Snitch-Thursday

Agreed. I'm hopeful to see if their research into synthetically created hydrogen fuel powered cars will get us fuel created by green energy that we can run in hydrogen fuel cell cars so we get the best of both cutting fuel emissions to net zero and still have the flexibility of cross-country drives and fast fuelings without having to have all our (agriculture, industrial, etc.) vehicles be BEVs.

> The HN guidelines are clear about political topics.

I agree with that guideline. I don't want HN in general to devolve into standard tribal mudslinging.

But I don't believe this is the standard 'breaking news' chum of the day, mostly because of the reputation of the author, though I readily admit the sensationalist title is click-baity.

So far (7 hours after this was first posted) most comments seem to be complaining that the HN users can't flag this away. I found the story interesting, it makes you think about just what the USGov is doing, if it's true or not is somewhat immaterial...the story was an interesting read, whether it was a non-fiction story or not.

Do you happen to have an opinion re: how this book compares with "The Power of Habit"?

I'm trying to decide whether to purchase "Tiny Habits" and the blurb on the seller's page is nice, but somewhat generic.

these tasks are similar to the 'intellgent dumbing down' talked about in Getting Things Done, no wonder they work!

Having said that...I'm not diagnosed as ADHD but I definitely feel I exhibit executive dysfunction symptoms, and one of my siblings was diagnosed, so I'm feeling confident I'm ADHD adjacent at least...and just trying to implement Getting Things Done helped me immensely. Not only does it help with having a less stressful day (no longer do I have "what am I missing? what am I forgetting? Ahhh, angst!" feelings), it also helps me to just stay on task and/or when I switch tasks, know that I have the confidence to come back to wherever I was.

Not to be a grumpy old man, but I will say, my known original definition of Web 3.0 was the Semantic Web [1] but I have no idea if that definition came before the one in TFA about those selling javascript webpage controls marketing their latest spinner product spinning it as web 3.0 > web 2.0.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

I would swap over to basic locksmithing. And / or swap to starving artist mode writing my manual AI-free fantasy novels.

Per [1], PWAs on webkit lacks push notifications, full-screen display, hardware acceleration, web bluetooth as major headline features needed, which Firefox on mobile appears to generally support per a 5-second glance (I didn't see web bluetooth, but the rest I did) [2].

That wikipedia page has a support table saying IOS supports PWAs as YES and Firefox as NO is odd considering Apple requires Mozilla to ship a crippled form of safari on IOS, if Firefox could ship their own true application, I suspect they would have better PWA support as a differentiator with Safari.

[1] https://thenewstack.io/owa-takes-on-apples-browser-ban-for-p...

[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...

I like #2 because, while I do have subscriptions lasting years, at some point, I will turn them off. Life circumstances change. But having a 'rent to own' model for digital files is perfectly acceptable to me.

I don't know. I know that nothing digital is truly permanent outside of like CD-Rs and Project Silica, but websites you own tend to be way, way more permanent than services like Xanga, MySpace, old LiveJournal, etc. and I don't see how Medium, Substack, and their similars also manage to hang around.

It's the age old 'control of technology vs convenience of content authoring'.

I do understand that there is much more flexibility of content to be hosted on Substack. It is, as it were, a OneNote page that can have access charged for. Pretty nice!

What I don't understand is...how do I get a PDF / talk authors who take this path into making one?

When the book was being authored, the True Blue subscribers could get a PDF when the book was done.

Can I do that now? If I pay $300, do I get a PDF still? Or has that opportunity passed, and in order to have an offline copy, do I need to subscribe and scrape all the content for my personal archive?

Like TFA states, one day Mr. Sinofsky can decide to download his zip and close up shop, what happens to the rest of us who subscribed? Our interesting nerd / business running / retro windows insider war stories archive goes poof.

I like this information. I want to 'own' it forever if only to review it and learn its lessons over and over during my career. I don't want to make unauthorized copies, but I can't actually buy this, I can only rent it, and that's a bummer.

So. I'm not subscribing nor am I scraping it. I just look at it regretfully from the distance of a free viewer.

Edit: less flamey mode

Thank you! I first went back to vector legacy, but then I saw monobook which is the wikipedia of my memories and have swapped there, so now I'm happy.

Kudos to WM for keeping the option for that theme in MediaWiki. Now I have a reason to browse logged in all the time.

good news! the delta chat application is available for PC, Mac, Android, iphone and gives you signal-style clients but powered by (encrypted if you want) email messages.

> Even if office space were as comfy as home and more fun than free beer, a couple hour drive would be a deal-breaker.

Private offices on a spoke with a collab/whiteboard room for a hub are the most tempting form of office space to me, but that still presumes that

1) my entire team is in one location. If we are going to have at least 2 people remotely, in order to not treat them as second class citizens, we all should be remote and only use remote-capable tools, which kills whiteboards

2) my commute is not crazy. It's really, really hard to compete with zero commute at all every single day. Nothing more convenient than doing the quick laundry / lunch prep / seeing family tasks

Coming back to the ~~bullpen~~ collaborative open plan office where we have nothing but L desks and nerf guns is not that tempting to me.

I would offer docker containers as helm charts so I can bake in preferences and defaults.

If a customer has never used kubernetes and just wants to run a few containers from you, I would consider handing them a docker compose file instead.

I use the multimedia and handwriting touch capabilities of my tablets and phones. Since Joplin does not have handwriting support, nor image embeds, nor file embeds. This is not to single out that tool, since most cross-platform notetaking applications have the same problem or a similar permutation.

