I actually came here to commend the author for letting me opt out of the nonsense. It may not seem like a big deal for you but the images are distracting to me, require more scrolling in order to reference something that was mentioned previously and do not add anything to your content.

BTW I think your content is great and I imagine you think so to. You commented on the fact that most of the comments were about the GIFs and not the content. I think that should be a not so subtle clue about the value of some lady waving in front of a green screen.

I read 90% of my content in emacs-w3m, in the terminal, where no images load unless I deliberately want them to. It also has the advantage of getting rid of javascript and most page design nonsense, flash, non-text ads, and various "Web 2.0" annoyances.

The result is beautiful, consistently formatted, lightweight, and perfectly readable plain text (fully integrated with my editor/OS, incidentally).

the most hacker news comment ever

This comes close, but I think there was one where one user talked about how they use Spacemacs (Emacs with Vim style editing), and use Org files[1] to bascially plan their life. Meetings, Calendar events, reminders, notes, TODOs, you name it.

[1]: http://orgmode.org/

Same here.

They also make me see the author as a bit immature (not necessarily true, but still).

Too late. I finally added media.giphy.com to my UBlock filter. This one put me over the edge, since I couldn't focus on the content.

However, otherwise an excellent introductory article. Got me reading about Shannon, Kolmogorov, and information theory now.

Nooooo!

I highly recommend Stephen King's "On Writing." The basic lesson - if it isn't needed, take it out. Kill your babies.

The GIFs are the "your babies" of this article.

Great book recommendation btw. On Writing Well by William Zissner is a great one too. Less autobiographical (but the Stephen King bio IS great and inspirational - still recommend)

Oh, I forgot to do what I always do when I recommend King's book - skip the autobiography at the beginning :P

Maybe if someone really likes King's works it'd be worth reading, but I didn't find it that interesting. I think perhaps if someone wanted to make a career out of writing, it'd be good to get a perspective on what it took him to "make it." Otherwise, eh.

I quite liked it. The struggle was interesting. Reminded me of The War of Art by Pressfield, but less or more extreme depending on how you look at it.

Thank you. Normally I'd enjoy the "pointless gifs" but they make it hard for me to read your article at work.

You got it.

Spoilsport :P

This is great content! Do you mind if I ask how you made it? Specifically the interactive demo? I've been working myself on a project[1] to explore tools for interactive demos, but so far I've just done one with a toy piece of content.

1: https://akud.github.io/visualization-blogs/posts/01_content_...

He made it with React.

I was able to actually read the article because of this. Thanks.