There's also this website which shows ancient Roman roads: https://itiner-e.org/. Note that some roads are speculative / hypothetical though. But regardless it's also a cool road map related to Rome.

Yeah I wanted to point out the same. This sizing problem is not as prevalent outside of the US/Mexico (leaders in obesity).

It’s less prevalent in EU and even less so in some East Asian countries.

That's actually what the article points out. But I do think the language of normal vs abnormal obfuscates some of the intent. It's a 'deviation from healthy baseline' that they're talking about, and there are multiple such deviations in the grouped 'anomalies'.

From the article:

The language in particular should change given that “abnormalities” are ubiquitous—thus normal—and shouldn’t be described in terms that indicate a need for repair, like “tear.”

“Why should Americans trust them”, I’d go further and say you shouldn’t trust any company.

Amazon is pretty volatile stock at the moment, as are most companies that chase the AI bandwagon. I don’t think Amazon is doomed but the companies chasing AI are in for a rough time.

Plus continuing waves of layoffs will lead to more frequent and longer AWS outages, and lower quality of retail products will hurt that side of Amazon.

People predicted that about Twitter but it didn’t really happen

That's because Twitter only really does one thing. Also, despite not having any hard stats twitter has been down an awful lot more these past few years

I tried Obsidian to build a “second brain”. But eventually just reverted back to notes on my iPad (handwritten) and Vim (markdown) for typed notes.

I actually think Obsidian is a great tool, but I just need something as low friction as possible to quickly jolt something down. Vim and Goodnotes does the trick for me.

Same, all projects get a .notes folder where plain text goes. Home directory gets a .notes folder also. It helps to have good command over text based search tools.

There was an exception though, where text just didn't cut it, which was a brief period where I was importing vehicles from Japan and needed lots of images, documents and comparisons up on a big digital whiteboard. I used LogSeq for that.

Obsidian is amazing on my desktop environments but I shared the same sentiment with you, on mobile I use Apple Notes and transpose to Obsidian if its worth doing so...

Similar to mine. I use Apple Notes for quick, ephemeral notes and for Shared Family Notes. If they are the ones that are more important, they go into the plain-text notes in the Obsidian folder.

The Notes folder(s) is sync with a Cloud Service. So, I use iA Writer[1] (a brilliant Notes App) to have a pleasant writing experience on other mobile devices. They are just Markdown, so I can open them in any Notes App that supports Markdown. I paid for iA Writer once, like 10+ years ago.

1. https://ia.net/writer

I like the desktop app, but the android app is such ass. It's bad enough that I wonder why they even bother.

I tried it several times and the one thing that got it to stick for me was having a structure to the markdown. I have an AST parser for markdown body grammar and validate the frontmatter. The structure helps me keep things sane and organized because my brain is all over the place. Beyond that, unlike OP I attach these schemas to folders in my vault per schema.

This is a project that's always on my mind that I never take the time to flesh out. I can't put my finger on the scope. I don't know if I want a full, Johnny Decimaled PKM platform for my entire life, or topical, dense information about things that interest me.

Phew, way too young. RIP.

Telegram is almost on the opposite end of the spectrum of Matrix & Signal so I wouldn’t really consider it an alternative.

Their text explicitly acknowledges and waives away the security concerns for themselves.

How so? I genuinely don't know, despite casually using both.

Opposite end in terms of security. Telegram group chats have no E2EE, private messages aren't E2EE by default (you have to initiate it as a "secret" chat), and the encryption itself is home rolled.

Yup exactly, their home rolled encryption is problematic in and of itself, but the fact that it lacks E2EE means you shouldn’t even trust it in the first place.

They do publish https://telegram.org/blog/tdlib so couldn't a client author just do shared key encryption or something?

Also opposite in terms of feature-richness.

Yep

It also contains scam advertisement by now.

It,s quite clear what you never used it. UX wise it's one of the best clients and probably in the top 3 network-wise.

It's deeply insecure in most of the ways it is used.

But people don't care about security, that is obvious, they only care about UX

"only" is probably too strong here. But certainly UI/UX gets more weight in the decision making. Nevertheless, people often do things simply because other people are doing them (fad, fashion, in-group signalling) so just showing that enough people of the right stripe are doing it is often enough for a switch---I'm setting aside cases of making a switch then switching back.

I should have been clearer in my initial post, but I was referring to the security issues with telegram rather than the UI.

Meta is the easiest to cut of those. I don’t use anything from them as I don’t engage on social media, nor use their VR and AR stuff etc.

Google and Amazon are harder to complete cut imo. I have replaced Google apart from using YouTube, and I do rely on Amazon for delivery and running personal projects on AWS.

Agreed.

That said for some I can foresee Meta being hard or harder to disconnect from because of their percieved level of personal social needs.

I left facebook and many of my friendships faded away.

Awkward bumping into people conversations would happen such as: "We missed you at my birthday party!", "I didn't know about it, else I would have been there!" "We posted it to facebook..." "I deleted my facebook account 2 years ago."

My personal philosophy was maybe they were not real friends to begin with. After all in the now 5 years since deletion, not one has reached out to ask if I'm even still alive. I've reached out to a couple people, with little to no reply. None the less, it was a hard transition.

For others', that might be an impossible task.

I removed Facebook about 11 years ago now. I made new friends who know I’m not on social media so we organize through text or discord. And for my core friend group they also moved to discord servers, so that made the switch easier.

I guess it can be hard initially though. Also, my core group of friends is less than 10, but that’s enough for me. I don’t need to follow what 100 other people are doing in their day to day haha.