Trump is weaker, and Xi is stronger, since their last summit in Beijing. But the U.S. does not have to remain in this state of weakness forever.
McFaul's World
12 May 2026 8:54PM BST
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There you'll be
The submarine is a surprisingly ancient technology—at least in its early, primitive forms. The idea is quite simple, that a well-enough-sealed boat ought to be able to submerge and resurface. It's the practicalities that make the whole thing difficult.
In this week’s free newsletter, I explained how bad the circular AI economy is in the simplest-possible terms:
Anthropic not have money to pay big cloud bills, because Anthropic company cost lots of money, more money than Anthropic make! So Anthropic only PAY cloud bills if OTHERS
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Everyone, it’s time to talk about AI demand and the capacity constraint issues across the industry.
These constraints are not a result of “incredible demand” for AI, but the desperation of hyperscalers and the avariciousness of two near-trillion-dollar failsons living off their parents’ welfare.
Joe Abercrombie in 20 Years:
One observation that blows my mind – The Blade Itself is now twice as old as A Game of Thrones was when The Blade Itself came out. GRRM felt like a long established pillar of the genre to me at that point. Truly I must be part of the fantasy furniture at this one…
That you are, Joe. That you are.
Just this weekend I was visiting a fantasy and science fiction book store with my seven year old son, with whom I'm currently reading Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets. As we stumbled upon the First Law books, I told him ‘just wait until you're old enough to read these ones, you'll have a blast’.
I guess The Blade Itself was about 10 years old when I read it. In another decade, he'll be the one reading it.
I mentioned in a recent note that I've been tinkering with the front page setup for a while. The previous iteration of the front page had been mostly identical since I relaunched the blog in late 2023. It showed recent posts and recent notes.
Since then, I've added a couple of content sections to the website. I add books to my reading log several times per month. The workout log is updated daily. The result is that the front page wasn't really reflecting the entirety of the activities that happen on this website. As new visitors tend to drop by the home page, I think it's a good idea to use that page to give them an idea of what's happening on this website.
To that end, I've tried several times the last year to find a way to incorporate updates from the reading and workout logs into the front page. Unsuccessfully! I've created and discarded at least five different mock-ups. Common for all of them is that I've begun with the approach of trying to lift the design elements from the two logs into the front page. As I'm happy with how both sections look, that felt like the natural approach.
The drawback is that every single time I tried this approach, the overall feel of the front page was disjointed. It came off as something haphazardly thrown together. When I tried once more to tackle this challenge the other day, the outcome was the same. But at that point, a lightbulb went off.
‘I don't have to bring the design elements from the logs to the front page. I can just bring the data from the logs and present them in the same way I do the other front page elements!’
The template was essentially already in place. Posts and notes are distinct types of content, and were already presented as such. Doing the same with two more types of content shouldn't be an issue. So I gave it a go. And, to my surprise, it worked just fine. It's not revolutionary or anything out of the ordinary. But that wasn't what I was aiming for. I just wanted to preserve the look and feel of the home page, while also showing the breadth of content I share on the site. And I think I achieved just that.
To spruce it up a little, I decided to reuse the icons from the workout log on the workout log entries. With that little visual in place, it was a short order to just reuse miniature versions of the book covers from the books I'm reading to add a little bit of colour there as well.
One unexpected result is that the posts and notes entries feel a bit flat by comparison without any visuals. But, as I want to err on avoiding anything akin to Apple's icons in menus everywhere, I think I'll leave it as it is for now.
While make some changes to the front page (I finally found a way to include the content I wanted!) I accidentally copied the settings file from my ‘dev’ directory to my actual website directory. The dev version only has a placeholder URL and site name in the settings.
Now I've gotten a reminder where I use those settings.
In addition to the header, the feeds rely on these. When I regenerated the site with the placeholder values in the settings file, every old post in the feeds were given a new URL and unique ID. This would result in your feed reader thinking these old posts were new posts. And a dead link to these posts.
