tal

considers tradeoffs

So, if it were me, I'd probably use a text editor, as the big text editors are going to be able to do the rest of those. I've authored text in a number of lightly-annotated-text formats like Markdown and similar (AsciiDoc, Docbook, Markdown), and I always did it in emacs, and generally vim has analogous functionality.

If you don't mind me asking, what is the use case for this? Markdown originally had the design goal to be easily-editable as plain text -- that is, one could view it as plain text almost as well as in a rendered form. That was kind of its selling point relative to many other rich text markup languages; it was intended to let a user edit and read it in a plain-text editing environment, without even colorization and such.

Markdown, unlike, say, PDF or Microsoft Word or something, is intended to be display-device-agnostic. That is, if you distribute a Markdown file to others, what the end user will see may differ from what you see, because Markdown intentionally abstracts the specifics of how the material is displayed. Normally, WYSIWYG is mostly-useful for formats that don't do this. If you're using Markdown to author PDFs or printed pages or something and then using that format for distribution, I get that. But if you're handing out Markdown, what you see might not be what the end user sees; screen size differences, typeface differences, other things may pretty-dramatically change what they see. Even above-and-beyond device differences, the Lemmy Web UI, Mbin, the Lemmy clients that I've used, Reddit, and GitHub all use intentional variations on the basic Markdown format. IIRC from last time I used pandoc, it supports multiple of the different dialects, but even it can't provide a representation for every one. Lemmy recently ripped out the auto-renumbering of numbered lists. IIRC either Reddit or Lemmy disabled huge top-level headers after people abused them to flood threads (though maybe that's a per-community/subreddit CSS thing). Reddit doesn't support Markdown's syntax for inline images (well, old.reddit doesn't, at any rate, and I haven't tested new.reddit). Many websites and client software packages that present Markdown permit a user to view it in light-on-dark or dark-on-light or have other theming options.

Is it to make sure that there are no errors in the Markdown leading to some kind of wonky display, say (like a table row missing a trailing pipe or something)? There may be a non-editable-WYSIWYG way to accomplish that that might work with text editors. pandoc may have the ability to emit errors, and it looks like there are Markdown linting packages. It may be possible to rig those up to a text editor to highlight any errors. If I were doing it in emacs, I'd guess that flycheck can run a command in the background during idle time to check for errors and flag them. I don't know how vim does it, but I'm sure that it has an analogous feature.

kagis

It looks like flycheck already does support running markdownlint in the background to highlight errors in Markdown, actually:

https://www.flycheck.org/en/latest/languages.html

Supported Languages

Markdown

markdown-markdownlint-cli

Check Markdown with markdownlint-cli.

goes to try it out

On my system, I just needed to install markdownlint, and then enable the flycheck minor mode (M-x flycheck-mode) when in markdown-mode. Then emacs starts highlighting errors in the Markdown text, and one can get a list of errors in the document and jump to each.

It looks like markdownlint is pretty nitpicky out of the box (warns about line length, trailing whitespace, multiple consecutive blank lines), but I expect that that's configurable. It also did pick up on table column count mismatches, which is the main thing that I can think of to ask it for.

I also see a couple of vim extensions for markdownlint. Can't speak as to their functionality, but there's some level of integration there as well.

Unless there's more text that isn't quoted, the article title doesn't seem to reflect the article body text.

This is what the article title says:

NASA instructs employees to remove pronouns from all work communications

This is what the article body says:

"In response to the Executive Orders, NASA has disabled features in id.nasa.gov and Teams that allows users to add pronouns in their display name in Microsoft Outlook and Teams," the email reads. "For users who have previously added pronouns to their display name, those pronouns will be automatically removed from the system this week."

It also references a signature block, says that it's standardizing on one, and I suppose that a current one could contain a pronoun:

"In addition," the email says, "NASA has adopted a uniform signature block for emails that are sent using any nasa.gov email address. All users (civil servants, contractors, and grantees) must modify their signature block to follow the appropriate signature block… the signature block should not include additional embellishment."

That body text doesn't seem to me to say that pronouns can't be used in work communications. It says that they are removed from three points:

• The display name in Microsoft Outlook.

• The display name in Microsoft Teams.

• Email signature blocks. The quoted text doesn't mention pronouns, but one assumes that maybe one could contain them, though I'd think that there it's more-likely to be an honorific, like "Mr.", "Mrs.", etc.

I don't believe, based on that body text, that use of pronouns would be prohibited in, say, email text or chats, or whatever. Like, if someone sent out a message to their team, "Jim and I are going out to lunch, and he's offered to pay for anyone else on the team who is coming", from the article text, I don't believe that that'd be prohibited. As someone else points out below with some example text, that'd probably be impractical (especially given existing text that does use pronouns).

