I posted the DOS version on CompuServe (!) probably 30 or 35 years ago. I don't think I ever posted the Word for Windows version. I switched to a MacBook a dozen years ago; I think I remapped some of its keys to emulate Emacs. (But in recent years I've used mostly Emacs itself and org-mode, because these days I'm mostly a law professor and use Word mainly in the occasional client contract-negotiation project.)
A small difference at small levels but one which obviously matters when it's shoved into countless foods without most people event realizing. It's not just in soda and candy; it's in bread, pasta, almost any processed food (crackers, ketchups and other sauces, canned fruit, applesauce, lunch meat, peanut butter, the list goes on) and many foods one might not considered processed.
It makes sense to try to eliminate it even though it's "only" a small difference. Might as well remove the difference at all and look out for things with no HFCS shoved in it for no reason.
>HFCS 42 is mainly used for processed foods and breakfast cereals, whereas HFCS 55 is used mostly for production of soft drinks.
In other words, the type of HFCS that's "shoved into countless foods" has less fructose than table sugar, not more. If fructose is the villain here, that actually constitutes an improvement over table sugar.
Plain pasta almost never contains any HFCS. Maybe you can find some that does but that's not what most people are buying in their local grocery store. (The sauce is often a different story.)
Fair - I went back and re-edited enough times my original message got jumbled, and I had been thinking of pasta dishes you could buy, which almost invariably have HFCS, but absolutely correct plain pasta pretty much never does.
The point is, it doesn't matter if your ketchup is made with sugar or HFCS. If it weren't HFCS, it would be sugar, because ketchup is supposed to be sweet, and they have the same nutritional effect.
Similarly, it's not suprising when pasta sauce has some sweetness added -- grandma also likely added a bit of sugar if she found tomatoes too acidic, which many do.
The only thing that matters is that it's sugar. HFCS isn't somehow worse. If you're trying to eliminate sugar overall then sure, of course avoid HFCS. But if you're fine with a certain moderate amount of sugar per day, then the relatively small amounts of HFCS in things like pasta sauce and peanut butter are fine. The same way the sugar or honey in teriyaki sauces is. They count towards your daily allotment of sugar. For people trying to eat relatively healthily, avoid the soda but there's no reason to worry about the HFCS in ketchup or normal amounts of tomato sauce, for goodness' sake. The only reason to avoid HFCS entirely is if you're truly cutting sugar out of your diet entirely. Otherwise they're just substitutes for practical nutritional purposes.
That's another fair point that specifically tomato-based products often have sugar, but also kind of missing the forest for the trees. For various reasons, we have a slew of foods that one might not expect to have added sugar (like lunch meat, ham notwithstanding, or applesauce which is already sweet without extra sugar, to pick from my short list above), that do because of reasons. In any case it does pay to still look, because if you're not careful you could pick one random tomato sauce that has double the amount of sugar compared to the jar right next to it on the shelf (Bertolli Tomato & Basil, 11g per serving; Newton's Own Marinara, 6g per serving).
These choices add up, which is the point I was trying to make originally (though I agree I did not do a good job of it); I understand I was being pedantic so I understand the nature of the responses to me. The point is that small differences, isolated, don't matter, but in aggregate they absolutely do. We make arguments like this all the time in software when trying to write correct, performative code -- the milliseconds add up, and so do the grams of sugar.
The anti-HFCS movement, despite having its targets aimed for wrong reasons, is still aiming at the right thing: being more mindful of what's in the things we put in our bodies.
I would actually argue the anti-HFCS movement is not aiming at the right thing.
Because they make people think Mexican Coke is fine because it's made with real sugar, or that putting honey all over your toast doesn't count. Like, I know people who think these things, but avoid HFCS like it's the plague.
Unless you're trying to avoid sugar to an extreme degree, the sweetness in tomato sauce is not worth concerning yourself about. The small differences, when added up, don't matter that much. The sugar in your bread and peanut butter is nothing compared to a Coke. Again -- if you're concerned about sugar, then don't drink soda and don't eat dessert. No candies, no sweet drinks, no sweet juices. That gets you 95% of the way. Worrying about HFCS in bread is missing the forest for the trees.
