emacsen

Let's first start with what I understand to be the premise- that private industry and governments are two worlds (ie your worlds colliding idea). Let's explore this from the other side: Private industry should never compete with the government.

We don't need bottled water- tap is fine, and it competes with government water.

Commercial radio and TV stations should not exist in countries that have a public station.

Doctors and nurses should never work in private clinics where government offers medical services, or supplementary insurance should not exist.

Back to government, though. Government should do what's best for the citizenry. It might make a public bridge to compete with a commercial ferry service. Or it might mean offering cheap Internet to compete with exploitive ISPs.

Proprietary software like this is an effective tax on the citizens, but a commercial one. Governments can fund a public alternative for a small amount of money. Why not?

The original authors executed an exit strategy. They sold the site, got a bunch of money, and left to work on new things.

The various new owners (of which there have been a few) have never been ambitious about expanding Slashdot, either in technical or social scope.

I'm not even clear who owns it now. It would surprise me if it's very profitable.

The birth of Digg and Reddit were a big contributor (as was HN later). You may also remember that /. was sold, first to VA Linux, then to another company, along with its sister, Linux.com.

Slashdot's model of editor selected stories also meant that the number of stories per day was lower.

The editor selections when CmdrTaco left, along (slowly) with other editors such as Roblimo (RIP) and others changed the site's feel.

It's clear the Slashdot product is kept around but not actively developed. Many sites from that era are in much the same state, or shut down entirely. RIP Freshmeat, kuros5hin, and others.

I use plain text accounting for my business, and it's lovely to be able to enter bookkeeping data with a plain text editor and keep it all under version control, but the next step is using a program such as hledger or beancount to work with that data.

I'd love to work with plain text calendar software, but it would still need to do things such as provide a mechanism to work on my desktop and mobile device. It would need to handle recurring events automatically, and it would need to allow me to invite others to events and ideally to track when they've accepted or rejected my invites.

I'd need to be able to update, cancel or propose to move events in such a way that others would be updated.

I wish I knew of a good command line tool to interact with CalDav or similar servers, or that I could maintain my calendar in a file format and then handle the synchronization automatically.

Maybe calendar.txt could play a role in that, but on its own, it's not quite enough for me.

Streaming games has a large social component, whether it's speedrunning, or just casual play. It's often as much about the personality of the player as it is about the game. People watch as a communal activity.

It's not merely doing something quickly; it's more akin to a sport.

The objective of speedrunning is to perform something you would do in a game in a record time, or it's now been somewhat expanded to sometimes include or mean some extraordinary feat in a game that may not be directly related to speed.

A speedrun of a game might mean to complete a game that would normally take months in (for example) "only 10 hours", in which case the speedrunner needs to be live for those ten hours. A recording is not an acceptable substitute due to issues of cheating[1].

Even if a speedrun is only two hours, a speedrunner may need to play the same game four, five, or twelve times in order to achieve their objective. They could be playing for an hour and fifty minutes only to have the entire run ruined by a mistake, or even just a random game event.

[1] It's still possible to cheat live, but it's more complicated, more challenging, and there's a greater likelihood of being caught.

What you are building is essentially what Tiago Forte calls a "Second Brain". He has an entire book around Second Brain, as well as the one on PARA.

Ironically, I've found myself using Second Brain less since using PARA because PARA ends up solving my needs without it.

As an example, this week I received a letter from the tax authority where I live. I took the letter, scanned it, and placed it in my PARA/2 Areas/TAXES/2023 folder (since it was in relation to my 2023 taxes). I used a descriptive filename that included what the letter was about and the date.

I didn't need second brain to process the tax letter- what was important is that it was stored quickly and easily, and that I can retrieve it later if need be. I also don't need any complex tagging or keyword systems- the folder and filename help me find the relevant documents, and it takes no more time than adding lots of keywords. I know because I've tried more complex systems, and they ended up being more trouble than they were worth.

But more importantly, I'm not tied to any specific service or software. I'd never use a program that requires me to upload my most sensitive data to a third party service. It would put my data at risk and it would also mean that if the company were to change its business model (like Notion did) or had a breakin, or went out of business, my data would be at risk.

That's why I don't advocate for Second Brain services that do this, even ones with lots of cool features.

I would love automated integrated voice notes (vs what I do now which requires a bit of cut and paste) but the benefits don't outweigh the extremely high cost to me.

