One of the first thing you learn in CS 101 is "computers are impeccable at math and logic but have zero common sense, and can easily understand megabytes of code but not two sentences of instructions in plain English."
LLMs break that old fundamental assumption. How people can claim that it's not a ground-shattering breakthrough is beyond me.
I don't have much to add to this right now other than to say this is really fantastic writing. I don't normally enjoy "my journey" kind of blog posts, but this one feels full of valuable insights, and I'm grateful to the author for sharing. It's also just nice to read something written by a skilled writer.
Because unlike the other my journey posts, this one is sharing acquired knowledge and framing it through his (in this instance relatable since it explains the reasons) experience.
Other my journey posts are look at me with only enough subject matter to disguise it.
This post is about sharing knowledge, the others are about sharing experiences.
Right, if we could educate users on the tools they use, and if the trillion dollar companies could provide tools to help community members protect each other, we wouldn't be here. Apple doesn't have to be a dictator if they would help the community support each other. Instead they took the easy way out of stripping freedoms from everyone so they can control every device out there. It's a minor inconvenience to be involved in protecting vulnerable people in our community, it's tragic that people just said Apple should take that role.
I do have the "second visual canvas" people here are talking about, but the thing about mine, and I haven't seen anyone say this yet, is that I don't have full control of it.
For example, I have a memory from childhood of visualizing a yellow bucket, and it showed up in my mind's eye with big cartoon eyes. I tried to delete the eyes because I just wanted a normal yellow bucket, but they kept coming back.
Also, when reading Harry Potter as a kid, Severus Snape always showed up in my mind's eye with the head of a crocodile. I remember telling my brain, no, he's just a guy, just give him a normal man's head, but it never worked. Even now when someone mentions Severus Snape I see him with the crocodile head.
Thing is, italic and bold don't have just one meaning.
Italic can mean: emphasis, foreign word, word which is being defined for the first time, title of referenced work, mathematical variable, and many field-specific uses.
Bold can mean: strong emphasis, term that needs to stand out and be found easily while scanning, mathematical vector, and again, field-specific uses.
If a markup language only has tags for emphasis and strong emphasis, then you can't put bold or italics for any of the other reasons you might want to use them, so anyone wanting to do those things can only misuse the emphasis and strong-emphasis markup, so it de-facto starts to mean bold/italic anyway.
It's at least reasonable to propose a markup language where you have to say "this is emphasis, this is a foreign word, this is a title of a referenced work," etc. but not everybody is writing a document that needs that much metadata. At least HTML retained <i> and <b> when it introduced <em> and <strong>.
Styles, like words, can have several meanings, and forcing authors to separate them feels a bit like forcing them to write the word "set" differently for each of its 10+ meanings.
> At least HTML retained <i> and <b> when it introduced <em> and <strong>.
That is not as practical with markdown though, as you are working with a limited set of practical character combinations.
> Styles, like words, can have several meanings
This is one of the reasons why there are many markdown alternatives that behave slightly differently: not everyone writes plain text mark-up with the same intentions.
This isn't something you can solve with a single markdown version, so we have to accept that each could, and probably will, work a little differently.
The author is a startup founder. I assume he means that the person wanted to maximize the cash portion of his comp and reduce the stock portion.
The author meant this signaled a lack of character because... I dunno. It means the person wasn't as committed as the author? Of course, the author doesn't mention, even to himself, that the employee doesn't get the same upside from stock as a founder.
> The author meant this signaled a lack of character because... I dunno. It means the person wasn't as committed as the author?
It is simple. Salary has to be paid, now. The stocks is likely end up being nothing as most startups fail. So, the author is strongly motivated to pay in stock options and not pay in money.
But, admitting so would make him sound bad. Therefore, it is about your character. If you want to actually be paid, you have bad character.
This is what I do, these days. Whenever I would previously have reached for X-macros or some other macro hack, I tend to use Cog [1] now instead.
It's quite a clever design; you write Python to generate your C++ code and put it inside a comment. Then when you run the Cog tool on your source file, it writes the generated code directly into your C++ file right after your comment (and before a matching "end" comment).
This is great because you don't need Cog itself to build your project, and your IDE still understands your C++ code. I've also got used to being able to see the results of my code generation, and going back to normal macros feels a bit like fiddling around in the dark now.
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