> The government recommends that free sugars – sugars added to food or drinks, and sugars found naturally in honey, syrups, and unsweetened fruit and vegetable juices, smoothies and purées – should not make up more than 5% of the energy (calories) you get from food and drink each day.
> This means:
> Adults should have no more than 30g of free sugars a day, (roughly equivalent to 7 sugar cubes).
Like I said, it adds up. And as I pointed out above, the added sugar varies wildly in the "same" things you buy off the shelf, so it does pay to pay attention.
I don't see the same argument for adding more beneficial things to your diet like protein or fiber so it's curious to say the negative things don't also have some cumulative effect.
You can easily find peanut butter without added sugar, and applesauce without added sugar, and many more of the garden variety things without added sugar. Sure, there is naturally occurring sugar, but that's the point -- why add more, and why add that to your diet?
For many writers and creative types I've read and talked to, the use of AI for pretty much any reason is equivalent to crossing the picket line.
When so many models are trained on illegally-obtained data (libgen, etc.) and provide profit without acknowledgement to the folks whose creative output made said profit possible in the first place, it feels really icky to put it lightly.
What's more, the creative process is about pulling something out from inside of you, examining your ideas and yourself, and maybe showing it to the world. Feedback from others, editors or readers or whatever, is a reciprocation of that. Or if you keep it to yourself, you've learned and grown anyway, and have honed your craft for the next time you try it.
What reward is there in computer mimicry? How does AI empower this process?
From a commercial aspect it all sucks. Creatives are devalued and the creative process is arrested. This isn't new, though. Ever since we started calling entertainment "content," you could see it coming. It's a struggle Hollywood's faced since the studio system, even before. We had the subversives in the Code era, the new wave people, the auteurs, and so on, all fighting that good fight against the business people who spoke only in dollars and cents. So it was, so it shall be.
I don't think there will be an AI takeover in creative writing, except for maybe a hiccup where slop content creators chase gold. Already a couple of romance writers accidentally published stories with prompts left in them and have instantly ruined their reputations forever. I think the people interested in reading what a machine wrote are the people interested in making the machine write. Everyone else wants something from a real human.
> From a commercial aspect it all sucks. Creatives are devalued and the creative process is arrested.
Don't worry, if we keep it up, we can do this to everyone, all humanity, and finish our centuries long work of making a world that's hard on humans and good for our superorganisms -- business, capital organizations, churches and states that we started on centuries ago. Our technical creations can help us accelerate and complete the process by which we have chosen to make our only possible significance and value in how much we can scramble to control of these, crushing every other human endeavor and the suffering we create and potential joys we torch in meanwhile nothing but the meaningless price of progress.
This is an alarmingly reductionist statement that I cannot believe is made in good faith. If it somehow is, it's based on an abundance of ignorance that only highlights the importance of education.
Are you genuinely arguing that LLM output is derivative, and human output is derivative, therefore they're equal? Why don't you pop that thesis into ChatGPT and see how it answers.
I didn't realise that by comparing derivative human output to derivative machine output that I was inherently arguing that they are equally derivative at this point in time.
It is true that human output has higher entropy, but that will not be the case forever.
BART crime is up over the past decade. People don't avoid BART because of that headline with the chainsaw man. They avoid it because of everyday crime and violence.
I'm sure it's similar for many other metro transport options in the USA. California in particular has a rough go for many reasons.
It doesn't even have to be something bad or happen to you. One "my buddy had his bike stolen off the light rail" and several people will be turned off of ever trying to use it.
The "crime" story has been so twisted by propaganda and lies-by-statistics that you'll have to forgive me for saying that I can't take your word for it and will need numbers. Truthiness certainly can drive people to make poor, (unfounded) fear-based decisions.
This is pretty much how I play GTA V. I have a Self Radio playlist for a specific vibe. Hop in a random car and cruise around the city, get distracted by some event, cause a little mayhem and escape if I'm in the mood, and keep cruising. Like the Truck Simulator games, it's a good way to go for a drive without actually needing to go for a drive (so less exhausting, wasteful, and dangerous).
When my oldest son was very young, he enjoyed watching me play GTA IV in a style that involved cruising around the city, observing all traffic laws (he got quite upset if I bumped another traffic participant or ran a red light), and hopping into random stores to try on various outfits.
