TK, or the secret to effortless writing (2024)

TK, or the secret to effortless writing (2024)(atthis.link)

32 points by Tomte 3 hours ago | 16 comments

rsingel 1 hour ago |

Indeed a great trick. I often double it to TKTK just to make it stand out even more.

Fun fact: the Ghost.org editor looks for TK

https://ghost.org/changelog/tk-reminders/

pratikdeoghare 55 minutes ago |

If you use Brashtag notation you could insert #tk{} bag.

https://github.com/pratikdeoghare/brashtag

cauch 2 hours ago |

I've a very dim memory of having heard about it years ago (more than a decades), from an article of Cory Doctorow, and in my mind, he was the one who came up with the idea (and chose the letters TK).

But I can be wrong (maybe it's not from Doctorow, maybe the article did not even claim the paternity of coming up with TK but it was me badly understanding it, ...)

bobbiechen 2 hours ago | |

TK is a very standard term, see William Safire's usage in this 1996 NY Times article: https://www.nytimes.com/1996/10/06/magazine/of-hacks-and-tk....

pm215 1 hour ago | | |

Mmm. This Q&A -- https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/M... -- suggests it's been kicking around as printing and journalism jargon since at least the 1980s, and I would expect probably earlier.

CommieBobDole 1 hour ago | | |

Paywall-free link:

https://archive.is/Ipm3J

natbennett 2 hours ago |

I do this a lot but I use “TK:” with the colon to make it unambiguously grep-able (stands out better visually too)

karmakaze 1 hour ago |

LLMs should use "TK" or stable diffusion (and the like) so as not to get hung up on sequential words/thoughts and fill them in later instead of hallucinating filler.

Haranrk 1 hour ago | |

I think this is a great idea.

aleksiy123 1 hour ago |

GCP employees heart rate spiking at the title.

sublinear 1 hour ago |

Could you instead use any two numerical digits? Then you've got a tagging system with up to 100 tags.

This assumes you're writing according to guidelines that insist you spell out all numbers. i.e. 58 is always intentionally "fifty-eight", so "58" must be your own meta text.

chickensong 2 minutes ago | |

I think you can use whatever you want. The point is just to drop a quick marker that you can find later, and not interrupt your flow.

x______________ 2 hours ago |

tl;dr

add tk when you hit a wall (abbreviated from 'to come', yet spelled with k as tc appears in many words)

ultraboom 2 hours ago | |

I slice my latke with a pocketknife.

karmakaze 1 hour ago | | |

I found the low frequency surprising as it's so easy to pronounce--I suppose tc is used in most cases. Here's what I found for bigram freqs near TK:

Ratios (count / total) and percentages:

    PG: 0.00047%
    TK: 0.00046%
    KK: 0.00045%
    HQ: 0.00042%
    FN: 0.00042%

Every other one here I'd expect to see: Postgres, kk/okay (and my initials), headquarters, function. Of course there's Tcl/Tk but not used nearly as much as it could.

wonger_ 1 hour ago | | |

True, but have you ever sliced your LATKE with a POCKETKNIFE?