> Markdown files are slightly annoying to read/preview
Maybe I’ve missed the intentions of markdown, but the ability to easily read the plain text version has always been the killer feature.
Rendering as html is a nice bonus.
I understand there are plenty of useful things to say “but what about…” to, like inline images, and I use them. But they still detract from what differentiated markdown in the first place.
The more of that you add, the more it could have been any document format.
AI is like electricity. It may be the “product” you think you are selling. But it isn’t the product people are buying.
People are buying what these things facilitate (lights, tvs, air conditioning, etc in the case of electricity)
I think the AI folk have generally done a terrible job of connecting the dots to show people what they are actually getting.
It’s worth noting that some things mentioned above already existed before electricity. So people needed to be shown that electric light is in almost all ways better, cheaper, more convenient than existing alternatives.
Douglas Crockford addressed this many years ago: write your human readable config with comments and run it through a pre-processor to strip them out before handing the config to a JSON parser. Seems like almost no one picked up on the idea.
I love the punchline: the computer eventually worked out that the sofa could never have gotten into that spot in the first place. Adams always brought me joy!
1. Naming things 2. Cache invalidation 3. off-by-one errors