As I fell into the SSG pit I found I mostly wrote about and fooled around with the SSG itself, instead of all the things I originally planned on writing about and doing. So I threw away the SSG and installed Wordpress and stopped caring. It's been liberating.
If the goal is to tinker and write about the tinkering, that is fine. If you're not like me and the tinkering never gets in the way of the writing, that's also fine. But that wasn't me. I had to learn yet again that the best tool was the one that got out of my way and let me do what I came to do.
The last thing I need when I'm aiming to write is a chance to procrastinate.
Wordpress in 2025 has a very dangerous pair of traits:
* It and all its plugins must be kept up to date or else you will be compromised.
* The BDFL is a maniac who is happy to block access to deliver or receive security updates for petty personal reasons.
With a static site there are no security vulnerabilities to patch, so it doesn't matter if the SSG project totally implodes because the maintainer goes crazy. With WordPress it matters a lot.
Even if the dude tries to paint the internet with Wordpress's brains, I'm confident I will have time (and the impetus, finally) to find an acceptable alternative for my workflow. I'm open to suggestions.
Also, as I mentioned to a sibling response, the upkeep really is not that much work. It's a personal blog and takes a grand total of three (maybe four) clicks to update every once in a while.
Only as long as Matt deigns to allow your server to access his servers and deigns to allow the plugin authors who you depend on to log in to his servers.
WordPress has no governance, it just has Matt, and wo betide anyone who ticks him off (or who relies on any developers who tick him off).
WordPress.com doesn't support many of the plugins out there (or at least not on the price tiers I can see) -- but I happily used it for https://librefm.wordpress.com for a number of years.
Of course, WordPress.com is updated differently to a blog running the wordpress.org code.
Same here. Started ages ago with DokuWiki and then decided to try GitHub Pages. Transferred everything over, but then wanted some kind of search. So, I’ve implemented a custom Google search. Wanted some way for visitors to leave comments, so added Disqus. And in the end it was a potpourri of different services and a whole lot of JavaScript.
A few years ago I wanted to own my data again and not depend on external services, so exported the Disqus comments and after playing around with Serendipity ended up with Wordpress.
Was able to import the comments and the Markdown pages and there are even plugins to make it publish everything in the Fediverse. Made it all work using SQLite and enabled auto-updates. It’s basically maintenance-free.
I agree, but I think wordpress is overkill in 95% of cases.
Why? Because it takes too much maintenance (keep it up to date ornbecome part of a botnet) for features you probably don't need. A static site generator is totally fine for most blogs and if it needs maintenance it is at a time of your own choice.
I disagree, it's not overkill unless you make it overkill.
My update process is:
- Click a button to back up
- Click a button to update everything
- Open my blog to make sure it still looks normal
Definitely not onerous. To be fair I don't use many plugins, and my theme is very simple. I don't think a plain old blog doesn't need many plugins.
Sometimes I take a break from blogging. I don't want to have to read documentation on how my SSG works (either my own docs or docs on some website) to remember the script to generate the updates, or worry about deploying changes, or fiddling with updates that break my scripts, or anything like that. I do stuff like this for my day job.
I like my blogging experience to be focused on a single thing: writing.
You are running one of the most popoular PHP programs exposed to the internet. So on top of just writing you should probably schedule your regular check for CVEs and patches. And you should do this even if you're not blogging or on vacation.
Not a thing you'de need to do with a static website. If you're like: "Hey, I am not doing it right now and I am fine", consider that your warning. I have been hosting wordpress instances since wordpress existed and I know how things can go wrong with them.
I ran into the maintenance load of an SSG for my blog, and only just now switched themes over this rather than fixing the old theme (which had several customizations). In that theme swap, I think I lost all the productivity I gained from using the SSG over raw HTML.
One other productivity gain though is that if you end up switching SSG engines entirely, you still have your source files. Those could easily work with the next one, or at least leverage trying others out. If everything is baked into rendered HTML, it will be much more work.
The only thing I really wanted was 1 command to publish (which is does great) and an easy way to drag and drop images into posts (which I can do via the publish jupyter notebook function).
