If it's something I want people to read, I'd never dare write it in cursive, because if I did, I wouldn't count on them being able to read it.
I'll write in (not great) cursive for myself, but for other people? Writing in block or print is basically an accessibility feature. Even if my cursive was perfect, plenty of people would not be able to read it.
I grew up in a world where everyone knew cursive, and until this sort of discussion became popular in recent years, it honestly wouldn't have occurred to me that there were many people who didn't know. But I guess they had to cut some things out of the curriculum and it's not as useful as it used to be.
> Cursive is an outdated skill for when it was the fastest way to get words written to paper.
There was a class signifier aspect to it as well. Poor kids couldn't spend as much time practicing and perfecting penmanship. In a world where much got done through handwritten personal letters, good penmanship would make an impression similar to having properly tailored formal attire vs a tattered coat.
My grandma went to public school but grew up in an era where that sort of thinking was widespread, so she got extra tutoring. She learned to write freehand with a ruler flat baseline and machine like consistency in each letter. You could recognize a card or mail from her instantly just by the addressing on the envelope.
I wasn't taught that strictly but I did spend years of elementary school with those Red Chief notebooks copying letters page after page much to the frustration of my young ADHD brain.
I doubt I could properly write cursive today. I barely ever hand write notes anymore, so there's no real point.
I'm confused. How do you write if not in cursive? Do you just write in block capitals? With each letter on its own? Do you just not hand write anymore?
>>Cursive is an outdated skill for when it was the fastest way to get words written to paper.
But....It still is? Without using some kind of machine of course.
Block capitals? no. It's print. With upper and lowercase letters.
I rarely handwrite now. The last time I really did was in college.
> But....It still is? Without using some kind of machine of course.
But of course this is HN where most people are technical. We all have some sort of machine at our disposal otherwise we'd not be writing back and forth to one another.
So like.......not linking the letters together then? Doesn't that just actually take more effort than just writing cursive? And is slower?
>>But of course this is HN where most people are technical.
For sure, and as a professional programmer I keep a notebook with hand written notes - the fact that I have a keyboard and multiple monitors in front of me doesn't change the fact that hand writing is still the best(for me) way to save and recall information.
> Doesn't that just actually take more effort than just writing cursive? And is slower?
Probably yes to both counts.
However, when I'm handwriting I'm generally not in a position where speed or effort is the most important thing. To me, it's not much more effort to print and I get the added bonus of legibility. When I write cursive, it can be hard for me to understand what I wrote when I come back to it. I'm just a little too sloppy. It would take effort for me to get to the point where my cursive is neat and I frankly just don't handwrite enough to warrant that effort.
Consider this, do you use shorthand? I'd assume not. But why not? It's the fastest way to write anything. Cursive, by comparison, is both a lot of effort to write, is slower, and it wastes space.
I'd say for (some of) the same reasons you likely don't write shorthand, I don't write in cursive.
I don't get your point of not writing cursive. It is literally the same as what you are already doing, but just stopping raising the hand between letters. It is also not like you have that specific cursive, and then it is unreadable. It is a continuous tradeoff of faster vs. readable, so you can just slow down for some letters and not for others.
The thing that needs effort is learning to write, why did you waste time on learning to not connect your letters?
> why did you waste time on learning to not connect your letters?
As someone who learned cursive by learning a new script first, you're making a big assumption here. Nobody learns to not connect their letters.
I didn't learn to not connect my letters. I learned to write without connecting letters, and never properly learned to connect them (until much later in life), because that was never required (and never emphasised while I was in school anyway). If I were to write as I did before, but attempt to connect the letters, it would turn into an unreadable mess. So I didn't. Not until I learned to write in a new script and could transfer that back to my original handwriting. I still don't write a cursive lowercase F, because Cyrillic doesn't have that glyph, and the one that I'm supposed to use never looks right. Not that it matters, since I only write in cursive for myself.
> If I were to write as I did before, but attempt to connect the letters, it would turn into an unreadable mess.
Oh, okay. They did not tell you in which order and direction you should write letters in print? They focused on that here, but maybe that was actually part for the preparation of learning cursive.
A part of me wants to learn it as well. It looks so alien that it seems interesting to learn.
Because of this conversation I've been reading up on it. There are multiple systems, but for English they all pretty much revolve around representing words phonetically. One form (Pittman) uses different line widths for different sounds, making it work best with a pencil or fountain pen. Gregg doesn't do that. Gregg is most common in the US and Pittman is common in the UK.
I'm a person who mostly types, writes tons of code, but also is a graphic designer, and I also have pitiful penmanship. I can write regular sans-serif (all caps or properly capitalized), as well as cursive, but ultimately the concept of fonts make more sense to me than anything else in terms of an expression of letters and typography.
There are a million ways to articulate a glyph, from thick to thin, clear to murky, big, small, harsh, soft, whatever. Some people still use typewriters or typeset a printing press. Others use spray paint or marker.
End of the day for me it's just about communication and expression and aesthetic and clarity (or sometimes intentional LACK of visual clarity in honor of a style), not technique or medium. I dunno.
I do think every bozo should be able to pick up a pen and make his mark, and I think humans should practice the art of crafting a sentence and turning a phrase, but I really don't focus on the how, and more on the what, the message.
Even the Zodiac Killer had a unique and bizarre style with his handwriting and cipher LOL can you imagine if it was just bog-standard 5th grade cursive?
