Readit Newsjklm commented on Tailwind and the death of web craftsmanship pdx.su/blog/2023-07-26-ta... · Posted by u/paradox460
Tailwind CSS is fast fashion. Gives you a fresh look in a cost/time-effective way, entirely not sustainable w.r.t. the environment, but sells like hot cakes in any case.
The reality for better or worse is it's good enough for most companies and engineers.
jklm commented on SF Becomes First U.S. City Where Electrified Cars Make Up 50% of Sales carscoops.com/2023/06/san... · Posted by u/geox
Depends. My current SUV costs $1100 a year to insure including tax. I just got a quote for a Tesla Model 3 for the same level of coverage. As of today it's $6014 a year without tax.
I don't drive enough to make up a difference of $5000+ a year in gas and maintenance.
I have an S and the cost is $2k a year after tax, about on par with the insurance costs of my old Camry. Probably worth shopping around a bit more if you’re still in the process.
I used to host my blog on Medium because it was the easiest way to get a simple, attractive blog available with a minimum amount of work.
Then they started adding various annoyances, which I'm sure they thought would help with financial goals, but it eliminated the "simple, attractive" part. As a reader, seeing that a link went to medium.com used to mean it was easy-to-read and text-focused, and afterwards, it meant that it would be full of intrusive crap one would have to deal with before reading. To the point that people started making [special browser extensions](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/make-medium-readab...) just to remove them.
As a writer, whose main interest is in people reading my stuff (rather than, say, monetization), I wanted to move it somewhere where the readers would not be annoyed and maybe refuse to click on the link in the first place because of the domain.
I'm sure the above describes many others' experiences as well.
Interestingly enough, Substack is heading down the same direction - when you get linked to an article, it now forces a full screen popup on you asking if you want to subscribe or just read.
> When you write with perfect grammar and punctuation, most people don't know how to read into the nuance
I still can't understand the argument here, it sounds so off that seems fabricated to me.
When you read the Divine Comedy (we study it in high school in Italy) the grammar is not in current modern Italian, the style is from 550 years ago, the poem is written in hendecasyllables in terza rima [1], the references are often obscure, but in no point of it the tone is hard to understand, because the author conveys it explicitly.
l’ora del tempo e la dolce stagione;
ma non sì che paura non mi desse
la vista che m’apparve d’un leone.
Questi parea che contra me venisse
con la test’alta e con rabbiosa fame,
sì che parea che l’aere ne tremesse.
Writing is a non-verbal, not-in-person, form of communication, you can't look for what's not in it.
Assuming a neutral tone unless specified otherwise, it's always the best bet.
Also, as I've said before, improper grammar could also mean "I don't know the grammar of your language well enough", if I'm writing French, I make a lot of mistakes because I don't use it very often, so the tone is the last of my concerns and the people reading it could easily think it's from a 9 year old kid who hasn't finished primary school yet.
If you think that correct grammar is more than just "the proper way to use the language" you're most probably seeing too much into it.
> Imagine you're working with a new PM and he tells you the team's progress is 'acceptable.' What does that mean exactly?
it means "acceptable"
in a scale from 0 to 10 acceptable is >= 6 and < 7
but, when in doubt, ask, words are free.
> Assuming a neutral tone unless specified otherwise, it's always the best bet.
I actually believe most writing is non-neutral in nature. Every word choice and sentence structure conveys meaning, intentional or not.
For example, why did Dante describe the sight of a lion as making "the air tremble" rather than cause "a stillness in the air"? Or a slightly more powerful variant, "a silence in the air"? My guess is that he wanted to call attention to how dominating the lion's presence was, that even the air was humbled/scared. That's how intimidating and commandeering the lion was. (Very intentional word choice here by me to pair with enraged!)
Maybe that's the wrong interpretation, but we also have people who study exactly this! The nuance of literary works and their meanings.
The article mentions a difference between 'lol' and 'haha' - if you boil it down, is that really so different from 'the air tremble' vs. 'a stillness in the air'? It's word choice again, ultimately.
> Also, as I've said before, improper grammar could also mean "I don't know the grammar of your language well enough", if I'm writing French, I make a lot of mistakes because I don't use it very often, so the tone is the last of my concerns and the people reading it could easily think it's from a 9 year old kid who hasn't finished primary school yet.
Maybe this is why we disagree - I believe that once relative fluency is assumed, tone becomes more important.
Mandarin is a great example here. Most people who are just starting to learn Mandarin focus on vocabulary, pronouns, etc. But once you get to a more advanced stage, it reveals a really unique twist.
Informal 'modal particles' [1] are optional in sentences but also can significantly change the mood. You'd never use them in formal writing (they're not exactly professional), but in practice people use them in everyday written communications. Interestingly enough, they're by default pronounced in a neutral tone but can also be inflected with more emotion even though Mandarin is already a tonal language.
English doesn't have modal particles, and the closest equivalent I've seen are these Gen Z Netiquettes (which aren't only for Gen Z as a few people have pointed out).
---
As an example:
1. 吃饭: eat food
2. 吃饭吧: eat food, we should (friendly but also commanding)
3. 吃饭吗: eat food, want to? (friendly but more suggestive)
---
In English, you could write it like this instead:
1. food
2. we should get food
3. want to get food?
---
But that's not exactly right, because Mandarin also has formal sentences for those forms:
1. 吃饭: eat food
2. 应该吃饭: should eat food
3. 要不要吃饭: want to eat food or not?