Will try not to do that again! ^_^
Watched Train Dreams tonight.
Wow!
Another great film. Loved the quiet contemplation of it. The perseverance in the face on unbearable grief. Speaking of, I was, presumably like the protagonist, hoping that it didn't happen. That they simply moved on from the scorched earth, to start anew somewhere.
I still am.
Back when Copilot first came out, I immediately disliked it. But I decided to give it a fair shake and tried to evaulate it in good faith. I wasn’t interested in paying for it, but they had a form for FOSS community members to apply for a free subscription, so I filled it out and gave it a shot.
Been thinking about redoing the front page for a while now. Want to incorporate recent workouts as well as books I'm reading. Perhaps even recent listens from my ListenBrainz profile.
Fiddled around with the inspector trying to land something. But nothing feels right. Yet. Could probably take to Figma or something to get a decent sketch, but ‘designing’ with HTML and CSS feels more like shaping clay or working wood, and that's the way I want to do it.
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Yesterday morning, GitHub Copilot users got confirmation of something I’d reported a week ago — that all
Tommy Dixon in the end of our extremely online era.:
And I think we won't realize how sick we were, how sick and sad and confused it makes us, until after it's over. We will look back on these times with a compassionate sadness. Shake our heads at how ignorant and naive we all were, to give up so much for so little. And wonder why we ever cared so much about strangers on the Internet.
Came across this piercing piece of writing by way of Tommy's follow up, How to end your extremely online era. Start with the first, the follow his somewhat practical guide.
I'll do the same.
Noah Hawley in What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat for the Atlantic:
It’s not that the wealthy become evil; it’s that their environment stops teaching them the things that nonwealthy people are forced to learn simply by living in a world that pushes back.
Fascinating insights from someone who spent a weekend inside Bezos' private circus exhibition.
If you've done much with modern cellphones, you've probably noticed just how odd the architecture can be around audio. Specifically, I mean call audio: modern smartphones have made call audio less of a special case (mostly by just becoming more complicated in general), but in older phones you would often find arrangements where the cellular modem 1 had direct analog audio to the microphone and speaker, perhaps via some switching to share amplifiers.
Rewatched Interstellar tonight. First time since back when it came out.
Great movie. Very intense. Amazing music. Sure hits different when you're a parent. Cried like a baby.
It also triggers an immense longing. Something deep inside me. A desperate urge to know. What's beyond? I need to know. I must! It's almost a temptation.
Great movie. Fantastic, even. But I don't think I shall ever watch it again.
When it is time, I'll finally know.
Jeremy in Finally Finishing Ocarina of Time:
Ocarina of Time is one of those games that gets talked about so much that I’ve sort of always felt like a fake gamer for never finishing it, even nearly 30 years after release.
I don't know why Jeremy needs to exaggerate (or, alternatively, make me feel so old) when opening this otherwise great post. Was great reading some thoughts — thirty years on, apparently — about the game that defined my youth. Jeremy points out that the combat experience has aged well. I would agree. Every battle in every 3D Zelda game since has felt like a natural evolution of the standard set by Ocarina of Time. It was groundbreaking at the time, and even three decades later it holds up well.
WU LYF are back!
Their 2012 show at Parkteatret in Oslo is one of my all time favourite concerts. Fourteen and a half years later, they have a new record out and they're coming back to Oslo.
I'll be there at John Dee in September. Cannot wait!
Herman in The commodification of travel:
Perhaps once sunglasses cameras take off and people can record their entire lives they can finally experience where they are, instead of trying to capture it perfectly for later.
Yeah, I don't know it's going to be as peaceful as that. I think Black Mirror got it spot with The Entire History of You back in 2011.
Otherwise, I fully agree with what Herman's saying about travel. What I will say is that this long predates social media. Although social media has certainly exacerbated the tendency beyond all hope.
