsewhere, Ada is in totally the wrong place. Probably more system than Rust right now, and definitely not obsolete.

Yeah, my eyes are so perfect, I read that as ‘cartoonists’ and spent a good few minutes confused.

I’m almost more irritated by the use of two hyphens instead of a colon after the first definition. They just didn’t give a shit really.