To be fair, I think echelon was calling out that there are absolutely ads in browser updates now. "Try Firefox VPN!" "Look what's new in Chrome!", etc.

I purchase a product from company X. They require an email and will not let me buy without it. I actually do want an email confirmation that the order went through and even that my product shipped.

I do not want emails about "we released a new thing" or "we have a sale" or "it's Tuesday and we want you to remember we exist". Signing me up without an explicit opt-in using information you required me to provide is absolutely unethical.

"X is even worse" does not make Y ethical, good, or acceptable. What your least favorite corporations do isn't relevant.

Other people are inconsiderate monsters who litter in national parks and abandon mattresses on the side of the road. BP and Exxon did more damage to the environment than I ever could. It's still unethical if I drop my garbage on the ground.

Defaulting to uploading all locally saved documents to cloud storage is ABSOLUTELY a dark pattern.

The prompts every few months to "change back to recommended defaults" that make it easy to accidentally get into this state even if you made the correct decision previously to turn it off is a hellish black hole of a pattern.

All three are intentional, not incompetent.

Trying to answer this would fill (and almost certainly has filled) numerous Ph.D dissertations.

There are a multitude of reasons. In no particular order:

* The utterly broken and ruinous US Senate, whose composition would be unconstitutional were it not written into the constitution[1], enabling a tiny minority of the country to block any meaningful federal progress on a host of issues

* The US's strong mythos of the Protestant Work Ethic, which leads many people to believe that people succeed or fall on hard times due to merit rather than luck

* Newt Gingrich, who in the 90s introduced hyperpartisanship to Congress, turning a body where members of different parties were friends and had good working relationships into a zero sum game

* The fact that one of the two major parties campaigns on "government doesn't work" and as soon as they're elected to their best to turn that sentiment into reality

* The impact of greed in the US and its successful capture of the media and significant chunks of regulatory apparatus

* The utilization of that media control to push divisive narratives that pit the lower classes against each other instead of focusing on the real problems and their causes

* The goldfish-like memory of too many US voters who buy into narratives like "they're all the same" or get frustrated when one party can't fix everything in 4 years and elect the other party - paying no heed to the fact that building is much slower than destruction or the obstructionist tactics.

That's just scratching the surface.

[1] Seriously, the Supreme Court has ruled it unconstitutional for any legislative body to be based on land instead of population. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynolds_v._Sims

Fake content and lies. To drive outrage. To influence elections. To distract from real crimes. To overload everyone so they're too tired to fight or to understand. To weaken the concept that anything's true so that you can say anything. Because who cares if the world dies as long as you made lots of money on the way.

Much of the current environment is driven by the SF Bay Tech Elite/Culture.

Peter Thiel funded and enabled Curtis Yarvin, whose work was the backbone of the modern alt right, project 2025, etc. Plenty of tech VCs/elite are investing huge amounts in fighting effective government, pushing models of city states immune from regulation, policing the discourse, and more. Musk gets more press coverage than most but tons of folks who are either on HN, are connected to startups talked about here, etc. are primary forces driving what America has become.

If you introduce something with advanced functionality onto a team, soon enough someone's going to use pieces that others don't fully understand later.

Now everyone touching the document has to understand includes and document metadata and whatever else someone added. Suddenly you have includes and cross-references and what used to be a document where you could read the raw non-rendered form linearly top to bottom is a confusing mess unless you render it. Markdown is almost always just as legible raw as rendered.

Markdown is popular because it is simple. I have never had to teach anyone Markdown. They look at the file and immediately see what's going on and can copy the style.

Occasionally someone may have to look up something like table syntax, but no one in my career or personal life has ever asked me to explain Markdown to them, which is rare for a technology that is so widely used.

This has not been my experience with other markup languages.

It's "allowed" to use raw pointers, malloc, and any number of things in C++ code. In general, if you do any of them in a modern codebase you're doing it wrong.