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Only took me like half a year to notice that the default port for Navidrome is 4533. As in 45 and 33 rounds per minute vinyl. Now that I have seen it, I cannot help thinking ‘that's so clever!’ every time I open Navidrome.
Kiwi Farms is a web forum that facilitates the discussion and harassment of online figures and communities. Their targets are often subject to organized group trolling and stalking, as well as doxing and real-life harassment.
Rishabh in Old newspaper like blog design:
I also added another category of posts, i.e., workout, whose design is copied from Lars‑Christian's website. Thanks to Lars for the guidance.
Stumbling across this in my feed reader put a huge smile on my face! Risabh's workout log looks great, and it's so cool to have provided a little inspiration for someone else to take control of their data and share workouts on their personal website.
Another great implementation is by Zak, who created a dedicated site on a subdomain for his workouts.
Of course, I encourage both to create dedicated feeds for the workouts. That way, I can truly recreate the good parts of Strava (with none of the many drawbacks) by building a ‘workouts’ folder in my feed reader to draw inspiration when people get the work done.
Hopefully many people will join us in sharing their workouts on their own websites like this, and this is just the beginning of the workout log revolution!
15 years ago, on December 11th, 2010, at the bold age of 17, I wrote my first blog post on the wonders of the Windows Phone 7 on Blogspot.
A few years ago, I made the mistake of filling out a form to look into a business loan, one that I never ended up getting. Since then I receive no less than three texts a day offering me lines of credit ranging from $150,000 to as much as
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I'm inside my feed reader and I click a link to a feed. What happens? The link opens in my browser and the feed file is downloaded.
Downloaded! When I'm in my feed reader and click a link to an actual feed. Come on guys! We need to fix this. But, given that Google hates RSS and are already taking additional steps to kill its usability, I'm not too optimistic.
We should be bringing back feed:// URLs and work to make them ubiquitous. The open web needs it, or an equivalent, in the fight against the lock-in of the tech oligarchies.
The internet used to be great.
I was going through my old notes and clippings (why is a big post in the making) and I came across this quote by Joel Miller. I don't know who Joel Miller is, but this quote by him feels more relevant than ever in the age of AI:
Our investment in reading changes the book because the book has changed us. ... If books are merely a means of transferring information, then perhaps, yes, a book is a waste of time. If a summary of its thesis and key points could be presented in a brief article or Substack post, why not just save the hours and read the Substack post? All the more if the information is outdated or questionable for one reason or another. But that mistakes what a book is for. A book is a tool. It’s a machine for thinking. And “all machines,” as Thoreau once said, “have their friction.” The time it takes to engage with ideas—whether factual or fictional, emotional or intellectual, accurate or inaccurate, efficient or inefficient—might strike some as a drag. But the time given to working through those ideas, adopting and adapting, developing or discarding, changes our minds, changes us. It’s not about the wisdom we glean. It’s about what wisdom we grow.
Light: it's the radiation we can see. The communications potential of light is obvious, and indeed, many of the earliest forms of long-distance communication relied on it: signal fires, semaphore, heliographs.
Soundtrack: The Dillinger Escape Plan — Setting Fire To Sleeping Giants
In what The New Yorker’s Andrew Marantz and Ronan Farrow called a “tense call” after his brief ouster from OpenAI in 2023, Sam Altman seemed unable to reckon with a “pattern of deception”
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If you've peeked at my reading log the last year or so, you'd be excused for thinking I'd abandoned Letters from a Stoic by Seneca. It has featured under my reading section for more than a year!
Finishing a book has never taken me this long before. But finish it I did, and I did it just the other day.
Stoic philosophy has interested me for many years. Even before it was co-opted by the ‘manosphere’ and quotes from Seneca, Marcus Aurelius and their fellow stoics became endemic to various platforms. I just never really got around to following up on my curiosity. Not until I began listening to the History of Rome podcast a couple of years back. It renewed my interest in the philosophical teachings of the age, and — having both Seneca's Letters and Aurelius' Meditations on my shelf — I decided that I needed to read these two cornerstones of stoicism.
