Why Prefer Textfiles? (2010)(textfiles.com) |
Why Prefer Textfiles? (2010)(textfiles.com) |
[1](https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2018/08/07/securing-sites...)
The format being text, html, video, or an executable program has nothing to do with it.
So what exactly distinguishes them? The OS knows how to render them? It's just a linear list of characters? The reliance on a fixed font to allow some form of layout or positioning? Good basis for embedded DSL's, like Markdown?
Don't forget they are a binary format also. Oh, I just said that. I anticipate the day UTF8 will be a fond memory of a big mistake we made in our youth, that held us back for decades.
Don't forget that all of IT is a shit show sprinkled over with dollar paint, much like alchemy was. We don't yet know what the formation in Information is.
Alternative that would be better?
Besides, this is exactly the kind of site HN constantly laments the loss of - unique, quirky, basic and rough around the edges.
Which is nonsense, of course, just like this site illustrates. Trivial formatting and layout changes make it more readable.
> Besides, this is exactly the kind of site HN constantly laments
And this is exactly the beside-the-point response you sometimes encounter on HN. I'm not a representative of the collective HN, so why does it matter that some other people did some lamenting some time ago?
Many years ago someone "infected" my computer with a "manual virus": A printed-out sheet of paper placed on top of the computer, telling me to delete all my hard drive's files myself, then photocopy the sheet and put both copies on nearby computers.
It was obviously a joke. But in the "modern" agentic era, the same thing in a text file is slightly more realistic as a threat...
There used to be something of a game of making specific files that would change screen colors or play songs off terminal bells, etc, tailored for specific terminals or command prompt windows. I remember a few short animated sequences using various backspaces and colors that only really worked if you could expect the text to be loaded at specific baud rates or in specific BBS software.
Interesting video story: https://youtu.be/9aHfK8EUIzg (2016)
Data site: https://xd.saul.pw/data
not j/k.
I'd rather read in my beautiful gpu-powered terminal emulator than a website with bad taste and/or bloated nightmare under the covers.
Or if you prefer magnet/ed2k download links: https://pastebin.com/UZNDd564
But also, you continue to miss the point - this lacking/bad layout/formatting is precisely the reason not to use plain text
They aren't in the wrong place, if you view the site on desktop, or mobile browser in desktop-mode (for me at least), or the source, the line-breaks form proper paragraphs. Looks like the host actually delivers HTML/CSS with wrapping rules instead of plain text though, which messes it up for screens narrower than a full line in the file.
But either way, the file remains perfectly readable even with the added line breaks, not like any text is missing or moved.
I don't miss the point, I rather disagree with your opinion.
Formatting and layout are properties of the client, and you can display plaintext in any color or font you wish.
But the default - plain white background and plain black text with a simple serif or sans-serif font simulating a paper document - is perfectly readable.
So why can't you address it instead of coming up with an alternative argument again?
> Formatting and layout are properties of the client
No, I've given you a specific example - forced newlinew - of layout that is not a property of the client. ======================= is another example, this time it's formatting, also not a client property
> if you view the site on desktop ... , or mobile browser in desktop-mode (for me at least), or the source, the line-breaks form proper paragraphs
Nope. The first paragraph consists of 3 lines (#9,10,11), so has 2 extra linebreaks (both in desktop and source form). The next one is lines #13-21, so has 8 extra linebreaks. Because of that it doesn't reflow properly, so looks bad at most of the screen widths
> not like any text is missing or moved.
It is moved due to linebreaks, here is a simple example: the notation of the numbers is force-moved to the next line instead of being adjacent to the numbers, this hurts your "perfect" readability
> re characters 32 to 126
> (decimal)
There is nothing perfect about readability of the poorly formatted/laid out text! And doing everything "plainly" simply robs you of the ability to reach the expressiveness available even to the cave man
> Even today with easy access, a majority of Christians have not read it.
Not read all of it certainly. However, most Christians have definitely read some of it. The Bible is not "the canonical text" for two reasons: there are disagreements about what is canonical, and it is not a single text, it is a collection of works.
Not reading all of it - why should we? What is the point of Christians reading things such as (most of?) Leviticus which is a collection of rules that do not apply to Christians? It is perfectly reasonable to be selective about which books within a large collection people read.
It's like commenting on the book Abundance without having read it.
Or talking about the Death Panels in ObamaCare.
I haven't read Mein Kampf / The Communist Manifesto but I would bet some pages if not chapters are agreeable to a lay-person while the overall theme wasn't.
This is how we end with the Dunning-Kruger effect meaning worse performers rate their own performance than high performers rate their own performance. (The actual effect found was that low-performers could not distinguish between a high or low performance; and although they rated themselves higher than they were it was still lower than the self-ratings of high performers for all tasks but Humor).
Abundance is a book. The Bible is an anthology of various works - letters, poetry, biography, historical chronicles and all kinds of things. You can comment on the books you have read.
You also need to interpret it, which makes it a very hard read. You cannot really understand it without knowing the context (historical, cultural, personal) and about things like disputes about correct translations.
You also do not have to attach the same authority or relevance to all of it. As I said, the laws of Leviticus are irrelevant to Christians and we simply do not follow them (we eat pork, for example). They might be worth reading as historical background. In general the gospels and epistles are the most relevant for most people.
