Over the last few months I have looked at basically every note taking app in existence, every "markdown" app also, and my verdict is there are two major, overlapping categories in this space
- Shit note taking apps
- Vibe coded note taking apps
There's basically no worthy software in this space.
pret-a-male 🤔
✋ alpha male
✋ beta male
👉 feta male 🧀
A pervasive problem amidst tech(ie) people is that they don't understand how the rest of people use computers, and that their ways are exceptional and in the grand schemes of things, unimportant.
Yes you can make computing work on an incomplete or unsupported platform, I can too. It's fun (or it was, rather...) and somebody has to do it, but that doesn't mean it's the elephant in the room.
We're no longer in a world where software and computing is an optional extra or an hobby. It's become the main conveyor of bureaucracy and business, it's become an inescapable hydra. I can't book a doctor appt or apply to a job without a functional computer AND phone. I probably just got excluded from a much needed scholarship due to a bug in their MOBILE APP which is the main way of applying to the scholarship and there's no way of handing in a physical application. They're talking of making ATMs refuse cards here and requiring QR codes for withdrawals etc.
And that matters more than our dotfiles.
I am generally predisposed to giving some benefit of the doubt to people who object a bit too enthusiastically to what I say, but at least try and make it about what I say... especially if you are gonna insult me.
In amongst these knee-jerk reactions, the impulse to fork is the most sensible, as it is akin to an actual protest or strike, but that requires organisation, willpower, commitment, goals, infrastructure, people.
People seem to think it's easy to fork something like Linux. It's not? It's not a fork when you clone some source code over to another server. GitHub etc have trivialised the word I guess, because their absurd web based patch submission model abuses the word. "Forks" on Github are just wasteful clones.
An actual fork is an attempt to spin up a new collaborative project. A hostile fork is a form of protest and an attempt at occupying and taking over infrastructure, because SOFTWARE IS INFRASTRUCTURE. Software is not a product. It's not a consumable.
When you declare (for) a fork you should understand what kind of commitment it is. You should know what you're doing. You should be able to foster or provide the necessary expertise to take over and continue an existing thing that already has momentum and an ecosystem around it.
Otherwise you're wasting everyone's time.
People are like "let's fork Linux", "let's make a new OS", or "let all switch to BoobsBSD" kinda need to chill tho.
It is a very common misconception of software especially pervasive amongst coders, that you can just whip up any sort of software package at a whim and build something equivalent to the existing, enduring packages.
Software is a social infrastructure not a product, it is built up over time, it's additive, and accumulative. It slowly accumulates features, edge cases, users, expertise, experts, social purchase, a literature of documentation, help, user/developer's public discussions, and similar.
Something like an OS or a big app also accumulates addons, apps, drivers, extensions, or whatever else they might be called.
When you say "let's make a new Linux", it's like saying the metro sucks let's build a new one. Let's use city X's trains to go to our jobs at city Y that we live in. Let's switch to horse drawn carts instead of the metro.
People would protest if the municipality just decided that they'd trust unpaid teenager interns to drive all public transport vehicles. You wouldn't dream of setting up an entire new transport network because (1) the existing one is YOURS it's a public good, and (2) it's fucking impossible are you insane?
But when it comes to software it feels like it's this simple and easy trivial thing. It's perhaps the exact same mindset that trusts it to LLMs: it's insubstantial and easy, why worry!? Well cos it's fucking not, that's why.
Cars are a fucking locust and a scourge and are the ultimate indicators of peaks of selfishness. Especially when you hop on your car thinking rather you'd avoid a single drop of rain than the whole city operate smoothly in the moment of an exceptional rain.
I heard emergency vehicles gridlocked. Just because some selfish fuck faces can't be arsed to get off their twatmobile.
Take a fucking bus.
News here in İstanbul in a.bit will report that torrential rain caused traffic all over the city, resulting in widespread gridlock.
No it didn't.
Selfish cunts who got in their cars in a day like this caused traffic.
I am in my second bus of the day, half empty especially given the hour, waiting for idiots in cars who would rather die and kill than let a drop of rain touch their stupid uncivilised heads.
And I had to get off the first one because it had practically stopped. I decided I'd rather try and walk to an alternative path that might be (and thankfully is) less gridlocked.
I might've even caught up with the same bus I got off as it's the same line and I had to circumnavigate a little impromptu pond of sewage that was impassable...
Bit old but ok
RE: https://circumstances.run/@davidgerard/117401666800260862
There's so much vulnerability scaremongering around now. Software has bugs. Software has vulnerabilities. In fact all software is definitionally insecure per the physical realities of computing. We do what we can (much less than the best we can, thanks economy :/ ) within those confines.
Vulnerabilities also don't really matter, RCE don't matter. Most "hacking" is social engineering.
We've completely lost sight of what computers are, how they work, what they're good for.
RE: https://circumstances.run/@davidgerard/117390225782096263
Papa: cc¹, ne
___
¹ chacchinatio clamorosa²
² I don't Latten, actually
The problem with using the computer for non-computer-touching work is that your way of working and imagination are limited by the miserable confines of the intellectual and cultural worlds of coders and designers.
If you can't tell, I'm doing the readings for my historiography course lol
(It's Michael Stanford's "A Companion to the Study of History")
"Ugh what's all this thing with pronouns nowadays we never had that until Tumblr"
This Mr. Historian in 1994:
I was gonna do LGBTQ but couldn't find anything with Q. Is there Q-bahn in some German hellhole, that sounds like something that could exist
LGBT (Lightrail Gadgetbahn Bicycles Trams)
It's only digital humanities if it involves the use of fingers, otherwise it's just rudimentary computer usage.