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It's good planning ahead for when Apple no longer supports perfectly fine old-ish machines. Both my mother and wife are now using Linux not because their computers broke but because Apple gave up on them.

Just in case some additional decision-making functionality would be useful, we're working on a Lua mod for that. https://gitlab.com/medlabboulder/modpol

It seems to me that the goal should be not to require the other user to be using Emacs, since the underlying data is text files anyway. The open protocol approach seems most exciting, enabling people to use whatever editor they like best with the same documents simultaneously.

Great to hear! I tried using it at CommunityRule.info but ran into no-go issues, which I posted here: https://gitlab.com/commento/commento/-/issues/391

Also would love for it to be easier to match the CSS to the host site.

Was running it self-hosted on Cloudron but would be happy to try the paid, hosted product if it worked for me.

I use it daily for syncing among multiple Linux PCs and two Android/Lineage devices. I actually like that mobile sync is manual because my usage is so heavy it would involve moving around a lot of data unnecessarily.

Setting up my wife with NC on mobile, however, reminded me of lots of ways in which I've accustomed myself to some pretty weird behaviors, like manual syncing, the built in text editor that doesn't load without being online.

I love NC (I use it both for personal needs and with students in my lab) but there are definitely UX issues that present a barrier to new users.

Switched to FairEmail and never looked back. Just a beautiful piece of software.

In addition to some dinosaur bone pictures, this post is an argument against posting preprints because a) the author doesn't want to deal with feedback from people who aren't official peer reviewers, and b) doesn't want to bother reading anyone else's preprints.

That's fine for the author. Nobody should force you!

But being in a field with extremely slow peer review processes, preprints are a lifeline. (I still believe in the importance and value of long, careful peer review, which I think is a good counterpoint to quicker pp publishing.) Often I get the best feedback from non-scholars who read the preprints. And ideas circulating in preprints start to forge new collaborations and relationships long before the journal publication happens.

Shout out in particular to OSF.io which lets me post non-crawlable private links to papers pre-publication (so they don't show on Google Scholar, etc) and then easily port those to a public preprint when the time is right.

I don't see it. I recently bought a System76 laptop, in honest competition with a comparable (and comparably priced) machine from a huge corporation. I ended up going for S76 based on better battery life and better design, plus the benefits of open firmware and excellent hardware integration with Linux. No regrets. I also got my employer to buy me a S76 desktop at work.

At home, though, I do run a slightly modified old Dell desktop that I bought on Craigslist for basically nothing, and for daily work I much much prefer it to any laptop. So yeah, old desktops and S76 FTW.

I can't express enough my gratitude on a daily basis for what pandoc enables me to do. I made a simple Emacs script that I use to output files, and I use it constantly for Latex PDFs, HTML output, RevealJS slides, and odt/docx/etc. All with bibliographies fron Zotero in zillions of formats. As a professor and journalist, I need to use a wide range of output formats, but as a human being I like to work in clean, simple text files that will never be obsolete. Pandoc, way more than any tool, gives me the freedom to work in any writing environment I like and keep that distinct from whatever weird formatting preferences a journal, magazine, or publisher might have. I've written two books with Markdown and a huge variety of articles. I am so thankful for the care with which it has been built and maintained. Thank you.

I recently applied this article and more to current debates in open source: https://nathanschneider.info/Tyranny

Same, except I use NextCloud to share across machines. And edit in Emacs. I still have trouble seeing what I am missing by using simple, universal files instead of some lock-in app. Any extra feature seems to come at the cost of losing the benefits of constraint.

I disagree. I have a Thelio and now a Lemur Pro, and the distinctiveness of S76 design is one of the great pleasures for me. It's quirky, geeky, and fun. It's decidedly not the kind of thing you'd get from a minimalist corporate giant. It's what you'd get from a company making computers out of their factory in Denver, hiring local geeks.

If you get the chance (post-corona), stop by the factory, meet the lead designer Kate, and be amazed. She's a visionary.

While this is very much in line with Rerum Novarum's call for state assistance for the poor, the way Francis presents this indicates that he understands it as a call for trying something distinctly new. Otherwise, he would simply talk about buttressing the welfare state, as the church often does. Instead, he's talking about the need for considering a different approach.

Article author here. I don't get the sense that he's just talking about a living wage for marginal workers. That is a longstanding demand from the church, but the language here is different. To speak of "universal" and "basic" here is a clear nod to UBI of some sort, as are the references throughout to care work and activist work, which are never going to earn a wage in the labor market.

+1 on the point about hedging against technocratic solutions, however. He expands on that language a lot in Laudato Si. I should have highlighted that in the article. Unlike many Silicon Valley UBI advocates, he does not see this as a simple, algorithmic fix, but his emphasis is on the way it could help bring about cultural change, transforming what kind of work we value and orienting the economy toward a recognition of universal human dignity.

Will check back to chat more. Fun to see this show up in my HN feed!

I agree this is annoying, but you can always Exit the program from the icon in the menubar (works for me on both GNOME and xfce).

Big thank you to the Zotero team (@dstillman) for your ongoing work, particularly the much improved web interface. One of my favorite features is to easily share a URL of a Collection with someone interested in the subject.

My setup: writing in Emacs with markdown, export with pandoc, which grabs Zotero's .bib file made with the Better BibTex plugin. Works really smoothly, though takes a little tinkering to get it set up on a fresh rig.

Suddenly my lab's Cloudron + droplet costs seem low. Just the Cloudron subscrption opens up a world of easy to deploy and maintain open productivity tools with linked accounts.

Any word about whether this affects Thunberbird?

I briefly spoke with Wu some weeks ago about platform cooperativism. I suppose he wasn't impressed.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qvxbgq/its-time-for-mark-...

Social.coop is a cooperative instance of mastodon. A better kind of network also needs a better kind of business model. You might like it. We do.