ezst

> You can apply tags to blocks, which make them a kind of thing (a project, an author, a quote, a thought)

FWIW, needing typed notes is what settled me on Trilium Notes after a foray into a bunch of alternatives, including Notion, Anytype, Obsidian, etc

I realized that efficient note taking and knowledge management generally means (to me) having "dimension lists" (collections of places, people, projects, ...) being referred to in topical notes/journals/events, generally organized as a hierarchy (but not always). Once you come to that realisation (and that your notes system is essentially a glorified RDBMS), you want a system that ensures that "notes of the same type remain as consistent as possible", which Trilium makes easy via Templates and/or Inheritance (attributes can be inherited in the OOP sense, or composed like traits), collections to represent, manage and edit large amounts of notes at once, and emacs-levels of scripting if that's your jam.

https://triliumnotes.org/

An edge that dates back to the late 60's/early 70's? How soft is that edge by now?

Which seems reasonable. And those who care deeply will have no problem configuring it the specific way they want on their own project. Win-win.

The paradox of them selling "intelligence on demand" or "coding agents rivaling the best developers" and yet having dumb as fart bots/scrapers is lost on many. But not all.

LinkedIn has always been a weird and uncanny place, LLMs somehow managed to make that effect much worse and unsettling.

One front-end for multiple servers is how you end up reimplementing XMPP (bar federation) before you know it: servers are not guaranteed to run identical/compatible versions -> you bake versioning at capability level in the protocol -> you make clients and servers degrade predictably when that happens -> you write a standard to document it formally -> you invite around the table those authors of alternative client and server implementers and boom, you've got the X in XMPP, and the XEP standardisation process and the XSF to support it.

I'm saying that if Service B is under a jurisdiction that has export control regulations (i.e. all of them) and somehow decides that "users from country X are non grata" ; or under a jurisdiction that oppresses on the basis of your political beliefs, skin color, sexual preference… (both of which characterise the current Trump administration, under which Signal operates) then the service operator has no choice but to lock you out of your account, making the whole cypher/crypto argument moot.

I'm not sure Slick is still maintained. Recently I depended on https://github.com/com-lihaoyi/scalasql#simpletable-variant-... for small CRUD stuff and liked it quite a bit. These days there's a whole boulevard through the Scala ecosystem that doesn't involve typelevel pedantry and obscure DSLs just for the love of hieroglyphics.

> I genuinely do not understand where this impression is coming fron.

I don't want to engage in a citation battle, I just can't care enough for that. Having read those posts about Matrix, XMPP (OMEMO) and a couple others, many months/years ago, they really came across as "screw those amateurs for even trying, Signal is great, and by my very definition of it, only Signal can be".

Again, those are not your words, but something about the tone and the way you compare them made it sound that way.

Also, even if that's besides the initial point, I firmly disagree with the premise of the post you just linked. For the same reason mentioned in a sibling comment stating that the real world isn't binary even though IP addresses might be: A centralised service is political no matter what. If not their admins, their hosing provider or executive power may decide to censor you based on your country of origin, political beliefs, ideological activism or any other reason out of your control. Signal's crypto protects what's in the envelope, but does little else (neither can it) against a motivated state-actor fingerprinting you beyond the service boundaries, and guess what, we know it to be a fact for the jurisdiction Signal is operating under.

> disabling it if you don't keep updating

yep, it's almost like "Open Source" "non profit" and "we are the good guys, trust me bro" doesn't matter nearly as much as "open, federated, standardised protocols".

I've been self-hosting Jabber/XMPP for a very long time, now. There's nothing I feel I'm missing out from signal and others. Not to sound like I'm preaching, I generally tell the curious to give ejabberd a spin.

> Does one have to be nuanced in everything one says?

no, but unlike a computer, the real world isn't binary, and recognising that it's flawed and full of compromises generally heightens your chances of affecting it (by your ideas or actions).

> I'm not a fan of Signal's threat model […] but Signal's main protocol seems pretty solid, especially compared to some other systems.

My main gripe with Signal is that no amount of protocol sophistication can undo the problems linked to it being a centralised service. Soatok seems unable to acknowledge that centralisation is a real (privacy, security, reliability, political, …) concern here, nor to see value in the decentralised (federated/P2P) alternative protocols implementing the same double-ratched/PFS crypto primitives.

Maybe I shouldn't, but I stopped taking the author seriously for their lack of nuance/extremely biased views favouring Signal in every article about E2EE applied to IM. But I do agree that threat modeling is just a support to formalize and document the variables in the threat equation. It doesn't say anything about whether the threat is reasonable, legitimate and grounded in reality, so it's only knocking the subjectivity can a tad down the road.

What do you believe is so unique about US cloud providers? True, it's a de facto triopoly of American-incorporated businesses, but then what? It's not like computing is alien tech that only the US can own. The US doesn't even make the chips. It's commodity at scale with a bit of convenience sold at a steep premium.

