Ah, nice. I can't argue with this (de gustibus non est disputandem). Although I almost feel like you're making my point for me. For those for whom the ineffable joy of Emacs wizardry isn't a factor, learning such wizardry is an investment that's unlikely to pay off. But that's an empirical question. The joy might even be effable after all, making the whole question empirical: Will you maximize your utility by embracing or eschewing powerful text editors?

I don't actually have a very strong prediction. I just wanted to make the points that repetitive mindless editing is less costly than it seems and the wizardry is more costly than it seems (modulo the intrinsic joy, as you say). In fact, I just thought of an analogy: the mindless repetitive editing is like doodling during a lecture; creating a macro or other wizardry to avoid the mindless editing is like texting during a lecture. The former leaves your brain engaged with the topic at hand and the latter engages it elsewhere. 

You can say that in this analogy it would need to be particularly life-affirming texting. Again, I can't argue with that. I'm just highlighting the cost. If the cost is worth paying, that's fine.

Ooh, nice! I had a very compressed version of that as tip #4 in my list of tips from Inkhaven and actually paid out a $15 honey money prize for it (long story).

Actually that's a small subset of your advice. Probably the more important part is what your title refers to. The thing where you tell someone, "I can't figure out how to say XYZ" and they reply "what you just said works". Scott Aaronson said that was his secret to adding value as a contributing writer at Inkhaven. He'd read the draft, say "I don't get it", the author would explain, and Scott would say "great, write that!".

Good call. I should've included more of that! Off the top of my head, I loved it because Lighthaven as a venue is cozy and delightful and because everyone involved was absolutely lovely. The participants were impressive and of course getting to hang out with other Contributing Writers (eg, Scott Aaronson, Scott Alexander, Dynomight -- filling out my top 3 favorite bloggers of all time) was pretty amazing. The organizers worked their butts off to make everything as conducive to writing as humanly possible. Plus a ton of fun activities as well -- hiking trips, open mic nights, you name it. And so many nice touches, like having an assortment of typewriters and fancy pens to try writing with. Or the Winner's Lounge with ice cream and video games that you're only allowed into once you've published for the day. And I'm only scratching the surface here. Very highly recommended!

Oh, yes, great point! It didn't even occur to me to mention that you absolutely can't say "this dessert has fewer sugar".

I have an old post on the scare quotes question: https://messymatters.com/scarequotes/

In short, I have the following cases where I claim you should not use quotes:

(0) of course no quotes for emphasis, (1) don't use quotes to indicate that you're not going to explain a word, (2) don't try to distance yourself from a phrase by putting it in quotes, (3) use italics instead of quotes for introducing a term, unless it's also a mention as opposed to a use of the term, in which case either is ok.

And that leaves the following as the remaining acceptable uses:

1. Quoting someone or otherwise referring to the literal string of characters
2. To indicate you don't mean something literally — like adding a parenthetical "not really"

Layers of further irony: (1) I actually started this post around 6pm, honestly believing it would take a couple hours and I could take the rest of the evening off for a change. Of course I ended up hitting publish right before midnight. (2) I fell into a quintessential Wikipedia rabbit hole along the way, uncovering a case of citogenesis (see footnote).

Ha! I'm embarrassed to have missed this reference without neuroprosthetic assistance.

https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html

Maybe I should give ed a try??

Ooh, thank you! I can't get it to work though. I have it in my bookmarks but when I click it, nothing happens anywhere that I can see -- not in the textarea or elsewhere. I've tried it on lots of websites and, nothing.

PS: I tried one more time and suddenly it's working in GitHub Issues comments at least!

Does it work for you for LessWrong posts?

Good point! I'm noticing that in VS Code, the autocomplete is getting scary smart. You'll start doing some tedious edit and the AI is immediately like "so... continue for the rest of this block like this?" and you can just hit tab. For a while I would hit escape in annoyance when it did that. Why would I trust the AI not to introduce subtle errors? But (a) that doesn't seem to happen, and (b) it does a good job of highlighting the parts that will actually change so you can vet it pretty easily. It's pretty freaking magical (modulo the part where it's possibly a harbinger of dooooooom).

One more update. I'm thinking more about the "permanent DST" idea and what the logical extreme of that would be. I think it would mean that whatever time dawn is on summer solstice, that's what we call "8am", year round. No sleeping past dawn ever! (Unless you want to; we're just talking about the standard "when things happen during the day" range, aka business hours.)

Then the downside is that it's dark till like lunch time in the winter. Maybe that's ok!

I made a tool to experiment with such questions: dreeves.github.io/daylight