I remember it like this: If you squint the brackets around the link text make a rectangle and look almost like a button you can press. [Press here](to.go.there)
Suppose you want to use asterisks to mark footnotes.* As soon as you add a second footnote,** you're in trouble because your asterisks disappear and everything between them turns bold.
* I had to escape all of these asterisks.
** I see this happen fairly often to people's comments here.
> It should turn bold but keep the asterisk displayed so you can still edit as normal.
This is just terrible UI, why do you need garbage marks when you already have bold? And you can edit "as normal" if you like, but that only requires displaying asterisks during that tiny % of time you edit the word, not all the time when you read it or edit something else.
So you can still see the actual text that you're editing. And to reduce ambiguity. If you don't leave them, then you can't distinguish between adding more bold text to currently bold text or adding non-bold text immediately after
> So you can still see the actual text that you're editing
But you're not editing that text! You're editing some other text and see a bunch of asterisks all over the place. And this is especially bad in nested styles - try some colored bold word in a table cell - without hiding the markup you'll basically lose most of visibility into the text/table layout
> to reduce ambiguity
it does the opposite, you can't easily distinguish between an asterisk and an asterisk, which is... ambiguity
> can't distinguish between adding more bold text to currently bold text or adding non-bold text immediately
Sure you can. In a well-designed editor you'll see the style indicator right near your caret is so it's always obvious whether and how your typed text is styled or not.
In a not-so-well-designed editor you'll get that indicator far away from your caret or just get asterisks appearing when you need them.
In a not-designed editor you'll see them all the time even when they don't serve any purpose.
Ha, I remember this religious debate all the way back in the days of text-mode word processing in the 80s on CP/M and PC. I was indoctrinated in the WordStar camp where style controls were visible in the editor between actual text characters, so you could move the cursor between them and easily decide to insert text inside or outside the styled region. This will forever seem a more coherent editing UI to me.
This might be why I also liked LaTeX. The markup itself is semantic and meant to help me understand what I am editing. It isn't just some keyboard-shortcut to inject a styling command. It is part of the document structure.
Heh, I'm not even sure WordStart other styles at that level. Changing the color back then would mean having the print job pause and the screen prompt you to change ink ribbon and press a key to continue. I can't remember if it could also prompt to change the daisy wheel, or whether font was a global property of the document. The daisy wheels did have a slant/italic set, so it could select those alternate glyphs on the fly from the same wheel. Bold and underline were done by composition, using overstrike, rather than separate glyphs.
But yeah, this tension you are describing is also where other concepts like "paragraph styles" bothered me in later editors. I think I want/expect "span styles" so it is always a container of characters with a semantic label, which I could then adjust later in the definitions.
Decades later, it still repulses me how the paragraph styles devolve into a bunch of undisciplined characters with custom styling when I have to work on shared documents. At some point, the only sane recourse is to strip all custom styling and then go back and selectively apply things like emphasis again, hoping you didn't miss any.
And... I preferred WordPerfect's separate "reveal codes" pane, which reduced the opportunity for ambiguity. WP 5.1 has never been equalled as a general-purpose word processor.
This looks like it’s a story about some Israeli individuals being arrested for organ trafficking, and not at all a story about prisoners in Israel having their organs harvested.
TIS-100 is great. The “mesh of many tiny cores” architecture is cool, and also somewhat mind-bending — but the simplicity of the TIS design makes it just about possible to get your head around it.
After playing TIS a bit I found it really interesting to read about the Transputers and the Connection Machines, two similar real-world architectures.
David Ackley’s T2 Tile project[0] and Movable Feast Machine[1] look similar to me too, but they take the idea much further; the aim is to create an infinitely scalable and totally decentralized architecture. I only know a little about it, but it’s super cool stuff.
If you liked Transputers, you might want to also read about Adapteva and their Epiphany core for a more recent attempt at something similar-ish.
I still have two of their prototype machines from their Kickstarter - two ARM cores to run Linux, with an Epiphany chip with 16 cores in a 4x4 grid. But their goal was scaling it up to 64 cores or up to I think 4K cores on a board. Each core had a small amount of on core RAM and four buses to each side in the grid, and you could access the memory of every other core with a predictable latency (one cycle per "hop"), so if you planned things carefully, you could have them working in lockstep.
It's an interesting space, but hard because the first difficult question you need to answer - which strips away a whole lot of potential use-cases and many of the most profitable one - is "why not a GPU?".
Just before Epiphany, there was also the Tilera, which had a lot in common with the Transputer. Our lab got one and we played around with it, but it was a pain to program. Transputer had OCCAM, Tilera chased after the C model and shared coherent memory.
The Tilera TILE architecture lives on in NVIDIA's DPU.
I’m always delighted when I visit HN and see one of your blog posts on the front page; they posts are great and they elicit some of the most interesting HN discussions. It took me a little while to realize that all these good posts were on the same blog, but once I did I had a lovely time browsing through the archive and reading more of the “deep cuts.”
The posts about the System/360 consoles come to mind, for example. I’m not sure how “popular” those were(?), but they’ve been very helpful as references for an art project I’m working on!
Obsidian creates a hidden directory in your “vault,” which contains plugin files, plus metadata about your settings, currently opened files, etc. If those settings don’t work equally well on both systems, that would be a hassle. Maybe try copying all the files from inside the directory (so that you don’t grab that hidden dir when you do) instead of grabbing the whole directory.
You might also want to look at the git-obsidian plugin. It takes a little setup, but seems to work well once it’s going.
In email, I naturally write things like "...on the example website (www.example.com)..."
Markdown keeps those () in the same place, and just adds the [] so you can delimit the visible text: "...on the [example website](www.example.com)..."
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