The slowness is a feature, not a bug. It gives your brain time to chew on it a little bit, digesting the information and storing it away instead of just copy-pasting.
Speed-hacks like shorthand and stenographers' machines are for copying exactly what was said, not consuming and understanding it. I would be very surprised if there were not very old studies moldering in a paper journal somewhere investigating the information retention of secretaries / stenographers compared to "naive" note-takers.
Also, MS Word auto-corrects <space>-<space> into an em-dash just like it fixes quotes. Depending on which software was used to write it, it's very likely that's what happened.
I'm never suspicious of only one em-dash, as they are a perfectly valid, if infrequent punctuation. Three or more in an article this length would make start looking at the rest of it more closely, though.
Of course not. You can, however, control what you then do with said data.
If a courier accidentally dropped a folder full of nuclear secrets in your mailbox, I promise you that if you do anything with it other than call the FBI (in the US), you will be in trouble.
PyInstaller-made executables also used to have a habit of getting flagged by security software as malicious (maybe that's why you couldn't run it?) -- apparently, so many malware writers used it that it ruined the party for everyone.
Fortunately, that was only the 32-bit version of Python 2.7. Using 64-bit versions or Python 3 was enough to not get flagged as malicious. I figured that out when I decided I didn't want to teach myself Go just then to deploy something that had worked the day before.
> The most successful exception I've seen are books by Joe Klassen (of I Want My Hat fame)...
If you haven't read it The Dark[1] (his collaboration with Lemony Snicket) is also great; my kids absolutely love the voices I do for the animals in I Want My Hat Back and for the titular Dark.
I would argue that the fast part isn't optional for web apps (where "transpiling"), but it can be in many other instances.
I write a lot of data-pipeline code in Python that mostly runs once a day. Does it matter if it takes an hour to run instead of five minutes? Not really, as long as it's ready to go for the next run.
Speed-hacks like shorthand and stenographers' machines are for copying exactly what was said, not consuming and understanding it. I would be very surprised if there were not very old studies moldering in a paper journal somewhere investigating the information retention of secretaries / stenographers compared to "naive" note-takers.