The “you” in my comment was directed at “VikingOSX” in the screenshot. And at Apple, of course.
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Cake day: September 27th, 2023
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I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Totally and completely agree. Though it would’ve been hilarious if she’d hit him with a deep cut like “Oh, Nicholas Hammond, for sure” and then winked. My wife genuinely likes me, but I’d be personally offended if she missed an opportunity like this to at least make a little joke.
This is the entire argument I’m making. HTML makes compromises that makes it harder for the human to read and also harder (or at least less optimal) for the machine to read. Markdown codifies an existing human-readable format in a way that a machine can handle easily, too.
<title>exists to be human readable.The text within
<title>exists to be human readable, but the tag itself exists so that the browser application knows what to put in the title bar.Uhh ask any non-tech person to write a markdown file. This simply is not true.
Write, sure. But I meant read.
A header 2 tag (
h2) in HTML requires no more training than a header 2 tag (#) in Markdown.I did mention that that was one of the more bilaterally semantic parts of the language, alongside emphasis and strong tags. But I still think the
#is easier for a regular user to understand.
5·1 month agoHonestly if they haven’t done it in the past 22 years, I’m not sure it’s ever coming. Not saying they’re a “good” corporation, just that it seems like they’ve been playing it fairly clean for a while.
Besides, Ubuntu is FOSS. If Canonical does do a rug pull, there’ll be a fork available for people to migrate from in approximately 10.3 milliseconds.
Not saying I like Ubuntu—I’m not a huge fan, honestly—just that this probably isn’t as much of a risk factor as it seems on the face of things.
Let’s try to define the problem space here. I realize we’re actually slightly off-target on this discussion when we’re talking about languages like Rust and Python and C, because neither plaintext nor markdown are trying to fill that niche. Json is nearer the mark, though still doing something slightly different. Markdown, as humorously implied by the name of the format, is a markup format; more in line with HTML and LaTeX than with Rust or Javascript. And plaintext is also, in its own way, a markup format; albeit one with which computers would struggle particularly.
Think about an HTML file. There’s a ton of stuff in that file–basically everything within the
<angle-brackets>--that’s solely there for the purpose of the machine rendering the file. It doesn’t provide much if any semantic information for the human reader; we can tell where the document starts, we don’t need the<html>tag. We probably don’t need anything in the<head>tag except for maybe the<title>, and that’s likely to be repeated in the body anyway. We don’t need the CSS, we don’t need any of the Javascript, and if we don’t need the opening tags, we don’t need the closing tags either. We also don’t need the opening<body>tag, because without the<head>tag, we can tell that the content starts at the beginning of the file. We don’t need<p>or<div>or<br>tags, because we can see the line breaks visually. We don’t need<span>in almost any scenario. Not only don’t we need all of that information, but we couldn’t easily parse it if we did.Of course some of the formatting options are useful, because they provide formatting information that’s semantic (like
<strong>and<em>and<h1>) and some provide structural information that’s semantic (like<table>and the list tags), though a lot of those are packed so full of additional parameters and styling and handles and such that they actually lose a lot of semantic meaning for humans because they’re buried under a ton of stuff we can’t easily parse. So they’re not the best way for humans to read it, but they do work for humans who can figure them out.A lot of stuff is included in an HTML file for the benefit of a computer that will be reading the file which adds no useful information for a human. Even the stuff that does add useful information for a human could be communicated more easily in other ways. In short, the things which are added to plaintext to make HTML make parsing simpler for the computer and more difficult for the human. This is because its primary function is to provide direct and unambiguous control over document presentation, which means that it has to be clear and unambiguous to the computer.
Now, if you consider plaintext, you run into the opposite problem: it’s entirely human-focused. There’s nothing there providing any useful information for a computer, unless the computer has some advanced sentiment analysis or a decent neural network working on the problem (either of which would certainly be hugely resource-expensive). A computer can’t tell what the important words are in a plaintext document, or what the title is, or whether a single line on its own is a header or just a very short paragraph. It doesn’t know what a list looks like, or a table. Humans can read it fairly well (though honestly the lack of formatting might present some challenges to them as well). In short, the things which aren’t included in plaintext make parsing very difficult for the computer while making it reasonably simple for the human. Its primary function is to provide text content to a human, which means that it can be formed and formatted however the human wants.