When you say all of it, what constitutes all? Different denominations accept different books - no Judith in protestant Bibles, no Ethiopic Clement except in Tewahedo (Ethiopian) ones, etc. Its not usual for individuals to disagree with their denominations, but it certainly happens. It is definitely reasonable to read the books you think are relevant.
Why would it matter, because Christianity is very much not about following a large set of rules. It's more (some branches of) Jewry, that is famous for knowing and following a large set of rules. Most of the interaction with the priests is about how that is not actually sufficient and doesn't actually matters all that much. There is even a passage how someone following all the rules still won't succeed (the rich young man). The only real hard rule fits into a single sentence (double commandment of loving).
> it's a collection of works that you agree with and want to associate with?
Disagreeing is a normal and expected part of the faith and is the topic of some books in the collection. If you don't disagree with anything in the bible, I don't thing you are actually believing, you are just regurgitating things. The bible is a side effect of the formation of cultures and the getting to know in a relationship, and there is quite a development in it.
> I haven't read Mein Kampf / The Communist Manifesto but I would bet some pages if not chapters are agreeable to a lay-person while the overall theme wasn't.
Maybe in the Communist Manifesto, but Mein Kampf is total bullshit.
> Death Panels in ObamaCare.
No clue what that is, must be an US insider.
> This is how we end with the Dunning-Kruger effect
You know that Dunning-Kruger effect is autocorrelation, right? https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2022/04/08/the-dunning-k...
> Even today with easy access, a majority of Christians have not read it.
Depending on the denomination, 50% to 100% of the service they do revolves around reading from that book.
> preachers of the Church
Also what do you understand by "the Church".
> So the "employees" of X are untrustworthy, but the collection of circular letters for the "employees" of X is not. This doesn't make any sense.
I am not saying anything about whether the text of various ideologies is trustworthy or next. I am contending that contrary to the original comment I was replying to, it's not actually text that converts people to most ideologies. For Christianity, people generally adopt it for reasons like: being born into a Christian household/society; societal pressure; a desire for community; having received charitable aid when they needed it most; mid-life crises seeking a purpose in life; reckoning with mortality after a near-death experience or losing a loved one; witnessing something they perceive as miraculous. There are many, many reasons people become Christians, but I have never once heard of someone being converted merely by reading the Bible, and I suspect that such an occurence is exceedingly rare relative to all the other means of adoption.
My question wasn't about denominations, I wanted to know what you think the church IS. Because the definition I am familiar with is the collective of all people (and creatures) believing in Christ. With that "people get to know about Christ only from the Church" is circular.
> I am contending that contrary to the original comment I was replying to, it's not actually text that converts people to most ideologies.
That I agree with. But that is not what you wrote.
And the point I was trying to make was that "the collective believers of all Christianity" did not have direct access to the Bible for a long time - manuscripts were rare before printing, and they were even more rarely written in a language laypeople could read, if they could read at all. Therefore, anything they heard about the contents of the Bible and Christ's teachings would be subject entirely to the filtered interpretations of the Catholic clergy, and that would determine the shape of their beliefs rather than the writings themselves. Indeed it was specifically the advent of the printing press, when more people gained access to the Bible directly rather than the Papal interpretation of it, that led to the Reformation and spread of Protestantism and other denominations.
> And the point I was trying to make was that "the collective believers of all Christianity" did not have direct access to the Bible for a long time - manuscripts were rare before printing, and they were even more rarely written in a language laypeople could read, if they could read at all.
I also think that copying manuscripts was a huge thing, BECAUSE reading the original was so highly valued, and the literacy rate was higher under christians as opposed to the fellow heathens for which there was just no point in learning to read. The letters were addressed to the whole parishes rather than at single individuals, so I think the expectation was that the whole parish read it. This might have changed in the middle ages, when "being a Christian" was much less an individual decision, but more an effect of the ruler saying them to be.
> Therefore, anything they heard about the contents of the Bible and Christ's teachings would be subject entirely to the filtered interpretations of the Catholic clergy, and that would determine the shape of their beliefs rather than the writings themselves. Indeed it was specifically the advent of the printing press, when more people gained access to the Bible directly rather than the Papal interpretation of it, that led to the Reformation
I think what led to the Reformation was much less the clergy hiding "the true meaning" with the Papal interpretation, but rather the clergy preaching their crude personal insight against the Papal interpretation. This was a huge issue and problem at that time. Most of the issues raised by the reformators were indeed a problem with which the church at large agreed. The Reformation was (initially) exactly that, a reformation in the church. That reformation was continued even after some parts decided to split off.
Also the bible is a written form of the teachings of the church, so I don't think that there is a real disagreement to be found that is substantially true and not just language lawyering and not just yet another (mis)interpretation.
> spread of Protestantism and other denominations
The dogma of Protestantism are also largely based on the translation and omissions of their founding fathers and often not really based in the text itself.
> the usage of "the Church" that I am familiar with is shorthand to describe the historical central institute of Christianity as an organized religion - the Roman Catholic Church.
Note, that I perceive the "Church" in "the Roman Catholic Church", to be what I described. I don't really know what exactly you thing of when you write that (hence my initial question), but I guess something more like a company? The Roman Catholic Church isn't really a single uniform entity, and hasn't been through history, there isn't really a real hierarchy above a bishop. This is actually much less true for protestant denominations, which tied themself to the nations they live in and thus had a real hierarchy often entangled with the state.