cecilkorik

@cecilkorik@lemmy.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  This is primarily a North American concern. A 15amp 120V circuit does not heat water fast enough for the pre-wash cycle to actually have hot water in it. The wash cycle will eventually get hot water but not until at least halfway through, so for half of it you’re washing with cold/warm water at best. Depending on what you’re washing, that may be okay, but the dishwasher will definitely wash better if it is connected to the hot water supply and the hot water pipe is pre-filled with hot water by running the tap at the sink. European dishwashers are often connected to cold, because they have 220V+ heating elements that can deliver a lot more heat energy and they are designed for this. North American dishwashers are not.

  The drain does not matter, you can pour whatever you want down the drain. The concern is on the supply-side only, and only applies if the dishwasher is in fact connected to the hot water line (which it should be, in North American installations, but sometimes it is installed wrong)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  In video games, when you are offered a choice between two horrible options which both have the same outcome, you quickly realize that you either have either done something terribly wrong prior to this event and that’s led to this bad ending, or you are being pushed to search for the secret third option.

  I think in this case the same thing applies. We can either accept the bad ending and quit, or search for the third option. Neither of those two choices are going to solve these problems. There’s one that maybe offers a few more minutes of dialogue before you get there, and maybe the secret option is down that path, but we’d better start searching for it now instead of assuming that things are going to turn out okay if we pick the less-bad option.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This is why Americans hate Socialism.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  That sounds more like it’s probably a problem related to living in a house built out of toothpicks with paper-thin walls and windows in a place where too many humans have been forced to congregate in a small area for primarily economic and sociopolitical reasons. But, you know, you can also blame the people stuck there with you too if you want.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Temp Check on Blood of the Dawnwalker?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I only meant it came out of nowhere to me. I’m not trying to universalize my experience onto everyone else or attack the game, I’m just living and sharing my own experience, and this is how it works and looks from where I am, which I thought was the kind of perspective OP was asking for. I’m glad they’re enjoying it, but I’m going to be holding off.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Temp Check on Blood of the Dawnwalker?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The temperature is too hot for me. That’s because I get suspicious of games that are mega-viral and seemingly come out of nowhere to have everybody talking about them all at once. I figure it’s often either a fad, a masterfully executed guerilla marketing campaign, or genuinely outstanding, or some combination of these things. Of course, sometimes it is just genuinely outstanding, and if that’s the case I’ll probably pick it up eventually. But there’s no rush, so regardless of which it is, I’m a patient gamer and I’m perfectly willing to wait and let the dust settle so I can get a better perspective, and very often I find these kind of games fade pretty quickly and are forgotten and in the clear light of day I’ll often realize they’re not really the kind of game I like anyway. And if they’re the kind of genuinely outstanding instant classic they seem to be at first, they’ll still be around once I’m ready for them, and potentially on sale. So, overall this strategy of suspicion-by-default and wait for more data has served me well.

  There are plenty of games I’ll impulse-buy, but it’s never the popular ones, it’s the ones that have a dozen reviews. I’m always suspicious of popularity. I do not believe in the wisdom of crowds, at least for my own entertainment preferences. I have very specific interests and preferences, and frankly I know them when I see them, and this probably isn’t it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Valheim: Deep North 1.0⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I highly doubt you are a developer of this game, but if you are, well… that explains a lot I guess.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨why do we punish people when nothing bad happened ?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I absolutely can and do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨why do we punish people when nothing bad happened ?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Nothing bad happened yet. Keep doing it, and something bad’s going to happen. An ounce of prevention is better than a truckload of cure. Some things can’t be cured. You can’t punish someone hard enough to undo road deaths. The victims are still going to be dead. They don’t come back to life once the killer goes to jail. There is no other reasonable way to handle road deaths than by stopping them before they happen. Drive at a reasonable and appropriate speed, or someone’s going to die. Those are your options.

  No it’s not a perfect solution, people still die on the roads, and they probably always will, but we’ve chosen the speed limits at a point that prevents some deaths, you cannot realistically argue that, and that is all you have to know to understand that they are justified, and they do have an appropriate punishment.

