Hacker News: anildash

New comment by anildash in "Warp is now Open-Source"

anildash — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 22:09:39 +0000

It's technically legal to take photos of people through their windows, but we don't worry about anybody but big tech creeps actually doing it on a regular basis.

New comment by anildash in "Ghostty is leaving GitHub"

anildash — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 22:07:43 +0000

It's good to care about these choices. There are also lots of ethical reasons to leave GitHub, and this makes it easier for people to choose to leave on those grounds, too. Every time people talk about their decisions and normalize anything that's not just having a monoculture where there are no competitive markets and monopolists control entire ecosystems, that's a good thing.

New comment by anildash in "Mozilla Thunderbolt"

anildash — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 17:03:12 +0000

That’s literally what the phrase means. Can’t help if people don’t know what words mean. It was phrased fine, it wasn’t _read_ well.

New comment by anildash in "Mozilla Thunderbolt"

anildash — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 14:30:40 +0000

Addressing the usual few complaints folks always bring up:

* This is from the separate independent team that works on Thunderbird, not Firefox, so there isn't any resource contention happening there

* Thunderbird is revenue positive, and this potentially gives that team another revenue stream to be even more self-sustaining through charging companies

* Businesses definitely want to control the AI they're using (especially with RAGs of their own data) instead of just throwing it at their LLM vendor and hoping for the best

People on HN are fond of asserting that their own POV is the only one. Imagine that there is such a thing as a person in charge of choosing technologies for organizations, and that you're such a person. That's who this is for.

New comment by anildash in "Teens sue xAI over Grok's pornographic images of them"

anildash — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 01:18:30 +0000

Adobe doesn't provide tools explicitly designed to enable the creation of child pornography — in fact their tools try to prevent its creation — and they don't profit from the sale of it. But, of course, Musk fanboys can be reliably counted upon to support profiteering from child sexual abuse in any form.

"Something you don't like" as a description for the deliberate sexualization of children for profit, as if it's not an objective moral harm, is telling on yourself here. Just because the loudest leaders in Silicon Valley have been trying to convince every one of their sycophants that sexually abusing kids is no big deal doesn't mean the rest of us who are normal have bought into it.

New comment by anildash in "How Markdown took over the world"

anildash — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 00:23:05 +0000

Hanging your jersey from the rafters in the Plain Text Arena. A bullpen of weary cubicle-dwellers salutes you!

New comment by anildash in "How Markdown took over the world"

anildash — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 01:07:31 +0000

I _don't_ think it was just ego. I think it was a smart strategy because formal standardization tends to bring in complexity, and just letting folks go off on their own and document their own usage (or "flavors") ends up being Good Enough in actual practice. It sucks from a standpoint of what I personally find satisfying, to be clear. But based on what I've seen over the last 20+ years, it is the strategy that is much less likely to yield a format that gets captured by giant companies that own a hyper-corporate standardization process that eventually gets enshittified.

New comment by anildash in "How Markdown took over the world"

anildash — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 01:05:20 +0000

I was texting with John the other night while working on this piece, and reminiscing about my initial quibbles about the format, and I think I had been frustrated by just about everything on your list. I just need you to travel back in time to tell me to fuss more!

New comment by anildash in "How Markdown took over the world"

anildash — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 00:59:45 +0000

I actually _did_ want the underscores, but enough people thought it wasn't intentional that I just gave up and changed it to italics. lol?

New comment by anildash in "How Markdown took over the world"

anildash — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 00:57:23 +0000

It took me a long time to see the variations as a plus and not a minus; as a veteran of the RSS-vs-Atom wars, I was long an advocate of Technical Correctness(tm) like any good coder. But the years since then have made me a lot more amenable to what I think of as a sort of Practical Postelism, which I guess is like applied worse-is-better, where we realize the reality is that we'll _always_ have forks and multiplicities, so we should see it as a feature instead of a bug. It's like accepting that hardware will fail, and building it into the system.

I mean, HTML itself is well specified in the streets, and infinitely different flavors in the sheets. I don't _like_ that, the part of me that writes code _hates_ that. But the part of me that wants systems to succeed just had to sort of respect it.

