Pandoc is such an amazing piece of software. I used it to format my novel and made it part of a GitHub action to produce all the formats I required. I wasn't aware of templates, but some look really sleek.
I keep thinking that modern text editors are just flawed and markdown, with all its downsides and limitations, is what 99% is the people need.
You may be overestimating technical abilities of 99% of the people. I tried to convert some to pandoc and failed miserably. Personally I love it, markdown is becoming more and more central to my workflows.
Building my resume in a wysiwyg editor was an exercise in frustration. Formatting was inconsistent, they were only searchable from inside the editor and versioning was useless because diff had no meaning.
My markdown resume has its own problems but having this level of control has been a huge load off my mind.
For most of the short simple documents I create, I don't want to redo the formating for every document. Simply writing it in something simple like Markdown ( possibly a markdown wysiwig editor) and having my software automatically apply appropriate standard formats to it is ideal.
Agreed. There is actually a lot better control in openoffice / libreoffice than most people know. You just have to set up your styles and be systematic about (virtually) never using direct formatting, instead always applying a pre-configured style. There is a distinct value in seeing your final product as you work, when the final product is visual.
WYSIWYG pretty consistently leads to visual and structural messes. It's only going to "beat" everything else if you don't care about quality.
Most people don't—and don't have to—care about quality for their short, simple documents, but that is neither good nor inevitable, and it's always worth trying to do better.
I'm a programmer and even I like writing in a non-programmable environment. Programming in the document system just stimulates the more primitive parts of my brain that love the processing and programming more than the writing itself. So it's distracting in that way.
You should be aware that pandoc markdown has extensive non-standard additions to the language to make it usable.
If you want a pure markup language that is simple, plain text readable and able to produce text more complex than what a type writer could manage in 1920 then restructured text is the way to go.
pandoc has infinitely many devices for including various commands. A lua filter - to take one standard example - can manage basically anything you cook up. The going AIs can write them for you and your triggering syntax at the drop of a hat. Inter alia, you can write your restructured text in markdown and include bits like this.
Here is normal Pandoc Markdown text.
```{=rst}
.. note::
This is a native reStructuredText directive!
Pandoc will not parse or change this text.
It goes straight to the rST output writer.
```
I don't think we're in the early ages... LLMs technology has essentially stagnated since GPT3.5, we just have bigger models that can handle more context. We're trying to cope for the lack of progress of the actual technology by coming up with contraptions of multiple models stuck together, Mixture-of-Experts, Reviewer models, PM models...
Writing your own storage is a great way to understand how databases work (if you do it efficiently, keeping indexes, correct data structures, etc.) and to come to the conclusion that if your intention wasn't just tinkering, you should've used a database from day 1.
I LOVE this, but I am still love the Sunday night family bonding moment of planning the week in the pen and paper weekly planner that also costs us $10 a year.
Didn't know about Grokipedia, I've just opened an article in it about Spain, scrolled to a random paragraph, and the information in it is plain wrong:
From https://grokipedia.com/page/Spain#terrain-and-landforms
> Spain's peninsular terrain is dominated by the Meseta Central, a vast interior plateau covering about two-thirds of the country's land area, with elevations ranging from 610 to 760 meters and averaging around 660 meters
I still stand on not trusting any of what AI spits out, be it code or text. And it takes me usually longer to check that everything is ok than doing it myself, but my brain is enticed by the "effort shortcut" that AI promised.
I'm not an expert on the geography of Spain, and it's rare that I'd defend Grokipedia but in this case I think it is correct.
Meseta Central mean central tableland. Segovia is on the edge of the mountain range that surrounds that tableland, but often referred to as part of it. This is fuzzy though.
Wikipedia says: The Meseta Central (lit. 'central tableland', sometimes referred to in English as Inner Plateau) is one of the basic geographical units of the Iberian Peninsula. It consists of a plateau covering a large part of the latter's interior.[1]
Looking at the map you linked the flat part is between 610 to 760 meters.
Finally, when speaking about the Iberian Peninsula Wikipedia itself includes this:
> "About three quarters of that rough octagon is the Meseta Central, a vast plateau ranging from 610 to 760 m in altitude."[2]
Spaniard here. Spain it's tricky, it's both 'flat' with the meseta and the 2nd most mountainous country in Europe. I am not kidding, look at a heigth map. It has a plateau... surrounded by mountains and with a bigass sierra at mid-North (Picos de Europa).
Grok does cite that claim as being from https://countrystudies.us/spain/30.htm a page in Eric Solsten and Sandra W. Meditz, editors. Spain: A Country Study. Washington: GPO for the Library of Congress, 1988.
The nice thing about grokipedia is that if you have counter examples like that you can provide it as evidence to change it and it will rewrite the article to be more clear.
Not Wikipedia as Wikipedia doesn't care about evidence. Those people care about reputable secondary sources and will ignore you when point out evidence that contradicts such sources.
I don't ever edit English wikipedia because my English is not nearly up to the standard, and suggestions for improvement (worthwhile IMO) are usually ignored. Grok at least won't ignore you. (I tend to post suggestions to unpopular pages with sparse edit history, which is probably the reason for them going unnoticed.)
I use to frequent irc channels and forums where no such thing as an old question existed. Someone asked an interesting question on irc and days or weeks later a response would happen. On forums the response could be more than a year "delayed". Gradually things shifted to newer new new news that couldn't possibly be new enough. Then debates happen where people sometimes link to the vastly superior olds. Wikipedia finally caught up and questions are no longer ignored. In stead they are archived long before an ignored status could be earned.
I didn't know about Tansu and probably would not use it for anything too serious (yet!). Bus as a firm believer of event sourcing and change of paradigm that Kafka brings this is certainly interesting for small projects.
Just that all of those activities you mention feel like a useless life compared to spending time with your own children in a house big enough for everyone to have their space, but small enough to force you to feel you're living with each other, seeing them grow and thrive, and going around your closest nature patch.
Not much money is needed to have a fulfilling and worth-living life.
There's no more proof that any Venezuelan election's results has been tampered with than with any US election. The state of Venezuela's state is sad, and so is the fact that millions of people have felt forced to flee the country due to economic uncertainty. But this is probably a mix of culture, ingrained corruption and US blockage for decades.
It’s completely unrelated, I find a bit insulting that even our own wrongdoings have to be blamed to the US. Not everything wrong that happens in the world is caused by the US, the regime has been very capable of their own wrongdoing and mismanagement through the past couple of decades. Just look up the UN reports of human right abuses committed by the regime, thousands killed and tortured.
> The Republican Party's ticket—Donald Trump, who served as the 45th president of the United States from 2017 to 2021, and JD Vance, a U.S. senator from Ohio—defeated the Democratic Party's ticket—Kamala Harris, the incumbent U.S. vice president, and Tim Walz, the incumbent governor of Minnesota.
> The election was contentious, with international monitors calling it neither free nor fair,[4] citing the incumbent Maduro administration's having controlled most institutions and repressed the political opposition before, during,[2][5] and after the election. Widely viewed as having won the election, former diplomat Edmundo González…
I really enjoy using text.npr.org from my Kindle / Kindle Scribe. I'm really thinking about setting up a self-hosted RSS aggregator site that's Kindle-friendly.
I keep thinking that modern text editors are just flawed and markdown, with all its downsides and limitations, is what 99% is the people need.
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