  Does that help you understand?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨is there a name for when you stop preventing a problem thinking it's solved and it comes back?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  In software development this is called a regression, and it is why we have regression tests. If you don’t run or check the regression tests, the problems they’re testing for can (and do) come back.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What happens if I call the family of Karoline Leavitt?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Trump and his buddies are very, very petty and vindictive. The law will not protect you, even if the things you say are protected by law, and if the FBI has nothing better to do (which seems likely these days) you may be in dangerous waters. I would never recommend intentional aggravation of bullies unless you’re very confident you know a way to make sure they can never hurt you again in the future.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Could heating oil subsidies be reduced or replaced with subsidies for installing electric heating and houses.?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The HVAC trades are run kind of like a mafia, at least in my part of the world. It’s a savage business, and it’s not because they’re competing on price.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Could heating oil subsidies be reduced or replaced with subsidies for installing electric heating and houses.?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Using secondary heat for a few days or even a month a year is still a huge improvement, huge cost savings, and adds up to a massive reduction in annual carbon footprint, even if you’re using a fossil fuel furnace for secondary heat. People are crazy to not consider heat pumps as the primary heat option, especially if you already have central air conditioning, it’s basically the same machine, typically with the same connections and location, just physically somewhat bigger. Obviously it won’t work absolutely everywhere, but for the vast majority it’s a brilliant option and almost a drop-in replacement.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How com the ad industry make so much money?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t know how that’s a conspiracy. Like you suggest, it’s basically tautological, that’s what advertising/marketing IS by definition. Whether you think that’s a bad thing or not (I do in almost all of its current forms) is an entirely different question and a matter of opinion, and while I might be guilty of letting that opinion leak into my commentary I also don’t see a lot of facts we actually seem to disagree on, so I’m not really sure what else there is to discuss. I don’t think it would be productive to get into the weeds of why I think that’s such a bad thing, it’s not really relevant to the question that was asked. I just thought understanding the profit motives that make the advertising industry so lucrative would probably be pretty useful to appreciate why the industry is the way it is.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How com the ad industry make so much money?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Because they are funded by literally almost every other industry and business on the planet, small and large. They have established themselves as the critical and inescapable middleman between consumers and providers, not necessarily directly or exclusively but in every practical way possible and in such subtle ways that it’s not always obvious how much they actually control. They are the gatekeepers of all commerce, they control the information of even knowing what businesses exist and what they do and are the only way of finding them and are often the only way of finding a price too. All commerce flows through them, and so they inevitably take their cut of all that business. Few other industries are as widespread through the rest of the economy as advertising is, and none are able to establish effective monopolies as easily as advertising has.

  Oil comes close, but even oil is ultimately a commodity that can be take from or moved around from place to place for the right price. It doesn’t separate businesses from their consumers the way advertising does. A business or consumer can find a different source for oil – but they have to use information to do that. And the advertising industry controls most of the information.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Whats the point of the 2nd amendment⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Have you tried stating your opinion one way or the other, since your questions clearly indicate you have some thoughts of your own on the matter, instead of sealioning people with “just asking questions”?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Obama wing of the Democratic Party is declaring “war” on progressives. Why don’t they ever bring this energy against Trump? Why do they hate working class people even more?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Because the working class have always held the real power, being the real reason work gets done, and as a result have always been the real enemy of the people in power and the real threat to their power. Some of them are just better at pretending, because they want to play “Good cop, bad cop” against us, and that strategy has been working really well for them lately.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How no-techy/"common" people know if a Open Source code is secure?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It is always possible. The point is that while open source software doesn’t solve this problem, it gives you a non-zero chance of someone detecting it and raising the alarm. Non-zero may be large or may be small, it is probably never 100% chance, but large non-zero is very good, and even small non-zero it is much better than the 0% detection chance that closed source offers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What would a super hero A.I. be like ?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  They’re not real. They don’t have desires. They are programmed with massive amounts of data a human created and they mix that up with a random number generator to decide what to do. The output is just randomized selections from the program that the model is loaded with.

