There are two Linux paradigms that I consider stupid. One is the use of centralized software repositories managed by the distro instead of individual developer maintained installers. The other one is file system case sensibility. They already admitted defeat on the first one with the rise of containerised applications. I wonder how much longer they’ll keep the charade on the second one.
Indeed, but I’m sure we can agree that it’s pretty stupid for every distro to maintain its own repo. That’s a lot of duplicate work, which could be spend on more useful things. Luckily flatpak is well on its way to change that
Hm… But different distros have different philosophies (not just) about updates. That’s part of why people choose a specific distro.
Theres still plenty speaking against flatpak (larger sizes, problems with GTK/qt themes, and it’s only meant for GUI applications - you still need a separate system for the kernel and lower-level/cli tools. And frankly, that makes flatpak unusable to me, because the purpose of a centralized package management system is not having duplicate systems).
So in short: y’all are gonna pry pacman from my cold, dead hand.
I’m not against distros as a whole, some extra work will be inevitable because people have different preferences, but it feels like a waste having a Firefox package for arch, ubuntu, fedora and Debian while essentially all being identical. Indeed flatpak isn’t perfect yet, but it works great for me and it’s steadily improving
Doom “needs to run everywhere” otherwise cyberdemons will manage to materialize within that machine, thus making Doom 2 a prediction of what would happen if we fail
Jokes on you, I use my fingers as bits for a total of 1024 numbers (0-1023). Or I can sacrifice 1 finger time be a sign bit and count negative numbers too.
I like this idea in theory, but some combinations of fingers are very awkward to extend without the others, and one particular combination is very rude.
Jokes on you, fingers are tri-state (fully extended, fully closed, bent at middle knuckle) not binary, so I can count to 59049.
Someone with better finger control should be able to treat them as quad-state, granting the ability to count to 1048576 by bending just the outer knuckle.
Yeah one of these views is more valid than the other:
“I got an error message! It says, Please right click the application and select ‘Run As Administrator…’ What does it mean?! What do I do!!! Why are these instructions so confusing?!”
“I got an error on the page! It says ‘Password incorrect’ What does that mean? How do I fix it?” “Have you tried using the correct password?”
Why on earth are you putting double quotation marks inside double quotation marks? We have single and double quotation marks for this exact reason. It took me forever to understand what you’re saying
Yeah, I’m in the IT dept (companys conatantly flop between throwing software into engineering, IT, or its own dept) and the other day, 5 minutes before I leave for a week long vacation a user comes up and asks if we’re ignoring her.
Outlook is constantly asking for a password to one of the emails she uses. She doesn’t know it and keeps clicking close on the popup. So she sends an email, FROM THE ACCOUNT SHE IS LOGGED OUT OF, to helpdesk a few days earlier.
I’ve had to walk someone over the phone through a prompt that says “Click OK to continue” and there was nothing else except the OK button.
Also when I used to work for Federal Student Aide help center it was common for (people who were about to enter into higher education) to get stuck at the end of the online form when a final screen came up with the options “Submit” and “Cancel”
That just seems like bad software design with a prompt like that, unless its for audit trail purposes and it’s used to log the user is actively accepting to continue.
I was looking for a journaling app that didn’t have vendor locking, or required some weird export dump that messed your formatting and folders up. That lead me to Markdown and Obsidian. I love it. And when I die, that shit will still be readable by any basic text editor.
I’ll admit I’m a sucker for a good UI, and I’m very picky apparently. And as much as I like Markdown, I like looking at rendered Markdown more, lol. I was just looking at GitJournal and Markor and my god…hideous apps.
I came from DayOne, and their format is some json that I wasnt too keen on for future proofing.
I don’t remember why, but there was some reason I wrote off LogSeq. I tried so many apps but Obsidian was the best fit for me. Maybe I’ll have to try Logseq again and remember…
I’m still figuring out how exactly I want to use LogSeq, but for now it’s kinda acting as a Calendar, Journal, Me Wiki, ToDoList, and general notes scratchpad. I’m not sure how organized I can keep it, but it definitely is nice opening 1 app, and being able to put anything and everything in the journal page for today, just #hashtagging topics for searchability/Discoverability.
Sort of…I’m still testing various apps. The big draw for me to Keep was mobile and web apps. I will often sit at a computer to input even short ToDo because phone swipe keyboards and me do not get along. There is no shortage of Keep clones, but a bunch are missing sync function entirely or require Nextcloud, which is way too much app for my hardware and I’m not standing up an instance just to sync some notes. Here’s a not very formal rundown of what I’ve so far:
Joplin - seems like a solid app and you can easily selfhost the server. But the android app is awful. That and the fact it stores Markdown files in a sqlite db had me look elsewhere
Quillpad - a fork of Quillnote. Looks identical to Keep. Only syncs with Nextcloud and has some quirks. The big one was creating a To Do list with checkboxes from the Notes app in NC displays correctly in Quillpad, but you cannot interact with them at all. So strange.
