Don't overthink it. Government exists to protect the wealthy at the expense of the many. The wealthy will be bailed out.
Wilhoit's law.
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
We slobs will pay for the bailout. Big Brother needs these data centers for mass surveillance, either directly or by proxy e.g. Google et.al.)
Technology transcends the narrow-mindedness of nationalism. We are one world. Nationalism is another tool for power-hungry people who thrive on a divide-and-conquer strategy.
This QR code fear mongering is one of the most annoying internet memes to me.
> Almost three-quarters of Americans (73%) scan QR codes without verification, and more than 26 million have already been directed to malicious sites, according to NordVPN.
Obviously, since the only way to verify a QR code before scanning is to decode it manually…
Just treat every QR code like an unknown URL and you’re fine.
We are one world, but within that world are people who are willing to kill you in order to advance their own interests. Given that, I really prefer that the more powerful technology not be in their hands.
Unfortunately, my own country is becoming more that way than I have ever seen it...
Fact is, you won't get your preference. So move on to the next step, and form new, better-informed preferences and opinions.
Assume that you'll be living, and eventually dying, in a world where raw intelligence isn't monopolized by people who agree with you. Then, think about how best to get along in that world and help it flourish benevolently.
The U.S. legal system is very often a war of attrition. One side can relentlessly sue until the other side is broke, or just threaten. This is the basis of many plea deals, or worse, in the case of Aaron Swartz.
I got to 1737 the hard way. Lots of 1 point posts (which don't seem to count) but mainly, I collect karma points so I can afford to fend off downvoting trolls.
I seek quality. That's why I read and contribute to Hacker News.
One can seek and live a life of quality experiences with focus and depth or experience infinite random "hits" that require tedious curation to have any meaning. Out of today's "haul" of HN articles, I saved 30 worth some (perish the thought) serious review. (IMO, relying on AI is like trusting a liar who will soon flood answers with ads. Soon.)
To me, it's like a good book versus grabbing internet bytes. A book has four "Cs" A good one is
1. Connected. - One chapter follows another logically, not going off the rails.
2. Coherent. - All chapters reinforce each other, and don't contradict.
3. Consistent. - Chapters are in the same voice, and level.
4. Complete. - There are no gaps, or necessary stitching to be done.
They also have a very intense workplace culture, I had a manager who was part of Evernote while their site was being laid off by Bending Spoons, and he heard some wild stories, they pay above average for a European tech company (but with geo-fenced brackets), crunch a ton and then crash out at a big new year's party were they fly all their teams to some resort, among other things.
How many people work in your family? How many different events in random parts of the world can your family attend together at mid-night December 31st?
Warren Buffett used to do the same for decades, in fact this is how he came to control Berkshire Hathaway which he calls his worst investment, as it wasn't rational and merely driven by ego.
He wanted to take a controlling share of the company and then sell it for pieces so he started to buy increasing stakes in it.
When Berkshire management understood Buffett's plan they decided to stop him to not let him cannibalize and kill the company, and they offered to buy back his shares for 11$ a share which he accepted as it would've been a 2x return on his investment in a very short time span.
But then they made the critical mistake of low balling him by 1$ per share when it came to sign the documents, and he got so much emotional that he went and bought the entire company to prove a point and fire the management.
It was not a good idea and he would not make money on that acquisition, so after selling off the assets he decided to make it the holding for its other investments.
Buffett wasn't liquidating textile mills. What would happen is that all the publicly traded New England textile companies themselves would close down unprofitable mill locations to stay alive and would use the resulting cash from liquidating the real estate to do a tender offer. Buffett simply bought the shares and waited for the next tender offer to happen.
When Buffett eventually did take control of the Berkshire, he poured tons of money into it to try to keep it alive, and eventually lost every dollar he invested. He didn't make the decision to shut down the last mill until 1985! That was 20 years after taking control. Throwing all that good money after bad to try keeping it afloat is why he called it a 'monumentally stupid decision'.
