John MacFarlane
Person on 3 sites
Philosophy professor at UC Berkeley and creator of the pandoc document converter and the gitit wiki.
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2 channels on ppll (opens ppll.app)
Where public figures publish, and what they are on record saying.
Updated 2026-11-02 -
6 beliefs on korrents (opens korrents.com)
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Faithfulness to the original Markdown has made the CommonMark spec very complicated. (opens korrents.com)
“But this respect for the past has made the CommonMark spec a very complicated beast.”
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The cost of moving existing systems to a new light markup language outweighs the burden of Markdown backwards compatibility. (opens korrents.com)
“the burdens of maintaining backwards compatibility are light in comparison with the enormous practical costs of moving existing systems to a new light markup language.”
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Making intraword emphasis harder is a good tradeoff for simpler emphasis rules in Markdown. (opens korrents.com)
“Intraword emphasis is extremely rare, so it’s a good tradeoff to make it a little harder, in exchange for simplifying the rules (and conceptual model) for emphasis in general.”
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Faithfulness to the original Markdown has made the CommonMark spec very complicated. (opens korrents.com)
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11 recommendations on rcmnd (opens rcmnd.app)
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Vim (opens rcmnd.app)
“I do all of my writing and programming with Vim in a terminal.”
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Evil-mode (opens rcmnd.app)
“I use Emacs for just a few things – browsing compressed archives, for example, and maintaining a todo list with org-mode. Evil-mode makes Emacs bearable.”
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mutt (opens rcmnd.app)
“For email, I use mutt. It's slightly inconvenient for attachments and multimedia content, but for text-based emails it is incredibly fast and efficient.”
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Vim (opens rcmnd.app)