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> falling behind the US economically and technologically

Are you even human? Do you really believe what you say? Doesn't it come across as absurd, from everything that happened to the US since the Snowden revelations, the Patriot Act, spiraling into fascism, a first time attacking science and democracy, a second time to install oligarchs, traitors, corrupt and incompetents to run the state, with the result of tanking your real economy (on every metric that's not related to AI), burning down your soft power, burning bridges with every ally, losing the war against Iran, and causing a generational talent exodus out of the US?

Oh yeah, by no means am I blindly defending "the EU leadership", but some reality check is much needed.

Sorry to be annoying on that, but if there's one thing LLMs certainly aren't are search engines. They don't index content predictably, they lossly compress it, and furthermore in a manner that the loss cannot be quantified. If you are using them as more than a semi-random/fuzzy content production engines, you are doing it wrong (you're not alone in that, but that's besides the point)

Only worse: internet infrastructure (routers, fiber, ...) depreciates over multiple decades, not mere months. What's inside those data centers matters more than them being built: today's cutting edge inference chips or GPUs may not be so useful if either hardware or models evolve in the slightest, and in some way, we should hope for that if we want to be optimistic about the future of AI/LLMs.

> Sure but you need to be able to get to “someone” when say the owner skips town or dies or…

And now you get to "nobody at all" when effectively nothing happens to the leaders the instant the need to bear accountability

> plus this firewall makes it so people will be more willing to build businesses.

Doubt.

> Seems like a lot of European tech companies are kept afloat by "digital sovereignty" and maybe EU grant money

woah indeed.

Ok, and what would you say is the problem, there?

https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/about-dma_en

All I see is more interoperability, fairer competition, more consumer rights, etc. If you are against this sort of regulation and a rational being, I envy you because you must either be oligarch-level rich, or in a happy bubble disconnected from world-affecting current events.

What are you even trying to say?

The Sans versions has Signika vibes, I like it, but the price was enough of a showstopper for me.

They have served to train multiple generations of ANN and ML algorithms, in that, I think they've been a resounding success!

> If his monetary value to the company was as said why would any other metric like complexity even remotely matter or need convincing assuming the main goal of the company was to make money.

I'll just be the Nth commenter to say it, but corporations, especially larger ones, are anything but efficient. I don't know if it ever was true, except maybe for companies focused on producing high volumes of highly standardized/specific products in a competitive environment. That's not to say that efficiency isn't desirable or beneficial in general, but as soon as it becomes difficult to put a value tag on the work being done (which unfortunately gets harder in more services oriented corporations), competing for clever ideas just rewards less than competing for the boss's attention. There's no justice or fairness in that.

Not saying that more governance and focus wouldn't bring more bang for buck, but from the lists I sent, you would notice a pattern of investing on open standards and vendor-agnostic infrastructure. It makes servicing specific needs overall easier, because the whole field is elevated through easier interop and efficiency. If LDAP, email, GUI apps and videoconferencing become easier, making an "LDAP-enabled GUI email client that does group calls" that's perfect your (industry/trade/…) needs goes from "near impossible, requires millions in CAPEX" to "we'll have it in a matter of days/weeks".

The other nice thing is, the whole world benefits from it, for free. The only losers are the monopolists and other societal parasites.

But then they also pay social workers to guide you through the steps of applying and receiving this support. Sometimes the biggest hurdle is to get to know what you don't know.

> Maybe with the current political events and subsequent changes in priorities we'll see EU governments ponying up some money

Those wheels are already spinning at a fast pace, the French government has its own NixOS-based distro for public servants¹, teams-up with the German and Dutch governments to develop a productivity suite as to not rely on MSOffice², NLNet sponsors many "infrastructure-level" initiatives though NGI Zero³ (many in the area of networking, computer design, federated/P2P communication protocols, …)

¹: https://github.com/rlahfa-dinum/securix ²: https://www.opendesk.eu/en ; https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/ ³: https://nlnet.nl/project/

Maybe it should have clicked earlier in life and I'm perhaps that much dumb dumb, but it only recently occurred to me (from experiencing it at two very different companies and discussing with peers having reached a certain seniority level more or less at the same time) how dysfunctional many companies are, and how often they produce incentives that are misaligned with the overall company goals and sustainability principles. I blame in large part a layer of middle management that selfishly puts itself above all else, misguides, misrepresents, because it essentially pays larger dividends (literally and not) to "play the networking game than to be an efficient and effective productive structure". Maybe that's to be expected in a services-driven economy where the value of the work is immaterial and subjective (and the whole phenomenon of bullshit jobs).

Not OP but many people eligible for social benefits don't seek it, for all kinds of reasons (not knowing about it, pride, ideology, peer pressure, ...)

Who exactly in the Linux world is supposed to get paid wonderfully to keep mountains of old cruft and technical debt in working order? Not to say I'm insensitive to your point, but when whole UI frameworks are amateurs' passion-projects, the practical burden of maintenance has very real implications. That's essentially the whole story behind the Linux desktop losing Xorg.