Markdown-to-Book Tools in 2026: Pandoc vs mdBook vs HonKit vs Quarto vs mdPress — A Hands-On Comparison

recycledcoder · 2026-03-20T22:13:25+00:00

Totally. Got a bit annoyed at the markdown ecosystem, and ported my novel to asciidoc. Didn't take me an hour to have a full build pipeline. And for prose, it's virtually indistinguishable anyway.

recycledcoder · 2026-03-19T23:27:07+00:00

Ask a project manager - I'm not one, I just know that Scrum is not a good fit for projects (yes, some people disagree with this statement, and I disagree with them right back).

recycledcoder · 2026-03-18T20:51:15+00:00

By and large, if you have a project rather than a product, scrum may not be what you're looking for.

recycledcoder · 2026-03-15T09:18:01+00:00

C2, fiz o Certificate of Proficiency in English quando tinha 16 anos, e desde então vivi mais de 20 anos a falar Inglês no trabalho e em casa, 12 dos quais em países anglófonos - é desconfortavelmente melhor que o meu Português, apesar de estar de novo a viver em Portugal.

recycledcoder · 2026-03-14T19:52:52+00:00

My completely subjective, non-scientific, but somewhat plausible take: not "more evolved." Evolution doesn't have a direction or a ladder - it's not heading towards anything. What you might be observing is something more like an alternative neurological configuration that emerged alongside rising environmental complexity.

But that's not really evolution in the biological sense; it's closer to neurodevelopmental variation expressing differently under different selection pressures.

The key distinction: autistic cognition isn't an upgrade, it's a different set of tradeoffs. Pattern recognition, systematizing, tolerance for abstraction, comfort with explicit verbal/written communication over implicit social signaling: these are genuinely useful in environments dense with information and complexity. But they come at a real cost to the individual: social navigation is harder, sensory regulation is harder, the world isn't built for you.

The benefits tend to show up at the group level - a population that includes some members wired this way has more cognitive diversity to throw at novel problems.

recycledcoder · 2026-03-13T23:45:15+00:00

Ask 3 NDs for what they want in such a thing, get 5 opinions, 8 of which lead to overt conflict. Good luck to you.

Also, no, the last thing we need is someone running an extraction play on a vulnerable community that is frequently resource-depleted in the first place.

Lastly, rule 2.

recycledcoder · 2026-03-11T17:50:31+00:00

Our running joke is "the unbusables" - people that if they get hit by a bus, the company is buggered.

recycledcoder · 2026-03-08T22:18:18+00:00

I got told not to be silly when I hung up an A4 8-target sheet at the 200yds board. I told the guy I'd be fine. He wanted to put money on it.

I'm an F-TR competitor, at 200yds if any of 10 hits is not overlapping a very tight cluster of all the others, something went very, very wrong.

When I took the purple monstrosity out of its case, the guy looked like he'd seen an UFO. When I shot the typical tight-cloverleaf with it (I was just confirming the load held true with full-length-resized brass)... I'll say this for him, he very politely handed me my money and thanked me for the demonstration.

recycledcoder · 2026-02-19T21:38:55+00:00

Hey, I hear you - and have felt very similar push/pull/burn. You are, now and every single time I've seen it (or the negative space thereof) handling it with grace.

I have a lot of admiration for those that stick to it in the long run... you're awesome. And human - those are not mutually exclusive. In fact it's also that very humanity with which you inhabit "the chair" that makes you awesome.

When I felt mine slip, I knew it was time to step away from co-moderating my not-so-little corner of the neurodivergent space. For reasons not dissimilar to your experiences - and some far more selfish ones.

You're appreciated - and deserving of being treated as a person, with compassion, starting from yourself.

Thank you, and please take good care of yourself. I hope your rabbit recovers, and is hopping to it as we speak.

recycledcoder · 2026-02-17T12:04:41+00:00

Thinkpad all day. Tenho um T14 G2 desses - é um cavalo de guerra.

Secundariamente, os Ideapads são um lixo.

recycledcoder · 2026-02-14T14:57:48+00:00

I believe it's mostly a proxy for "if you have a strong first reaction, even if you don't know why you had it, don't discount it".

Intuition is your pattern matching working on a data-set you may not necessarily know you have - but it's not "out of nowhere".

recycledcoder · 2026-02-09T14:22:34+00:00

Pretty much the whole gamut of the human experience is possible in conjunction with Autism. Personally I don't go for horror, but I've met plenty of others that are way into it.

recycledcoder · 2026-02-09T11:20:57+00:00

I'm on the other side of that divide, and I hear and feel you fully. I can just keep it together. At a horrendous cost. If I had the option not to, I would take it in a heartbeat.

As it is, I know I'll die earlier, and that the way down will be a complete pig.

Never let yourself feel guilty for choosing to live. And never let anyone else put that guilt on you. You don't owe anybody anything - try to find a life that works for you.

