Today a co-worker tested positive and was hospitalized, the first one in our company and the first such person personally known to me. This person has worked remotely for a long time, so there is no reason to think they carried it to others here in the office.
Another possible example of this that I thought of yesterday: church worship teams, which frequently lead songs whose theme or refrain is “Here I am singing this song and worshiping”.
In short, the entire published content of the CMS is contained in or derived from a single file.
Scrolling down past the cover art shows the chapter marks, as usual.
Even just being able to search the Memo field would be an improvement, because then I could use that as a "tags" field.
Another news clipping:
Washington Post: An alarming number of scientific papers contain Excel errors
The Australian researchers found that roughly 1 in 5 of these papers included errors in their gene lists that were due to Excel automatically converting gene names to things like calendar dates or random numbers.
...Even more troubling, the researchers note that there's no way to permanently disable automatic date formatting within Excel. Researchers still have to remember to manually format columns to "Text" before you type anything in new Excel sheets — every. single. time.
Another dimension of comparison: the ways in which I intuit (rightly or wrongly) each activity to be healthy or unhealthy for my personal development.
With Twitter, there is this great Unease (in which many of us share) that the actual activity of Twitter is both addictive and destructive of one's inner life, regardless of who you interact with. On the other hand, I have also found my thinking challenged and broadened by reading and interacting with people I'd ordinarily never hear from.
With church, it's sort of the opposite; I understand the activity of weekly communal worship and eating itself to be fundamentally (profoundly) sound; but that there are also Problems caused by tribalism among the particular people you might find yourself with.
I started a new tutorial series: @Github for Poets - no code or knowledge of code required. https://t.co/1fVNyzMyOB pic.twitter.com/Tj1c92XQNh
— Daniel Shiffman (@shiffman) April 20, 2016
Definitions
Separate from the arguments, both sides need a place to say what they mean by certain key terms.
Either side can define a term, and for each term each side can explain what they mean by it with text of any length.
Others are thinking about this as well! From kottke:
It is the assertion of The Walk of Life Project that the Dire Straits song Walk of Life is the perfect thing to play at the end of movies.
Sixth Argument: “Scandinavians aren’t as happy as Americans”
Writer brings up suicide rates as, I guess, a proxy for economic results.
The simple explanation for this is that frozen darkness is depressing and this has nothing to tell us about Scandinavian economics.
At one extreme, we can see that Twitter and Facebook
- make web publishing completely simple for authors of no technical ability whatsoever -- but only at steps 3, 4 and 5;
- shift that difficulty to either side of the publishing lifecycle: steps 1-2, step 6 and step 8;
- make you dependent upon them for step 7 (backup) (Twitter makes this easy, Facebook makes it impossible);
- make steps 9 and 10 effectively impossible.
As of yesterday multiple targets are supported. So for any tag that I design in my custom markup, I can specify what output it will produce for HTML targets, and LaTeX, and plain text, etc. I blogged about it.
This will always make me smile: https://vimeo.com/57981966
3. Payment Processors
Some have said (including myself, initially) that Bitcoin would be the way to go. I think the truest thing ever said about Bitcoin is that everyone who touches it becomes either a thief or a victim. It's possible that Bitcoin could be incorporated, but in my experience and from what I've seen keeping an eye on Bitcoin since near the beginning, it's just far too complex for average people to secure their Bitcoin wallets.
Support for YAML is probably a long way off but it could go several ways:
- Hardly Nothing: Just strip YAML headers in document previews (just like Marked)
- Minimal: Implement syntax highlighting for YAML headers along with stripping YAML in document previews
- Nice: Implement basic metadata (say title, date, and author) per-sheet and per-group, in an "internal" Ulysses format, and optional inclusion of this metadata as YAML when exporting to Markdown. Plus #1 and #2 for use in external files.
- Really nice: In addition to #3, allow users to define their own custom fields. To preserve some simplicity, these need only support strings of text and could be the same for all projects.