Sorry!

https://blog.emacsen.net

The problem I have is that writing the why is harder than the what.

For example, I use a modified Cycle System, but some of my modifications are around how many tasks I do a day, and how I categorize which tasks I do.

As an example, understanding task limits and why you should use them is important. As I write out my thoughts about them, it feels boring.

Then I put the blog down and don't pick it up again. Maybe I should do it anyway.

PARA also (and for me primarily) helps with things like documents I get from other places which I then scan in.

Yes, I could probably use a specialized program for this, but this way it's all just files.

I'm starting (in my "ample free time") to document them and in a series blog posts help people find systems that will work for them. My experience is that the best systems are the ones that have five characteristics:

1. They're simple

No complex patterns, no "we'll solve everything"

2. They require little or no task switching in the middle

This breaks my ADHD concentration.

3. They're forgiving if you fall off the wagon

You will always have bad days and need to restart. The system must make it easy.

4. The system must be very general, maybe even "too simple" but easy to customize.

There is a natural desire, especially in ADHD people, to over complicate, so the system must allow you to be as simple as possible, but then let you customize later.

5. They don't require any specialized tool (especially not an online tool). No system should be invariably tied to a specific piece of software or hardware. These may be excellent augmentations, but they should never be requirements.

Am I an "organized" person? No, but I'm far better organized than I was. Tasks rarely get missed now. I'm far more productive than I was (and I have stats to back up my assertion). I can almost always retrieve documents I need relatively quickly.

These systems won't change who you are, but they will assist you in being better at being who you are.

J.D is fine (maybe even great) if your categories are relatively static, such as a small business, but as an individual, I found it very restrictive and challenging to remember. Moreover, while the decimals are cool, I found them somewhat irrelevant if I was the only one referencing them.

J.D is optimized for retrieval, where what I needed was optimized storage, and then occasional retrial.

To each their own of course, and using any system is better than none.

I can define Open Source easily, using the OSI definition.

There is not a trademark for Open Source because they failed to secure the trademark, but we have decades of use for the term meaning something specific.

The CC licenses do an amazing job when it comes to artistic work such as books, movies, music, etc. but you don't have the same issues there, and that's why even CC says that they don't recommend using them for software.

Even if they didn't know CC wasn't suitable for software, everyone knows that non-commercial isn't Open Source.

I didn't dig into the software, but I wonder if the licenses for the dependencies allow this either, eg if any are GPL or similar.

CC licenses are not meant for software. They explicitly say so on their FAQ: https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-comm...

And non-commercial licenses are not Open Source, period. This has been well established since the 1990s, both by the FSF and the OSI.

It's such a promising piece of software, but deceptive advertising is a bad way to start off a relationship of any sort.

As for it being the best of both worlds, it depends what best means.

A company that wants to make a lot of money won't do well with this model. It's a slow growth model requiring a lot of hands on work that requires customers who are paying for features and custom installations.

It's labor intensive work that's quite the opposite of the proprietary software model, which has traditionally had a lot in common with the publishing or entertainment industry. Write a book, get paid for it for years.

CentOS started as a fork, and new forks exist now.

If you look at companies like Red Hat, and Nextcloud, neither of these companies sold proprietary versions of their software. Red Hat sold licensed versions of their software, but they were always FLOSS.

Nextcloud's CEO talks about how selling a proprietary version of your code is bad for your customers and puts your company into a Catch 22 with itself. "Do we add this feature to the 'Community' or 'Enterprise' version?" or worse "What do we do when someone makes a FLOSS plugin that competes or is better than our internal version of the same functionality?"

There's a huge need for a good chat system to compete with the likes of Slack, but Matrix has bitten me several times and I don't trust it. In an alternate universe, they could have made Matrix work well for all levels of users and then sold customization and B2B deals with their customers leveraging the community, which has always wanted Matrix to succeed.

Yes, and even if it doesn't go to court, the university will know that it will cost them time and money.

It's entirely possible that university president or higher administration is unaware of the situation, and if they were, will intervene. The best way to do that is to have it brought to their attention via a legal letter, which then means they need to bring in their lawyers.

A good lawyer for the university won't want to fight because fighting is not in the best interest of the university. A good lawyer will say "We threatened the student with this? No good can come of that... let him register, let him graduate and make this all go away."