New comment by anildash in "How Markdown took over the world"

anildash — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 00:53:10 +0000

This is a good call. I know it's been suggested multiple times over the years; I wonder what the rationale was for rejecting the format, or at least having the option to render a file when it's loaded. (Maybe a "display as HTML" button or the like would be required before it would be rendered.)

New comment by anildash in "How Markdown took over the world"

anildash — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 22:44:04 +0000

I know it seems quite absurd! I actually just added in to this piece a photo I took of the CNN screen that (I believe) was the first mention of the word "blog" that they ever put on-screen; it also has a mention of Hart's campaign. Very low-res, but the potato quality is worth it for the historical value, I think.

New comment by anildash in "How Markdown took over the world"

anildash — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 22:39:49 +0000

I actually had a digression into "worse is better", but the piece was already pushing 5,000 words, so I figured I probably was better of leaving out such a big topic. But you're right that's a larger trend that mattered. I think of it more as a triumph of Postelism in the Internet at large as more people came online, too.

New comment by anildash in "How Markdown took over the world"

anildash — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 21:23:33 +0000

I liked Textile a lot better initially, and it came out first. And interestingly, both launched at the same time on the platform (Movable Type) where Markdown debuted. So it really was sort of a clean A-B test about which one users chose.

This piece was already pretty long, so I cut out most of the sidebar about Dean Allen and Textile, but he was a special guy, and certainly influential on so many parts of this era, not just Markdown.

New comment by anildash in "Microsoft Office renamed to “Microsoft 365 Copilot app”"

anildash — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 19:31:23 +0000

Prince changed his name because a corporation had refused to give him control over the work he created, and wouldn't let him release work under the name that he was born with. (Sort of the template for "Taylor's Version" decades later.) And he then used a logo that became the most successful personal logo of all time, not a mishmash of design-by-committee.

So, basically the _opposite_ of an incoherent brand based around training on content that was gathered from creators without consent, being foisted onto employees who didn't ask for it, with an ugly logo that nobody will ever remember.

New comment by anildash in "Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help"

anildash — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 14:54:46 +0000

People love to smugly suggest this useless advice like there aren’t literal public services from governments around the world that are being tied to these platforms, let alone the many private companies which gate access to their goods and services behind apps on proprietary devices.

To say nothing of the fact that well-adjusted humans need to communicate with friends and family, and many times that also practically requires being on these platforms as well.

New comment by anildash in "I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla"

anildash — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 22:28:56 +0000

I actually don't think this is true. I think a lot of folks who are (understandably) angry at the Big AI companies want people not to want AI in Firefox. Which is a slightly different problem. https://www.anildash.com/2025/11/14/wanting-not-to-want-ai/

New comment by anildash in "Tell HN: X is opening any tweet link in a webview whether you press it or not"

anildash — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 06:59:21 +0000

There's more than enough critical mass on other platforms that there's no excuse for them to still be on X, and it's a shame they stay there. Journalists would go to (for example) Bluesky if it were the only place they could get AOC dunking on the tycoons that they're obsessed with covering every utterance from.

New comment by anildash in "ChatGPT's Atlas: The Browser That's Anti-Web"

anildash — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 08:03:45 +0000

Also, to be clear, I’m mostly goofing about it CLIs, and — as I mentioned in the piece — I use one every day. But yes, there are four or five billion internet users who don’t and never will. And CLIs are a poor user interface for 99+% of the tasks that people accomplish on computing devices, or with browsers, which is pertinent for the point I was making.

If I’d anticipated breaching containment and heading towards the orange site, I may not have risked the combination of humor and anything that’s not completely literal in its language. Alas.

New comment by anildash in "ChatGPT's Atlas: The Browser That's Anti-Web"

anildash — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 07:59:43 +0000

Yeah, I think there are profound security issues, but I think many folks dug into the prompt injection nightmare scenarios with the first round of “AI browsers”, so I didn’t belabor that here; I wanted to focus on what I felt was less covered.