slightwinder

Emacs had many changes in the last decade, even very deep changes. What did not change is its fundamental concept, the foundation. And this is probably true for most software. They barely change on a fundamental level after a certain age, just receiving more features, sometimes remove some, or rework the look.

So the question is, that is recognized as a real change? Did Chrome change? Seems overall the same to me. Did Firefox change, might depend on whom you ask. It changed it's internal with Quantum significantly, switched their extensions-system, added multiprocessing, but on surface, for the normal user, it's probably all the same.

> Dependent types are very useful for some things. For example, I wish Python had the ability to express "a 10 x 5 matrix of float32s" as a type, and typecheck that.

What do you mean? Every class is a type, so create your own class and control what goes in.

Men wearing hats is still quite common today. But the style has changed to baseball caps and similar forms. Most of those "dress codes" usually also have a more practical origin. So it's less of a code, and more a practical benefit.

Probably because for most locations, they are actually not very useful, but quite expensive and just cumbersome. They take up space, and create artificial travel-zones, and at the same time they don't even enhance the flow, because most people tend to stand still on them. For safety-reasons (and probably costs) they are usually just around walking speed. So it's overall just a fancy gadget which is only beneficial for heavy luggage or people with special demands. For those situations, we often have better and cheaper solutions.

> I don't fully agree with that, IMO it's a multifaceted problem.

It always is.

> There's the obvious fact that tech has become the new path to high salaries, and culture changes when people are pursuing the money rather than the trade.

There is nothing new about this. Education and skills have always been a path to salaries. Even a thousand years ago, craftsman and artisans had a better career than any random farmer. And with education, there is will always follow standardization and certification at some point, because where money flows, scam grows, and societies have to protect their interests.

This is all nothing new, or harmful by itself. The problem is that all those legit interests, can also be too overprotective or even abused for someone's greed. It's always a balanced battle between legit interests and someone's greed. But many countries seem far to much leaning to the greedy and abusive side at the moment.

> There's also the death of piracy limiting access to resources. Apps, courses and books were files pirated massively, online services kinda stopped that.

Piracy is not dead. It's always been a battle of life and death of individual sources.

> They’re socially conditioned to assume that anything free is a scam or illegal, that every tool is associated with a corporation, and that learning itself is going through certain hoops (by the uni, the certificator or whatever) so that you get permission to earn money a certain way.

To be fair, there are also legit reason for why it evolved this way. It's mainly for quality and reliability. There is so much crappy sloppy work from unqualified workers, and it used to be even worse.. The easy available free knowledge really helped to rise the standard even for people without proper education in an area.

> What is with the negativity in these comments?

Excel and AIs are huge clusterfucks on their own, where insane errors happens for various reasons. Combine them, and maybe we will see improvement, but surely we will see catastrophic outcomes which could not only ruin the lives of ordinary people, whole companies and countries, as already happened before...

Fiction is the superset of definitions here. Science Fiction and Fantasy are genres in that pool, with many other genres.

You wrote that "Closed-source software" is unethical, not "harmful software & services" is unethical. There is a significant difference. Don't shift your goal as you like.

Not all closed-source software is harmful; Obsidian here is a prime example of one which is not harmful and could be even considered as beneficial, despite being closed source, because of how open and supportive it's designed in everything else.

The article is about security and trust. Open Source is in that context by definition the only good solution. Though, doesn't mean that a closed app has to be bad, but you have to blindly trust them, and hope that this will never change. With Open Source, you don't have to be blind, you can trust them educated (or at least trust that other will check what's going on).

Of course this always a bit of case by case, but obsidian is a very exposed and worthful target.

I hope you understand that ethic is not absolute. It's unethical for you, according to your ethical rules. Doesn't mean that this applies to other people rules too.

Obsidian is using electron, so the source is already somewhat available anyway. I understand them not making it open source, and risking someone forking it and harming their business. But considering the situation, I would think making it at least source available on a popular forge, where people can make issues and open merge-requests, might be a beneficial thing.

There are a bunch of small problems people encounter here and there, which usually will never be solved by the company. Giving the community a route to improve their tool, would be good.

No, not really. You want to change the world, but bring up a technical solution, when it's a social situation. If you want to strengthen indymedia, then work on the social level, not technology. Reinventing the same thing again, will not change anything.

That's a different problem, and won't be solved by any P2P-platform. There are more than enough ways for discovering selfhosted content, people just don't use it.

> We certainly need a more P2P, version of this type of platform and a way to fund and scale it such that it can’t be messed with by billionaire hacks.

We already have that. Selfhosting is possible, and today even simpler than ever. And there is a multitude of systems and platforms which one can use to collect money as long as it's not doing something too critical, like porn or terrorism. Influencers have those field already covered well, and will continue building them to avoid the hefty shares on their usual platforms.