Artwork — When I started the site in 1998 I was using Victorian spot art illustrations (Examples: 1, 2). They're one of the few (maybe only) design elements that have survived to the present; amazingly, they still "fit". But I'm still using the original scans, because I lost the Dover art book I got them from. Just recently I finally ordered another copy.
The plan is for Jess to paint & ink her own watercolor versions of the same sketches. We've talked about doing this for a couple years now. I'll probably leave the originals in place on very old posts (the ones that predate the 2012 redesign) and update newer ones with fresh, colour, retina-quality artwork.
Two years later:
The Magazine, Newsstand, and "Subcompact Publishing" all turned out to be duds.
Ebooks may still be relevant for now. But the medium is so annoying to work with due to platform fragmentation and complete lack of open distribution mechanisms.
Personally at this point the mediums that interest me most are (1) plain old web pages (for reasons like this) and (2) printed books (which, unlike any digital format, have actual archival qualities).
My current paperless setup:
- Fuji ScanSnap S1300i. The OCR in the included scanning software does a great job, which means my PDFs are fully searchable from the moment they're scanned
- Hazel for automatically filing incoming scans. I set up rules to search for specific strings and dates within the scanned PDFs and use those to rename, tag and move them into a special "Paper Documents" folder.
- An Amazon Basics shredder. This thing is not very quiet but it is aggressive and does the job quickly. I keep it in the basement and either recycle the cuttings or compost them.
@joeld wrote above:
there's no way to file thoughts entered here into a different stream later on
Yes there is, we just obviously haven't been clear about it. If you "repost" from Your Thoughts to a stream, it moves it to that stream.
As to where they appear for others, they are under the "General Thoughts" tab on a user's page.
If you have $178k to throw at an unexpected hitch in your crowd funded project, you are basically someone who has way more money than you know what to do with.
This explains the warehouse, the lawyers, the accountants, and (let's be honest) the unrelenting optimism about following your passions.
I could be wrong. But I seem to remember that a lot of the Apple side of the "Apple vs PC" arguments of yore focused on "how is it used" rather than "who has the fastest CPU".
Really, just think an open source Tumblr, optionally self-hosted, with RSS-powered "Follows" and Dashboard.
In my column on Microblogging with RSS I'm proposing that, in the future, blogging software would be fused with RSS reading. (Think Tumblr with its "follow" functionality, but self-hosted.)
The Vouch proposal for webmention abuse would fit very nicely with this model, if we allow follow lists to do double-duty as "endorsements".
So each blog will publish a list of other blogs it publicly follows -- basically a list of its RSS subscriptions.
These follows serve the purpose of Vouch's endorsements. Another blog could then send you a webmention if you follow them, or if a blog you follow follows them.
This automates the process of creating a vouch for webmentions you send, although the bulk of the "work" is still done on the sender's end. The sender simply needs to look up the follows of all the target's follows and see if it finds itself in there anywhere.
The initial "tile" Start screen has a metric ton of crap on it. Very sad.
In comparing ProtonMail with the GPG approach, remember the following:
- As noted earlier, it's far harder to compel or steal that metadata from ProtonMail than from typical email providers. The U.S. government can have that info from Google very quickly and silently.
- GPG remains little-used because it is too complicated for most users. It's worth considering why Snowden resorted to Lavabit rather than trying to educate lots of lawyers and activists on how to use GPG. (He did use GPG for his most sensitive correspondence, however.)
- Both approaches are equally vulnerable to a compromised user machine.
- Even if you and your correspondent both host your own private email server, that server can be physically and silently seized if it is located on U.S. soil, or the soil of any country the U.S. can strong-arm, or if it is hosted/colocated by any company with U.S. ties. And you can't count on encrypted filesystems to save you from government forensics.
It would also be nice for Reporter to have access to Healthkit data, thus allowing a combined data source for reporting from any other fitness apps/wearables you might be using.
