TomDavey (u/TomDavey)

TomDavey commented on Tell HN: GitHub no longer readable without JavaScript · Posted by u/leminimal

Someone1234 · 2 years ago

People have the ability to decide what does and does not run on their machine. I'm sure a major motivation is to stop annoyances (e.g. ads, sounds, video players, etc).

That being said: There is a certain entitlement that comes along with it, while they're absolutely entitled to decide what runs on their machine, they have this expectation that sites should dedicate engineering/QA/time/etc to this niche. In essence give a sub-3% user base a disproportionate amount of attention. IE11 has a higher usage, and you likely shouldn't support that either.

Sites should both morally and legally support ADA users. But screen readers and other accessible technologies have had full JavaScript support for going on 20-years now. If you're spending energy/money on this no-JS cause, you're doing it for a small handful of contrarians who won't thank you.

TomDavey · 2 years ago

> In essence give a sub-3% user base a disproportionate amount of attention.

Some comments in this thread are arguing that many less economically developed countries provide poorer connectivity and lesser bandwidth than elsewhere. Are the users in these countries truly "sub-3%" of the global user base? I honestly don't know.

Depends on the site, naturally, but it seems to me that devoting dev resources to serve users in less developed countries is a good thing. Wikipedia, for instance, renders essentially the same with or without Javascript. That helps to account for its vast international uptake, is my guess.

TomDavey commented on Sturgeon's law (90% of everything is crap) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stu... · Posted by u/janandonly

AlexAndScripts · 2 years ago

Obsidian has nested folders. Using tags to organise flatly is a choice. I organise with a hierarchy just fine - what are you looking for

TomDavey · 2 years ago

Emacs includes a built-in mode named Org. Org-mode offers both hierarchy and tags. Org does many things, but it's especially accomplished at notetaking.

Elisp authors have written package extensions (aka "plug-ins") for Org-mode that provide even more powerful and specialized note-taking. Among the most popular today are org-roam (built on the zettlekasten method) and denote.el.

TomDavey commented on When Trucks Fly newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/acdanger

resolutebat · 3 years ago

I'm genuinely confused by what you're outraged by here. The average New Yorker reader knows more about wines than monster trucks, so they're trying to put it in terms that will make sense to their readers.

If anything, the article reads as the opposite of pretentious to me: it makes it clear that monster trucking isn't just brainless amusement for inbred yokels, but a sport where things like the exact composition of dirt is critically important.

TomDavey · 3 years ago

Tut-tut, my good sir, condescension is the raison d'être of The New Yorker.

TomDavey commented on My ranking of every Shakespeare play nullprogram.com/blog/2023... · Posted by u/chmaynard

jovial_cavalier · 3 years ago

>Tolstoy: ... "but having read one after the other, ..."

Do not read Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote plays, not books. Shakespeare should be watched, either on stage or on screen.

Reading a Shakespeare play is like deciding to listen to the Beatles by downloading MIDI files and playing them through software. Maybe you get the broad strokes of the song, and maybe you even like it, but you're not listening to the Beatles.

TomDavey · 3 years ago

Or, more starkly: "Reading a Shakespeare play is like listening to Beethoven by reading the score."

TomDavey commented on Notes apps are where ideas go to die (2022) reproof.app/blog/notes-ap... · Posted by u/pps

dang · 3 years ago

Discussed at the time:

Notes apps are where ideas go to die, and that’s good - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30344237 - Feb 2022 (158 comments)

TomDavey · 3 years ago

Thanks for recalling the earlier discussion. It includes testimonials to Emacs org-mode, and to the Zettelkasten package built atop org-mode, org-roam.

Org-mode can't be beat, IMO, if you live in Emacs all day long, as I do.

TomDavey commented on The end of the accounting search lwn.net/Articles/925782/... · Posted by u/belter

semi-extrinsic · 3 years ago

https://xkcd.com/1172/

TomDavey · 3 years ago

That XKCD is hilarious! I've never seen it before:

  My control key is hard to reach, so I hold spacebar instead, 
  and I configured Emacs to interpret a rapid temperature rise 
  as "Control."

Good ol' "M-x spacebar-thermometer-mode".

TomDavey commented on The day you became a better writer (2007) dilbertblog.typepad.com/t... · Posted by u/sherilm

p0pcult · 3 years ago

Mistakes were made.

TomDavey · 3 years ago

Excellent example! This sentence contains no actor at all, unless the mistakes made themselves.

TomDavey commented on The day you became a better writer (2007) dilbertblog.typepad.com/t... · Posted by u/sherilm

TomDavey · 3 years ago

Preferring the active voice to the passive voice (to use the terms from formal grammar) whenever feasible is the universal recommendation of writing instruction in English, e.g. by everyone from Strunk & White to the Random House Handbook to George Orwell.

As noted by others in this thread, the active voice puts the focus on the actor, i.e. the grammatical subject. This lends the construction vigor. The passive voice, which puts the focus on the grammatical object, is weak and even dull by comparison.

As well, by diminishing the actor, the passive voice can serve to evade responsibility and accountability: "The campaign finance rules were violated by the senators." rather than the more pointed "The senators violated the campaign finance rules." This convenient effect explains the prevalence of the passive voice in bureaucratic prose, which was Orwell's particular bête noire.

The active voice is also less "wordy," which improves the vigor of the style. In the example I just gave, the word count is 9 versus 7. I achieved the lower count by removing an auxiliary verb ("were") and a preposition ("by").

Now, I could have written the previous sentence like this: "The lower count was achieved by removing an auxiliary verb . . ." etc. Here the passive voice is probably preferred, because the actor, "I", is not of significance, and may even distract.

The passive voice does have its uses, hence the caveat "whenever feasible" in the first sentence above.

TomDavey commented on Goethe and Schiller ushered in the romantic age prospectmagazine.co.uk/ar... · Posted by u/lermontov

Tainnor · 3 years ago

I don't think it's wise to conflate Sturm und Drang with Romanticism, despite their similarities. They are also quite distinct in many respects.

And Beethoven is rightfully considered to be a transition point between the Classical and the Romantic style, you can hear the echos of Haydn (and even Bach) even in his late works.

TomDavey · 3 years ago

I was careful to say "middle-period Beethoven." Beethoven's stylistic evolution over the course of his life truly astonishes. In his late period, e.g., the Grosse Fugue, one can hear Bartok being invented.

And he was stone deaf by then. It's staggering.

TomDavey commented on Goethe and Schiller ushered in the romantic age prospectmagazine.co.uk/ar... · Posted by u/lermontov

TomDavey · 3 years ago

No: music ushered in the Romantic age, earlier than Goethe and Schiller in literature.

The musical style, a decisive break from the High Baroque, was initially called "Sturm und Drang." It appeared in the work of Gluck and Haydn in the 1760s.

By the first decade of the 19th century, Goethe and Schiller had retreated from Romanticism. In the same decade, middle-period Beethoven had already made Romanticism immortal.

Immortal is not an exaggeration. To this day, orchestral film music remains utterly derivative of late Romantic composers like Richard Strauss.

The most famous example of musical Romanticism's enduring dominion is probably the opening of Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey." Everybody knows the fanfare and the ecstatic harmonic progression that follows in full tutti; few know it was written by Strauss in 1894.

The rip-offs of Academy Award winner John Williams would be impossible without the much better music of the 19th century.

Corresponding data point: in 1822, Beethoven chose Schiller's "Ode to Joy" (1785) to provide the lyrics for the final movement of the 9th Symphony.