Copying my thoughts from there which haven't changed:

>To which I say, are you really going to avoid using a good tool just because it makes you puke? Because looking at it makes your stomach churn? Because it offends every fiber of your being?"

Yes. A thousand times yes. Because the biggest advantage of Markdown is that it's easy to read, and its second-biggest advantage is that it's easy to write. How easy it is to parse doesn't matter. How easy it is to extend is largely irrelevant.

Markdown may or may not be the best tool for writing a book, but Markdown is the best tool for what it does - quickly writing formatted text in a way that is easy to read even for those who are not well versed in its syntax.

I don't want to write a book. If I did I'd use LaTeX before RST. I want something to take notes, make quick documentation and thread comments.

*****

My thoughts on strictly-defined XML-ish syntaxes are the same: they're harder for humans to read, write, and modify, which defeats the primary purpose and benefit of Markdown.

Very few people have to write a Markdown parser. Many orders of magnitude more have to read and write Markdown. Optimize for them even if it makes writing the parser painful.

Two very significant things happened in 1981.

After years of claiming the government couldn't help people, Ronald Reagan was elected and Republicans have been working hard to make that statement more true ever since. A big part of that was deregulation of the financial markets.

That same year, Jim Welch became Chairman and CEO of General Electric. He juiced the stock prices by selling off the company's prize jewels, real estate, and future, and for a while (before the utter collapse of the company) artificially raised the stock price so high that executives around the country copied him, and and an entire industry of vultures like Mitt Romney started private equity firms to cannibalize healthy companies for their personal profit.

Let's grab a few books off the shelf (literally).

Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has four emdashes on the very first page:

> It is also the story of a book, a book called THGTTG - not an Earth book, never...

Isaac Asimov's classic The Last Question: three emdashes on the first page (as printed in The Complete Stories, Volume I)

> ...they knew what lay behind the cold, clicking, flashing face -- miles and miles of face -- of that giant computer.

Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves: Three emdashes on page 1

> Much like its subject, The Navidson Record itself is also uneasily contained -- whether by category or lection.

Robert Caro, Master of the Senate: Five emdashes on page one

> Its drab tan damask walls...were unrelieved by even a single touch of color -- no painting, no mural -- or, seemingly, by any other ornament

Other pages 1s:

* Murakami - 1Q84: 1

* Murray/Cox - Apollo: 1

* Meadows - Thinking in Systems: 1

* Dostoyevsky - The Brothers Karamazov (Pevear/Volokhonsky translation): 4

* Caro - The Power Broker: 5

* Hofstadter - Godel, Escher, Bach - 3

Honestly, when I started this post I expected to have to dig deeper than page 1. The emdash is an important part of English-language literature and I reject the claim that we should ignore all writing that contains it.

I don't believe that the people who train models have a secret way of identifying and filtering out bot-generated content that no one else (email spam filters, search engines, etc.) have identified. I do believe that they feel their models need to have up-to-date information on a variety of topics that require regularly ingesting new data. So no, I don't think they have a good way to avoid their inputs rotting from their outputs.

For years, even before LLMs, there have been trends of varied popularity to, for lack of a better word, regress - intentionally omitting capitalization, punctuation, or other important details which convey meaning. I rejected those, and likewise I reject the call to omit the emdash or otherwise alter my own manner of speaking - a manner cultivated through 30+ years of reading and writing English text.

If content is intellectually lacking, call that out, but I am absolutely sick of people calling out writing because they "think it's LLM-written". I'm sick of review tools giving false positives and calling students' work "AI written" because they used eloquent words instead of Up Goer Five[0] vocabulary.

I am just as afraid of a society where we all dumb ourselves down to not appear as machines as I am of one where machine-generated spam overtakes all human messaging.

[0] https://xkcd.com/1133/

....35mpg at 60mph and little traffic, maybe. I can't speak for that specific model, but most vehicles I've driven do significantly worse than advertised.

My Subaru Legacy advertised 27 City, 35 Highway, 30 Combined. In practice I average 25-26 while commuting and on extended highways drives more like 29, still on stock tires.