Being an 80s kid, I love Reading Rainbow. But I found myself unexpectedly dismayed by yesterday's Kickstarter.
What is it we loved about Reading Rainbow?
And, setting aside why we enjoyed it, what kind of cultural value did it have?
(You can comment on my blog here or make your own stream with the same name.)
Property is a point of honour. The true contrary of the word “property” is “prostitution”. And it is not true that a human being will always sell what is sacred to that sense of self-ownership, whether it be the body or the boundary.
As I mentioned before, Gelernter's book is mainly interested computer syntheses of human creative problem-solving, but he devotes a couple of chapters to looking at what his ideas mean for poetry, ancient thought, and spirituality.
Gelernter believes low-focus thought is the medium or music of mystical spiritual experiences.
His argument for this is rich and well worth reading. I can't include it in full here, and I'm afraid to edit it down lest I mutilate it, but you can read a few of the most relevant pages of it in this PDF scanned from the book.
Another thing about Pinboard's killer feature: it's the kind of thing where, once you sign up for it, it doesn't make any sense to cancel it or restart it. That definitely doesn't hurt the economics any.
The Territory Tax
The designers promise "the game will never offer players a paid-for advantage over opponents – the only way to build a successful empire will be through commitment and planning."
This is nice, but perhaps we could go one further: not only will players not be able to buy advantage over other players, but players that do amass large amounts of territory (above a certain threshold of ridiculousness) will need in-app purchases in order to retain their empires at baseline levels.
Given that this game could require significant ongoing server infrastructure and attendant costs, this could be a way of keeping the whole thing sustainable.
This is body text[^1].
[^1]: This is a footnote
This brings us to Analogy #2, the second statement above:
"Are all forms of music poetic?" -- no, that's not quite what I'm asking;
Rather, the possibility we are considering is that: all the forms of language that share some overlap with music are poetic forms.
“In handwriting the brain is mediated by the drawing hand, in typewriting by the fingers hitting the keyboard, in dictation by the idea of a vocal style, in word processing by touching the keyboard and by the screen’s feedback. The fact seems to be that each of these methods produces a different syntactic result from the same brain. Maybe the crucial element in handwriting is that the hand is simultaneously drawing. I know I’m very conscious of hidden imagery in handwriting—a subtext of a rudimentary picture language. Perhaps that tends to enforce more cooperation from the other side of the brain. And perhaps that extra load of right brain suggestions prompts a different succession of words and ideas.”
— Ted Hughes, from this highly informative interview in Paris Review
The only risk with allowing span-level spoiler markup is that the writer will be too indiscreet when choosing what sentences they wish to reveal and which to redact.
Swiss to vote on 2,500 franc basic income for every adult
Another example of basic income -- this one not, I think, very likely to have good results overall.
For one thing, it should be suspect because it is purely the result of a popular referendum; the only thing needed to get it on the ballot was to collect 100,000 signatures from the populace. So the amount of the "basic" income was probably picked very arbitrarily based on popular appeal, rather than sound economic analysis.
For another, the amount is too high. As Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution notes:
With that, a married couple could piece together more than 67k and simply not work, so this sum appears infeasible.
Today at the Chaos Computer Congress (30C3), xobs and I disclosed a finding that some SD cards contain vulnerabilities that allow arbitrary code execution — on the memory card itself. On the dark side, code execution on the memory card enables a class of MITM (man-in-the-middle) attacks, where the card seems to be behaving one way, but in fact it does something else. On the light side, it also enables the possibility for hardware enthusiasts to gain access to a very cheap and ubiquitous source of microcontrollers.
Serving up UTF-8 encoded plain-text files on the web may look garbled in the browser if the server's not sending the correct headers. I'm currently having this issue with the transcript links on my podcast episodes.
