TK, or the secret to effortless writing (2024)

(atthis.link)

46 points | by Tomte 8 hours ago ago

24 comments

  • kazinator an hour ago

    > The obvious question that comes from this is why not just type TODO, add a few question marks, or highlight the text that needs to be looked at?

    Because we know from the software engineering discipline that TODOs never get done, so the safe thing is to avoid that with TK.

  • ifh-hn 2 hours ago

    I just used to use: ????

    It server the same purpose, placeholder for a word I couldn't think of, and wouldn't naturely appear in the text. Plus for me I could hammer out the four characters in frustration too, for not being able to think of the word/term I wanted.

  • rsingel 6 hours ago

    Indeed a great trick. I often double it to TKTK just to make it stand out even more.

    Fun fact: the Ghost.org editor looks for TK

    https://ghost.org/changelog/tk-reminders/

  • cauch 7 hours ago

    I've a very dim memory of having heard about it years ago (more than a decades), from an article of Cory Doctorow, and in my mind, he was the one who came up with the idea (and chose the letters TK).

    But I can be wrong (maybe it's not from Doctorow, maybe the article did not even claim the paternity of coming up with TK but it was me badly understanding it, ...)

  • natbennett 7 hours ago

    I do this a lot but I use “TK:” with the colon to make it unambiguously grep-able (stands out better visually too)

  • pratikdeoghare 5 hours ago

    If you use Brashtag notation you could insert #tk{} bag.

    https://github.com/pratikdeoghare/brashtag

  • karmakaze 6 hours ago

    LLMs should use "TK" or stable diffusion (and the like) so as not to get hung up on sequential words/thoughts and fill them in later instead of hallucinating filler.

    • Haranrk 6 hours ago

      I think this is a great idea.

  • vincent-manis 3 hours ago

    Tk without Tcl?

  • chickensong 5 hours ago

    Shout out to Title TK by the Breeders.

  • aleksiy123 6 hours ago

    GCP employees heart rate spiking at the title.

  • sublinear 6 hours ago

    Could you instead use any two numerical digits? Then you've got a tagging system with up to 100 tags.

    This assumes you're writing according to guidelines that insist you spell out all numbers. i.e. 58 is always intentionally "fifty-eight", so "58" must be your own meta text.

    • kazinator an hour ago

      > writing according to guidelines that insist you spell out all numbers

      What? There exists such a guideline, which is not limited to very small numbers that can be written in at most two words?

      That would have you writing things like one million, four hundred fifty-three thousand, one hundred fifty-eight instead of 1,453,158.

      "TK: for the thousand one hundred and eleventh time, ditch this idiotic editing job"

    • chickensong 5 hours ago

      I think you can use whatever you want. The point is just to drop a quick marker that you can find later, and not interrupt your flow.

      • sublinear 4 hours ago

        Ah, never mind. A slight refinement needed here.

        AP style only spells out one through nine. 10 and above are written as numerals. So, you'd get 10 tags, not 100.

        I think the regex would be: /(?<!\d)\d{1}(?!\d)/

  • alchemistkevin 3 hours ago

    [dead]

  • x______________ 7 hours ago

    tl;dr

    add tk when you hit a wall (abbreviated from 'to come', yet spelled with k as tc appears in many words)

    • ultraboom 7 hours ago

      I slice my latke with a pocketknife.

      • karmakaze 6 hours ago

        I found the low frequency surprising as it's so easy to pronounce--I suppose tc is used in most cases. Here's what I found for bigram freqs near TK:

        Ratios (count / total) and percentages:

            PG: 0.00047%
            TK: 0.00046%
            KK: 0.00045%
            HQ: 0.00042%
            FN: 0.00042%
        
        Every other one here I'd expect to see: Postgres, kk/okay (and my initials), headquarters, function. Of course there's Tcl/Tk but not used nearly as much as it could.
      • wonger_ 6 hours ago

        True, but have you ever sliced your LATKE with a POCKETKNIFE?

        • techno_tsar 5 hours ago

          ...I did, a few years ago, when I went camping with some friends.