I give things like Duolingo a pass because it’s not trying to trick me into doing something they want me to do but I don’t want to do. It’s trying to gamify something that I do genuinely want to do (learn/practice a language) but haven’t had the discipline or plan in place.
Just like how there are apps that gamify getting through tasks, gamify chores, etc. They aren’t really dark patterns in this context.
I think you might be misunderstanding. The semantic line breaks described here are not shown to readers. They are visible only to the person writing/editing the text, as a tool for their own use. If you aren't someone who finds a tool like this useful for your own writing, then no worries! Nobody has been harmed by this existing but not being used. It has no effect on the result.
While I never knew there was a name for this, I naturally do something very similar when writing, keeping thoughts separated by at least a line or two, even if I imagine they'll be in the same paragraph in the end result, just so I have a visual sense of where my different thoughts are and how long they are.
GP brought the point up that addresses this: "why deprive readers of extra clarity offered by this formatting?"
So if this is something that's valuable when reading or editing material, why not extend that to the final, rendered output?
To me, this smells of micro-optimization that's not well thought through: where are the boundaries between being able to edit vs being able to read? If we make every word be on a line by itself, you can use remove-line command in your editor, and diffs will automatically become word-diffs, and it would encourage writers to limit sentences to clearer sentences by fitting them into one ~50 line/word screen. By using double newlines, you can still keep "semantic" newlines too. Wouldn't that be appealing? "No" is what I would say.
I’ve always done similar. My initial writing is a disconnected jumble of sentence parts, sentences, more fleshed out paragraphs, etc just to get ideas out and they later get organized into something cohesive.
I like your extension of the term “readers” but I don’t think that’s the intended use for this matter. And if it were, would it be safe to assume that editors and other collaborators would consent to this standard?
> But also, have you never read the plain text / source of some markdown/other markup language written by someone else? Readme.md in its raw form?
That’s beside the point because the spec states "A semantic line break must not alter the final rendered output of the document.”
And I think you’re misinterpreting what “plain text” refers to here. Not .txt files exclusively, but the markup languages mentioned as well that are...plain text. The final rendered output of these kind of documents are not themselves.
The expectation is that the source of whatever flavor of plain text is not the final output.
If this practice offends you, don’t use it. This is a specification suggesting a practice for you* to use.
How have you been able to manage with hard-wrapped text elsewhere?
> And if it were, would it be safe to assume that editors and other collaborators would consent to this standard?
Easy no, only some of them in some instances. There is no uniformity at such a scale / variety of collaboration.
> That’s beside the point because the spec states
It's not, and I've addressed this in the very next semantic line! And you've also ignored the very point in your quoted line as well. Editing "Readme.md in its raw form" with the extra line breaks is still bad regardless of the final rendered output.
> Not .txt files exclusively
I don't need exclusivity, complementarity still works. And again, final output doesn't save you
> If this practice offends you, don’t use it.
If the criticism offends you, practice in the shadows and don't publish the raw misformatted specs/docs!
> How have you been able to manage with hard-wrapped text elsewhere?
Sometimes by batch-replacing those extra newlines in a text editor, sometiems by abandoning reading because the text reflow is too broken, sometimes just by plowing through while cursing the cavemen that force their habits onto the readers with different devices.
Your aversion appears
to be psychological.
It seems to me like
you have trouble examining
things by the sum of
their parts and
semantic line breaks
agitate this.
You’re free to
the render “misformatted”
text in the format that it’s
intended to be viewed.
And I take it that
physical literature
is a burden for you
to bear.
My condolences.
I imagine this type of formatting caused you to sneak in a typo or two like "free to the render" — if you had it as a free-flowing sentence, it'd be easier to catch.
The point is that if these formatting snippets are useful for reading, we should extend this to all the readers too. If they are not, we should be mindful not to micro-optimize lest we confuse others and ourselves.
My guess, reading this thread, is that most people would tell me that they find the breaks annoying and would rather read my prose without the breaks? Hmm. Would love to hear some feedback.
I’m clearly biased. But I enjoyed the format and it's risk like this that make me more likely to read the content where under different circumstance I may not even care about your professional experiences. The smaller font size mitigates any issues due to the line breaks because I can still see all the text.
Although I can get how someone else would feel that the text is too small and if the size was a conscious decision on your part to accommodate the line breaks they would hold you to blame further.
I think you’ve got a nice personal website overall. Even down to the drafts that lead to 404 errors; a nice touch even if unintentional.
Everybody wants personality to return to the Web again until they’ve got to deal with personalities.
I still might batch process all my notes to break at words up to 72 characters anyway! But I’ll be mindful to where safety goggles and proofread before grinding axes in public.