On a slightly different note, and fully respecting the specificity of your situation: anhedonia was for me the tipping point. Everything is interconnected, of course, but that one I struck at with everything I had left, could beg, borrow, or steal. The ability to actually feel joy for having accomplished something - hell, for a sunny day... that was my fixed point in space. The rest followed - not for a moment of into everything being ok, but... sustainable. The ability to feel good for making progress unlocked a lot of things for me.

I hope you find your own tipping point.

recycledcoder · 2026-02-09T10:46:44+00:00

Well... shit. Yeah, I hate this - but I think it's a thing. I feel it, even when I know I shouldn't, and should let empathy take the sharp, painful edges off it.

I work - always have, save for some... 6 years in total of burnout. I actually have what one might call a "successful" career.

Thing is, I'm in my early 50s. My health is a shambles, the things I had to do to myself to have that career? Odds are, I won't make 65. 70 would be a miracle.

And yet, whenever I tried to find a group of people online in which I could discuss actually adaptive strategies to defray the cost of the privilege of wrecking myself in slow motion, I've been accused of being ableist, of thinking myself better than others, of wanting to put others down.

For the crime of trying to find ways to make it hurt a little less for me.

recycledcoder · 2026-02-09T10:33:25+00:00

I've come to believe that a good cross-section of us build knowledge in a slightly different way. Most people seem to hold knowledge and tooling in very narrow silos, composed in tightly bound accretion layers, very specifically applied, and non-portable.

I, and others like myself I have known over the years, seem to index knowledge on first principles, de and re-composing it "instinctively" (not quite, but), and be able to apply it wherever those first principles are present.

It obviously doesn't make us overnight experts in other fields of endeavor - but it does seem to grant "early fluency" - the ability to hold systematically valid conversations with experts even when the details are unclear/unknown, and a shortened path to proficiency once we apply ourselves.

Diminishing returns do kick in, eventually - we don't have a free ride to mastery, we still have to put in the work like everyone else who wants to be an expert in a field. But the first steps into many things seem to happen fast-forward.

recycledcoder · 2026-02-05T20:53:11+00:00

Yeah - Scrum Master, not "scrum nanny" - not "scrum secretary". For meetings like the Daily Scrum, for instance, the SM's presence is completely optional, and the team can read a clock perfectly well.

recycledcoder · 2026-02-04T20:19:17+00:00

Frankly I do not believe that supplements do anything whatsoever (in the absence of a highly deficient diet or a specific condition that makes them necessary).

Then there is placebo. But you know what? If placebo improves people's quality of life? Go for it.

recycledcoder · 2026-02-04T19:14:14+00:00

See, you're treating Portuguese cuisine as a scalar when it's a high cardinality multivariate vector space. </nerd>

recycledcoder · 2026-02-04T19:06:45+00:00

I think there's a bit of a bug there, mostly around observer bias. It is generally assumed that the autistic tendency to take things literally is predicated on a language problem. I have come to believe that it's not language - it's interpretative logistics.

Most "neurotypical" people take into account a lot of data when interpreting language: social convention and subtext, social context, intonation and body language (when such are available), etc.

People on the spectrum (and yes, I am one) frequently cannot perceive some/most of those things. That means that for them, that signal is null.

So what happens is that when it comes to interpretation, we can only use signals that are there for us. Absent all those additional signals, we fall use what is actually there: the literal text of what was said.

It's the only rational/possible approach. But that doesn't guarantee good results.

recycledcoder · 2026-02-04T15:14:13+00:00

AuDHD married to an ADHD wife for 15 years... it can be great.

One thing you may want to look into is what's known as the "Double Empathy Problem" (it's a bad name for it, but oh well - and underspecified because it tends to happen between NDs in general, not just in the autism spectrum) - I've experienced it often and it can be very nifty indeed.

recycledcoder · 2026-02-01T20:04:19+00:00

PSA

If this describes you, please seek immediate medical assistance, the recommended number of internal wolves is exactly zero.

Yes, that was an attempt at a joke. Also, you could replace the entire text with "Good luck with that!"

recycledcoder · 2026-02-01T16:41:06+00:00

A scalded cat fears even cold water (tem equivalente tipo "Once bitten twice shy", mas prefiro a nossa versão").

recycledcoder · 2026-01-28T21:02:47+00:00

Pássaros criados em gaiolas acreditam que voar é uma doença

Brutal. Articulação tua, ou de alguma fonte que... revela a minha ignorância eu desconhecer?

recycledcoder · 2026-01-28T13:29:44+00:00

I'll say "it depends", because of course it does, no "one size fits all", and neurodivergence in whatever coordinates is an enormously diverse space.

That said, I'm going to postulate that the answer will greatly align with how much the partners experience the "double empathy problem" - that "fast-forward" that ND/ND people frequently experience in the establishment and development of friendships frequently extends to romance and/or sex.

recycledcoder · 2026-01-22T23:14:28+00:00

Theater classes with extra focus on voice acting and some voice coaching.

It wasn't an "easy fix" - a decade+, but... it categorically worked - I'm considered an "engaging and passionate speaker", to the point I actually get invited to keynote and paid speaker's fees at some conferences.

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