  Maybe the humans who programmed it are really dumb and don’t know or understand what they programmed it to do, maybe those choices will be unpredictable and that might seem like intelligence to you but it’s not. Maybe they used another AI program to tell it what to do, which makes it feel even less connected to the human who created the data, maybe there are layers and layers of unpredictable AI programming controlling what it does. But it’s still just a program picking random choices. It doesn’t have motives, intentions, or thought. It is a program.

  To answer your question directly: It would do whatever the AI model and random choices tell it to do. Probably random things mixed with megalomaniacal nonsense. But that’s not because it is any of those things or cares about any of those things, that’s just what the combination of your prompting and the model data led it to start doing. You can literally just delete the context (or sometimes not even do that), and tell it “stop being evil and give me a recipe for soup” and it will be like “Ok! Here’s your recipe:”

  It’s not an AI superhero vigilante. It’s a nonsense generator. It will generate any nonsense you ask it to, that’s what it does. It can’t even actually do things other than generating text, it requires a harness to interpret the nonsense it spits out, then that harness controls an operating system and the operating system just does whatever the nonsense generator’s harness tells it to. That’s not superpowers. If it happens to be effective, it’s probably because there’s a pretty clever harness wrapped around it and a pretty good OS running its commands with some form of competency. But that’s not AI, that’s well-coded software written by humans doing the heavy lifting.

  It’s like a room full of competent adults being ordered around by a 2-year-old. It may seem like the 2-year-old is an incredibly effective manager but they’re not actually the brains of the operation and they don’t really always get what they want, and if you put them in charge of anything significant you’re going to have a real bad time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The hill I will die on: Games are the opposite of fun, and I’d ban them for anyone over 12 | Emily Watkins⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Arguing against her strawman is not a productive use of anybody’s time or attention, and it even further wastes the time of readers. It’s not solving any problem because it’s not a genuinely held opinion. It is just meaningless slop, seeking profit, filling space, devoid of any intellectual value and no different than AI slop, whether a human wrote it or not.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do non-English speakers learn to code in English, or in their native language?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The only solution to having too many standards is always to add another new standard. /xkcd

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do people make mods for games without access to the game's source code?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s possible in some cases but pretty rare realistically. DLL mods are much more common. Windows (and most operating systems) have the concept of what they call dynamic link libraries (DLLs) which are basically modules of reusable code that a program (like a game) can use. Now these are not the same as game mods, but its their inherent modularity that makes them useful for game mods. It’s also a big part of what triggers anti-viruses, as this is also a very virus-like behavior.

  The trick is, anyone can trivially look at any DLL and see what functions are in it, and you can easily trick the game into calling a different version of any DLL file you provide, and the game won’t realize there’s anything different about it, it’s just expecting the same function names to be there but it doesn’t know if they’ll do anything different than it expects (this is often how viruses work too). There are many common well-known DLLs like Unity or DirectX or SDL that a game will often be connected to and calling into constantly in a very deep and profound way and this provides a great starting point for a modder to gain access to the game logic. Once you have identified a DLL like this for a particular game, you can replace that with your own DLL that either has the same functions, or (more practically) simply stands in front of the real DLL and hands all the functions directly to the real DLL as soon as they are called while also providing a branching point where modding code can start to develop.

  Once you have direct access into the code paths that the game is calling, you can run your own code instead of, or in addition to, the real code it is calling, and from there it’s pretty much open season for modding. Once you’re changing or replacing the running game code in any form, that’s a mod. And usually the first layer that gets built at the DLL level is not a mod itself but rather a mod loader that instead of making any significant changes on its own, it’s only job is to intercept as much of the game’s logic as it can, then load other mods/DLLs to activate each one and pass control to them when needed or requested. This way, you don’t need every individual modder to be able to figure out the exact places to do all this DLL interception which would almost certainly conflict with each other since everyone would do it in a slightly different way and in different places. Instead modders can just follow the documentation of the initial mod loader/framework and have access to everything in the game that the mod loader is already intercepting for them.

  This is what’s involved in making a game moddable. Sometimes developers do this work themselves, designing these access points into the game itself and provide their own mod loader and modding API. Obviously this saves a lot of work on the part of the modding community, but either option leads to pretty much the same place. These are what we sometimes call “code mods” or “core mods”.

