Personal experience bias in mind: I feel like owners and managers are less interested in resolving tech debt now vs even 5 years ago… Business owners want to grow sales and customer base, they don’t want to hear about how the bad decisions made 3 years ago are making us slow, or how the short-term solution we compromised on last month means we can’t just magically scale the product tomorrow. They also don’t want to give us time to resolve those problems in order to move fast. It becomes a double-edged sword, and they try to use the “oh well when we hit this milestone we can hire more people to solve the tech debt”… But it doesn’t really work that way.

Its also possible I’m more sensitive to the problem now that I’m in them lead/principal roles rather than senior roles. I put my foot down on tech debt a lot, but sometimes I can’t. Its a vicious cycle and it’ll only get worse the longer the tech sector is stuck in this investor-fueled forever-growth mindset.

Too much “move fast and break things” from non-technical people, not enough “let’s build a solid foundation now to reap rewards later”. Its a prioritization of short term profits. And that means we, the engineers, often get stuck holding the bag of problems to solve. And if you care about your work, it becomes a point of frustration even if you try to view the job as just a job.

Honestly, I’m not mad if AI fully defeats captchas to the point they go away. They almost always fail to be usable via accessibility tools. These things might block some automated systems, but they also block people with disabilities.

Roku supports chromecast (and airplay, if/when needed)

The main reason people are distributing podcasts via youtube or spotify and not via RSS is because podcast RSS (podcasting 1.0) gives limited visibility into audience or whether anyone even cares.

Podcasting 2.0 is trying to build a standard that still uses RSS but provides the info podcast creators need to understand their audience. Basically, what can we do to keep people from relying on closed-source solutions and go back to RSS as the main driver of distribution. Its not intended to be used for targeting and mostly just provides download counts and such (which rss doesnt)

I also have that UPS rack mounted, just the cage nut bolts. It doesn’t concern me at all. I have it towards the bottom of the rack since its heavy(ish) but its also not too deep so there isn’t a lot of flex on it.

I have not explored Trillium enough, but from what I know, it seems to be an excellent choice and worthy of mention and advocacy. I did not say that Trillium was bad.

Unless obsidian goes fully foss, and gets way way more stable, i’ll be using the genuinely better choice, thanks though.

I’m glad it’s a better choice for you! Replying to you doesn’t mean I was saying your choice was incorrect for you or others, merely that I wanted to discuss in context of your comment. Apologies if you read that from my response. I do not think I can declare a genuinely better choice. In my opinion, the most important thing with note-taking is whether you keep returning to do it and can easily find past notes.

You’re doing that thing where someone starts going to bat and listing off this that or this other thing to rationalize their own choice or rationalize the choice for others.

Ok? I don’t recall saying Obsidian was THE choice, nor that your reasons were incorrect, so I don’t know why you’re casting me in that role. Generally I lean towards self-hosting and foss options for the reasons you describe, but this is an instance where I calculated differently, and I just want to provide context that, compared to other proprietary options, Obsidian is way less a concern. I’ve personally gone down rabbit holes with foss alternatives because i’ve been overly concerned about things and ended up not being productive. I’ve also chosen foss tools before that I thought would be safe or easy to migrate out of, and then ended up having a terrible time anyway when the day came that it became abandonware or a new maintainer took it in a different direction.

Perhaps you are doing that thing where you forget that not everyone can easily use a fully foss option and that not everyone can reliably install a tool from github in the event it isn’t available on an app store or via an installer? (I’m certainly guilty of this sometimes myself)

Even for a tool like Trillium, while it wouldn’t enshitify the same way a proprietary tool could, it could also just be abandoned, no forks could arise, and someone without a ton of self-hosting/compiling/cli-based install troubleshooting experience would be in just as bad a situation for migrating or going elsewhere. Even right now, Trillium is technically unsupported on macOS, so it’s not a great option for some out the gate. (Nor does that make Obsidian automatically better)

100% agree that Notion is fantastic compared to OneNote. I also switched back in 2018.

Unfortunately, their mobile app is still fairly sub-par, their data format is proprietary and not markdown, and it is only slightly cheaper than Obsidian Sync. Also, their integration system has basically gone nowhere. Which sucks because it could be good. I also have lost data on numerous occasions due to their sync system and their official policy is “oops”. In that respect, OneNote is better.

I used Notion for about 5 years before switching to Obsidian recently. Notion was far better than anything id used and generally it is a good tool, but i also was never able to make notion work as well for me as Obsidian, esp. in a way that i optimistically keep information in it. Notion often was just enough effort (esp when on the go with mobile) that i just simply could never use it to its full potential.

However, obsidian, imo, does require some plugins to meet my needs. But i think this is a good thing. Projects basically does everything i like about Notions databases. Dataview takes care of database views.