I don't like PE players like Bending Spoons, but I have used Komoot extensively for years, for cycling (and more recently hiking), and haven't seen any decrease in quality since the acquisition.
It's the circle of life - all businesses reach a point where they don't have significant growth potential or became a "keep the lights on" operation, and at that point their investors and founders wish to exit and cash out in order to invest in greener pastures.
That's where businesses like Bending Spoons, Red Ventures, and IAC come in for digital media.
I really liked Evernote but they raised the price too much for me.
I used it mostly as an archive for long term storage where I could find things easily and it was pleasant to use. When it was $36 / year it made sense for me. I probably only used it a dozen or two times every year so it cost me roughly $1 / session.
Then they quadrupled the price for me and paying $4 to dig out my TSA known traveler number was too much. I loaded it all into another application (Obsidian which is going downhill as well).
Like Evernote, they keep adding more and more features and functionality to the core product. The original idea of it being a great notes application over a directory of markdown files (and attachments) was simple and brilliant.
I think they jumped the shark with the canvas feature. They had to add a non-markdown file to the directory system and signaled that they were okay moving on from the original idea. Obsidian has only gotten fatter since then.
Canvas and the other big changes are all interesting ideas, but they should be a separate product or products. IMHO, Obsidian should be recognized as complete and go into a maintenance mode where stability, security, and performance are the development goals.
I think they worry that if they slow down, their paying customers (of which I am one) will jump ship. For some of us, it's the opposite.
Canvas can be disabled in Core Plugins, like most other features.
In general I mostly see the opposite criticism: that Obsidian out of the box is too barebones and that it requires plugins to be useful.
I tend to be more on your side though. I prefer Obsidian to be as streamlined as possible and hate bloat. Last year I asked the community "what should we remove from the app?" And I mostly got feature requests :(
It's a hard thing to balance, but what makes me hopeful that Obsidian won't become bloatware is:
1. We're only seven people, we don't have investors, and we plan to stay a small team so we don't have the same growth pressure that Evernote faced. We simply don't have that much bandwidth.
2. The file-over-app approach makes it easier to build opt-in interoperable tools like you describe. We've explicitly focused on shipping things like Obsidian API, URI, and CLI instead of building everything into the app (most other teams in our space seem busy stuffing a bunch of AI junk in their apps). One example is Obsidian Web Clipper, a separate tool we made that has matured into a great separate product.
3. Plugins (both core and community) mean you can make the app as streamlined as you want.
> Obsidian out of the box is too barebones and that it requires plugins to be useful.
From my perspective, it's absolutely not. I have a couple of vaults, and only one of them has one community plugin installed, and that's edit history. I'm pretty happy with what it provides out of the box.
I have a couple of friends who uses bigger/heavier plugins like media manager to basically transform Obsidian to other tools, but as a note taking tool and wiki/digital garden publishing platform, it does a great job out of the box.
I currently trust it to keep my most valuable notes, to be honest.
Please keep it up that way. I really feel sad when the tools I like go haywire and I'm forced to stop supporting the people behind that because I can't use the tool anymore.
Hi! Not the OP but I've used Obsidian since before 2020 till about 2022 when I switched to org-mode and Emacs.
I like the new Obsidian features like the CLI a lot but I still feel Obsidian inherently is incredibly similar to org-mode and Emacs (guess that's why I was drawn to both) in the sense that both work with local data and file formats that usually can be opened in any text editor but both of them bolt so much stuff on top that the files themselves (markdown or org) become incredibly coupled and hard to use by themselves.
Now of course in Obsidian's case you're not forced to install a lot of plugins that lead to this issue but I don't know a lot of people that have the diligence to keep their notes "light". Though if I remember from your blog post showcasing how you do note-taking you might qualify.
And then it's also the fact that you've got a powerful piece of kit and now you're not supposed to mold it to your needs and preferences and avoid driving it hard, instead you're forced to practice discipline. Sure, there's something to be said for that too but that's besides the point.
If I understood correctly Obsidian is readying for a plugin marketplace akin to the Unity Asset Store and I'm personally thinking this might drive you to monetize Obsidian harder even though you've shown throughout the years you're a great steward of it.