  There are also games where some or most of the game logic and graphics functions are modularized into datafiles. In this case, you don’t even necessarily need code mods for many things, depending on how much has been modularized into data, and how easy to acess that data is (often defined in text, XML, json, or other easily modified formats). You can also have mods that are just “data mods” where no game code is even changed at all, only the data files like swapping a 3d Model for a different model, or changing a texture to look different, changing the stats of an enemy or a weapon, or even adding content and whole new levels or areas purely with game data, and completely reusing and building on top of the existing code without modifying it.

  Code mods and data mods like this are by far the most common modes of modding games today, but which methods exactly depends on the game and what is most suitable for it. Memory-access mods like you’re describing are typically the most challenging to develop, the most fragile to maintain, and usually the hardest to detect, which makes them most suitable for cheating but rarely suitable for genuine modding. Trainers, cheat engines, aimbots, overlays and other automations often take advantage of memory access, and likewise tend to flag on anti-viruses and anti-cheats for obvious reasons. It’s definitely possible to use them for legitimate modding but it is uncommon.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do people make mods for games without access to the game's source code?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, that’s a big part of it. Unity-based games generally follow most if not all of the framework that Unity defines, and since Unity itself is very well understood mechanically, that makes it very easy to find the right places to inject mods directly in between the game itself and the Unity DLLs that the game calls to act as a middleman or even completely replace the functionality that one side or the other would otherwise be implementing, and with that you can either create a mod on your own, or create a reusable modding API/framework for other mods to connect to. It’s not quite as straightforward as modding a game that is intentionally designed to be moddable, but in general, it’s pretty trivial once the basic setup work has been done and it’s almost the same for almost any Unity-based game so it’s not hard work to repeat on new Unity-based games either.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If everyone in power is racist, a pedophile, and just all-around hates poor people, happiness, and everything that's good, then how do we keep winning?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s exactly right. We stopped holding people accountable, we normalized bad behavior as “that’s just how it is” and became comfortable with it always happening. Anger is a useful tool. It has a purpose. This is its purpose. Maybe it would’ve been good to become angry about all this earlier, but that water has already gone under the bridge and it’s not coming back. We are here now, and now is the right time to be angry about *gestures vaguely at everything*.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Input is an Embarrassing Disaster⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  “Disaster” is obviously just hyperbole for clicks. He raises some valid nitpicks, but they’re just nitpicks. It’s a reasonably good system. I wouldn’t mind having some of the quality-of-life features he suggests though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The more miserable you get about it, the less likely you are to “get picked”. The more unfair the world is to you, the angrier you get, the angrier you get, the more unfair the world will become to you. Do you see how this is an endless spiral that doesn’t lead to a good outcome? It can’t lead to a good outcome. Nobody wants to be around an entitled, fragile, angry, miserable, unstable powder-keg of a human being like that.

  The only way you’re going to solve this is by changing yourself and disconnecting from the idea that you’re “owed” fairness. You may argue the world is a bad place because of reasons. You might be right. But how does that help you? You can’t change the world. You can’t fix the world. So are you going to be angry about it, and confirm everything the world is already telling you about yourself?

  Or are you going to move on, ignore what the world says, accept that the world is going to do whatever it does, and learn how to relentlessly be a good person for its own sake, without expectation of reward? If you can do that, there’s a good chance you will eventually find love. It’s not guaranteed, and you have to stop imagining that it is. You don’t have a right to it. Maybe you think you should have a right to it, but you don’t. The sooner you accept that the better off you’ll be, and the better your chances will be. But it’s still only a chance. Life doesn’t have guarantees.