That doesn't mean the client (the university) will take it, but overall fighting isn't in their interest either.

I'll add another angle: financial.

You have invested years of time and presumably thousands of dollars into your schooling. Their threat that they will not allow you to graduate unless you give them unpaid labor without a clear boundary condition is a threat. While I haven't seen the correspondence, from what you said it appears they're doing the moral equivalent of one of those sitcom situations where someone is compelled to do what the other person wants under a threat, and even when they've done it, the threatening person keeps the threat.

A good lawyer (and not all lawyers are good) will help you understand your rights and your position.

As others have said, this is not an escalation of aggression, and not only don't you have to tell them whether you've seen a lawyer, unless the lawyer is speaking on your behalf- you don't have to tell them anything, and you shouldn't tell them, or tell us (in case they read this, which they likely will).

A lawyer in this case is more of a scholarly resource, telling you what your options are.

For example, Creative Commons has a visual/bullet point explanation of their licenses. That's entirely okay, as the legal text is the core license.

I had a similar discussion with a lawyer once about a TOS that also included a summary. The lawyer told me that as long as you make it clear that your summary is just a summary, and is not the agreement, and you point out the actual agreement, you're okay.

In this case, the OP is pointing to the legal text clearly and merely summarizing it's most salient points.

Again, IANAL and this is not legal advice.

Kando is very pretty, and it can be fun to use an interface like this, but in terms of practicality, text inputs are better.

For example, on my desktop, there's an icon on my taskbar for Firefox, but most of the time, I get my screen to the search bar and type "F" and my system knows I probably want Firefox. Done.

There's a game I play, Astroneer, and it uses a pie interface. I often wish I could just type in what I want. It'd be faster.

I want to love this, but I can type on a keyboard so much faster, and use up so much less cognitive energy doing so than switching my hand to the mouse, pulling up a menu, reading the symbols (even if I have their location memorized) and pulling my wrist/arm in the right direction.

As someone who also kept a lot of files in their repo that went untracked, it was a small adjustment. Add to my .gitignore, untrack the files, and done.

1. If it works for you, no need to stop

I remember plenty of people who used SVN saying why did they need to use git. In fact, I remember companies complaining about distributed version control generally, saying they preferred centralized version control.

If it works for you, you can keep using it. No one will stop you, but you may find that just as SVN users have largely shrunk down, maybe the same will happen with git.

2. jj today

I use jj today and the biggest advantages for me are not needing to worry as much about the order of operations.

I write some code and then I come across a bug. I can pull out the bug and fix it while still working on my existing code. I don't have to go back in time to fix it.

I also appreciate not needing to stop just because of a conflict. This is something I miss from SVN, which was similar-ish in that conflicts didn't need to be addressed immediately, only jj's implementation is better.

Generally I find the jj workflow to be something that takes a few days of adjustment, then it just makes more sense.

3. The way things will be

jj is still relatively early. The commands to interact with git aren't all very intuitive or easy to use. I had to make some aliases to make this easier. More importantly, there's no jj backend yet. Once that happens and it's adopted by forgjo or another forge (Gitlab, Github), I think we'll see a big shift towards it.

I think git is going to be around a long time, but the day to day use of jj is so much nicer than git that I hope it will gain fast adoption.

My communication is spread across email, Signal, Discord, Matrix, and XMPP. I have several email addresses, two Signal accounts, a Discord user, and XMPP.

The selling point on the website is that my communication is fragmented. The answer you're suggesting is "Move all your communication to my platform and it won't be fragmented." I could make the same argument about any of these. "Stop using Signal, Discord, Matrix, and XMPP and do everything by email." Worse yet, it demands that everyone else stop using these other communication mediums and I switch exclusively to this. Even if this were possible (it's not) I'd never want a single vendor controlling all my communication.

The port idea is similarly underwhelming.

What I thought you were going to offer is some kind of semantic categorization. This way I can know about all the communications that involve Project X15, but instead, I now must rely on the other party to send to the right port.

I can't even get people to update their email address for me after over a decade, so this feels like a non-starter.

At the end of the day, I don't see what this will offer me. It's yet another platform, adding to the problem of fragmented communication. It's features aren't especially compelling, and it suffers from deep vendor lock-in.

My suggestion is to find a niche for this, since I don't see it providing value as a general tool.