Might as well switch now to something which largely works better and is more feature rich.

Which is relative to personal taste and needs.

If I was going to trust obsidian, their code would be fully foss.

I definitely agree that I wish it was fully foss, but i also think it is a far better option than notion, onenote, etc for most people (as long as it meets their needs and preferences) since with obsidian you do actually own your data and you don’t need to pay unless you want their sync.

Since it isn’t, there is nothing future proofing my notes in their software.

Even if, worst case, Obsidian enshitifies, all the notes are markdown or json (json for config and things that don’t work in markdown, but the community and the devs work hard to keep that to a minimum) so you can still access your stuff in any text editor and it will be fairly easy to get the important data migrated into anything else. (I often use vs code to manage my notes, for instance, esp for big find and replace or re-org tasks) Even the non-standard markdown from obsidian and the most popular plugins reads well and could fairly easily be replicated with remarked or other markdown libraries. In this way, i think Obsidians approach is far superior to a tool which uses a database to store its data, since a database would require some effort to use standalone, or some work to migrate it to another tool or some sort of minimal client interface.

By its design, Obsidian could also be replaced by reverse engineering their api. If obsidian takes the dark path, we will probably see a foss community grow from the plugin dev community to replace it and be as compatible with plugins as possible, even if its just the basic text and display components. Tbh, it could totally be a vs code plugin, an emacs mode, [insert any text editor with plugins here]… thats how portable the data is. The obsidian devs know this, and they are intentional about staying this way. A shift in attitude here would be noticed by the community very quickly.

Anyone who just casually adds their own affiliate links without asking is not your friend. All they had to do was ask. Consent is easy. https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/8/21283769/brave-browser-affiliate-links-crypto-privacy-ceo-apology

The CEO is also known to be homophobic, has some ties with some far right chat boards, and has been resistant to privacy checkups/audits, which is a red flag on its own. I wont post links, but there are plenty of threads here and on other forum/aggregator sites where they can be found. These points are obviously something that is less about the browser itself and more the people running it, but if the people running a project are untrustworthy or exhibit behaviors that are exclusionary, one has to consider using or supporting their products.

Qemu can also easily evade anti-cheat, iommu passthrough or not. Lots of great guides over at the level1techs forum.

Thanks for the detailed response, definitely a lot to consider there.

I think part of where I’m coming from is that i see the negative points, especially around preventing money being spent or gaining unfettered access to information, as items that are only a few laws away in event of a ultra-conservative majority, regardless of a digital ID system. With a MAGA-driven majority at some point there is not much in the way of patriot act 2: electric boogaloo, patriot act 3, 4, etc. So i tend to see the CBDC fear mongering as being distracted by the trees instead of considering the forest in total. There’s not much to be done to prevent it, but whether its mandatory or not, the bigger problem is who ends up in charge of it and especially who ends up writing the initial laws for it.

My cat is FIV+ and is generally more sensitive than most, so its much easier to determine what things bother him. But 100%, either they need a good brushing, something is on their coat that isn’t sitting well, or its a food/treat, if puking is frequent.

And no matter how much they love the greenies, the greenies might be the problem.

Not a solution to your current problem, but an alternative to consider depending on your network setup.

I’ve been running unbound as my DNS via OPNSense. Same capabilities for blocklists, plus some nice privacy benefits with DoH/DoT. I think you can use unbound with pihole too, fwiw, i just don’t have a need for that.

This. We already rely on digital, currently through a rather small number of payment providers who, at the end of the day, suck at privacy and security. I’m not terribly well educated on digital ID, but i generally don’t get why it is any worse than our current system (in the US, at least) of a bunch of corp run finance systems which are already very transparent to government surveillance, and care more about appeasing shareholders than security or privacy.

Comparing visa/mastercard/discover/credit reporting/banks etc to a government based digital option, at least the government option can be beholden to voters and at least the government, as a whole, isn’t serving shareholders wants over privacy/security.

It certainly means an authoritarian government could abuse the system more easily, but its a mistake to think that an authoritarian government can’t already abuse the current system to the same extent.

Whether the US adopts their own stablecoin and bans/doesn’t ban other crypto, and whether this digital ID thing is the harbinger of that, it wont change what the vast majority of people reach for at the end of the day. Which, pending massive societal upheaval, will be whatever the government backs.

That’s how Microsoft markets their “safe links” in Outlook, which is more or less the same behavior of wrapping all links with a redirect. Whether they actually do anything with that to save you from phishing attempts or whatever… who knows. Even if there is a safety feature, it’s still an easy way to mine url query params for data or learn about the user for other purposes (which they may or may not be doing)

IMO if you can’t turn it off, there’s a secondary motive to the feature. Especially when the feature is marketed from a place of fear rather than aid.