Misc low-hanging fruit
- Seldon makes holographic recordings of himself that he sets to play at certain dates decades and centuries after his death. In these recordings he appears and explains to whoever happens to be watching the likelihood and significance of events which he has predicted, and which at the time the recording "airs" will have only just occurred. These replays take place in the city's Time Vault, which makes for an obvious play on Apple's Time Capsule backup software. Steve Jobs could appear in an advanced version of an Apple Time Capsule.
- Power struggles within the Foundation form a big part of its narrative. Something related could be made of the ousting of Scott Forstall, the subsequent rise of Jony Ive and the end of skeuomorphism.
Streams by this user that have been favorited by others.
Today a co-worker tested positive and was hospitalized, the first one in our company and the first such person personally known to me. This person has worked remotely for a long time, so there is no reason to think they carried it to others here in the office.
It’s been a couple of weeks now since the John Hopkins COVID-19 dashboard was at all useful in the US. It was handy for tracking the global spread during the early stages, but at this point we all know cases are everywhere and skyrocketing. The useful dashboards and tracking sites are those that operate on a more local level.
It will probably become interesting to look at again in a couple of months, when we might start to see a plateau or decline in the global number of cases.
Felt impacts in Minneapolis so far:
- No rush hour traffic whatsoever for the last couple of weeks.
- Jess (spouse) has been home with the kids and the loss of any outside activity (gym, social gatherings with other adults, playground visits) combined with so much time with the kids who also have no other outlets, combined with the larger uncertainty about Everything, is taking a mental toll on her, as it would be on me if I were home alone with the kids.
- This has exacerbated the already suboptimal divide between our two lives, hers centered at home and mine at work. Ideally we would both be home at this time. I’m upset with my employer for taking the stance that all of this represents some kind of business/profit opportunity rather than doing its part to limit the spread as much as possible.
- My 4-year old has regressed in independence somewhat; he has no time with his preschool teachers and peers, and the more he is stuck at home the more constantly he demands our attention to keep himself from being bored. This is not unusual considering his age. He’ll obviously grow past this, but it’s affecting us now.
- Jess went for groceries yesterday morning and the place was pretty empty for a Saturday morning. Lots of reminders to keep six feet apart. No one was using the self-checkout.
- Various people at work who have the option (i.e., their work can be done remotely) have been working remotely.
- Political chatter in the hallways and around offices has ticked up very noticeably. The vast majority of it is pro-Trump, which makes sense because most of my co-workers are right-wing.
- A couple of my siblings are filing for unemployment benefits due to reduced or no pay from their jobs.
On another note: a lot of celebrities seem to believe they can help us during these trying times by …being famous online from home. It’s getting old.
Yesterday the Governor announced a “stay at home” order will be in place in Minnesota for 2 weeks starting Friday at midnight.
Many people are confusing this with a “shelter in place” order, which would be much more stringent. The stay-at-home order allows us to leave home for a number of reasons, such as to get groceries, exercise outside, work jobs in exempted/critical sectors, etc.
The last one is interesting. The guidance on exempt industries is very broad. According to MN’s Dept of Employment commissioner:
About 78 percent of the jobs in Minnesota are in critical industries as defined by the executive order, so it's just 22 percent that are not. (source)
There is also no enforcement, so companies can declare themselves exempt and require their workers to come in as usual. My own employer has taken this route. We sell desks and monitor walls, but since some of our customers are in exempt agencies they have decided we are exempt as well.
Gov. Walz dithers about a statewide shelter-in-place order
Gov. Walz is, I think, two steps behind the curve of what we actually need to happen right now. By his own account to WCCO this morning: A) today's numbers are going to jump way up, and B) the rate of growth is going to accelerate! Besides this, he knows that the ratio of tested cases to the actual number out there is abysmal. And yet: a shelter in place order is “not the situation we believe we're at.”
Developments today:
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Grocery store workers included in definition of “emergency workers” in MN, qualifying them for free healthcare.