The side-by-side view doesn't do it for me, I'd more likely than not have multiple windows open with different documents instead.

That'll probably rule out text editors like emacs if you don't want side-by-side. Emacs has some functionality that can do some styling, but you probably won't have a purely WYSIWYG mode for, say, tables. It looks like emacs has some way to translate org-mode tables to Markdown, but that's probably not quite what you want.

It should do autocomplete, syntax highlighting, bracket closing, live spell checking in a variety of languages, launch quickly, be rock solid when faced with a massive log file and allow me to add menu-items to run bash scripts that do things like calculate the time it would take me to read out the text at my normal podcast reading voice or covert weird characters into hrml-entities.

That'll rule out most "small" programs targeting specifically Markdown.

Depends on what you mean by "massive" log files. If you mean you require out-of-memory editing -- the ability to load only a small portion of the document into memory, which is probably going to be necessary once you exceed your machine's main memory -- then you're looking at a small set of software. Some hex editors, emacs can use vlf (which will constrain other features available), a few programs targeting specifically this feature.

I haven't looked at heavyweight word processors, but some may have reasonable support for at least many of those, stuff like LibreOffice. They probably won't open quickly, but there are a few programs capable of speeding up startup by leaving a daemon running, just opening something in that daemon, like emacs, urxvt, etc. You can possibly do that or just leave a blank document open on another workspace.

Emacs's Markdown mode has two options for preview:

• C-c C-c p (Control-C Control-C p) runs markdown-preview, which will open a preview in a new window

• C-c C-c l runs markdown-live-preview mode, which will show an updated-as you edit preview next to the text.

In addition to built-in functionality, in my emacs setup, I also personally bind C-c a k to run Make. In my init.el:

(global-set-key (kbd "C-c a k") 'compile)

That way, if you have any sort of project -- which could hypothetically be a Markdown file -- and a Makefile for it in the same directory, it'll build it. An example Makefile:

all: foo.pdf

%.pdf: %.md
	pandoc -f markdown -t pdf $< -o $@

Editing foo.md in emacs and hitting C-c a k will regenerate the pdf using pandoc with that setup. It sounds like you're familiar with pandoc.

If you have evince running on foo.pdf, it'll monitor changes to the displayed pdf file, and then just update its display if the file changes.

My guess is that demand for high-end GPUs is more for AI stuff, which can always benefit from more horsepower.

Can they actually move their experience over to a new living room box thoug

I don't really see the need.

Valve is tied to the PC, which means that they don't have everything written to a single hardware platform, and their platform isn't locked down.

If you want a Steam console, get yourself an HTPC case, put whatever parts you want in it, throw some controllers on it, set Steam to autostart, and set Steam to use Big Picture Mode.

There is one company that makes Playstations. There is one company that makes XBoxes. There are zillions of companies that make Steam gaming systems.

A lot of California -- and, I expect, the area under concern -- is arid or semi-arid.

I suspect that it'd be possible to use evaporative coolers. They use much less energy than an air conditioner. Need low humidity to be effective, though.

Musk got US citizenship some time back.

What makes someone a foreign national is not having domestic citizenship, not in having multiple citizenships.

I suppose that we might get software that anonymizes photos. I don't think that there are databases of anything other than facial attributes out there, so just blanking a face with an image editor today might be enough to prevent automated identification with a still photo with existing technology.

But, on the other hand, I imagine that one might combine multiple data sources, and we don't know what types of databases and technques will show up down the line.

Setting aside the question of whether Trump is above the law, this won't be suing Trump, but rather the DoJ, their employer.

In the news today:

https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/04/food/waffle-house-egg-surcharge/index.html

Waffle House is placing a surcharge on every egg it sells

“The continuing egg shortage caused by HPAI (bird flu) has caused a dramatic increase in egg prices,” Waffle House said in the statement to CNN. “Customers and restaurants are being forced to make difficult decisions.”

I'd say that it's probably one of the easier places, actually, because post-9/11, there's a lot of security at the Super Bowl, whether-or-not a President is there. Like, they already have overhead marksmen and airspace restrictions and stuff, which is the sort of stuff that you'd put on the President at an event.

I believe that the Super Bowl is considered to be a potential target because of its high visibility.

IIRC, even before that, Tom Clancy had one of his books involve terrorists blowing up the Super Bowl with a small nuclear weapon.

kagis

Yeah, The Sum of All Fears.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sum_of_All_Fears

The terrorists' plan is to detonate the weapon at the Super Bowl in Denver while simultaneously staging a false flag attack on U.S. military forces in stationed in Berlin by East Germans disguised as Soviet soldiers.