Contrast both with Markdown. Every syntactic tag and mark is equally useful for both the human reader and the computer reader. A human does not need additional training to utilize every character in a Markdown file, and a computer does not need additional functionality (beyond a parser for the language) to utilize every character in a Markdown file. The things which have been added to plaintext to make markdown make parsing simpler for both human and computer. A developer doesn’t have to meticulously craft a document that humans will have trouble reading, and a computer can still comprehend it as well as an HTML file. Its primary function is to be equally readable for computer and for human.
I never disagreed with the Wikipedia lede. I only said its primary purpose isn’t human-readability, and Markdown’s is.
Machines do read Rust. Just because those machines are compiling the Rust code doesn’t mean they aren’t reading it. And every affordance the Rust devs included to make it easier for that compiler to do its job makes it harder for humans to read, but Markdown’s affordances are equally helpful for humans as for computers; and they’re designed to be so because they were adapted from shorthand that was already in use.
No. The primary purpose of programming languages is to be machine-readable first, human-readable second. The primary purpose of both markdown and plaintext is to be equally readable by both humans and machines.
Not intended to be easily human-readable though.
My only objection to that is that its source code isn’t easily human-readable, like Markdown’s is. The point of an .md file is that a human and a computer can both parse it just as easily as a native format.
Markdown…is…plaintext, though?
I’m not even joking, that’s literally the best compliment I’ve received all month. Thank you.
What do you mean you didn’t learn assembly and compile your own kernel? Did you not read the forum rules?
Just in case the search algorithm points people here:
“What distro is best for gaming?”
Most of them are fine these days. Bazzite, CachyOS, SteamOS, and Nobara are the ones everyone seems to be talking about, and the differences between them all are probably going to come down to which games you want to play and your specific hardware.
“Will linux run on my (insert random PC specs)?”
Almost certainly yes. I don’t care what the specs are, and you might have to try more than one distro for it to nail down the most performant one, but if Windows runs on it, some flavor of Linux almost certainly will too. Even Nvidia isn’t a dealbreaker these days.
“Why does (insert Windows/MacOS program) not work on the linux? Linux is crap then!”
It probably does, and you just need a good installation guide. The only applications I’ve heard of that reliably fail to usably run on Linux with some combination of Wine tricks have been Adobe Creative Cloud and online multiplayer games that use kernel-level anticheat. You may be able to get away with using some other FOSS software replacement, or using a virtual machine to emulate Windows and run it in there, or you might find dual-booting Windows a reasonable compromise. But in any case, those applications don’t work on Linux because the developers explicitly chose to make them incompatible with Linux, and continue to patch the application so that community workarounds are broken. Adobe decided you couldn’t use their software on Linux, this isn’t a failure of the open-source community.
“Recommend me a free antivirus software for linux”
Linux. You’re probably fine; not because “nobody writes viruses for linux” (as some jokes online suggest) but because the way Linux is set up is at odds with the idea of computer viruses. Linux has a much more robust permissions system enabled by default which will prevent random programs from running without your consent. Of course you still need to be careful not to install shady packages, but that’s true on Windows too.
Hundreds of millions of websites run on Linux servers. The community is very invested in making sure that they can’t be exposed to viruses.
“Why does Arch not work on my PC from the early 2000’s?”
Have you tried plugging your computer in?
I guess I’m just really lucky, because I almost never run into those. Sometimes I find the good ol’ xkcd DenverCoder9 problem:
Lost user: (Random Monday Five Years Ago, 7:00 pm) Hey, here’s your exact problem, down to the specific language on the error message even.
Lost user: (Random Monday Five Years Ago, 8:30 pm) nvm figured it out
<Thread was locked for inactivity>
But even more often than that I actually get frustrated in the other direction:
Lost user: Hey, I’m having a problem with totally-not-grombl.
Experienced user: Oh yeah, I’ve seen that. Just run
sudo grombl reload -skqq --xbs-juju '2793'and then restart your desktop environment.Lost user: Oh thanks, that totally worked!
Meanwhile I’m like…but why did that work?! It was a completely different package and there’s no indication why the two would even be related…? And sure, it did work, but I’ve learned nothing now.
I used to be a mod on a forum for a fairly popular free program, and we generally treated even that like an information availability problem. Yes, we had an FAQ (and yes, sometimes even still people wouldn’t read it), but when there were a ton of similar questions that were all answered in the FAQ, we figured that meant that the FAQ needed a rewrite for better SEO.
Just means more and better support for Linux going forward. This is a good thing.