>I think it's worse to force everyone into intellectual submission just because you're "right".
I think it's worse to consider the acceptance of reality as being "forced into intellectual submission" and to use scare quotes around "right."
There are discussions that everyone on the planet should be 100% on one side of and this is one of them. It is literally just wasting everyone's time to entertain the premise that opinions to the contrary hold any value.
On this planet, humans have read HTML without parsing for years. People building their first websites without any significant technical knowledge stole HTML by reading the source of other sites and edited it by hand.
Oh, please. Don't insult everyone here by pretending you actually believe HTML is a human readable format like markdown. It was never designed for that and has never claimed that.
It is. Humans do read it, and have read it. Like any language it's just a matter of familiarity.
HTML was designed for humans to read and write long before Claude or compiling everything from typescript or whatever, when websites were all written by hand. In text editors. Even if you were using PHP and templates or CGI you wrote that shit by hand, which meant you had to be able to read it and understand it. Even if you were using Dreamweaver, you had to know how to read and write HTML at some point. WYSIWYG only gets you so far.
Is HTML more difficult to read than Markdown? Sure. It is impossible? Not even remotely. Teenagers did it putting together their Geocities websites.
You can be as snarky as you like, but facts are facts.
People use Markdown because it's expected, it's probably already a part of whatever library or framework they're already using, and there is no well supported or popular alternative.
I mean I started using it because I don't like using Word or Google Docs and wanted a more portable data format since I was going between Mac and Linux.
There are bunch of reasons why it came to dominate.
If HTML were for machines it would be a binary format. It's text so it's meant for humans to read and write, and humans did both for years without it being a problem.
>It is creepy as shit and I wouldn't allow him near my kids, but there is a very specific legal definition of pedophile and looking isn't the same as touching. It dilutes the term when you use it the wrong way.
Then why wouldn't you allow him near your kids? If he isn't legally speaking a pedophile, what would you be worried about?
If it were the case that "looking isn't the same as touching", child porn wouldn't be illegal. Trump is a pedophile because he's attracted to underage girls, he isn't not a pedophile if he looks but doesn't touch.
And there is a mountain of (granted circumstantial) evidence from the Epstein files that have been released to suggest he's probably done more than just look.
He's already been found liable for sexual assault, and I don't doubt a case for pedophilia could stick if the standard is beyond a reasonable doubt - he drew a picture of a naked girl on a birthday card for Epstein FFS. Just his conspiracy to keep the Epstein files hidden and protect anyone culpable (in his party) alone would put him in jail until he died if SCOTUS hadn't decided that anything a sitting President did while in office was legal.
Unfortunately he's going to die a free and wealthy man, and be buried with honors. All we can hope is that he does it soon and that he soils himself on the way out.
>Everyone seems to forget Markdown was invented for humans and incidentally for machines.
We already had plain text for that. Markdown was invented to be converted to HTML. It has no utility over plain text otherwise. The link and image syntax is doing what HTML tags do, but are less readable for people than just pasting the URL. The relationship to the machine isn't incidental, it's intrinsic.
Markdown largely serves the same role as things like vocal emphasis and intonation in speech. Here are some example sentences that have slightly different semantics communicated by markdown differences.
"quality" is something you care about if you want to virtue signal your professional or intellectual capability, usually as part of a monetization scheme. Hacker News cares so much about quality because this forum is attached to a billion dollar startup incubator, and for many people here their persona is business. Posting on substack is business for most people. Posting on medium is business for most people. "Quality" is just another kind of influencer culture.
Writing blogs shouldn't be about marketing and reading blogs shouldn't be about maximizing information density. The vast vast majority of blogs on the old web that everyone yearns to return to weren't "high quality." You were just writing about whatever, likely in a style that would get you downvoted on HN for being insufficiently substantive, and if you were lucky someone else might read it.
I wouldn't even call it "low quality" so much as "non-commercial."
>They're sending people around the moon in a giant rocket ship. It sells itself.
It actually doesn't. It didn't even "sell itself" the first time. Apollo required a massive national propaganda campaign framing the space race in terms of an existential war against communist annihilation to get people to even care - and people still stopped caring once the news stopped being sensational.
I think it's worse to consider the acceptance of reality as being "forced into intellectual submission" and to use scare quotes around "right."
There are discussions that everyone on the planet should be 100% on one side of and this is one of them. It is literally just wasting everyone's time to entertain the premise that opinions to the contrary hold any value.
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