And I’m leaving the typo above in situ so as not to mislead you that I’m less prone to error under normal circumstances. I’m a WIP.
I just made a root comment with my experience seeing their process at work, but yeah it really cannot be overstated how efficient and effective their archiving process is
Excellent! ArchiveTeam have always been impressive this way. Some years ago, I was working at a video platform that had just announced it would be shutting down fairly soon. I forget how, but one way or another I got connected with someone at ArchiveTeam who expressed their interest in archiving it all before it was too late. Believing this to be a good idea, I gave them a couple of tips about where some of our device-sniffing server endpoints were likely to give them a little trouble, and temporarily "donated" a couple EC2 instances to them to put towards their archiving tasks.
Since the servers were mine, I could see what was happening, and I was very impressed. Within I want to say two minutes, the instances had been fully provisioned and were actively archiving videos as fast as was possible, fully saturating the connection, with each instance knowing to only grab videos the other instances had not already gotten. Basically they have always struck me as not only having a solid mission, but also being ultra-efficient in how they carry it out.
I’m still not entirely sure what this is, but I visited, hit “Surprise Me”, and then spent a couple hours listening to/enjoying the retro-looking pirate radio site I got sent to, so, thanks
I felt the same way, but admittedly the scenario in which I would encounter it was always “in a dark, quiet room at 3am after downloading something and forgetting once again that the .exe is probably going to play music”
You know, for someone who clearly is a bit triggered (reasonably) by dealing with whatever stereotypes and judgements people make about trucks and truck owners, their post is quite positive and respectful. Your reply to it is not. It seems like your argument is “the data indicates a statistical likelihood that someone judging, assuming, or stereotyping will still be accurate.” The factual inaccuracy of prejudice is not the problem with prejudice, the prejudice is
I fail to see how prejudice against waste is a problem.
Prejudice is a bad thing- for things that people can't change, like their race or age. Prejudice against people making bad or wasteful decisions is a good thing.
No, prejudice is bad, full stop. By definition it means to judge someone for something before you actually know for sure that they have/do the thing that bothers you. It doesn’t matter what the thing is, that’s not the problem or the point. The point is you can’t, or shouldn’t, view or treat someone as though they have some quality you dislike when you don’t actually know about this individual and only know that a high percentage of them do. You can’t judge an individual this way! If you hate waste (as do I) and you feel trucks contribute to that and that a majority of truck owners don’t make use of their trucks, then great! Speak about it exactly like that. But you can’t simply take any truck driver and say “that individual is wasteful” without knowing.
You can’t do that any more than you can assume my friends and I are criminals and drug dealers because at some point we decided to use Telegram as our primary messaging app, or like ICE can assume anyone standing near a pro-Mexico protest is an illegal immigrant, you cannot attribute a quality to an individual without having actual knowledge of it.
But nobody is here to judge individuals. It’s the other way around - the discussion is around behavioral trends and data, they were the ones bringing in personal anecdotes to counter it. The point is to look at the behavior of of the general population and its impact, not trying to prove that anyone in particular conforms (or not) to the overall trend.
The point is you can't reliably tell if someone's choice of vehicle is wasteful unless you get to know them a bit. Snap-judging someone's entire lifestyle in the second it takes to recognize a make and model isn't constructive.
> This is a breath of fresh air. Modern pick up trucks post-2017 are giant vehicles with high danger to pedestrians. They are often touted as off road capable with high utility, and I see them in pristine condition on city streets hauling a totality of one human.
That's not a prejudice that's literally how they are marketed and used to a large extend.
The second poster said, he is not using it that way, sure fine nobody said that _everybody_ is using a pick up truck this way, however as the reply to the other post said, there is ample research that the majority of pickup trucks are never used offroad and hardly ever have anything in their bed. Why did the responder feel triggered? And let's not ignore the fact that people driving pickups on the road does have a cost for everyone else, they reduce safety for everyone not in a pick up as well as pedastrians and cyclist, they have poorer milage so are contributing unnecessarily to climate change...
Now as to the point of all prejudice is bad. That's a pretty strong statement. Are you not judging people by their actions? If someone walks around with a swastika (sorry for godwins law, but you made an absolute statement) on his sleeve, is it prejudice to judge him?
If prejudice is bad full stop, even to entirely freely chosen actions, then it's wrong to criticize people for writing prejudiced comments - after all, you're being prejudiced against prejudiced comments, and being prejudiced is wrong.
(Please note that criticising nested paradoxes of tolerance expires after one use per conversation.)
I can't be prejudiced after reading their comment. Prejudice would be dismissing their comment because their nickname contained a word I assume means they're not worth listening to, as an example.
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