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Some more malls closing, following MoA’s closure yesterday.
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Trump has invoked an act that gives him the authority to direct private production in times of war (ventilators? testing?) but is dithering about whether he will use it.
I only signed the Defense Production Act to combat the Chinese Virus should we need to invoke it in a worst case scenario in the future. Hopefully there will be no need, but we are all in this TOGETHER!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 18, 2020
Seems apparent that the lack of testing capacity is going to require blunt, blind quarantining measures, which have a heavy heavy economic toll, rather than targeted quarantining measures which would have a lighter economic touch.
Today I found out that a co-worker's son wired a house for someone who has now tested positive for COVID-19, and subsequently fell sick, missing a week of work. My co-worker, who is now working remotely, spent time at his son’s house while he was sick.
You can see I’m on the side of the fork that says that the virus is real and serious, meaning there will be many thousands of deaths due to an overwhelmed healthcare system, and many thousands with permanent lung damage. I expect that my wife and I will get the virus, and am cautiously optimistic that we will not require medical attention to live through it.
The outcome that would pose an something of an ideological smack-up for me would be if less than 50 thousand people die from COVID-19 (i.e. fewer people than do from influenza in a typical flu season) or have permanent lung damage (and assuming SARS-CoV-2 spread doesn’t become a new seasonal event like H1N1). As dumb as it would make me feel, this would be my preferred outcome.
Personal Prognostication Snapshot:
- The crisis will increase in severity through at least July, driven by severe healthcare shortages and consequent too-late severe quarantine measures further braking the economy, as we have seen in Italy.
- No measure big enough to offset major economic downturn will be able to pass in Congress.
- So, lots of unemployment and almost no relief.
- If we get the disease, and the public mood, under control before June, Trump is reelected in November. This is soon enough to avoid the worst economic pain, so that we all recalibrate our narratives and return to our baseline levels of (dis)satisfaction. Biden will be an ineffective nominee and, perhaps narrowly, end up as John Kerry 2.0.
- If we get there between June and September, Trump loses in November, since by then it’s too late to prevent the massive economic pain’s effect on his already-bad approval numbers.
- If the crisis drags on much of the way through September,
the Trump admin attempts to use emergency powersbig pressure in Congress from WH and some states to postpone an imminently disastrous election.Honestly not sure if SCOTUS upholds against the inevitable legal challenge.[edit 3/19/20: apparently the prevailing legal theory is that only Congress can change the date of the election. How exactly that plays out in a pandemic, I’m not sure. But even so, I think election-postponing is for sure going to be on the discourse table.]
As with so many aspects of society, the US public’s model has done a “hard fork.”
It seems to me that one xor the other is going to run smack up against the painful difference between its model and reality. Maybe such a disillusioning event would be a silver lining for our society.
I'm not so sure about the exclusive-or though. Might we emerge from this with each side of the fork just as or more convinced than they were before? Or might both experience a smack-up? Maybe the forks themselves will fork?
The USA’s neatly fractured view of the pandemic (along political lines) is something to behold, and will be fascinating to watch as the year progresses.
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An interesting controlled epidemiological experiment is about to unfold. https://t.co/4KM6gT71bm
— Fritz Swanson (@fritzswanson) March 15, 2020 -
“Recall how, in the run-up to the Iraq war, the White House signaled preferred policy outcome so heavily that it skewed the analysis and advice it received. Can see similar alignment b/w preferences Trump and his team were signaling, and strategic posture of his crisis managers.” —Jeremy Konyndyk
Second one above seems to have played out among the public at large, not just among administration team members and support staff.
My (at the time) half-serious Twitter thread started Jan 23. I felt comfortable tweeting about it because we weren’t yet inundated with the subject.
I bookmarked the John Hopkins COVID-19 dashboard on January 25 2020, when there were 2k cases in China. I should have started a thoughtstream at that time as well, but I have been out of the habit.