What I absolutely did not want was anything where "send HTML to clients" created any sort of overhead like a database.
I don't think I could ever go back to SSR like WordPress. My only real concern with SSG is if the build will work, and even when it doesn't it's never an emergency.
Whereas the concerns for something like WordPress is
1. Has our website been hacked and publicly defaced?
2. Has our website been silently hacked and is being used to secretly distributing malware or worse, aka the FBI randomly shows up at your business.
3. Will updating one random plugin nuke your entire live site, resulting in multiple sleepless nights? Will not updating it cause your site to get hacked also resulting in sleepless nights?
4. Or better yet something in your underlying environment changes and nukes your site, usually in the middle of a weekend out with your family, and your hosting provider pinky swears they didn't change anything. So you spend your whole weekend investigating just to find out your provider did change something, usually something stupid too.
5. Considering all the above your off-site backup solution is vital so better keep that maintained and thoroughly tested as well.
6. Plus a thousand other reasons to waste time, worry, and lose sleep.
We're talking about blogging here, not business-critical website infrastructure. If my blog went down I wouldn't lose a sleepless night over it. I'd figure it out later.
If I were choosing a CMS or tech stack for a critical piece of infrastructure my requirements would be different and I might find some other tool.
Also, if all these were so much concern, I doubt so much of the web would run on Wordpress. Yes, you need to keep your install and plugins up to date. But you need to keep your toolchain up to date no matter what you use. Risk of breakage on update is a thing everywhere, not just Wordpress. I'm by no means a Wordpress fan, but it really is not as bad as it's painted.
> Also, if all these were so much concern, I doubt so much of the web would run on Wordpress.
I used to run a company that all we did was wordpress, joomla, and drupal maintenance, performance optimization, and hack recovery. It very much was and mostly continues to be that bad.
> Risk of breakage on update is a thing everywhere, not just Wordpress.
Ya the issue with server side rendering is that your live environment is made of up dozens to hundreds of difference software stacked on top of each other and they all pretty much need to work perfectly to actually work and or not be vulnerable. And if you use something standard like cpanel to manage your environment, add another 1000 layers of complexity to the stack.
And lets not even go into all the work it takes to have that environment have decent performance and run on reasonably priced hardware.
Where as my concerns for my SSG live environments basically amounts to, is the host publicly accessible? To be vulnerable you would need to do something very stupid like set file permissions to 777 or something.
Again, we're talking about blogging, not business sites or SSR or CMS tooling. Very different needs with very different solutions.
I personally don't think it's that much work, and definitely not complicated, to keep my software up to date. And as a blog all I need to do is cache / throw behind a CDN and I'm golden. Nothing complex going on here. No headaches, no late nights, not even a wink of worry.
I think you two are talking past each other. Yes, people use WordPress for serious websites, and WooComerce stores, and all that stuff. But Tallain is not talking about those people. Tallain is talking about blogging.
Blogging is also often business critical. Entire businesses are built around blogs. I presonally know someone who sold their "wordpress blog" for $30m.
I think you're right. I stuck with manually writing raw HTML and it's fine, good even. I do have a python script that makes an RSS feed though, which was one more script than I wanted to write. WordPress would've saved me; unfortunately I already had a website so it was easier to add a blog there.
For the rest of my website I also just write raw HTML / CSS, and JS when needed. It's all static content and little toys, so no RSS need. It's nice to keep things simple when you can.
Senior backend engineer and integration specialist with 10 + years in .NET/C#, Azure, SQL Server, RabbitMQ, and Vue. I also have experience with Python and Delphi. I've worked on mission critical systems for fintech fraud prevention, public safety, and financial institutions; more recently I've been leading teams and slowly moving away from the world of individual contribution. Currently in Thailand (UTC+7) and fully remote, I’m looking for senior or lead roles -- or short, high‑urgency projects up to a year if you need a contractor who's good at cleaning up messes and stabilizing chaos.
Talk with your coworkers, send quick questions about code snippets, screen share and cowork or pair program or troubleshoot, have meetings, have sales calls, send updates that are a little less important than email would warrant.
If you're in-office you might do some of these less often. If you're fully remote and your org uses Teams, this is what goes on.
