loppy

Everything I wrote “is Markdown”, because the program you’re using to view my text assumes that my text is formatted in Markdown. You too are writing in Markdown, which for example is how your comment got displayed in bold. You did not “type boldly” to do that, you typed some text like **this is bold** and that got displayed in bold.

Maybe more examples would help. Here’s something I can do because the program you’re using to view my text assumes it’s Markdown: this is a monospace font and this is not. This desire for my text to be displayed in a monospace font is expressed in Markdown using grave quotes. It’s common to use this to denote literal, unprocessed text, so I would say that what I typed was `this is a monospace font`. If you copy and paste that text into a comment, do nothing else to it, and post it, you will see it displayed as this is a monospace font without the quotes because a Markdown compatible program sees it and knows “this person wants the text between these grave quotes displayed monospace”.

You can also see where I just wrote “without” italicized; in Markdown this is expressed as *without* or _without_.

If I type

* Thing 1

* Thing 2

* Thing 3

You’ll see this displayed with bullets, not asterisks, and proper indenting and vertical spacing for a list:

• Thing 1

• Thing 2

• Thing 3

It also gets displayed in exactly the same way if I write it in these two different ways as well:

* Thing 1
* Thing 2
* Thing 3

• Thing 1
• Thing 2
• Thing 3

  * Thing 1
  * Thing 2

  * Thing 3

• Thing 1

• Thing 2

• Thing 3

Maybe it would be helpful to just skim through a Markdown spec. (There are different flavors of Markdown; this one is called CommonMark, which is usually what people actually mean when they say Markdown. More information on their website.)

You typed some text to make your first comment, and it looked something like this:

Elder Millennial here. All I know about markdown is:

1. To make a hard copy of a thought or conversation. "Mark that down in your notes, so we don't forget."

2. A discount or sale. "Did you see the 30% markdown on three legged jeans?"

The way your comment actually displays is different though, isn’t it? The numbered items are indented and come one after the other without any space inbetween, and the text within each numbered item is properly aligned.

What you entered is just text, and text by itself is inherently meaningless. “Markdown” is the name of a particular standard way of formatting text so that programs can reliably interpret parts of that text as representing the writers desire for their text to be displayed a particular way. You can kind of think of it like a programming language. As another basic example, consider this text:

This is a paragraph.
This        is still    the same
       paragraph.

Here is the second one.





And here is the third                   one.

I’m going to paste this text right after this sentence; notice how the amount of space doesn’t matter, and how a new paragraph is denoted by at least two line breaks.

This is a paragraph. This is still the same paragraph.

Here is the second one.

And here is the third one.

You made me realize this is actually pretty common in math, e.g. “Let x, y be real numbers” instead of “Let x and y be real numbers”. I imagine this comes from the infuence of notation like “Let x, y ∈ ℝ”.

Well, Con(PA) is a “natural” statement I’d say, and ZFC proves Con(PA).

No one, and I mean absolutely no one, “truly” “thinks in words”, even people who have a constant running narrative in their head. The reason is simple: How can you choose words/form sentences without any prior thought/idea that those words describe? How can you “struggle to find the right words” if your thoughts are originally in words (an experience I assume everyone has had)?

I think probably people get wrapped up in the art and music, and rightfully so. But (having more that 100% completion, mind you) there were aspects of the level design and bosses that really did not sit well with me. I couldn’t help but feel like “it’s just Metroid but worse” in a lot of aspects.

Assuming that 99% of them are hoaxes, clout chasers, or misidentified phenomena, that still leaves 1% of all those videos to be true.

Yes, if you assume something is true then you can conclude that it is true.