161–170 of 229 posts
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And Discord as well. Every young person is on Discord, they're all learning some Markdown
Teams and Slack as well, though they use an odd variant markdown (where single asterisk indicates bold instead of italics).
Why do all these people like taking notes? I recommend a very simple process, which is to delete them and just remember everything.
I'm one of those people who went pretty hard into the whole "Second Brain" movement (using Apple Notes first, then Obsidian).
~6000 notes later and I've started finding the whole thing overwhelming and pointless at the same time. The vast majority of notes I have don't need to be noted down. At most they could have been a journal entry rather than a separate, curated piece.
Usually I hear something like "excessive noting means you're less likely to try to commit something to memory because you know it's there when you need it". (This is touted as an advantage of the Second Brain concept, incidentally.)
But I've actually found something different as well: excessive noting means you're actively engaging with significantly more information, and most of it is designed to be (or at least should be considered) ephemeral. Noting so much of it down is effectively the digital equivalent of hoarding junk, and the mental/memory repercussions are similar to the physical repercussions of hoarding actual junk.
He's right: Markdown was built for web editing in an era where physical keyboards outnumbered virtual ones. It doesn't really make sense for Notes outside of export. There's little benefit to it as an input system on iOS/iPadOS (likely the dominant platforms for Notes) where formatting menus are just as close as `#` and `_` characters. Several Markdown rules wouldn't make sense in the context of Notes. e.g. "end a li…
I’ve trained our support staff on basic markdown syntax and while we do use it predominantly for spitting out documentation and guides and whatnot, its usefulness far exceeds the original intent. And that’s okay.
I'd love to see Markdown support in MS OneNote...
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Markdown is like the new WordPerfect for some people, who want expressive written paths to format text. Like with WordPerfect, there are people who get great utility (attorneys in WP, developers with Markdown), but 80-95% of people don’t get anything out of it. It’s also one of those things where the constraints are an advantage. Markdown is great for internet facing text content, while many aspects of the mainstream…
Former lawyer here. That most commercial contract work is done in Word is a source of major frustration and wasted time for many lawyers. Others are simply unaware that there are any authoring/editing paradigms that allow one to separate the drudgery of getting document formatting just-so, from the actual value-additive work. Unfortunately there’s no realistic solution to the lock-in, so wrestling with broken paragra…
I write stories and everyone uses Word documents for editing.
Why do all these people like taking notes? I recommend a very simple process, which is to delete them and just remember everything.
Why do all these people like taking notes? I recommend a very simple process, which is to delete them and just remember everything.
(If this is a joke, well, I salute your dry humor.)
When Gruber mentions that he never uses Markdown outside of his blog, and hinting at the fact that it was not intended for text editors (and other apps), there's one important point I want to make. Yes, Markdown has disadvantages, and a few rough edges for uses as the format for editors et al, but there are two very big advantages and/or sideffects of it's widespread use: (1) it's cleartext and therefore very good as…
Agreed. For me, the popularity of Markdown on (pre-Microsoft) GitHub and GitLab was all I needed, to declare that the company wiki, code-embedded API docs, and anything else appropriate should just use Markdown. Markdown is good enough for most of the documentation that software engineers do (other than diagrams), they already have to know it, and I don't want yet-another-markup-language to be a barrier to capturing…
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Agreed, but that’s the tension. There’s no free lunch. On the flip, that user wants the complex features of the platform, and exposing them to a markup language takes elegant markdown and turns it into html or ooxml.
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