You described it as pebkac - it isn’t - it’s an OS design issue.

Strong Disagree, the GUI equivalent of chown is a bizarrely long series of clicks that less knowledgeable users will easily get confused doing.

Oh, one thing to mention - if you’re a resident in Nanaimo who frequently needs to go downtown you might just consider keeping your car on the mainland. It’s theoretically possible to have a ferry with no walk-on room but it almost never happens in practice.

And, like, living on an island is a “luxury” there are complete services on Vancouver Island and the Sunshine Coast so in theory you can do things locally but if you choose to live there the limited transportation is something you should be aware of.

My brother in Fusilli!

Tourists are usually unaware that you can book in advance while if you know you need to go in on the 4 PM Friday ferry every week you can book it far in advance.

Honestly, it’s pretty fucking rough so I don’t want to post it here - if you Google “Eddings abuse” you’ll get the results.

It’s…

PEANUT BUTTER JELLY TIME PEANUT BUTTER JELLY TIME.

I was a big fan of the Belgariad growing up… that one is fucking rough.

Gosh, if you’re able to share that I’d love to see that train wreck.

Yes, but usually not actual HTML because then there are a lot of security issues to address. BBCode might even be a better choice, i.e. [b]Bold Text[/b]

If I wanted a WYSIWYG field I’d probably still use markdown. I could add the buttons to properly inject markdown symbol and use a JS markdown renderer for the text field. Tbh I’d be amazed if there weren’t at least a dozen out-of-the-box packages that included a live rendered text area with a widget array.

In this instance I’m not advocating for markdown as a user interface but just using it as a quick and dirty markup language. Be aware that if you turn to HTML, you’d be adopting responsibility for a lot of non-trivial security issues. If the customization went beyond markdown (into, for instance, fonts) you’d need a more complex solution so you’d likely want to investigate other tag or boundary marker based markup languages out there. Markup is just simple and has ten billion implementations out there.

That is a very unlikely approach.

Rich text in the modern world is almost exclusively solved by using markdown because it’s such a trivial solution.

In previous words it was usually solved either using range tags (similar to HTML, sometimes literally HTML, more often custom stuff) or embedded boundary markers (something that marked a new boundary and then had a full definition of the styles to follow, sometimes omitting styles that didn’t change, often times in some insanely dense binary format for predictable scanning).

Usually, it’s more sane to embed formatting in the string itself rather than having styling separately defined (i.e. CSS, kinda). Because otherwise storage would be a huge pain and reading would require a lot of non-consecutive disk scans.

I love the superstitious z-index just in case it does something to help.

Fusilli, I’m cork-y like that and rather silly.

Cool. Do Raytheon next!

A very real risk.

Make time to check them if it’s important or be clear that it’s a dead communication line if you can’t maintain it. As a fellow ADHDer I’ve had to back out of a few different platforms because I simply can’t allow myself to engage with them - if someone @s me on Facebook I’ll see it in six months to a decade… I do try and make sure my contacts all have good lines to me if they need to reach out, though.

I still constantly bitch about not being able to pin the taskbar to the side of the screen in windows 11.

There will always be some static-friction to UI changes, even if it’s a change that makes the UI more accessible overall. Everytime you alter your UI you’re taxing your users as it will take them some time to adapt to the new system. You should minimize how often you do this for that reason. Additionally, sometimes you may be unaware of an unintentional feature users appreciate that you’re depreciating.

I dislike your comment because it’s making a lot of sweeping generalizations (like that the UI changes are actually good) and ignoring the fact that users may have legitimate complaints.

For this reason I refuse to take any actions that would mark a message as read until I’m confident I have time to reply to it.

Because they’re easy to recognize and consistent? It’s honestly more weird that other areas of the world haven’t followed suit.

The other joke is a reference to Ellison’s story, in case it wooshed.