ern_ave

"What is my purpose?"

"You turn this LED on or off"

> if, for example, you're writing Python or Javascript or Perl, it is dead easy to have Python or Javascript or Perl also be your configuration file language.

Sure. Like C header files. It's the easiest option - no arguments there.

But there are considerations beyond being easy. I think there's a case to be made that a config file should be data, not code.

> a recent HN article had a bunch of comments lamenting that nobody ever uses XML any more

I still use it from time to time for config files that a developer has to write. I find it easier to read that JSON, and it supports comments. Also, the distinction between attributes and children is often really nice to have. You can shoehorn that into JSON of course, but native XML does it better.

Obviously, I would never use it for data interchange (e.g. SOAP) anymore.

My guess is that AI training is the main issue.

Data that you can prove was generated by humans is now exceedingly valuable ...and most of that comes from the days before LLMs. The situation is a bit like how steel manufactured before the nuclear age is valuable.

> horrible people like you posting to it.

I challenge you to quote anything I've said that you can argue constitutes a "horrible person"

Why do you believe things that you cannot defend?

In my opinion, if I had said anything that you could demonstrate to be false, you would quote what I said and present an explanation for why it's false. I believe you're not doing that because you cannot do it.

> You are the one bringing politics into this

No, that's not true. The person I responded to characterized the old, pre-musk twitter as "a place where decent human beings cared to gather" and contrasted that with the current twitter.

What possible non-political interpretation of that viewpoint is there? He is clearly saying that when twitter was run by people on the political-left, and (for example) Trump was banned, that was "decent human beings."

My rebuttal is to show a large list of verified accounts making hateful statements. My point is, those statements were allowed under pre-musk twitter. Hate was allowed before, and it's allowed now.

The only difference is that the person I responded to finds the former brand of it acceptable.

Which part of this analysis is incorrect?

> Even collecting that image is odd and strange

It's odd and strange to pretend that you believe I personally collected those examples. You're well aware of how the internet works. You know that someone else created that image.