I choose to be stuck with OneNote 2010 because:

1. It has local files I can back up and sync, no cloud account or online requirement (also more privacy from cloud scanning)

1. It supports embedding files so I can back up the notebooks and not have to go find every file scattered all throughout my hard drive in order to make those up two

1. I can hand write and have text be searched or OCRed

1. It has embedding support for images and audio and have them be interactive (you can see the image, play the video, listen to the sound right in the program)

Writing such a program is a very difficult problem. If it were easy, we would be having all of these features and not just another round of markdown text file editors.

Xournal++ is considering moving to a file format that would enable you to embed files that would be zipped up as part of the file format, since it already supports handwriting recognition and has basic text and good enough image display, I continued to watch it to see if it can take over my onenote use cases, but it's just not there yet.

What are the chances that type of story could be repeated today? Seems pretty unlikely, but corporations are in some ways 'dumb' and we do base a lot of our society on trust.

I agree. I picked signal over deltachat to replace group MMS threads because it was less startup friction than getting everyone to login to their email accounts on a mobile account since they got SMSes for free.

Now? Delta chat is looking plenty fine for doing private group chats.

My threat model is not nation states watching my metadata, I have horrible opsec for that. My threat model is discord and whatsapp etc. tossing me and my chat groups off a cliff at their sole discretion.

Signal gave me control over chat groups, and integrated with SMS as a bonus. Now? If I'm gonna have to deal with a separate SMS app anyways, I might as well use delta chat where I know my messages are automatically backed up in my email account.

Paperbak[1] is a good program for that.

[1] http://www.ollydbg.de/Paperbak/

[2] https://github.com/gxurma/PaperBak

I'd like Microsoft Project Silica to come to the market. Basically laser burning your data onto a cube of glass, like CD-Rs it is write once read many, but it can store so, so much more, and also once the bits are 'drilled' into glass...there is nothing to delaminate or stop reflecting. Is the glass scratched? No? Then a reading laser can see the bit state.

It feels like everyone keeps repeating the same dialog tree that 'but thou must store their contacts list' and I don't see why.

Solution? Store your contacts list on your device. Back it up with your offline chat backups (android does external chat backups now, IOS should be enabled plus give em icloud backups to boot).

with a new signal app on a new phone, you restore your chat backups and poof your contacts list gets loaded back. your new signal instance reconnects with the other clients and poof, Signal's excuse for using phone numbers and storing your contacts list on their servers is demolished.

It seems so simple to me, but I feel like I'm failing to understand something about why this is so hard.

I was about to say, wikipedia by citations was a big help to me. I just had to do Words citation feature to make it look right and poof the teachers were happy.

I agree. Yes, Ubuntu, Fedora, and openSUSE have been the big 3 for a long time, and I doubt they will go away, but Cosmic Desktop is currently the main thing I'm watching for a post-C-dominated-desktop-linux.

Ubuntu is trying to go centralized control with Snap.

Fedora is like a sibling comment says, doing just enough to coast on a desktop.

I'm using openSUSE right now, so can't complain there.

The failure to adopt Inferno in its day showed we as an industry got stuck on the unixy API and we've never managed to advance beyond that to this day.

Edit: trim rant way down.

Maybe it's just the contrarian streak in me, but Firefox being on Gecko is why I haven't left. There must be more than just one browser engine to rule them all! We got rid of our trident just to get blinkered.

Firefox moving to Blink means I'm just hopping over to whoever has the slickest Chromium clone right now.

Google's recorder app for android will let you record audio files and make some transcriptions, right on the device.

yeah. I've made the 'not going to do nothing but also not going to dedicate my life to self-hosting everything' choice: I bought a dumb spectre generic tv, then hooked up a roku stick, and am letting the pihole catch whatever it can, and hoping for the best from there.

So far, the banner ads in roku stay away, so it probably works well enough?

I was recently reading Steal Like an Artist and one of the sections referenced having an analog desk and a digital desk, the former for ideation and creativity modes, the latter for editing and revising modes, and I found that salient.

I love my fountain pens and paper, but for permanence and immediacy reasons. It's really hard to put a file attachment for safe-keeping on your hardcover journal.

I love OneNote, but for ease of dumping screenshots, digital ink annotations, file attachments, and generally building up context around a bit of specific information reasons. It's really hard to put your sticker from your family-member's letter on your OneNote notebook.

And those are two different tasks, just like the desks example above.

I watched [1] in parent comment (really about the 49 minute mark fwiw), that was heartwarming.

Ageism needs to be kicked from this industry. Yes, defeated, static, close-minded people of all ages exist, but don't tar everyone with that brush just because their hair is grey!

Very cool, I love the idea of feeding some rust code to my retirement community of old PCs, native PEs that I don't have to use Win32 and C to use.

I've not read the resource either, but it sounds like (from only reading your and GP comment) Anaconda moved something from free-as-in-freedom to free-as-in-beer-as-long-as-non-commercial.

Which is reasonable enough to me.

Based on the title, I read this article thinking I was going to read a 'master vulnerability' or weakness of some sort in all major crypto implementations.

I was ready to say 'well actually - as long as you have perfect forward secrecy and maybe a double rachet you can make it virtually impossible to break the encryption at scale blah blah blah', like a good little armchair crypto parrot would.

But instead, I learned a little something new about how cryptography studies work. Thank you HN!