I write with mix of cursive and sorta print letters. The sorta print letters are more readable, actually.
Based on what teachers said, kids use cursive while they are forced to and switch to sorta print when they can. But everyone invents their own "font", so it is a challenge to decipher them.
Most people do not hand write anything more than a short note in 2025, and paper is not usually the target medium for longer texts. A desire to write without access to some sort of machine is a bit quaint.
Of course to be pedantic, modern pens are machines too.
>>Most people do not hand write anything more than a short note in 2025
Is this like....a personal feeling? Or something with actual data behind it? But even if so - why does it matter? If you write short notes, do you not write them in cursive?
>>Of course to be pedantic, modern pens are machines too.
That's beyond pedantic, I struggle to imagine that anyone other than the a professional linguist would call a ball pen a machine.
It's an impression from my own social circle. I looked for data briefly because of this comment, but didn't find anything conclusive.
It does make sense to hand write short notes in cursive if you're hand writing short notes at all, but many people never learned it, or are so rusty it would take deliberate practice to restore proficiency.
I'll be honest I actually prefer my words to be lasting and have weight so I prefer block letters carved into lead which doesn't benefit much from cursive
okay, but if you care about recall and activating regions of the brain that create a better understanding of what you're learning, handwriting wins according to research.
Can you link to some of that research? The last time I saw such research get shared on HN, the researchers were limiting the typists to 1 finger (per hand?), which is patently absurd.
More than that, I would be curious to see research that controls for proficiency at writing/typing. My theory is that if more kids were taught to properly touch type from an early age, the alleged differences between writing/typing would be far less dramatic. I was taught since kindergarten and there's no doubt in my mind that I absorb and understand information better through typing than writing. I'm also much, much, much faster. Brief Googling suggests I'm at least 10x faster than the average WPM for handwriting
Instead, here we are talking about how cursive should actually still be taught.
But is there a difference between cursive and block lettering? I fully agree with your overall point about handwritten notes being far superior to typed notes. It forces you to filter out extraneous information instead of being a live transcriptionist of your professor.
I've found drilling notes via method of loci of visualized flashcards/facts for this to be superior for myself which I always sourced from typed notes. Not really familiar with the research that cursive would improve over it.
This is not the case in the US (anymore) and atleast some places in Europe. Print gets taught first and you learn to write with that, then cursive comes later, by this point usually as an afterthought.
This hints at the authors misunderstanding. Customers don't care about good code. As an expert you are paid to cut corners intelligently. Customers want cheap and good enough.
Anyone else get confused on this thinking it was a legacy OSX version. The title should include super computer to clarify.As one interpretation implies some code golf.
Burry was underwater on that trade though and likely did it to avoid some paperwork revealing positions. He folded because he can't time it, if he was confident he was right he wouldn't have folded and we'd have another movie about him.
This site feels like this it's made by people that misunderstand games and genres and can't stand the concept of live service games which surprise takes money to run.
Saw one where powercreep is considered unhealthy
...if you played a competitive card game without power creep you'd quit because the first meta would be the only meta. Controlled power creep is healthy for game longevity.
Some games have enough room for new meta to develop even though there have been no updates.
That doesn't mean that's the only way to be a good game, and I don't necessarily have an issue with powercreep. If it's mild and expected, powercreep can also be a way to handicap... If you're introducing new people to a game, maybe you let them use current cards and you use 5 year old cards (or whatever), they get to practice with current cards, get to experience old cards, you get some nostalgia from your old decks, and you don't have to sandbag, because they've got an advantage.
That doesn't come across in the sites scoring at all however and I wish it did.
Using Arknights an an example it has a power creep as 5/10 despite being possible to clear current endgame with only 4* operators, which are essentially guaranteed as a free to play.And the bulk of them being added at the games release.
I think what they would want to see is the cards all be free. That way powercreep does not make a purchase less valuable, does not make people gamble for cards they want, and not give an advantage to people who want to spend more money to get good cards.
I agree that is what it would take to get a high score on their site but I think it's an unrealistic expectation to suggest that the developer should be on the hook indefinitely for content. Each card game set is functionally a new game with some costs amortized thanks to it's previous sets.
We have seen the forever sticker price in mega hit indies ala Stardew Valley or Terraria but I don't think that is really healthy to expect for gaming as a whole and is more that small teams hit a home run.
Why should developers be on the hook indefinitely for content? Why can’t they just make a good game and sell it? If a game needs continuous ‘content updates’ to remain good, it simply wasn’t meant to be played forever. Not all games are.
Your argument seems to be “won’t someone please think of the poor defenseless billion-dollar international megacorporations?”.
I feel the main difference is cars can't compress time in the way an array of computers can. I could win this competition with an infinitely parallel array of random characters typed by infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters instantly since one of them would be perfectly right given infinite submissions. When I make my tweet I would pick a single monkey cus I need infinite money to feed my infinite workforce and that's more impressive clearly.
Now obviously it's more impressive as they don't have infinite compute and had finite time but the car only has one entry in each race unless we start getting into some anime ass shit with divergent timelines and one of the cars (and some lesser amount of horses) finishing instantly.
To your last point we don't know that this was cheaper since they don't disclose the cost. I would blindly guess a mechanical turk for the same cost would outperform at least today.
Considering that OpenAI's model got a higher score than any of the world's best collegiate programming teams, I'd guess that a mechanical turk would not do better (even if you gave them quite a bit of time).
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