Seneca's letters are written as musings and advice for his friend Lucilius. The 65 letters have become somewhat of a bible or, the original teachings, for stoics. They cover a wide array of subjects. Everything from the folly of the crowds to how to meet death to the point of philosophy.
Part of the reason finishing the book took me so long is because I decided to read at most one letter per day. Given the subject matter, plowing through felt insufficient. Better to let each letter sink in and process it properly before moving on to the next. I also took a fair bit of notes.
Much of what Seneca teaches resonates with me. The stoic views on death, in particular, align with my personal beliefs. Seneca closes his 65th and final letter to Lucilius:
And what is death? It is either the end, or a process of change. I have no fear of ceasing to exist; it is the same as not having begun. Nor do I shrink from changing into another state, because I shall, under no conditions, be as cramped as I am now. Farewell.
Mic drop!
Death is a recurring subject throughout the letters. The view is consistent in that death is nothing to be feared. All of our lives we are dying. (‘For death itself is always the same distance from us.’) Not a single one of us has any guarantees for when that final moment will come. We should lead our lives as if death is constantly around the corner. ‘Let us postpone nothing’, he writes.
His first letter deals with just that. Seneca opens it thus:
Set yourself free for your own sake; gather and save your time, which till lately has been forced from you, or filched away, or has merely slipped from your hands.
Seneca preaches that ‘life is long, if only you know how to use it’. Most of us, unfortunately, do not. We are not set free. We do not gather and save our time. Instead, our precious time is squandered to ‘the most disgraceful kind of loss’ which ‘is due to carelessness’.
His strong and adamant preaching that ‘nothing is ours, except time’ was a timely (hur-hur) reminder. I'm at a part of my life where the days seemingly fly by. Each day is filled to the brim. Reading Seneca's letter compelled me to take stock of how I'm spending my time. To make adjustments, sure. But, more importantly, to reach the conclusion that much of what I fill my days with is genuinely what I want to be doing.
What a gift.
Another gift was his thoughts on crowds. In the physical sense, in the sense of ‘everyone is doing it’ that is so easy to use as justification for our actions and in the sense that we need to strive for the approval of the many. This particular anecdote hit home:
The following was also nobly spoken by someone or other for it is doubtful who the author was; they asked him what was the object of all this study applied to an art that would reach but very few. He replied: ‘I am content with few, content with one, content with none at all.’
And, on the subject of attracting praise, Seneca wrote (emphasis mine):
Many men praise you; but have you any reason for being pleased with yourself if you are a person whom the many can understand? Your good quality should face inwards.
These are thoughts I've sort of held or vaguely surmised, but never truly expressed. But I could not agree more. Your compass should point towards something other than praise and adulation. Your good quality should face inwards. Seneca also talks about going against the crowds in how you act:
It shows much more courage to remain dry and sober when the mob is drunk and vomiting, but it shows greater self-control to refuse to withdraw oneself and to do what the crowd does, but in a different way — thus neither making oneself conspicuous nor becoming one of the crowd. For one may keep holiday without extravaganza.
In opposing the crowd, it is easy to default to reclusive behaviour. As Seneca points out here, however, this is not necessarily the stoic way. Instead, to be among the crowds, and to do what they do, but in a different way, is both more challenging and more instructive.
Another cornerstone of stoic philosophy are the views on material wealth. It is not that they abhor richness. In fact, they actively encourage anyone to pursue it. It, however, being something quite different than what we normally consider wealth. Nothing illustrates this more than when Seneca quotes Epicurus in a story about Pythocles:
‘If you wish to make Pyhocles rich, but not rich in the vulgar and equivocal way, do not add to his store of money, but subtract from his desires.’
