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Is HTML really that much worse to edit than MD?

Yes, I do think it is.

HTML made by Claude will, by default, be "sleek, modern", with colorful tables, cards, maybe Tailwind for styling. And, of course it will, if you wanted a barebones HTML, you would just have asked for markdown!

So the LLM decided to present some content using 4 cards, and you now want to add new itens. You can't just add new lines of text: you need to copy the whole HTML of the cards. But the LLM used different colors for each card, so now you have the first cards with varying colors and the new cards all the same color as the last card. Now you have to think about colors... etc etc


Markdown is essentially just syntactic sugar for HTML[0], so yes it was made to be easier to edit than HTML.

[0]: https://spec.commonmark.org/0.31.2/#html-blocks


It’s a bit easier yeah but there’s not much in it.

Let’s see…

    *No!*

    I mean, <b>yes!</b>

It depends what we mean I guess, isn’t Markdown supposed to allow [hx]ml tags anyway if user need them? Then it’s more about asking the LLM to generate Markdown with this in consideration, and privilege rendering the output of reports in the preferred browser after relevant rendering.

1. I believe many applications that use markdown allow html. Others don't due to security/rendering issues.

2. One of the limiting factors of LLM is context. An html table takes up way more tokens than a markdown table. Especially if it's a WYSIWYG editor that has all kinds of css and <span> tags just for fun.


> An html table takes up way more tokens than a markdown table

That might be the case today but there’s no reason for it to always be true. They are different representations of the same thing, an LLM could (arguably should!) store an internal representation that uses fewer tokens.


Elsevier is shitty to people doing stuff that (imo) should be allowed. Meta is making money doing the same thing and not getting the same shittiness from Elsevier.

Elsevier at least works within the (admittedly broken) system, Meta does not.


Airlines were heavily regulated in the US and essentially operated as government contractors until 1978 [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Aeronautics_Board


Yeah and it was an absurdly expensive activity limited to rich people

You say that, but flying economy was much better back then. Less fights, more legroom. You've got to fly business today to get close.

Yeah and economy class was absurdly expensive and limited to rich people

I'd contend that inflation adjusted, the average flyer won out.

It was better because the Civil Aeronautics Board did not allow price competition, so the cost of economy tickets was much too high, on some routes reaching the inflation-adjusted level of business class tickets today.

And most families only had a single car prior to 1980.

What's your point?

Did airlines get cheaper due to deregulation or because technology and engineering made operating them cheaper?


Or as simple as incomes crept up and airlines reduced some amenities - both allowing for increased ridership which helped to reduce per head costs.

Probably mostly deregulation and a little bit the latter

Was it cheaper or more expensive for the public to fly on them during that time or after deregulation?

As I understand it, everything about the industry was better back then too.

Case in point: Old Perry Mason shows where characters regularly drive to the airport, pay for a ticket and get on a plane. Flying was actually faster than driving back then, even when measured by time between deciding to leave and arriving at destination!

(Yes, tickets used to cost a bit more. Whatever. Figure in the price for camping in the airport for 4-5 hours, and then tell me the current system is cheaper!)


"Yes, tickets used to cost a bit more"

Tickets used to cost 4-8x what they cost now, depending on route. It wasn't a couple percent extra. A lot of what made flying seem like such a glamorous activity was that everyone but the upper classes was excluded.

An economy class round trip from the US to Japan in the 1970s with Pan-Am was $8,900 in 2026 dollars. About $15,000 if you flew first class.


And for comparison, today you can do an economy round-trip flight with Delta Air Lines for roughly $1.6k (SEA-HND). A Delta One flight is roughly $8.5k. That's the apples-to-apples comparison.

Deregulation also allowed international carriers to sell to us too. An ANA round-trip on economy class is a couple hundred dollars cheaper. Their business class is similarly cheaper than Delta One.

Air travel is so much cheaper than it was back then that it is affordable for most people to take one international trip a year if they really want to. Even to exotic places in Asia or Southern Europe.


It would be prohibitively expensive for poor people to fly. I understand why you wouldn’t care about that, but some people are poor and still need to fly if you can believe it.

At least on x86, multiple additions and multiplications can be done with a single `lea` instruction so it's preferable to XOR. Though I have no idea about other architectures, compiler implementations, any interpreters...


That only helps with multiplications by statically known word sizes (4x, 8x, etc.) and not arbitrary x·y. It can help with many smaller constant multipliers if the complete is clever, but it has to be known at compile time.


Modern != brand new shiny hipster thing. Unless you're a devotee of rolling release or unconvential things like Nix, Mint is not obsolete.


Depending on your age, "brand new shiny hipster thing" could be Enlightenment Desktop, Mate Desktop, or it could be Cosmic or Hyprland+.

Mint is a steady distro like Debian is. It certainly hasn't changed much in the last 15 or so years. For better or worse, depending on your POV.


Mint lags upstream by years. Lol


Is it actually useful and valuable? I can't see any serious use cases except maybe stock video generation.


"Decentralized" seems like a stretch for something developed and promoted by monolithic payment processors.


> That backlash was short lived. Adobe went from $4.4 billion in revenue in 2021 to $23.7 billion

So? Anecdotally, the vast majority of Adobe product users are still upset about the subscription model (but not upset enough to switch to worse software)

> It used to cost $2500 for the "master collection". Now it's $50 a month.

Illustrator-filmmaker-animator-publisher-photographer-web-designers everywhere rejoice!


They're upset, yet they're paying for it. It sounds like the software was underpriced, because people are still using it. Honestly, blame the consumers, not the businesses in these scenarios.


For lightroom at least, no, because there are very few or even no good alternatives. It looks like there are a lot of photo editor apps out there, but most of them are crap or designed for different workflows. I can say because I evaluated various options before begrudging accepting lightroom was the only decent choice.

The subscription model irks me because it's a bit overpriced and they keep trying to shove subscription features on us. No, I don't, and will never care about ridiculously overpriced cloud storage nor generative AI tools. How about adobe fixes issues in the core product first? If given the choice, I would definitely choose a pay-once, no-upgrades licence. But adobe saw their opportunity and started squeezing us for more on a product that was fine.

The plus side of this is it's motivated me to consider building my own photo editing software.


I’m surprised capture one wasn’t able to meet your needs, as an ex-heavy Lightroom user that has been very happy with their transition to C1 with a perpetual license.

What about it ended up not working out for you?


The point is that there was basically no reason to totally kill Wordpad in the way that they did. They're different products and the new Notepad is closer to the ideal version of Wordpad than what Notepad is supposed to be, and now there's no Notepad.


Plus the devaluing of labor in basically every sector (to varying extents).


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