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My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file (2020)

(jeffhuang.com)
242 points simonebrunozzi | 2 comments | 11 Dec 25 19:30 UTC | HN request time: 0.444s | source
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analogpixel ◴[11 Dec 25 22:00 UTC] No.46237814[source]▶
I've been noticing lately, at least for myself, that useful technology stopped happening like 10-20 years ago. If all you could use was tech from 2000 and before you would have a pretty stable stack that just worked (without a monthly subscription.)

There is also this article today: https://jon.recoil.org/blog/2025/12/an-svg-is-all-you-need.h... about how great good ol' svg is. And then every recurring article about using RSS instead of all the other siloed products.

textfiles, makefiles, perl, php, rss, text based email, news groups, irc, icq, vim/emacs, sed, awk; all better than the crap they have spawned that is supposed to be "better".

Out of curiosity, what technology in the past 5 years do you use that you actually find better than something from 20 years ago?

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1. ivanjermakov ◴[11 Dec 25 23:21 UTC] No.46238745[source]▶
No media other than plain text can come even close to the quantity and quality of tooling we have for it. Plain text is amazing to read, edit, share, version, tts, print and all of it with nearly maximum space efficientcy.
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2. gf000 ◴[12 Dec 25 10:38 UTC] No.46242800[source]▶
That's pretty far from the truth though.

It is absolutely inferior to a database-like binary format for querying, sorting, searching etc. It's a good tool for certain jobs.