To get to the point finally I guess people are worried that because Obsidian itself is not open source at some point it might evolve in a way that becomes incompatible with most peoples' preferences and for me that's where something like org-mode and Emacs inch ahead because it's FOSS.
That said thank you for Obsidian. It was my entry point towards clearer thinking and brought a semblance of structure when I needed it most. I don't use it anymore but I watch enthusiastically from the sidelines.
tl;dr the chance of a paid plugin marketplace might signal a shift in the community
My bad! I've mixed up some parts from this official blog post[0] and some talk in the community.
I thought the "What does it mean for a plugin to be Paid or have Optional Payments?" part from the FAQ was hinting towards the chance for people to sell plugins on https://community.obsidian.md/ and Obsidian itself would facilitate the transaction for a small cut at some point in the future.
I'm glad that's not the case and I apologize again for the confusion though I hope it's clear now why I believed this in the first place.
I really don't understand how one could come to that conclusion. The blog post states that "Obsidian Community is not a store". I wrote that so that the community explicitly knows we are not going in that direction.
The new labels are meant to indicate which plugins have payments, since many plugins connect to paid services. There is no intention for Obsidian to ever become a middleman.
Yeah, that's on me. Thanks for clearing this up. I hope my previous comment didn't come across as doubling down on my mistake!
Now after our interaction I don't worry that much that Obsidian is closed source, it's clear that it's in the right hands.
Also I want to say that I hope JSON Canvas catches on, initially I was worried that the Canvas feature would lead to a "soft lockdown" but it isn't the case and I've found out about it recently. Thank you for the work that went into it!
> None of this is evenly distributed. Wealth data show extreme inequality among older Americans: early work using the AHEAD survey found that households with someone 70 or older in the top tenth of the wealth distribution held around 2,500 times as much wealth as those in the bottom tenth, and more recent work finds that inequality has widened further since the late 1990s.
How can you draw a "conclusion" from such data, where the mean is way far from the median? Personally, I am 77, a 49'er, living in an area in CA that's half the median home value, since a divorce. Not wealthy at all, and I gave my daughter some of my savings to help her get started in the Bay Area. (more than what I paid for my first home.)
Inflation is something else. My highest year's pay seems small these days. Naturally, homes cost way more, but people in the Bay Area always commuted long distances from Tracy and beyond without mass transit to help.
And, by the way, we USED to have a middle class. That's being systematically destroyed by the further concentration of wealth by the few, not the vast majority of us who went daily to our engineering jobs.
Let's face it, even "downsizing" takes my home equity plus another $100K or so just to move out of the woods. Renting will work only if all my equity (amortized into income) and IRA RMD's pay the rent. I check that now and then.
If Social Security is hacked, as some would love to do, I and many millions are instantly on the edge.
Since both my ex and I own homes outright (which seem to be worth a bit less than what we sold the home for) our daughter stands to inherit two homes, which she is not crazy about, since we are both somewhat in the boondocks. She advises me to spend it all, though good health (cross my fingers) says that be for a good while.
Fixing the "you can pay my fair share" situation will help millions. Way more than if I gave away all my equity and lived in a cardboard box. It would take millions of us and cities vigorously destroy those cardboard homes anyway. I've seen it in action.
You and your ex wife both own homes outright and you helped buy your kid a home in a VHCOL area. I mean, the point stands that you had plenty of concentrated wealth before the divorce and voluntarily gifting it away.
That being said, I don’t think it’s a bad thing. You just aren’t exactly contesting the point that you didn’t have concentrated wealth.
I checked the Buddhist notion of wealth. Perhaps in the earlier teachings, it's all about denial, but the later teachings are all about flow: having and sharing, exemplified by the rare bird, King Ashoka, who abandoned violence to benevolence.
Wilhoit's law.
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
We slobs will pay for the bailout. Big Brother needs these data centers for mass surveillance, either directly or by proxy e.g. Google et.al.)
https://pylimitics.net/wilhoits-law/
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