Seneca believes that it is equally true that:
If you wish to make Pythocles honourable, do not add to his honours, but subtract from his desires.
And:
If you wish Pythocles to have pleasure forever, do not add to his pleasures, but subtract from his desires.
Not as eloquent as his ‘Epicurean enemy’, perhaps, but it certainly gets the point across. This view that wealth and honour and true pleasure is not defined by what you own and acquire, but rather what you desire, is something I believe deeply. Seeing it written in such plain words helped me cement that belief. Every day I now try to remind myself of this. That I can become richer, more virtuous and make life more pleasurable simply be subtracting from my desires.
To that end, I will end this post with perhaps my favourite quote from all of Seneca's letters, concerning what constitutes happiness:
…teach us that the happy man is not he whom the crowd deems happy, namely, he into whose coffers mighty sums have flowed, but he whose possessions are all in his soul, who is upright and exalted, who spurns inconstancy, who sees no man with which he wishes to change places, who rates men only at their value as men, who takes Nature for his teacher, conforming to her laws and living as she commands, whom no violence can deprive of his possessions, who turns evil into good, who is unerring in judgement, unshaken, unafraid, who may be moved by force but never moved to distraction, whom Fortune when she hurls at him with all her might the deadliest missile in her armoury, may graze, though rarely, but never wound.
Alex Chan in Creating a personalised bin calendar:
I start by generating an HTML calendar using Python. There’s a built-in calendar module, which lets you output calendars in different formats. It doesn’t embed individual date information in the
<td>cells, so I customise the HTMLCalendar class to write the date as an id attribute.
Neat post from Alex. Can immediately think of a few places where this approach might be useful. Also wish I'd known that Python calendar module fifteen years ago when I spent a not insignificant amount of hours setting up a calendar grid in Photoshop by hand ^_^
Soundtrack — Soundgarden — Blow Up The Outside World
A lot of people try to rationalize the AI bubble by digging up the past.
Billions of dollars of waste are justified by saying “OpenAI just like Uber” (it isn’t) and “the data center buildout is
Mat Duggan in I Can't See Apple's Vision:
The first time I thought "oh man, they've lost the thread" was Notifications. On iOS, Notifications make sense — you've got apps buried in folders three screens deep, so a unified system for surfacing what's happening is genuinely useful. On macOS, this design makes absolutely no sense at all.
I absolutely cannot wrap my head around notifications on the Mac. Why are they there? Where do they come from? Who decides what goes there? Every time I accidentally open that right sidebar, I'm always surprised to see a heap of notifications there. Should I be checking up on these more often? Am I missing out on important stuff?
The concept of ‘notifications’ in a desktop environment simply doesn't make sense to my, admittedly not very smart, brain.
Mat's post is spot on. Recommended reading!
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Rakhim in Related UI elements should not appear unrelated:
A few years ago a new trend in UI design emerged where related elements would appear more and more detached and unrelated to the things they are meant to point to.
Somewhat related to my comments on old versions of OS X being much better designed that the current iteration, is this post where Rakhim points out that this goes for browsers as well. Nobody can claim with a straight face that this evolution isn't degrading the design and user experience.
Well, I guess it wasn't feature complete after all. Easy to forget when you're mostly running on the treadmill. Once the hills come around, though, you know you need to log and display elevation gain, or climbing.
So now my workout log does that.
You can see this in the summary section of today's run. As you can see, I climbed 140 metres. If you want to know the actual elevation profile, you can click on the elevation tab. This is just a little extra data point to give context to that visualisation.
For new readers, if you want to know more about how I went about putting the workout log together, I've covered the process extensively in these three posts:
Andreas in Emulating old OS X versions with QEMU:
It's weird, because I never used these systems back when they were new, and yet I feel somehow nostalgic for them. I don't know why, but there's just something about the look of them. The colour palette, the skeuomorphism, the fonts and the overall design are just beautiful, and I wouldn't mind using an OS with this kind of look and feel today.
