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For most of the short simple documents I create, I don't want to redo the formating for every document. Simply writing it in something simple like Markdown ( possibly a markdown wysiwig editor) and having my software automatically apply appropriate standard formats to it is ideal.

This is what Word is to most people. They just use the default styles, or their company's template. No special formatting, styling etc.

Also if you do want to add a table or a figure, for most people Word will be much easier than doing the same in Markdown.


Having handled Word documents a few times in my years, oh, how I wish this was true.

Right, most people don't want to do that, they want the burden of applying styles to the couple headings or whatever.

Unfortunately, most people don't use paragraph styles, but if you do, it's a couple clicks.


Agreed. There is actually a lot better control in openoffice / libreoffice than most people know. You just have to set up your styles and be systematic about (virtually) never using direct formatting, instead always applying a pre-configured style. There is a distinct value in seeing your final product as you work, when the final product is visual.

And if you define shortcut keys for your styles it's as quick to type as markdown.

This is more of a utopia than expecting the average office drone to learn emacs.

Right, It should be included in the app store page. Apple should have a specific place for it and it should be required.

Cars don't really need an online component in order to continue working. Some manufacturers have tried to force some features into online components, but the cars continue to work without it once they turn it off.


Forgejo is doing a lot of work to make the tooling decentralized, too. They are using open protocols and standards to link self hosted forges together.


Plus as TFA notes, they went full copyleft:

> As of v9.0 in August 2024 the project relicensed from MIT to GPLv3+, with the explicit goal of staying copyleft and resisting future commercial capture of the codebase.

The value of copyleft for decentralization is too often overlooked.


I can’t wait for federation in Forgejo. With that, there’s honestly no reason not to host your own forge.


The reason will be that not everyone wants to deal wit maintaining a self-hosted box.


my eyes have been glazing over it feels like our infra/devops dudes have proverbially given up and they're just looking to buy cloud services to do everything now. security guy looks like he wants to jump off a bridge and i keep trying to nudge them into waking up to not needing 99.9% uptime we'll settle with 95% uptime and no one needs to be on call, and you can go to sleep at night knowing all the code lives behind your damn fort knox firewall company intranet and 75 layers of authentication.

it's interesting because the more paid services these guys bring on board the more complex the security shit gets for them. the head of our IT is a fucking lunatic though and he is steering shit towards utter disaster, he's obsessed with being the guy who picks the next cloud service that "makes things so much better".

my small team is actually considering just getting some mac minis and making a cluster of servers. we decided we don't need infinite uptime for hosting m-f office tools and we can just ... not interface with our infra/devops guys who have lost their damn minds and say no to everything now. they're supposed to be the compute tower under the tragedy known as TBM and they haven't approved a single VM in like 2 years.


It's about offloading blame. If a server nukes, it's on infra to get a guy to unscrew it. If a service nukes, infra guy says "welp it's down", keeps on clicking.

It doesn't matter what happens 6m-2y down the road, your odds of being laid off or job hopping are high in the current regime so this all makes sense. You pay some amount of your budget to make your life "easier" in the now.

The trouble comes 2-5y down the line when the service is bought out by <insert MEGACORP here>, and you have to scramble to replace it or hold your nose and pay up.

(tbh, migration is not that hard, but the org will act like it is)

The matrix of authentications, compliances, and intranets will only go up as your company grows and often are enforced by people who do not suffer them daily.


> tbh, migration is not that hard, but the org will act like it is

It actually would be hard to impossible if done properly - meaning no lost information and no dead links.


Not your problem under the hot potato model. It's not impossible and here's the other thing: it often doesn't matter if things get broken to your megacorp as long as you keep up appearances with clients.

Sorry if this sounds really grim / cynical, I've simply seen enough of these kinds of migrations to know that it is fundamentally opposite of my perception of engineering philosophy. It often becomes more of a question of business rather than correctness. (Can we simply fire the smaller customers? -> yes.)


What would you use a cluster of mac minis for?

I mean, if you're going that far, a couple of refurbished servers gives you far more compute and far more capacity and much better maintainability.


it's just a few clicks, starting at 2 bucks a month.

https://www.pikapods.com/apps


I would love to see it happen, but an internal service vs something exposed to the internet can be challenging.

I think services like Cloudflare could play a role if they were able to provide some kind of forward auth and preferential treatment of core users during overload. My self hosted systems would have to be the source of truth and Cloudflare would have to be replaceable for me to consider using it.