Zoho Notebook - Zoho as a company is likely the closest you’ll get for a straight up Google replacement. But their privacy policy has some concerning statements regarding sharing data with “market partners”. It was enough for me to keep looking.
Carnet - only syncs with Nextcloud and for some reason the Android app is stupid slow.
Memos - more of a microblogging app. Similar format to Twitter but you can keep it all private and publish nothing. This one has no official app, in favor of a well done progressive web app. Also stores .md in a db file. Incredibly easy to self host. I keep wanting to love this one, but the single column view (think Twitter threads) as opposed to Keeps grid…i don’t know. I still have it up on my server since it takes almost nothing to run and I keep playing with it.
The two contenders for me right now have some amazing promise and nice features already, but it’s whats on their roadmaps that has intrigued me more:
Acreom - not FOSS yet and the mobile app can only sync with their cloud. No E2EE…yet. On desktop it’s great. You can use it without an account and like Obsidian, it stores it in flat .md. The To Do/Task function has some natural language processing that can recognize date/time for due dates like “Deploy patches Wednesday at 4am” would recognize Wednesday as Sept 20th since that’s the next closest date and the time at 4am. I think once they open source it and at least allow local only storage on a phone, it’ll be killer. I’d love to use Syncthing to just keep my pile of notes up to date between multiple devices. Not possible on mobile yet. This one is geared more towards developers to track projects, even offers a Jira tie in (gross).
Notesnook - somewhat recently open source. Has great apps for all OSes as well as a web app. And what is really nice is that the UI is consistent across platforms. They have a paid tier that’s a bit spendy for my liking, but they are working on a self hosting option that will be free of course. The dev did tell me they’re toying with the idea of a charge for commercial self hosters, but definitely not for individuals. This one isn’t in plain .md due to their selling point, which is encrypted everything.
Wow, thanks for the write-up. Joplin, Memos, Acreom sound/look the most interesting. Notesnook’s feature lockouts on the free tier makes me feel like they may not be included in the self-hosted option, that seems like a common practice. But I’ll keep an eye out… I’m gonna copy this whole thing into my page on notes-apps for later reference.
One I didn’t include because it either requires specific hardware, or some hacky workaround is Synology Note Station. Great app, and I got it up and running using a docker container that runs their proprietary OS. Other problem is the mobile app is not nearly as good.
As you can tell, I love notes apps. So the trend of all these Personal Knowledge Management/second brain apps is amazing.
In my free time I develop ways for advertisers to reach as many platforms as possible. I hate ads as much as I hate people who say things like “just skip it if you don’t like them” so I spend my time trying to fill every inch of their lives with ads as possible.
Flip side of the coin, I had a sysadmin who wouldn’t increase the tmp size from 1gb because ‘I don’t need more than that recommended size’. I deploy tons of etl jobs, and they download gbs of files for processing to this globally known temp storage. I got it changed for one server successfully after much back and forth, but the other one I just overrode it in my config files for every script.
Yeah python does lack in such things. Half a decade ago, I setup an ml model for tableau using python, and things were fine until one day it just wouldn’t finish anymore. Turns out the model got bigger and python filled out the ram and the swap trying to load the whole model in memory.
During the pandemic I had some unoccupied python graduates I wanted to teach data engineering to.
Initially I had them implement REST wrappers around Apache OpenNLP and SpaCy and then compare the results of random data sets (project Gutenberg, sharepoint, etc..).
I ended up stealing a grad data scientist because we couldn't find a difference (while there was a difference in confidence, the actual matches were identical).
SpaCy required 1vCPU and 12GiB of RAM to produce the same result as OpenNLP that was running on 0.5 vCPU and 4.5 GiB of RAM.
2 grads were assigned a Spring Boot/Camel/OpenNLP stack and 2 a Spacy/Flask application. It took both groups 4 weeks to get a working result.
The team slowly acquired lockdown staff so I introduced Minio/RabbitMQ/Nifi/Hadoop/Express/React and then different file types (not raw UTF-8, but what about doc, pdf, etc..) for NLP pipelines. They built a fairly complex NLP processing system with a data exploration UI.
I figured I had a group to help me figure out Python best approach in the space, but Python limitations just lead to stuff like needing a Kubernetes volume to host data.
Conversely none of the data scientists we acquired were willing to code in anything but Python.
I tried arguing in my company of the time there was a huge unsolved bit of market there (e.g. MLOP's)
Alas unless you can show profit on the first customer no business would invest. Which is why I am trying to start a business.
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