TomDavey's comments

> 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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".

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

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.

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.

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.

Indeed. My iPhone 6s (lovely big screen) has worked perfectly since 2015. I'm disappointed that IOS 16 won't be available for it, but I really can't complain after continuous, impeccable compatibility for almost eight years.

And, as the parent noted, my 6s is still getting security updates; current is 15.7.1. I'd swear Apple is sneaking in some UI polishing too.

I hugely dislike the POS terminal for exactly this reason: "The waiter brings the POS terminal and you pay at the table."

The experience I dislike goes like this: The server gives you the hand-held terminal and then stands watching you, tapping his/her foot impatiently, while you hurriedly verify the check, then calculate a tip amount under the server's scrutiny. I guess I'm a wimp. With the server's eyes on me, I feel the pressure to tip generously, no matter how poor the service or the overall experience.

By contrast, I find the traditional system, where the server would drop off the paper check for you to examine on your own time, to be private, un-rushed, and less prone to error.

After three decades of paying my restaurant checks without a POS terminal, I've never encountered any monkey business during the brief time the server is in possession of my credit card. Is "restaurant credit-card fraud" really a thing?

Yes, Directory Opus is outstanding. I'm an Emacs fanboy to an intense degree, but I've never bothered to learn Dired. Directory Opus, although mouse-driven, is simply too powerful.

What is this Windows Explorer of which you speak?

> anticipates 538 and all the other media on elections that ultimately disenfranchise voters.

Serious question: how does "media on elections" disenfranchise voters? I would have thought that they usefully inform voters, or at least remind voters of the importance of voting.

Also on Firefox. It appears that I'm not as privacy/security conscious as are most in this thread, but I heartily second HTTPS Everywhere.

However, the single Firefox extension that's indispensable to me is Tree Style Tabs. See: https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab.

Is it possible (for a Web page hoarder like me) to organize and access 500+ tabs across seven Firefox windows? You betcha it is, with Tree Style Tabs.

It's on my list. The reviews have indeed been rapturous. Before "Dawn of Everything" (his final book) was published this year, Graeber (an anthropologist with a specialty in economics) had already been long acknowledged as one of the world's best and biggest brains.

Something that I have read, and highly recommend, is Steven Pinker's latest book, his 17th: "Rationality." As a person who considers himself to be coldly rational, I found the book quite humbling.

Emacs Calc. Mind blowing in features and power. As for the UI . . . well, it's Emacs.

You just described the thesis of one of the wisest books I've ever read, Albert O. Hirschman's 1970 classic "Exit, Voice, and Loyalty."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit%2C_Voice%2C_and_Loyalty

+1 for Emacs autosave. Note that an autosave file is not the original file you were working on but a copy saved at the interval you specify. The original file is left untouched until you explicitly save it.

In case Emacs aborts for some reason, at restart Emacs will alert you that the newer copy exists and ask if you want to use the copy instead, which you usually (but not always) do.

If you want Emacs to automatically save the original file after a configurable interval, use auto-save-visited-mode.

Here's a technique for revising and improving prose that has no analog in programming: reading the text aloud to yourself.

This is the best way to fix a first draft, of short texts at least, without having to wait for it to cool off first. Often an email must be sent quickly, with no time to set the message aside. So always before I hit Send, I invest a minute to pronounce the text aloud, or at least under my breath while moving my lips.

I'm often amazed at the obvious typos I catch this way. As well, my oral fluency -- which appears to come from a whole different place than my written voice -- can often improve entire sentences with better word choices or figures of speech that emerge from my mouth spontaneously as I speak the text back.

Voilà! A much better second draft of the message in a very efficient manner.

And yes, I read this post aloud before I pressed "add comment." I hope it doesn't betray me.