  If you can’t accept that, you’re going to end up on the incel path, and that isn’t going to work out well for you, you’re never going to build a functional relationship on that foundation, but if it makes you feel better right now, maybe all the misery it will lead to in your future is okay. Is that what you want for yourself? Good luck. I hope it feels really good feeling bad for yourself. Because it’s going to be a miserable future for you if feeling sorry for yourself is all you can do about it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is negative voltage?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s my understanding, I think I’ve grasped at least the general gist of it, if not the specific nuances and details. Granted, I’m not a physicist or scientist of any sort. My dad was an electrician if that counts for anything, I dabble in electronics and I watch a stupid amount of Youtube, but those are pretty much my only qualifications, so feel free to consider this having a similar accuracy and truthiness level to that of generative AI, I won’t be offended.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is negative voltage?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It is a figure of speech in the sense that voltages are almost always being discussed between two things, and the figure of speech part is that “ground” or “earth” is implied in most, but not all terrestrial cases. Especially in microchips, which like you said have very limited safe voltage ranges, it is very important to give them a stable and consistent reference to ground whenever possible to make sure static voltages don’t develop on the other side that can damage them internally.

  Technically, if you’re referring to voltages on an absolute scale (not relative to each other) you’d typically be talking about “electron-volts” which is why powerful electro-magnetic radiation like x-rays, gamma rays, and other cosmic phenomenon are often measured in mega-electron-volts (MeV) for example. This is useful in physics, but just like we don’t use “absolute temperature” in day-to-day life, it is essentially meaningless to us standing down here on the crust of our pitiful little planet made mostly of molten rock covered in conductive water.

  So in day-to-day life, we talk about voltages relative to the closest thing we have to a fixed reference point, and the “zero point” we rely on which is mostly a decent reference to the voltage of Earth’s own water table tends to be reasonably consistent and practical for our purposes. Static electricity is what happens when a particular object starts to lose its reference to ground, and large voltages (positive OR negative) can build up RELATIVE to ground, which then sparks when it finally equalizes back to our stable reference point. When large static charges build up in the atmosphere, they too eventually equalize with ground through lightning strikes. This is why “ground” is important to us. High voltages relative to ground can be very dangerous. Even small voltages relative to ground can be damaging to sensitive electronics. There is nothing special about “ground” voltage in particular, in fact it changes constantly with the weather, and solar output too! The important thing about it is that almost everything on this planet is connected to it, either through humidity, water, plants, the moistness of soil and even rock has enough conductivity to maintain a stable connection to Earth’s average voltage. And of course we’re going to use that as a reference and baseline because it’s super helpful for us. We don’t care how many electron-volts the Earth has. We just care that almost everything is connected to it in some meaningful way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What happens when you just refuse to pay and go ... ?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Dementia is a terrible affliction.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why does not a CR (Carriage Return) automatically start a new line on some online text editors?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I think that’s a fair summary! I have to admit I’m still fond of ANSI (and some of the old DOS extended ASCII that included all kinds of fancy UI and box drawing characters) but it’s mostly nostalgia, and there’s the whole different rabbit hole of extended ASCII code pages to get into. :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why does not a CR (Carriage Return) automatically start a new line on some online text editors?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  So you’re talking about Markdown. It’s a specific format, popularized initially on Reddit, that has now become so widely used it is almost universal nowadays (and only growing more popular since so many AI seem to use it natively), and while I agree with you in general and I’d even go as far as to call this a fundamental anachronistic design flaw of Markdown, I think to gain any understanding of this issue you have to understand the historical context that Markdown was born from, and for that you need a history lesson.

  Let’s start by establishing some terminology: “ASCII” is the most basic standard for computerized text. It’s quite limited, 127 characters, ~30 of which are non-printable control characters (including CR). This is pretty much the most universal, most compatible form of transmitting text over the internet. It’s built into almost every other standard as its foundation, and we basically can’t live without it anymore. We often call it “plain text”, although nowadays we also have unicode, or “UTF-8” in its most common form, that would also like to claim that title, even unicode contains those original 127 ASCII characters hardcoded right at its base.

  Anything beyond pure ASCII or sometimes unicode typically falls under the umbrella of “rich text”. “ANSI” was one of the earliest and most basic forms of rich text, again completely built on top of ASCII, and is still used sometimes for terminals today. It allows some basic colors and bold/underline, occasionally supporting double-width or italic. It’s very primitive compared to what we are used to nowadays and it relied heavily on non-printable ASCII control codes to do its work. In the old days, there was no capability for any sort of line-spacing other than 1. if you wanted a paragraph, you typically did TWO newlines to add 1 line of extra space in between the paragraphs to make it clear the previous paragraph had ended and a new one was starting.

