What world-class city doesn't?

And if you think there aren't hookers in Dubai, then I don't know what to tell you.

For those of you who weren't there:

  *bold*

  _underline_

  ~strikethrough~

  /italics/

  > Quotation

  - list
  - list
  - list

Strikethrough and bold are doubled to avoid common ambiguities. Your underline should technically work, but it comes out as an <em> (emphasis) tag, which is rendered as italics in most browsers.

* I had to escape all of these asterisks.

** I see this happen fairly often to people's comments here.

The bullet point problem is fixed by only bolding when the asterisks are on either end of word characters.

This is just terrible UI, why do you need garbage marks when you already have bold? And you can edit "as normal" if you like, but that only requires displaying asterisks during that tiny % of time you edit the word, not all the time when you read it or edit something else.

But you're not editing that text! You're editing some other text and see a bunch of asterisks all over the place. And this is especially bad in nested styles - try some colored bold word in a table cell - without hiding the markup you'll basically lose most of visibility into the text/table layout

> to reduce ambiguity

it does the opposite, you can't easily distinguish between an asterisk and an asterisk, which is... ambiguity

> can't distinguish between adding more bold text to currently bold text or adding non-bold text immediately

Sure you can. In a well-designed editor you'll see the style indicator right near your caret is so it's always obvious whether and how your typed text is styled or not.

In a not-so-well-designed editor you'll get that indicator far away from your caret or just get asterisks appearing when you need them.

In a not-designed editor you'll see them all the time even when they don't serve any purpose.

This might be why I also liked LaTeX. The markup itself is semantic and meant to help me understand what I am editing. It isn't just some keyboard-shortcut to inject a styling command. It is part of the document structure.

And... I preferred WordPerfect's separate "reveal codes" pane, which reduced the opportunity for ambiguity. WP 5.1 has never been equalled as a general-purpose word processor.

Only for the 3 primitive styles that were supported? 3 table cells of RedBold GreenLowerCaps BlueUnderlineItalic isn't easy anymore

But also - there wasn't a single app in the 80s with a different easy approach, right? So removing noise had a downside.

> styling command. It is part of the document structure.

Not for the most used markdown markers, where styling = semantic.

But yeah, this tension you are describing is also where other concepts like "paragraph styles" bothered me in later editors. I think I want/expect "span styles" so it is always a container of characters with a semantic label, which I could then adjust later in the definitions.

Decades later, it still repulses me how the paragraph styles devolve into a bunch of undisciplined characters with custom styling when I have to work on shared documents. At some point, the only sane recourse is to strip all custom styling and then go back and selectively apply things like emphasis again, hoping you didn't miss any.

edit: HN automatically finds this example and puts in escapes to make it work. From elsewhere in the discussion I just want AsciiDoc.

https://docs.asciidoctor.org/asciidoc/latest/asciidoc-vs-mar...

Or italics can be //double slash// to avoid ambiguities with file paths. That still leaves the windows style //some/file/path as ambiguous But I’ll never accept single * as natural for italics.

*bold* and _italic_ would have been better.

As for /slashes/, which would visually be perfect for italics, the only reason they conflict between italics and filepaths is the fact that in both cases they are expected to be used at the beginning and end of a word. Maybe using an unnatural placement of )parentheses( could have worked as a non-conflicting indicator of italics.

Using different delimiter for opening and closing is a good idea on its own, too. I think it makes parsing simpler and unambiguous wrt nesting.

I've imagined something like this:

  `(monospace)
  _(underline)
  /(italics)
  ~(overstrike)

Markdown was created in an era before the web had easily used components for structural syntax highlighting (tree-sitter) and where reliance on regex-based approaches was more common.

If all LLMs did this, people would trust them more.

  apfel "How many shopping days until Christmas?"

  apfel "How many shopping days until Christmas?  Today is April 3rd."

So, there are 0 shopping days left until Christmas, but since Christmas is already past, there are no shopping days left.

Yep, feels like Siri.

"Text Carol bring me a glass of water please"

"I'm sorry, I don't see a 'Carol Bring' in your contacts"

Considering this is a spacecraft, that explains everything.

Once or twice a month, I have to RDP (now "Microsoft Windows App!") into a Windows XP machine on the other side of the continent through a jump box and a dialup connection.

Latency is bad, but not as terrible as you might think. The worst part is moving files between localhost and remote.

I think most of those tricks have been disabled in modern windows for better security (you don't want some guest user able to feed your not-so-robust awfully complex rendering code some malicious inputs...)

Tilting is up and down.

Panning is left to right.

You can't pan up, unless you've fallen over.

Let's not foster any more of it.

That is the worst possible take. The people launching the rocket and the people filming the launch are not actually the same people, nor do they take the same resources.

> You have a remarkably low threshold for "shit show."

I wish more people did. We certainly have an excess supply of shit shows these days.

Really? You lack imagination.

The many people involved in safely launching a rocket are not responsible for providing launch coverage, and the people who provide launch coverage are not allowed to interfere with the many people involved in safely launching a rocket. If they're going to do a bad job at one of those jobs I'd much rather they do a bad job at providing launch coverage, but the two are not mutually exclusive.

What SpaceX does goes in quarterly reports.