Here I’m trying to capture the kinds of things that can get hard to recall after the fact: impressions of the present, and evolving guesses about the future impact of this virus on any area of life.
Another possible example of this that I thought of yesterday: church worship teams, which frequently lead songs whose theme or refrain is “Here I am singing this song and worshiping”.
In short, the entire published content of the CMS is contained in or derived from a single file.
Self-contained file format
The CMS would store its data by default in a single-file SQLite database. That way there would be no RDBMS to configure, and backups would be as simple as copying the file.
The file would contain information about all pages, diagrams, shapes, and types, as well as “theme” info: HTML, CSS and logos/other images.
Self-contained binary
This CMS would consist of a single binary with no dependencies that could serve web pages itself over a specified port, or run in CGI mode. The way Fossil does it.
Diagram elements consist of
- Shapes, with connection points and labels
- Connector lines, with line/arrow styles
Any diagram element can be hyperlinked to a page in the CMS and can have its shape, label, or tooltip text determined by the properties of that page.
Visual Diagrams
Any page could have a Visio-like diagram in addition to (or instead of) the body text. The body text could also have any number of embedded diagrams.
As with the body text, diagrams are displayed in a non-editable context until the user decides to edit them.
In addition, every page would be able to specify a parent page.
So that when you follow a link to a page, you can either hit “Back” to return to the previous page, or follow the link to the parent for more relevant context around that page.
If you create a page by following a link to a non-existent node, that page's parent would default to the page containing that original link.
There would be facilities for
- Dynamic SQL-like listings/tables of pages that satisfy a set of criteria
- Links or buttons that create new pages using a type/template
In addition to pages, though, this CMS would provide a concept of types, which you could assign to pages when they are created.
A type have a name, a collection of fields, and optionally a template for new pages of that type.
A type could also have a default symbol for use in diagrams (see below).
Like a wiki but less stupid
The CMS would be very wiki-like: that is, it would allow you to organize information into a web of nodes or pages without being opinionated about what goes where.
Creating a new page/node (page, from now on) should be easy, as in a wiki. E.g., following a link to an as-yet non-existent page.
Many see the CMS as a publishing tool, or perhaps (at least in the past?) specifically as a blogging tool or a marketing tool. I think of CMSs primarily as a tool for storing and presenting structured knowledge.
I have an CMS in mind that would be ideal for this purpose that no one seems to have made yet.
- Like a wiki but less stupid
- Visual diagrams
- Self-contained binary
- Self-contained file format
Scrolling down past the cover art shows the chapter marks, as usual.
The File Uploads feature is great for any audiobooks you may have that you downloaded from a service other than Audible (which has its own app) or that you created yourself from CDs that you own.
You get all the same Overcast features for audiobooks as you get with podcasts. Overcast recognizes the chapter marks, remembers your last-played location (synced across the iOS app and the website player), and you can enhance the playback with Smart Speed and Voice Boost.
The file upload area is treated exactly like its own podcast.
This means that audio files you place there are treated on the app like new episodes, and are downloaded or streamed accordingly. You can add the Uploads “podcast” to playlists.
Most importantly: if the Overcast app on your phone is set to Delete Played Episodes, then once you finish listening to a file it is deleted from your phone and from the file upload area on the Overcast.fm website.
File Uploads and Audiobooks
When you sign up for the Premium subscription ($10/year) you get the option to use File Uploads. This is an interesting feature but there’s almost no documentation on it anywhere, even within the app or on the website.
Once you get your premium subscription, you need to log in to the Overcast.fm website, then scroll past your Active Episodes, and under the list of Podcasts, click on a new podcast you’ll see there called Uploads. (You could also go to https://overcast.fm/uploads after logging in. )
There you can upload any audio file. (The site will prevent you from uploading other types of files.)
Chapters: Overcast now supports chapters in MP3, M4A and M4B files , allowing you to skip back and forth to particular sections of the file, assuming the creator of the file put them there to begin with.
