i had observed some obsidian plugins inserting html in my docs. today i looked a bit closer at this. til: you can embed html directly within markdown documents. markdown processors are designed to pass through html mostly untouched.

however, the relationship between markdown and html is not symmetrical. standard html parsers do not understand or process markdown syntax. if you put markdown inside an html document, it will be treated as plain text.

markdown was created by john gruber and aaron swartz in 2004. their goal was to create a simple, readable syntax for formatting plain text that could be easily converted to html. aaron swartz pops up in the most unlikeliest of places whenever i go into rabbit holes in web tech.

markdown was designed to be a simpler alternative to writing html directly, but not a complete replacement for it. the ability to use html within markdown was intentional, allowing users to fall back to html when they needed more complex formatting.

Python project structure in 2024

Watched this fascinating talk on how multicore support was added into ocaml
Multicore in Ocaml - KC Sivaramakrishnan

#NoOneAskedForAIHere

Here's a user's reactions to the post:

"Logitech, could you ask one of your AI devs to spend a week just fixing the app so it works consistently more than 70% of the time?"
source

a few cool tools:

• webtorrent
• np - a better npm publish

Kalzumeus wrote a super interesting blog on why web apps beat desktop apps. Very prescient since it was written all the way back in 2009

He emphasised how easy it is for users to get started playing with your software when it's a web app vs desktop app. He introduced the concept of a shareware funnel and that tool made it obvious how much more volatile the onboarding path was for desktop apps vs how frictionless it was for web apps.

He mentioned a lot of other factors as well like how much easier web apps are to support, the ease of analytics for web apps etc.

All in all an excellent read to understand the trajectory of software businesses over the past two decades.