  The first truly cross-platform “rich text” that came around was “HTML”, which is still of course what we use for the web today in all its glory. It wanted to do things differently than ANSI, and in a way, this was so that it could be compatible with ANSI. If you’re copy-pasting code out of a terminal and getting a whole bunch of hidden non-printable ASCII that are going to mess up your HTML, that’s a problem. This is where the roots of that issue you’re seeing in Markdown were born. HTML intentionally has a whitespace-agnostic definition. It intentionally wanted to get away from all those ASCII “non-printable” control codes and it consciously chooses to completely ignore them, crucially, including CR/LF (which have all sorts of their own problems with cross-platform implementations, DOS/Windows uses both CR-LF and sometimes only recognizes both CR-LF in that specific order. Unix ONLY uses CR. Older macs ONLY used LF. It was a mess, and it caused a lot of problems (sometimes still does). HTML got around this entirely by completely ignoring those characters and treating them as if they didn’t exist. They can’t have cross-platform compatibility issues if they don’t do anything in the first place.

  HTML instead supports tags that control when to move text to a new line, and just as critically, HTML decided to make a key semantic distinction between “lines” and “paragraphs”. <br> specifies a line break ONLY, without breaking the paragraph. <p> specifies a paragraph break, or a paragraph block depending how you use it, and that caused confusion of its own. But like it or not, paragraphs quickly became the standard method of laying out text on the web, and <br> was sidelined as an afterthought.

  As HTML and the web as whole grew, HTML started to gain a lot of very advanced and powerful features. Early internet forums wanted to make it easy for novices to communicate in some form of rich text without necessarily knowing HTML, and they didn’t want to enable all the advanced features of HTML some of which posed legitimate security or usability risks for the rest of the site especially with javascript and web requests. They created their own forms of tagging like BBcode that they translated into a safe subset of HTML behind the scenes. Again it was typical to use paragraphs here, it was starting to become the expectation for “CR” to mean paragraph. Sometimes, the old typesetting definition of paragraphs was adopted, where two CRs meant a new paragraph, and one CR meant a new line only.

  Meanwhile, you’ve got Microsoft Word and other word processors which are also working natively in rich text and paragraphs, and hitting enter in Word gives you a new paragraph, OR a new line depending on exactly what context you’re currently in, but again paragraph is kind of the assumed default.

  Finally, Markdown enters the scene. It comes from the world of HTML and BBcode and Word, but it wants to go back to the days of ASCII and make invisible choices of whitespace start mattering again, to get rid of all the ugly tags wrapped around all of our rich text up to this point and make text where the whitespace defines how it’s going to be presented, and its choice to resolve this dilemma is that it decides to keep the historical typesetting distinction of two CRs in a row makes a new paragraph, and it translates that into an HTML paragraph so it’s not actually separated by two full lines when you have an HTML rendering of markdown, it’s a proper HTML paragraph. So far so good. At this point, they could’ve chosen to do exactly what you said and what I think would’ve been the consistent thing to do: one CR (not two) means just a single new line, and sensibly, that would translate to an HTML <br> element and everything would’ve been lovely.

  But they didn’t.

  Instead, for whatever baffling reason, possibly because DOS/Unix/Mac line endings were still a bit of problem, and like I said <br> was very, very sidelined by the whole culture and history of HTML, but without being able to see into their minds I can’t say for sure exactly why they decided to go their own way for the <br> implementation, coming up with this wonky “two spaces after a line” to require people to be deliberate about it. But they obviously continued following the HTML tradition of CR/LF being otherwise ignored.

  Not to fully excuse this decision, but in their defense, sometimes copy-paste can insert newlines where you don’t want them, so it’s not always as clear that a CR is intentional the way you’re hoping. Maybe the idea was that these non-spaced CRs aren’t necessarily going to be intended if you’re often copy-pasting long, wrapped lines out of an 80 column terminal or something. I still don’t think that is justifiable, but it is what it is.