I've been building a Markdown variant called Zd that's focused on extensibility and simplicity. I'm curious what you would change about Markdown if you were designing it from scratch, what challenges you face as a user, or what you wish were easier to do when incorporating Markdown into your own projects.
Any conversation
Definitely tables are cumbersome.
Yeah, 100%. That is completely something I am punting on currently. It would be easy to just copy over the solution from (extensions to) Markdown, but it's hard to entirely narrow in on both what tables ought to do and how to make them do it.
If you had a magic wand, what would you have them be more like?
I'm doing experiments with short attention-span students and code. Starting with python, and, oddly, now working in BASIC. As a C programmer of 40+ years, I find this aesthetically and pedagogically displeasing, but I am delighted to see them getting fully absorbed in writing
130 PRINT "You have been eaten by a bear!" : GOTO 900. Yes there is spaghetti, but it's their spaghetti and they seem to take delight in debugging it. Python will come later. taking a week off to stave off burnout, catch up on some reading and writing and small projects, and finish Ocarina of Time. also will make soup
It didn’t work out, we found competition offering the same service for free so the fell apart. Need to find something else to do as a side project to textlog. 😕 Thinking of a code editor that’s focused on the new agentic workflows, so you have it on the side regardless of your agent tools and it monitors the git diff and offers a nice panorama view. I’ve done an extension for VSCode similar to this idea.
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I'm 55 and recently self-diagnosed as "fairly ASD with some ADHD" after watching a lot of youtube videos. It's been immensely helpful (to the point of bringing me to tears sometimes) in understanding the struggles I had when I was younger. It's also been very helpful in understanding what I can do currently to support myself and work with my brain instead of against it.
I'm glad it was useful to you. This process of becoming aware of our autism is not easy. It is liberating, but it is also difficult, at the same time.
I watched a lot of videos too, but then I visited a couple psiquiatrists and a psycologist (I had other problems too), just to be sure.
What is your opinion about the ASD youtube landscape? I think that there are a few very good channels, but there is lot of noise too. I see some danger there.
Those "10 signs you may be [or not be] autistic" seem quite dangerous to me. Neurodivergence can be tricky.
Yeah I agree that there are many ASD channels on YT of varying qualities. I only follow a few. Some of my favorites (very roughly in order):
I think for now being self diagnosed is enough for me. Just knowing that I'm neurodivergent has been helpful for me to be kind to my own mind.
@MomontheSpectrum@imautisticnowwhat@elenacarr0ll-- kinda more emotive, but I find that helpful sometimes@autismfromtheInside-- no longer posts (burned out)
Putting a slide deck together (outside of work), despite agreeing with Tufte on this matter. I’ll also create a handout that tells the story better than the slides and deliver that, too, but was asked to produce a slide deck, and I think that’s part of the “effort theater.”
Using Beamer for the slides, but not a theme that looks like Beamer because humans have eyes.
Any users around?
I have been customizing it to the way I work, as it is meant to be. Bent it in a way that I enjoy holding it, so to say.
Maybe someone will find those useful, so I took the time to get it published.
Gruntfooot is a footer customization, where you can try new colors/glyphs in real time and also has theme support.
I find myself building bespoke tooling for my own and workflows these days, not only because of the obvious reason of software being so much cheaper to build, but also because there are SO MANY options for solving any given problem that it feels impossible to evaluate all of them.
If it's not a crucial piece of tech for a work problem then it often feels like paving my own way is both cheaper mentally (kind of amazing that's true these days) and probably a better fit.
It will become increasingly harder to find niche markets for software when those people can just build it themselves exactly how they want it. In the end, people want to accomplish tasks, and the AI is going to be building the software on-the-fly exactly for that task, why do we need generic software that may or may not be a fit?
Yeah. It makes me think that protocols for exchanging data between apps will become even more important in that landscape. But maybe, not - maybe each exchange is another bespoke AI-driven implementation?
Protocols, infrastructure, containers, those kinds of things. I was actually playing around with an idea for a minimal markup language + runtime that can be utilized by AI to spin up apps more easily, and brainstorming it with ChatGPT, I have a feeling something like that will appear soon to complement MCP.