Right now the ATP podcast is the only one I listen to that puts chapter marks in their podcast episodes. I find it very handy since, if they happen to talk about a bunch of topics that don’t interest me, I can skip them pretty easily.
Oct 2016
Streaming has long since been added. There is an app-wide setting to download new episodes on wifi, download on wifi and cellular, or stream. You cannot configure this per-podcast.
On the list of all current downloads in progress, you can tap a button to convert them all to stream instead of download.
On an individual podcast, you can go to the list of All Episodes and tap once on an episode to fetch it manually. If Overcast is set to download new episodes, this will place the episode in the download queue. However, you can tap the episode once more and it will be switched into streaming mode and begin playing immediately.
Even just being able to search the Memo field would be an improvement, because then I could use that as a "tags" field.
Another example, suppose you are a school teacher and you end up budgeting for extra supplies for children in your class and you want to compare your spending in this category for different school years. (Never mind the fact that you currently can't even total category spending by calendar years within the app.)
In all of these cases you might try setting up a new category for every school year and "archiving" (hiding) categories for previous years to keep from cluttering up your budget. But besides the fact that you still wouldn't get totals across any time frame shorter or longer than a calendar month, this is tedious and ugly.
Related to my third annoyance above, "no search or reporting", it would be good to have some way of tagging transactions related to a particular project.
After much saving, I'm finally finishing off my basement. All the spending for that project is going against the "Quality of Life Goals:Home Improvement" category. But if I want to keep track of all my spending just for this basement project, as distinct from other projects like bedroom painting, etc., I need to do it in a separate spreadsheet. Which is silly!
For example: Jess puts in an order for some stuff, totaling $212.17, and enters it into YNAB right after placing the order.
Then the vendor splits up the order into three shipments and charges her in three separate transactions of $17.84, $111.90, and $82.43.
Right now YNAB is going to import those three transactions and treat them as separate from the one that Jess entered for $212.17, which consequently will never clear.
Instead, it would be insanely helpful if YNAB could notice, "hmm, they entered this charge for $212.17 and I don't see it here anywhere, and it's been at least a week since the date it was entered so it should have cleared; but here are three transactions from the same vendor that they didn't enter that total up to exactly the same amount -- let's maybe ask if they're related or something!"
There are some annoyances that aren't bugs, just things that YNAB could (and probably should) make easier.
Mostly these are things caused by how online banking works in general.
Sixth annoyance: Imported transactions are often not matched correctly with entered transactions when the date varies by more than a day or two.
Jess will often buy something online and dutifully enter the transaction that day. But often a vendor won't actually charge her card until the item ships, meaning that the date on the imported transaction will be a few days later than the one she entered. YNAB will often fail to match the two, leaving the entered transaction as uncleared and creating a cleared-but-erroneous copy of it.
These are often easy to spot but it's a needless annoyance. Perhaps the problem is being exacerbated by my fourth annoyance above (poor vendor name matching).
Thoughts by this user that have been liked by others.
It would be nice to be able to rename streams.
Aside: Comments by git inventor Linus Torvalds raise doubts in my mind about the optimalness of git even for its intended use case (source code):
You released the Git distributed version control system less than ten years ago. Git caught on quickly and seems to be the dominant source code control system, or at least the one people argue about most on Reddit and Hacker News.
Git has taken over where Linux left off separating the geeks into know-nothings and know-it-alls. I didn’t really expect anyone to use it because it’s so hard to use, but that turns out to be its big appeal. No technology can ever be too arcane or complicated for the black t-shirt crowd.
I thought Subversion was hard to understand. I haven’t wrapped my head around Git yet.
You’ll spend a lot of time trying to get your head around it, and being ridiculed by the experts on github and elsewhere. I’ve learned that no toolchain can be too complicated because the drive for prestige and job security is too strong. Eventually you’ll discover the Easter egg in Git: all meaningful operations can be expressed in terms of the rebase command. Once you figure that out it all makes sense. I thought the joke would be obvious: rebase, freebase, as in what was Linus smoking? But programmers are an earnest and humorless crowd and the gag was largely lost on them.
