Reading up on Aaron Swartz

The author reflects on his overreliance on AI tools, realizing it eroded human interaction and prompting a reconnection with genuine human experiences.

Aaron Swartz’s 2002 ATX spec gave Markdown its # headings and reference links, and his RSS/CC work shows the simple open specs we lost after his death.

Markdown, created by John Gruber in 2004 as a simple plain-text formatting tool for blogging, has become the ubiquitous standard for annotating everything from AI prompts to code repositories.