I think it's really interesting that Void (and Zed) are both much more tastefully designed than Cursor, Windsurf or VSCode (though I wouldn't have expected VSCode to be well designed)
There's a double space on this page: https://www.otherbranch.com/for-engineers in "arbitrary black box" and it's really annoying me, but I can't see anyway to tell anyone about it
> Hello. I am rational developer. I am very clever and very rational. Devoid of emotion. Oh what is this? [Something has changed that I don't like]. What is this bubbling feeling in me? An emotional response? No way. I am rational. Therefore these changes must be objectively stupid and dumb and wrong. Let me explain why.
I certainly do this a lot.
I'm going to put that paragraph on a postcard and put it up in my office to try to remind me about it.
(It would also be helpful to come up with a name for this phenomenon).
I highly recommend reading "Who Moved My Cheese?" By Dr Spencer Johnson. I'm not one for self-help books, but this really did make me think about how I look at change generally.
We all do it a lot. We are primary emotional beings and we go around pretending we are rational. Life gets a lot easier and more comprehensible when you start paying attention to it.
> You can’t simply start training today and run a half marathon tomorrow, for example. You can, however, create a system in which you consistently increase the number of miles you run.
The marathon will be on a specific day, ie a deadline. If you haven't finished your training before the day of the marathon, you fail.
As someone who has run many half marathons, one marathon and followed several training programs: no, that is not what happens. If you have not finished your training the only thing which happens is that you will probably run slower than you would have if you had finished your training. A common advice is to not follow the plan slavishly because that way there is only injury and burnout.
So, yes, races are deadlines but not deadlines you can rush towards because then your body will break and then you will fail the race for real. You still need to slowly and consistently build up your body just like if there was no deadline at all. It is much better to not have finished your training than to be injured.
> You can, however, create a system in which you consistently increase the number of miles you run.
This is indeed how you become a fast runner and how most training plans work, except they often peak at a mileage most people do not want to sustain to top the form right before the race.
Creating "a system in which you consistently increase the number of miles you run" is pointless if it doesn't get you to the point where you can run the marathon on the day that it happens.
How long you have until the marathon would determine what kind of training schedule (system) you create.
Yes and no. Having more time gives you more flexibility in how to plan it so you can for example either reduce injury risk or aim at running the race at a higher pace. But it is not like you can rush it beyond a certain level.
I feel one of your misconceptions is that running a marathon (or a half as in the article) is something binary. A lot of people could just go out and run a half marathon tomorrow if they were forced to. The injury risk would be high and they would feel miserable, but they would make it. A full marathon requires much more training but all marathon training programs I have seen are overkill if the goal is just to complete the race. They are instead aimed at either making people complete it at a certain pace or complete the race while being able to enjoy it. If you have a lack of time to train you can sacrifice pace/enjoyment. Rushing the training on the other hand is stupid.
So for marathon training the deadline is in the form of a hard cutoff where you have to decide if you are satisfied with that little training or if you want to wait until a later race. It is more like a release train which only happens a couple of times per year.
Edit: Sorry for the rant, my real point is actually that you are encouraged to change your training plan on the fly to adapt to real life events and that while the race is a deadline it is very unclear what will be delivered at it until you get pretty close to it. Will it be a 3:30 marathon or a 3:15 one? Unless you have sponsors nobody will get angry at you for not delivering what you had planned to.
> if it doesn't get you to the point where you can run the marathon on the day that it happens.
Doesn't the same logic apply to the training system that we created based on time until the marathon? Does the existence of a deadline guarantee success of a training system?
And, doesn't any training system increase the number of miles consistently? Because, if I am to run 26 miles, any training regime should make me able to run 5 before 10, 10 before 26.
This is a straw man that the article argues against. I don't think it is a common belief that deadlines make you more productive. Deadlines exist because that is reality.
The marathon happens on a specific day. You can train however you want, but if you want to run the marathon then you need to be ready on the day of the marathon. Deadlines exist.
