It’s absolutely one of my favourite books too. His style of humour was a perfect dichotomy of reverent/irreverent that made him the perfect author for a book like this. Beautiful appreciation of the world meets shake-you-awake, perspective-bending humour.
What syntax are you trying to use or thinking that you need? In Obsidian for example, remove all plugins except Daily Note and just start typing. Ignore all syntax except maybe bullets. Ignore properties and links. Ignore any habit-tracking or database tricks people say you need. Ignore the graph.
Or consider using Vim/Neovim and set a leader hotkey to open today’s journal/YYYY-MM-DD.txt
> Or consider using Vim/Neovim and set a leader hotkey to open today’s journal/YYYY-MM-DD.txt
For a broader audience: Create a shell script that runs “$EDITOR $JOURNALDIR/$(date +%Y-%m-%d).md”, and bind a system-wide keybinding to run that script. Works even for GUI editors.
This kinda highlights the exact issue I'm talking about. "Just open this, add that, change this, build that...sure it may work, but it's far too much effort for a journal."
I kinda agree that there should be a market for more journaling apps. Something like Logseq for non-programmers would be a hit.
At the same time… I think you overestimate how hard it is to get started with your own solution. The shell script and system-wide keybinding is just a convenience, since many of us like to automate things that we do daily. If you don’t want it you really don’t need it.
Just make one large file in whatever editor you prefer, and keep it always open. Manually add a new heading like “2024-07-14” to that file every day. Write notes in bullet points.
The basic system is independent of any app or script, and is more or less identical to what you would do in a paper journal. It’s a bit harder to add equations and diagrams, but a bit easier to search through it and access it from any device, that’s the trade-off. But writing a date stamp daily is really not a dealbreaker if your top priority is to not configure anything.
Try shifting it down: Another thing that can happen in 3 dimensional space but not 2 is that you can have two infinitely long rectangles which only intersect as a line at the origin (and nowhere else.) In 2 dimensions you'd get at least an overlapping quadrilateral in the intersection. (That doesn't imply I grasp it in 4.. ha)
I don't understand your comparison. It's true the intersection of two overlapping rectangles in a 2D space form another rectangle. But that's always true for all dimensions, isn't it? For example the intersection two overlapping lines in 1D space is another line, the intersection of two overlapping boxes in 3D space is another box.
The stackoverflow quote is the intersection of two 2D objects (planes) in a 4D space. If you take it down one dimension, you are looking at the intersection of two 1D objects (lines) in a 3D space. That intersection is always 0D object (a point). It's also a point if the lines intersect in 2D space. I would humbly conjecture two intersecting lines in any space with more than 1 dimensions would be a point.
My naive theory would be that the intersection of two N dimension objects in a space with more dimensions than N would always be a N-1 dimension object. Apparently not. The intersection of two infinite planes in 4D can be a point. Not any point mind you, only the origin. They must be very special planes.
Those are all good points. But to be clear for point #1, the devs never responded to this feature request. What you see in that thread is a couple of the community moderators (myself included, and all of my replies are tempered with "and I'd like it too") discussing some of the reasoning for why it likely is the way it currently is, and mostly just trying to simmer strong accusatory language. (But I totally understand the passion for our tools!)
#3 I'd likely be using my IDE (nvim) as well, except that I rely a lot on media and attachments for my work. And I just like to have dashboard/Kanban style views of things.
In retrospect, you all did a decent job of evenly responding to my spicy comments.
I will admit I assumed at least one of my direct responses was from someone involved directly with the development or design, or I probably wouldn’t have taken the confrontational stance I did. A year or so later, it does feel a bit accusatory, as you say.
All said though, I also don’t use that forum anymore (though I sometimes land on it from Google searching for plugins or tips) and I certainly don’t submit bug reports.
Obsidian’s biggest flaw remains, IMO, that there’s not a good way to report an issue with any confidence it’ll get an even chance of being addressed.
As far as I could tell, at least at the time, if the devs didn’t jump on it immediately, it’d end up automoved to a graveyard before it could ever possibly get traction. When things felt like they started getting actively argued down without considering user stances, that’s what tipped me over.
But, as I said in another comment, I eventually came back to Obsidian and renewed the commercial license so I could use it at work. It is a good system. I just think it’d be that much better with a more effective feedback loop.
Since the time of that thread, the dev team has grown, and WhiteNoise has joined the team officially in charge of bugs. I don't know the full systems they use in the background.
But I think I can definitely see where some of the burden of sorting and cleaning things up (following bug templates, or avoiding duplicate feature requests, etc.) could be abstracted away from the users, so that even if they can't be guaranteed any followup, they at least don't get the experience of being instantly shot down, just because we're trying to organize a busy forum.
For example, I really like how Linear App takes feedback. They have a button in the app, with a simple text-field prompt, "What if...". All the sorting and prioritizing is invisible to the users, but then somehow they even send a courtesy email to users after a related change has been made. That might be a function of team size vs. userbase size. No idea.
Definitely some room to improve. I'll pass this conversation on to the team, thanks.
I also grew to associate scanlines with sci-fi, which I love. I remember loving the original Ubuntu boot splash logo which had the line effect. And then was disappointed when it was changed to smooth and crisp.
I’ve seen Greg Egan mentioned a couple times. I love most of what I’ve read by him, but “The Clockwork Rocket” trilogy stands far above for me. A multi-generational hard sci-fi story. Characters who are intelligent, curious researchers who set out to learn and unravel the nature of their universe to try to save their world, set in alternate physics.
The drag introduced by the bucket would help align your boat as a makeshift drogue. If you can find a way to rig it up so you can adjust the angle from port to starboard, you could very roughly steer.