The early versions of Mac OS X were unequivocally better designed and a preferable user experience than the bastardised offspring that today's MacOS has become. My experience started with Tiger (10.4) and I would love to go back. In fact, if someone put together a Linux distro that closely emulates the early OS X aesthetic and UX, I would finally be forced to switch.
If you want to experience the old OS X versions yourself, Andreas' post guides you through the process.
A while ago, I came across a haiku by Basho by way of a two decades old post by Jason Kottke. The poem in question was ‘the whole family’ and goes like this:
the whole family
all with white hair and canes
visiting graves
It resonated deeply and sent me down a rabbit hole. I began my making a note of it. This to ensure I didn't forget the poem. The lines made me want to read more by Basho. Upon discovering that he was Japanese, I was reminded of the quote by the tourist towards the end of the movie Paterson:
Poetry in translations is like taking a shower with a raincoat on.
That got me thinking. Ideally I should learn Japanese to truly get a feel for Basho's work. But that was not a journey I was willing to begin at the moment. Nevertheless, I thought that instead of reading English translations, it would probably be one step up if I could instead find Norwegian translations. Poetry never came easy to me. Reading in my native tongue would probably be my best chance of ‘getting it’.
I then began searching for first hand translation. Translated poetry is bad enough. I certainly didn't want to spend my time reading AI-generated Norwegian translations based on English translation. Eventually I ended up discovering Fra duggens verden at the National Library of Norway's website.
The full title of the book is ‘Fra duggens verden: Basho i norsk gjendiktning (1644-1694)’. It translates to something like ‘From the dew's world: Basho re-created in Norwegian’ and the title made me confident that the author — of whom I knew nothing — had translated the works based on the originals. That it was released in 1985 made me reasonably certain they weren't AI-generated.
My next order of business was getting a hold of the book. Yes, I could technically read the book scans, in my browser, through the National Library's website. But that's no way to read a book! Of this particular book, I wanted a physical copy. That was easier said than done. My search eventually led me to the website of a local art gallery and antiquarian bookshop which claimed to have for sale. I emailed the owner that I wanted to buy the book, and a short while later it arrived in the mailbox outside my house.
At this point I still had no idea about what kind of book this was. My idea was that it contained translated haiku poems. To my surprise, the first half or so turned out to be a biography of Basho and his struggles to become founder of what's today know as haiku poetry.
Great stuff! I love getting more than I'd bargained for.
Basho's story was a fascinating one. His frequent pilgrimages throughout Japan to get away from ‘modern society’ of Japan in sixteen hundreds and live a more modest life to connect with nature rang familiar. Dørumsgaard doesn't hide his disdain for the contemporary society of the 1980s. He wonders what Basho would think of the lives we lead today. Which in turn made me wonder what both Basho and Dørumsgaard and would make of the world as it is in 2026. As I read this book in parallel with Letters from a Stoic, it struck me that perhaps this struggle to get back to natural world must be a universal human experience.
Despite Basho's poems and Dørumsgaard formal, almost to the point of heavy, and opinionated recounting of his live, the best part of this book to me was something else entirely: The smell. There is a certain, characteristic smell of old books and this book has it in spades. The smell brings me back to my life as a boy, sitting in the attic of my grandparents' house trying to find something interesting to read after ploughing through the Donald Duck comics I'd brought for entertainment. The sensation is so visceral that, for a tiny sliver of a moment, I feel as if I've been transported through time and space. Despite having finished the book, I still keep it on the side table next to my chair, only to pick it up towards my nose and flicker through the pages.
Sometimes you get way more than you bargained for.
As for Basho's poetry and Dørumsgaard's re-creations, well, they certainly are first hand translations. Dørumsgaard has included a sizeable sections of notes on his reasoning for the translations. And while I've gained newfound appreciation for both poetry as an art form, and haiku in particular, not a single other of the poems included in this book hit me as much as that first one I came across which pushed me down this rabbit hole. Dørumsgaard's Norwegian re-creation goes as follows:
Slektens siste
Alle med stokker
og hvite i håret
rusler de stille omkring mellem graver.