— Linus Torvalds goes off on Linux and Git, Sep 25, 2012
Reporting did get wearying and old after a month or so, but after that it became routine.
If you have a fairly repetitive lifestyle, as I currently do, Reporter will make that extremely (perhaps painfully) clear very quickly. I work a 9-5 job and spend most evenings at home. Data collection becomes much less interesting when the data involved seldom changes.
Effective questions: Reporter comes "What did you learn today?" as a default "ask at sleep" question. I soon ceased bothering with answers to this one. I guess it was too open-ended, and even when I have an answer it's never compact enough for the little-token format that Reporter seems to expect.
The only questions I've added to the default set are "Are you wearing glasses?" (I started using non-prescription reading glasses for most screen related work to prevent headaches) and "How many coffees did you have today?"
Usually a five-pointed star would indicate an opportunity to "fave" an episode, with no social aspect.
Calling this button “Recommend”, by contrast, makes it seem as though clicking it will make something social happen. But if something social did happen, I couldn't figure out what it was. For example, no new tweets appeared on my Twitter timeline as a result (it would have been a kind of creepy sneaky way to do it if it had though).
A good example of an "easy" win would be if ThoughtStreams implemented sending and receiving webmentions.
- Perform webmention endpoint discovery and sending on all outgoing links in new cards
- Receive webmentions for streams and individual cards -- display them in appropriate places, and optionally notify the user.
- Ideally allow users to specify a
u-in-reply-toURL.
If this were in place, suddenly I'd be able to carry out a exchange with other TS users, or between my TS and any webmention-enabled blog, or between TS and any Twitter account (if the Twitter user is signed up at brid.gy).
I've already implemented webmentions on my site, so I have skin in this game. At a minimum I'll be trying to design and code ways of mitigating abuse before it happens on my own web properties, now that I've opened that door.
But if in the coming months it turns out that abuse prevention remains an optional part of the spec, and people have to bake their own countermeasures (or not) on a site-by-site basis, then the writing will be on the wall.
In this article I outline a few big changes I would make to the internet to empower small, independent creators, and to make certain kinds of huge online businesses unprofitable to run.
Adding universal micropayments to the web is a core piece of that proposed set of reforms. Here I muse about how that could actually be implemented.
Overview of my proposed method
- The web server, responding to a request for a web page, includes an HTTP header that says, in effect,
Price is $0.01, payment should go to john@hisdomain.com. - The user's browser sees this header and notes this amount in a ledger.
- Every so often (exactly when would be configurable) the user would see a report saying "Here's how much web usage you've incurred", breaking the amount down by site
- The user would have the ability to adjust payment up or down. This could be done on a total basis (thus adjusting payments to individual sites proportionally) or on a site-by-site basis. Payments are voluntary.
- The browser connects securely to a payment processor (I nominate Gratipay or Patreon for starters) with whom the user has already signed up. It sends a list of payees and amounts for each, in a standardized format.
- The payment processor pays sites out of the user's balance as directed.
3. Payment Processors
Some have said (including myself, initially) that Bitcoin would be the way to go. I think the truest thing ever said about Bitcoin is that everyone who touches it becomes either a thief or a victim. It's possible that Bitcoin could be incorporated, but in my experience and from what I've seen keeping an eye on Bitcoin since near the beginning, it's just far too complex for average people to secure their Bitcoin wallets.
Been thinking about this for a while too:
For a while I've been thinking about people that tout themselves as experts in X but are really (self-professed) experts in being expert at X.
I'll call these types of people the Meta Experts.
Meta Experts may be too kind a term. In many instances of this kind of activity, there is more bullshit involved than "Meta Experts" would suggest.