oriesdan

Do you know wikisource? [1]

It contains hundreds of thousands of public domain books that you can read online or download. You can even download the whole collection as a zimfile [2], readable with kiwix [3]. Obviously all without DRM/phone home spywares/forced updates/remote control.

[1] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Main_Page

[2] https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content_in_all_languages

[3] https://www.kiwix.org/en/

I entirely stopped using streaming services and now buy and download my music from Bandcamp, using webradios to discover new titles (my personal favorite is the webradio Nordic Lodge Copenhagen, SomaFM also has a lot of good thematic radios).

I don't have any trouble listening to my collection when internet gets spotty, I can have real full shuffle on my collection without hearing always the same titles coming again and again, and I'm guaranteed I own my music, with no-one able to take it from me. It feels like the future :)

Stripe actually did invest in Stellar [1], so they seem to be interested in cryptocurrencies. This blog post is from 2014, though. It would still be interesting to hear their up to date opinion.

[1] https://stripe.com/blog/stellar

EDIT: well, hamstercat's link is a great follow up :)

Yep, that's in line with what I was saying, except for the conclusion.

Yes, I don't see either small teams keeping up with the amount of features we currently have (and security is a direct factor of the amount of features), but I would rather see them scaling down browsers than making sure we can keep adding to them.

Also, beware to not discard "hobbyists" too easily. Hobbyists did create GNU (and still are maintaining it) and early linux. And Blink comes from Webkit, which comes from khtml, made by hobbyists.

Webkit does still exist :)

Also, Firefox being free software, we can expect forks to appear the very day Mozilla falls. I even wonder if having a swarm of small implementers wouldn't be better for the standards than having three big ones who discuss among themselves, then decide what the standards should be. Maybe browsers would stop getting more complicated than OSes and go back to essential, that way. I would really love seeing web engines getting simple again so that third party developers can contribute to them - and that's certainly a direction many small implementations would push toward.

Of course, this is only speculation. At least, it's not guaranteed doom.

Not sure what you mean with external sources, but I have seen nothing but user generated content in there (but I haven't read all wikipedia articles, obviously).

A few things to note, though:

1/ it's not pure text content, it's html content, this has a significant overhead

2/ a zim file is not just compressed content, but also huge indexes referencing where is which content. You look for your article's title in the reference table, you find the position of your article in the file and you decompress just that part. This is what allows for selective decompression without decompressing the whole content.

One thing I remember from those times : even knowing there was an encyclopedia on the school library computer, I would not use it, because it just sounded impractical. I would need to ask for permission to use the computer, then wait for it to start, then figure how to do a search, while the competitive proposition was just picking the encyclopedia volume for the correct letter and finding my page!

How much a few decades can change… I would call painful the idea of manually looking for a page in a book rather than doing a computer search, nowadays.

Indeed, Kiwix is the proper solution for anyone who cares about knowledge access in places where internet connection is spotty. Given the file format it uses (zim) is compressed, and meant to be accessed compressed to pluck a specific article, you can have all the content of English's wikipedia without images and videos in just 36GB. Plus, the specs of the file format are published and it's easy to build your own implementation, I did it for my needs.

It's also great for privacy maximalists : I have wikipedia, wikisource and wiktionary in two languages locally, which means that most of my searches never leave my computer.

Kiwix/openzim don't provide only mediawiki projects either, I've recently downloaded stackoverflow's content (although, I'll need to build a dedicated search engine for it to be really usable).

You can have a look at the incredible amount of available content there: https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content_in_all_languages

Keep in mind that we're speaking of building games totally hand crafted for the players and the characters they built, if done properly. Even if using a module, not two games are the same, because GMs build around characters, and players may get the story off-rails. It doesn't seem expensive to me, we're in luxury territory.

This is awesome! GM/DM are a rare resource, and as a forever-DM, I would love using such services to be actually able to play.

One thing I think would be a cool addition : play by post games.

I'm not a native speaker and I'm always more comfortable in written games rather than spoken ones, mainly because of the highly specialized vocabulary that I don't recognize immediately when spoken. Of course, this could be roleplayed (playing an outlander character), but I bet it would quickly grow old :)

I suppose any non-native speaker would feel that way too - and then, there's the timezone problem.

One thing I know from roll20 : localized games are not the answer. There is just not many enough players outside US to properly fit each timezone with enough diversity. That's also why PbP has been what worked best for me.

Anyway, I'm glad to see this happen, best of luck!

This sounds like a great idea, and something I would have used if it worked with javascript disabled.

If the owners are around : would you consider adding nojs support? I know it's an edge case request, sorry to be that guy. But then again, "search without top results" is not exactly a concept that will bring you the average web user :)

By the way, you can help rms by volunteering to maintain this website, if you wish too. It's basically about publishing his political notes, which means formatting them, uploading them and occasionally finding old references and link to them.

It's a bit hidden in the content of the home page, but you can search for "volunteer" to see the reference about it.

That's really impressive and insightful.

I've been working all my career (12 years) as a remote worker (freelancer for a couple years, then employee) and poor async communication skills is by far the worst and most omnipresent problem I've seen - mainly because as nobody sees who is doing what, allowing interruptions quickly lead to everybody constantly interrupting everybody. Having Hangout or Slack constantly ringing because three people want my attention at the same time is a sure way toward madness.

The lack of async culture also often manifests that way : a manager/lead/whatever sends a grossly imprecise demand as a one-liner email ; then developers ask questions about what the hell that person is talking about ; then the first person gives a few more details (the minimum amount) and concludes with "can we have a call? It would be simpler".

I think the main problem is that many companies, while they want to try remote work as it "attracts top talents", don't have the proper culture for it, which is, ultimately, the culture of writing. Not only being able to type down the words you would have spoken, but to actually perform thinking writing - which implies to draft a few ideas, then read them, modify them, change their order, remove some, add others, and only when you're sure you've nailed the issue, hit send to share it with everyone.

The typical non-remote employee won't want to do that and prefer to throw vague ideas in the room so everybody contribute to making them clearer at the same time. I'm biased of course, but I think this is highly inefficient.