I guess that's poetry for you. It resonates when the most when you expect it the least. For instance when clicking a link to a twenty two year old blog post lamenting that the work of sorting and categorising has overshadowed the work itself. Nevertheless, here are some of my other favourites. I challenge you to find them recreated in whichever language you're the most comfortable reading poetry.
Tid og evighet
Hvor vis den mann som ikke tenker
«flyktig er livet»
ved synet av lyn.Silhuet
En kråke
På en vissen gren
i høstens skumring…Cikaden
Den sang sig
ut av livet –
tomt ligger skallet igjen.Lede
Ofte føler jeg at de dødes rike
må være lik en ensom kveld
ved høst.«L'etang mort»
En gammel dam –
en frosk som sprang:
et skvulp.
Years ago, when I was in college, I had one of those friends who never quite had it together. You know the type; I'm talking lost a debit card and took three months to get a new one because of some sort of "mixup" with the credit union that I think consisted mostly of not calling them for three months.
So apparently rsync is slop now. When I heard, I wanted to drop a quick note on my blog to give an alternative: tar. It doesn’t do everything that rsync does, in particular identifying and skipping up-to-date files, but tar + ssh can definitely accomodate the use case of “transmit all of these files over an SSH connection to another host”.
Consider the following:
tar -cz public | ssh example.org tar -C /var/www -xz
This will transfer the contents of ./public/ to
example.org:/var/www/public/, preserving file ownership and permissions and so
on, with gzip compression.
So apparently rsync is slop now. When I heard, I wanted to drop a quick note on my blog to give an alternative: tar. It doesn’t do everything that rsync does, in particular identifying and skipping up-to-date files, but tar + ssh can definitely accomodate the use case of “transmit all of these files over an SSH connection to another host”.
Consider the following:
tar -cz public | ssh example.org tar -C /var/www -xz
This will transfer the contents of ./public/ to example.org:/var/www/public/, preserving file ownership and permissions and so on, with gzip compression.
I’m turning 40 in a month or so, and at 40 years young, I’m old enough to remember as far back as December 11 2025, when Disney and OpenAI “reached an agreement” to “bring beloved characters from across Disney’s brands to
Mat Duggan in Markdown Ate The World:
Markdown doesn't do most of what those formats do. You can't set margins. You can't do columns. You can't embed a pivot table or track changes or add a watermark that says DRAFT across every page in 45-degree gray Calibri. Markdown doesn't even have a native way to change the font color.
And none of that mattered, because it turns out most writing isn't about any of those things. Most writing is about getting words down in a structure that makes sense, and then getting those words in front of other people. Markdown does that with less friction than anything else ever created. You can learn it in ten minutes, write it in any text editor on any device, read the source file without rendering it, diff it in version control, and convert it to virtually any output format.
Informative and well-written post from Mat on Markdown's rise to prominence over the past few years. Lots of fascinating information in the backstory detailing the .doc and .docx formats about which I knew next to nothing. I just realised a few years ago that plain text was the way to go, and Markdown was the obvious choice at that point. Now I know more about why that was the case.
Vim is important to me. I’m using it to write the words you’re reading right now. In fact, almost every word I have ever committed to posterity, through this blog, in my code, all of the docs I’ve written, emails I’ve sent, and more, almost all of it has passed through Vim.
My relationship with the software is intimate, almost as if it were an extra limb.
Vim is important to me. I’m using it to write the words you’re reading right now. In fact, almost every word I have ever committed to posterity, through this blog, in my code, all of the docs I’ve written, emails I’ve sent, and more, almost all of it has passed through Vim.
My relationship with the software is intimate, almost as if it were an extra limb.
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