---
So closer parallels in English instead could be:
1. food
2. food :eyes_emoji: [2]
3. food? :drooling_face_emoji: [3]
---
And as the article mentions, you can even merge 2 modal particles into a new one that's equal to the combined mood of both. For extra nuance!
e.g. 吃饭了吗: eat food, have you already done it? (friendly)
I think there's some truth to the idea that emojis are a bit of madness (but are also here to stay), but I disagree that nuance doesn't exist in written communication. It's existed for hundreds of years already, as mentioned above in the Dante example. Emojis are just a modern-day version of nuance.
In your original post, you mention:
> Not doing it [capitalization] proves that people either don't care or don't know the basic rules of the language, which says a lot more than doing it properly.
The third (more charitable) possibility is that people are intentionally doing it for nuance. For example, I capitalize in formal emails with customers but use lowercase with friends. My guess is that most people I work with do the same, and more importantly know others are also aware of this.
So at work, I can either choose to treat my coworkers as closer to customers or closer to friends. You can likely guess what that means. (<-- another example of a short sentence where tone is lost - was I amused? condescending? factual? <spoiler> it was the first </spoiler>)
Lastly, while you may personally disagree with the existence of nuance, it's hard to deny that a large chunk of people do infer nuance from text - just looking at this HN thread alone! So the takeaway I'd lightly (and not firmly!) suggest again is that it's worth optimizing for others in certain situations even if it seems like madness.
[1] https://medium.com/@glossika/chinese-grammar-how-to-use-moda...
> at a certain point caring about every single rule isn’t effective or is actually net less effective
My point is the exact opposite though: I've been writing like this for all of my life, for at least 40 years, to write like I don't care I need to actually think about it and put a lot more effort into it, because it feels unnatural, looks wrong and makes me immediately doubt of the quality of the content I produced.
Especially at work, where when I write something, it is for other people to read, sometimes many.
But I also capitalize my personal notes.
So, to me, your explanation of why you don't do it sounds like "look at me, I don't follow rules because we are all smart here, right guys? ... right?".
Don't want to be offensive, but correct grammar should be muscle memory by now.
Relying on muscle memory is good because it works on autopilot and let you focus on what's important.
That's fair, but your writing style mostly optimizes for you, your comfort, and your speed. And I say that as someone who started memorizing SAT words at the age of 8 - most people actually prefer to read a high school level (myself included in work contexts).
I didn't learn this lesson the hard way until I was past my mid-20s. When you write something for others, it's far better to optimize for them rather than for yourself. Let's say you spend twice as much time writing something in an 'odd' way, but it gets your 50% more reach or alignment or funding. That's probably actually a great use of your time.
> So, to me, your explanation of why you don't do it sounds like "look at me, I don't follow rules because we are all smart here, right guys? ... right?".
It's not about being contrarian, it's about the tradeoff. Tone is incredibly important in most situations.
When you write with perfect grammar and punctuation, most people don't know how to read into the nuance. Happy? Joyful? Pleased? Content? There's very little, if any, common understanding of the intensity or undertone in those adjectives. Imagine you're working with a new PM and he tells you the team's progress is 'acceptable.' What does that mean exactly? Is he happy with it? Is he mildly annoyed? Does he feel like things are off track and actually wants to talk more?
So how do we build this common understanding? It turns out most people have actually already built up a language with their friends! Through texts/DMs/etc. So when that language is ported over to a work context, most people immediately grasp it.
You can conform to the world or the world can conform to you. <-- A sentence where tone would be helpful.
> This is happening far outside the scope you're limiting it to, and it matters
Do you mean that you usually interact at work with people than cannot properly capitalize sentences, like we learned to do in primary school in practically any language that uses the Latin alphabet?
I capitalize English because capitalization in my language (and any other language I can write) follows the same exact rules.
It is a rule, it doesn't take much, capitalizing sentences at best proves that people know the basic grammar rules of the language and know when and how to use them, nothing more.
Not doing it proves that people either don't care or don't know the basic rules of the language, which says a lot more than doing it properly.
I think you hit the nail on the head - at a certain point caring about every single rule isn’t effective or is actually net less effective.
On HN I’ll use correct punctuation, grammar, and a wider set of vocabulary because there’s a good chance my message will come across more clearly.
For general emails, I’ll write with simpler language because it’s very much a get-in-get-out activity especially with more senior stakeholders.
For work comms, what’s the value in typing HN-style? Everyone already knows everyone else is smart. I believe communicating tone is more valuable than perfect punctuation and grammar, which make it much harder to get that across.
Or as my grandma used to say - you don’t treat people you want to be treated, you treat them the way they want to be treated.
Deleted Comment
jklm commented on Long Covid: major findings, mechanisms and recommendations nature.com/articles/s4157... · Posted by u/CharlesW
Interesting that they classify loss of smell as a neurological symptom. I had Covid last January and my sense of smell has never been the same. I used to be able to walk into a room, flair my nostrils, and pick up everything from the couch, carpet, and curtains… to the subtle cool drafts from the windows and fireplace. Now everything has completely dulled out, and I only occasionally pick up those old scents in passing - functioning as a cruel reminder of what I lost.
That's fascinating - even as a kid my sense of smell has been near-nonexistent. Whenever I've read descriptions of powerful smells in books, I've always written them off as overly flowery language.
Reminds me a little generally of how some have an inner voice when they read and others don't.
I joined Area 120 with huge skepticism. It was hamstrung and inefficient in its own ways. And I agree it didn’t reach its potential - largely because it was encased in Google 2020 instead of Google 2007.
But to my surprise almost all of the projects were impressive, well-conceived, promising bets. And the people in Area 120 were among the top 10% of Googlers I worked with in my decade at the company.
Google killed Area 120 because of bureaucracy and politics, full stop. Google is worse off because of it.
Most of what makes people effective at large companies is neutral or negative value when applied to very early-stage companies.