I'd like to second this comment, at least broadly. I've seen the e notation in blog posts and the like and I've struggled to put the × 10 in the right place.
One of the reasons why I dislike trying to understand numbers written in scientific notation is because I have trouble mapping them to normal numbers with lots of commas in them. Engineering notation helps a lot with this — at least for numbers greater than 1 — by having the exponent be a multiple of 3. Oftentimes, losing significant figures isn't an issue in anything but the most technical scientific writing.
Is there an alternative to constantly adding endless features? Can software be designed to operate without daily updates, similar to programming languages?
"daily" in "daily updates" is hyperbole, but you can probably get most of the way there with
prefers-color-scheme).The second bullet point is important, at least occasionally. I dropped my beloved VoodooPad because it never got a publicly-released version that supports dark mode that works on macOS, iOS, and iPadOS. I figure VoodooPad is nearly dead because its current owners can't figure out how to turn it into something that gets enough revenue to justify the time that it would take to make it a modern app.
At any rate, the notes I had in VoodooPad got moved into Ulysses some time after the Ulysses team added projects back in 2022. Ulysses is not a good personal wiki (internal linking isn't nearly as low-friction as in Obsidian), but it's adequate for my purposes and I dislike having a gazillion different personal-wiki software packages that I need to divvy my attention between.
As far as update cadence goes…
If you look at Ulysses' Releases page and make note of the dates in the headings, you can see that they've been steadily, but not all that quickly, been releasing features. There's probably at least one programming language out there with this release cadence, but I wouldn't know which one it is.
Cassandra/Mule: If Alice knew she were talking to a brick wall, she would give up; and if Bob knew Alice was trying to help, he would actually listen.
I've seen mules in the wild in internet forums (which, admittedly is outside the scope of your post). They usually present as ardent defenders of the faith, repeating well-known talking points…and never updating, ever.
AI safety posts generally go over my head, although the last one I read seemed fantastically important and accessible.
AI-safety posts are probably the most valuable posts here, even if they crowd out other posts (both posts I think are valuable and posts I think are, at best, chaff).
If there were one dial I’d want to experiment with turning on LW it would be writing quality, in the direction of more of it.
I'd like to highlight this. In general, I think fewer things should be promoted to the front page.
[edit, several days later]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SiPX84DAeNKGZEfr5/do-websites-and-apps-actually-generally-get-worse-after is a prime example. This has nothing to do with rationality or AI alignment. This is the sort of off-topic chatter that belongs somewhere else on the Internet.
I'd like to like this more but I don't have a clear idea of when to up one, up the other, down one, down the other, or down one and up the other.
Would you rather live in a society that valued “niceness, community and civilization”, or one that valued “meanness, community and civilization”? I don’t think it’s a tough choice.
This is an awful straw man. Compare instead:
Having seen what "niceness" entails, I'll opt for (2), which doesn't prioritize niceness or anti-niceness, and is niceness-agnostic.
That’s a lot of readers to throw away
Depends on how popular you are. Even if you make the highly questionable assumption that browser statistics collected on sites like cnn.com and such are representative of the readership of jefftk.com, if jefftk.com has hundreds of readers, he's still doing a lot of work for a group that can only manage to claim that there are "dozens of us", and in any case really ought to upgrade to a proper browser (and in probably most cases, OS) anyway, for security reasons.
Daring Fireball, a site you've probably heard of, seems to do OK with only browser-supplied fonts:
font-family: Verdana, system-ui, Helvetica, sans-serif;
Also, jefftk said "requiring". Sure, he could have a site that uses Inter, either loaded from his own site or from a CDN like Google Fonts, but if Inter doesn't load (mostly likely because of user preference), then everything will be fine.
If TeX fonts don't load…then what happens? Does the user see raw TeX, or nothing at all, or…?
You can start with the Dan Luu aesthetic and then redesign your site, either incrementally or in big leaps, possibly repeatedly, later. Redesigning websites is totally a thing. https://gwern.net gets near-constant upgrades, and all sorts of famous web-nerd bloggers have improved their sites' designs over the years and now decades.
One thing Substack does that you can't get super-easily from a static site is comments and emailing your readers with new articles (feeds are, unfortunately, mostly a nerd-only technology).