hi, I don’t normally promote here, but I feel compelled to ask if you’d like to test my thing. it’s a personal agent / API for creating and managing background cloud agents that I’m 100% committed to keeping open source & accessible as an alternative platform to putting all your eggs in one basket. there is also a desktop app and expanding the api to involve storage. kind of like agentic dropbox that can also do coding and has a full computer and ability to spin up N agents
Very much like the idea. Thanks for sharing. Noticed that you are pushing this fully anonymously and wanted to chat with you regarding a project that I’m building. Mind contacting me on the address in my profile?
Twitter is free, operational, easily accessible and known.
Finding a mastodon instance is a pain today. And "run your own" is not a great option. (It's a pain to run your own publicly accessible anything, these days. I will never go back to running my own email server ever again)
I suppose. I’ve also got 20x the followers on Twitter because I’ve been using it actively for years, but I’ve only recently started using mastodon. I can certainly say I’ve learned more about mastodon from posts on mastodon, but in this instance a user from twitter was helpful. Notably that user is also on mastodon. I’ll have to check to see if we’re following each other there. Every day I find more of my twitter friends on mastodon, and it’s a lovely feeling.
That is scary to me, an entire generation growing up within the walled garden and perceiving only Apple's products as what is possible for computers to accomplish. These computers are confining, as much as their constriction liberates the user in its simplicity, it is a real constriction. To me, that's exactly what the FLOSS movement hoped to avoid, and failed to do so by advocating for a purist f/open stance rather than winning smaller battles with open source at least staying in the war for market share.
Not just the walled garden. iPads are simply less capable as productivity devices than a laptop is.
Right now, for instance, I have this page open in a web browser, which has youtube playing in one tab, twitter in another, and this in yet another. I also have an iPhone simulator running behind this browser, a terminal window tail -f ing a logfile, and vscode in another window.
All of this stuff is open at the same time. I can hear audio from all of it, access all of it, see all of it, all at the same time. This is not possible on an iPad.
When was the last time you used iPadOS? It can run multiple programs, and can display two side-by-side just fine. Yeah that means it's a little clunky if you need to switch between three or more apps, but it's not like it can't have apps in the background when you can't see them. (Plus, no need to simulate anything, you're on a real iOS device.) There's still no Xcode for iOS, though there is Swift Playgrounds if you're an iOS developer, and VScode still hasn't made it to the App store, but it's got a keyboard and a mouse so if you squint a little, it's fine for a large segment of users.
Sure there are limitations; you can't hit F12 and drop into developer tools in Chrome, plus iOS Chrome is just reskinned Safari anyway. Oh and the sound thing. I'm not saying a full laptop doesn't have more, but the lost capabilities simply aren't showstoppers for everyone, especially if you're not a developer. In fact, because they can have build in cell-modems and macbook air's don't, combined with the fact that there are decent SSH clients, it's actually a better device for some.
Right, but some people do. And the people who do, used to be people who don't. And those people became people who do because it was possible. It is a bit worrying to me that so many people will be growing up with devices with such a low "skill ceiling"; devices which don't let your interest in technology bloom but rather restrict what can be imagined.
> And the people who do, used to be people who don't.
Yep. Walled gardens kill curiosity.
Curiosity is what got me into this industry, way before I knew it could be a career. Playing around, messing with files that ran my games, making web forums and learning to change how they look.
There is also very little digital knowledge for them to gain as they already handle their phones better than their parents. As a technically aligned kid I would have hated an iPad. Well, I still do...
Addiction is a problem, and it's a problem now, even with the harmful substances being prohibited. The fact that fentanyl and heroin are criminalized doesn't make anyone less likely to end up using them; the criminal penalties just make them even more dangerous to use. You're assuming that legalizing / decriminalizing fent and h possession the addiction situation would get worse -- I'm not convinced that is true.
If we legalized / decriminalized the possession of all drugs including fent and heroin, then people using them would not suffer criminal penalties for being caught with them. Oftentimes it's social factors like incarceration that make it doubly hard for addicts to escape the cycle of addiction. You are caught using and so you enter jail, and catch a felony on your record, making it even more difficult to land work. Or you end up with trauma from being imprisoned, further damaging your mental health, further driving you to escape with your drug of choice.
Long story short, prohibitionism doesn't really work in the sense that criminal penalties don't really deter drug users from using drugs. It just makes it even more dangerous to use the drugs!
1. addicts can't get predictable, reliable, pharmaceutical quality drugs. Street drugs aren't predictable, and cause overdoses because of that
2. addicts become criminals because of high street prices, leading to all sorts of associated crime
3. illegal drugs lead to massive profits for criminal organizations
4. people suffering from terrible diseases die in agony because painkillers that would work on their pain are illegal
5. people who suffer from chronic pain, which is not diagnosible, are forced to turn to street drugs
6. legalizing heroin is not going to tempt me to use it. Is it being illegal stopping you from using it?
7. being an addict is punishment enough. Why does anyone think punishing them further will improve matters?
8. consenting adults have a fundamental right to their own bodies. As the pandemic showed, our government is not very good at determining what drugs are best for people. It's more politics than science.
Write something extraordinary. Don't worry about the frame, what's your content? Write something so god-damn extraordinary people want to preserve it indefinitely, and will do the hard work for you. You've gotta write something absolutely biblical, fundamentally groundbreaking, revolutionary to the hearts and souls of all humanity.
I'm currently researching ways to integrate org-mode based citation structures with more commonly used tools such as Zotero, and apparently it's possible to make them talk nicely? The linked article states:
> Zotero is a good option, and if you’re using it it’s quite easy to use it with Org Cite. Out of the box, you can tell it to export your library, or parts of it, to a .bib file and automatically keep it in sync. I’d recommend installing the Better BibTeX extension though.
A non-technical friend and myself are looking into creating a blog for discussing issues related to health care, hence my interest on this front. Hopefully it's straightforward (famous last words)!
even if you ignore addiction , mobile phones have been integrated into society in so many infrastructure-like roles that they are hardly at all optional or 'ignorable' at this point.
When you live in a world that requires bills to be paid via mobile, rent to be paid via mobile, mass transit tickets bought via mobile, physical location reservation via mobile, as well as any customer service only available via mobile... who cares about personal addiction; normal life isn't feasible without a mobile phone at that point, and very few (if any at all) mobile phones are designed from the premise that they should respect your attention.
The mobile phones that are designed to preserve the users attention are widely incompatible with any functions that the user needs (billpay/specific group apps, whatever) to stay integrated with the systems being forced upon them, so those options are already non-starter.
That means this problem is worth discussing -- non-compulsive normal people as well as compulsive addicts are being affected by the lack of 'respect for attention' that mobile phones have, and this problem intersects with the 'required prevalence' of mobile phones across the world.
https://tinyfat.com
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