Not sure if the linked articles covers it due to the paywall, but according this article [1], the estimate that carbon emissions to build it would exceed emissions is possibly overly pessimistic. Such as predicting that air and car travel will get cheaper over time and rail travel more expensive
Although if the estimate is accurate I would still hazard a guess that it could be a net positive if it successfully increased capacity/speed to the point where people considered it a viable alternative to air/car journies and it was combined with policies to reduce the costs of rail travel/discourage air and car travel where possible
I wonder if studies are systematically underestimating modal shift because it's impossible to quantify the cultural shift from a generation that saw car travel as a sign of upward mobility to a generation that sees unnecessary car travel as tasteless and harmful.
> HTML, Markdown, JSON, LaTeX, and many other standard formats, are just plain text.
On this definition, Word and Excel are just (zipped) plain text files.
> Every device, including ones long gone, and ones not invented yet, can read and edit plain text.
This definitely isn't true, and it kind of misses the point that there's no such thing as "plain text". It's still encoded in ascii, or utf-8, and still potentially has problems being read on other machines.
It's reasonable to say that ascii has become so ubiquitous as to be universal, but it definitely wasn't always so, and won't definitely always be.
You can't be pedantic and then say Word and Excel are files. They're applications.
On a more serious note, ascii and nowadays utf8 are customarily considered plain text, the fact that a specific charset is used doesn't mean it's not text.
If anyone in this thread has a talent for writing that compares to either Homer or Shakespeare, then we're in excellent company!
The rest of us, who can't necessarily achieve the desired effect through words alone, need typographic assistance — much like how I would need a bicycle to keep up with Haile Gebrselassie.
Why not just use letters and avoid punctuation ... that's all Markdown is: punctuation.
> Homer was able to write the fall of troy and Shakespeare Hamlet without bold text.
Oh really? Have you ever seen a manuscript?
Unlike handwritten text, plain text doesn't provide a means to underline, use italics, subscripts and superscripts, etc. Things like Markdown provide conventions for denoting such things in plain text.
I'll just quote my own answer from elsewhere in this thread:
Even if such a device needs to be used, decoding ascii is a trivial lookup operation,
not remotely comparable to decoding some arcane binary format, or a convoluted XML-
derived format such as they are used in WYSIWYG editor formats.
Even if such a device needs to be used, decoding ascii is a trivial lookup operation, not remotely comparable to decoding some arcane binary format, or a convoluted XML-derived format such as they are used in WYSIWYG editor formats.
Yes, text relies on an encoding standard. So do numbers btw. (big/little endian, 2s/1s complement, sign/magnitude, floating-point representations), element enumeration (0 vs 1 based indexing) and even boolean logic (eg.: 0 is true in bash, everything else is false)
At the end of the day, computers represent only 2 states: On and Off. Everything beyond that, needs an encoding.
And some of these encodings are, at this point, both so universal and simple, that they can be considered as much a standard of the IT world, as 0 and 1. ASCII is one of those.
A Commodore 64 can certainly read ASCII out of the box since ASCII is just data ... I'm not sure that person purportedly building a Commodore 64 understands how computers work. And the Commodore 64 display hardware expects PETSCII, which is based on ASCII-1963 ... a few characters will be displayed incorrectly, but alphanumerics will be fine.
ASCII text is just byte data ... nothing has to be done to "teach" a Commodore 64 to read ASCII. Displaying it on the screen is slightly problematic because the Commodore 64 uses PETSCII, which is an older version of ASCII, so some characters will be displayed differently, but it's not a terribly big deal.
> that doesn’t mean that these standards have always existed, or will always exist
These are irrelevant "points". ASCII will still be in use when human civilization ends soon (possibly next week due to nuclear war, or else in a few hundred years due to global warming).
When plain text is zipped, it is no longer plain text and as such it does not take advantage of all the things that can be done with simple text files, unless there is additional tooling, which again unzips the zipped files. This creates some friction of course. General tools do not bother with implementing a knowledge about every format on the planet, so those zips stay zips and are treated as bninary data by version control, which makes them not too useful.