Yes, of course, should this just be an optional gadget for a setup, which is already as safe as possible for the situation. After all, when the port has been opened, your setup is also open for attacks. The knockers purpose is to reduce the timeframe of when your system is accessible for attackers.

Every door you close, is one less someone can break.

Every complex services running, is a door someone can potentially break. Even with the most secure and battle tested service, you never know where someone fucked up and introduced an exploit or backdoor. Happened too often to be not a concern. XZ Utils backdoor for example was just last year.

> Your network authentication should not be a fun game or series of Rube Goldberg contraptions.

If there is no harm, who cares...

More important: Why does that person mobs people for using javascript, but then only displays an ugly trashy side when you disable it?

Visual appearance is the main indicator to identify the perceived culture of some random person on the streets, so it's a justified assumption the writer was talking about this.

tl;dr of the summary: Omarchy is a toy, not a proper tool, and dangerously "naive".

Why is even the summary longer than most articles nowadays? I will maybe read te full article later, but probably will just let it rot on my pile of readlaters.

Is this enough trash-talk now? Is the Pro-tip pleased?

Is there a legal obligation to use ISBN? AFAIK it's a free choice of companies, for the single reason that it's beneficial. ICANN is similar, their services are optional, and the main complaint is that one country has too much control.

> Why isn’t ISBN funded and run by a government agency, like the U.S. Trademark Office?

ISBN is used globally, why should a US agency control it? Especially when it's not even originates from the USA?

As a totally unrelated but somehow relate recommendation: there is a fantastic builder-game named Timberborn[1], where you can grow your own beaver-empire and even build dams. It's not the most realistic game, the proportion of everything is very off for example, but it's very matching the content of this article and I just wanted to mention it.

[1] https://www.gog.com/en/game/timberborn

> The problem isn't necessarily the need for permission, it is excessive bureaucracy.

Certain checks just need time. A lack of qualified experts who are able to evaluation the situation for a permission is in such a case more likely than excessive bureaucracy.

> If I want to build and sell houses, I should be able to do it, but it shouldn't take going to 10 government offices, filling out 50 forms and waiting a year for someone to give me a permit. And then, once I have built it, it shouldn't take another year for someone to check I did it correctly.

That's how you end up with deathtraps who are poisoning their resident and folding down in themselves on the next earthquake or some strong wind.

The victim would still be dead. And there are not that many murders who even have $12M. This whole thread is so ridiculous...

The solution are text-files, automation and version-control. Write scripts which are regularly automatically export all data, configs, communication, etc. into a centralized storage which is under version control with an automatic commit every day, which is also exported into a report of that day's changes. Then use grep or whatever to search it.

People will not maintain knowledge bases unless you force them. So remove as much friction as possible and make as accessible as possible. Hence, the automation and textiles. It doesn't need to be plaintext, just something universal and human-readable. Could be formatted in markdown, yaml, json, be single email-files, everything you can find with simple tools and make connections with. The version-control and it's report then will allow you to follow the trail of work, to discover what was discussed and change around the same time, to find connections. And it's never wrong to have a reversible history of your stuff.

And maybe along the way you can motivate people to also write some proper documentation here and there, and add some more fancy tools on-top.

Not sure whether is a matter of efficiency. Efficiency is more about the desired outcome. Insects are small and very low weight. So I would assume wind will give them more push and can carry them for much longer distances even without doing anything on their own. But the price is a lack of control; they have probably little to no influence where they will end up.

Because it IS json with some half-assed enhancements. I say half-assed, because it only seems to work one-way. Parsing this is OK, probably not the most efficient json-parser around, but writing back and preserving the enhancements seems not supported, at least not in the python-implementation.

> Because it lets us build an app that works well across all major platforms with the resources we have available. Building an email/contacts/calendar app is a huge undertaking. Doing it from scratch on each platform is just not feasible for us.

Just to be clear, does this mean the app is mainly reusing the already existing codebase of the web-app? How much additional work went into the desktop-app?

> I find it rather strange that so many email providers have to develop their own "app".

It's probably because people want easy access, and have all features supported flawlessly. Mail has come a long way, but there are always specific features not integrated well.

Also, most of those apps are more a thin wrapper around the web-interface, adding some interface-sugar for desktop-integration and serving as a playground for devs to test the web-apps offline-abilities.

> There are so many good clients out there, and I'd rather have 1.

I've yet to see any good client for me. They all are kinda flawed and limited, many suffering from age or not fitting modern demands. Thunderbird seems to be the only trustable Linux-compatible one which is still actively developed, and even this is app is lacking on many corners. Add-ons are supposed to fill and round up the corners, but without anyone developing them, what's the worth in having them?

Fastmail at least seems to work on developing the mail-standards, and having their own client is probably helping them in figuring out how well those improvements are working and where they are lacking.

With batteries included, growing should be a desired outcome.