Paul Lutus

Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we
can buy shit we don't need.
-- From the movie "Fight Club", based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk

Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.
-- Sinclair Lewis

Advertising is the rattling of a stick in a swill bucket.
-- George Orwell

Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.

Let advertisers spend the same amount of money improving their product that they do on advertising and they wouldn't have to advertise it.
-- Will Rogers

There is one thing you absolutely must know about modern advertising. No matter how true any single advertisement is, modern advertising itself, taken as a whole, tells a lie - that you need the thing being advertised. It is a lie because consumer goods of real value do not need to be advertised - such goods are part of a natural market that flows "beneath" the [consumerist] marketplace, although as time passes these basic necessities represent a shrinking percentage of the total flow of goods.
-- "Consumer Angst",
http://www.arachnoid.com/lutusp/consumerangst.html*

Virtually all consumer products, above a rudimentary level of complexity, have accessories and "enhancements." One can easily imagine a graph of products with the simplest (fewest accessories) on the left and the most complex (most…

You can sprinkle into my comment stream. It's already generated mock confusion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23980312

(The thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24006393 shows that GPT-3 can already pass my screening turing hurdle, one which many actual people arguing on the internet fail.)

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stolen from https://arachnoid.com/jokes/index.html :

Two academics, Albert and Bill, are sitting in a bar waiting for their friend Charlie.

Albert: "Charlie thinks women don't know any math, he might be right, but I want to play a trick." Albert calls the waitress over.

Albert: "Delia, my friend Charlie is going to arrive in a bit, and I want to play a trick. When he arrives, I'm going to ask you a question, and I want you to answer, 'X cubed divided by three.' Can you remember that?"

Delia: "Sure, no problem, I can remember that."

Charlie arrives and Albert raises his favorite topic.

Albert: "I think you're wrong, I think women can learn math. Just as a test, let's ask the waitress a math question." Albert calls Delia over.

Albert: "What's the integral of x squared, derived with respect to x?"

Delia: "Umm, that would be ... x cubed divided by three"

Delia: "... plus a constant."

The mid-ninties: It was innocent and simple, but you felt so technologically advanced to be able to publish something online. It wasn't about making millions. No one was judging your code. You used Java Applets to make dynamic menus and that was the pinnacle achievement. No one turned on Javascript. You only worried about Netscape and eventually IE, but you really didn't worry that much about either. You didn't think about domain squatting because you weren't sure how to get a domain and it really wasn't worth the cost, whatever it was. If you did, you got your name from Network Solutions or that startup, Register.com. CGI was for professionals. Perl was for scientists. You kinda checked email every couple weeks. You may have even shared an email address. You were ahead when you had a separate phone line for dial up. You were a big shot when you got DSL (from Phoenix). Your DSL was bought out every six months. It was Phoenix, then Earthlink, then... You got AOL CDs in the mail weekly. You remember gmail invites.

Edit: And this was your editor: http://www.arachnoid.com/arachnophilia/index.php

The problem with traditional Websites is that search engines don't index them in a way that attracts visitors. I know this because my archaic, out-of-date, 34-year-old static-page Website https://arachnoid.com/ has no advertising or other features that might cause it to be given priority by a search engine.

My occasional use of JavaScript only supports technical animations, specialized calculators and real-time LaTeX rendering, not dynamic page generation or dark patterns.

From a modern perspective, my Website is actually a museum. The proof? While I once directed Website visitors to my YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@lutusp), I now find myself directing YouTube viewers to my Website.

Not our topic, but one reason is kids can't read: https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/american-childrens-reading-skills-reach-new-lows/

Apropos, here's one of my favorite jokes. I visit a bookstore. On the wall is a poster: "The tragedy of illiteracy -- now available as an audiobook."

Those of us who've calculated our own modelines are familiar with that caution. It was part of the documentation of standard tools at the time, though I've never personally encountered a damaged display or knew of anyone else who had. Though one turns up in this thread: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33093385>

A typical modeline calculator warning:

It is also important to say that some seemingly reasonable modelines can damage monitors, so this method of hand-crafting monitor descriptions includes a certain amount of risk.

<https://arachnoid.com/modelines/>

My understanding is that monitors and/or graphics cards/drivers would reject potentially harmful configurations.

IDEs are useful for helping you match tags, see what part of your page is affected by which tags, and checking your HTML. They're also just handy as editors, e.g. they allow you to open multiple files simultaneously (e.g. your html file in one tab and your stylesheet in another.)

Not that there's anything wrong with vi. I use it and an IDE.

You might want to give Arachnophilia a try. It's simple, configurable, multiplatform, and does more than HTML/CSS:
http://www.arachnoid.com/arachnophilia/

Amaya is prettier, and focused on web page design:
http://www.w3.org/Amaya/

Neither one breaths fire like the big IDEs, but both do a great job on what they do. ;)