Think along the lines of automated pre-auth that coordinates with the origin based on some standard.


There is already federation support in radicle and vervis.


If the defendant consented, why is this even in dispute? Are they arguing the defendants consent was invalid?


I think the question is whether border patrol can decide ahead of time to do a targeted search for a specific crime, and specifically search phones, which everyone understands and acknowledges store a massive amount of information about people, without reasonable suspicion of that particular crime.

Extended questioning, a pat-down or other physical search, and cursory search of luggage for physical contraband (all at international port of entry, of course) is still not the same as scrolling through someone's media gallery and files.

Correction to my previous (GP) post above: The miranda warning and waiver of rights was after the consensual search of his phones. That could be very important. If law enforcement suspects you of a specific thing enough to want to search your phone, but they don't have enough evidence that you're a suspect who merits a miranda warning, what are they doing asking to search your phone?

While everyone can save themselves from this scenario by saying no to searches, it's obvious that this was a fishing expedition. I think EFF should (but probably won't) prevail on the theory that phones have too much of our lives to be allowed to be searched like that, even voluntarily.

Suppose cops went door to door asking to enter and take a look around for contraband. I doubt courts would uphold cops' power to ask to look at people's phones (maybe asking for a cup of coffee while they do it). Regardless of whether the individual consents, it's too much of a breach of privacy without any particular reasonable suspicion of anything in particular.

Case law seems to focus on length and intrusiveness of temporary detention. I'd say this was too lengthy, too specific, and too intrusive for the measly "evidence" (coming from Colombia, and a FinCEN report that didn't allege any impropriety, just financial transfer(s) to a minor) they purported to have.

It's possible this was parallel construction.


I don't know about Finnish law, but in most US states, when you form an entity, you can put most anything as a purpose. It is quite common to put it as "to engage in any lawful activity".

Beyond that, publicly traded company directors may have (depending on the state) various duties to shareholders to consider profit, but it is generally not considered to be so extreme as to profit above all else.

IRS regulations distinguish between a trade or business and a hobby by looking at the intent to make a profit (as well as the effort). see https://uslawexplained.com/trade_or_business

But it is generally possible to form a legal business under state laws with no intent to profit, the IRS may just treat it as a hobby for tax purposes. (You can't deduct expenses incurred pursuing a hobby, but you can deduct expenses incurred carrying on a trade or business).


GOG is pretty good too. I just wish they had better native Linux support.


Whisper Valley in Austin Texas is one example of a neighborhood geothermal installation: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/geothermal/texas-whispe...

Maybe not quite exactly what you envision.


> Maybe not quite exactly what you envision.

I'm too zonked to pick out the method from the article - but I'll offer that geo methods can be region specific. What I described fits the SE US, with our 13 month summers and abundant underground water.


13 month summers lol :) Yeah, definitely if your interested neighborhood geothermal Whisper Valley seems to be the largest by far in the US, you might check it out.


Isn't that the same excuse Gooogle is using to lrevent folks from installing what they want on Android phones?


Essentially, yeah.


I do not agree with Google on preventing apk installation. But unknown apk is a different risk profile than letting unknown entities to access local usb devices.

The main issue in the former case is that google is posing itself as a gatekeeper instead of following a repo model like Debian or FreeBSD. That’s wanting control over people’s device.

Allowing USB access is just asking to break the browser sandbox, by equating the browser with the operating system.


Mormons voted strongly to legalize MJ in Utah. Maybe your politician is just an odd man out?

edit: Well, I should note the Utah vote was only for "medical" MJ.


It got through via a ballot initiative. It wouldn't have been passed by the legislators in UT without that.

That's why the guy in my state, C. Scott Grow, has also been fighting to make ballot initiatives harder. He's terrified that an MJ initiative would make it's way in that way.


Republicans in Utah are also trying to remove the power from ballot initiatives because they're upset the Utahans passed an anti-gerrymandering initiative.


Yaeh this is a thing states do. South Dakota went in cahoots with the courts to cancel the ballot initiative to legalize weed, and California went in cahoots with the courts to sabotage prop 8 (the banning of gay marriage).


California Proposition 8 (gay marriage ban) was unconstitutional though, it was always likely to be struck down by the SC.


That's not why it was "struck down" by SCOTUS. It was struck down because California intentionally did not defend the case in SCOTUS, leaving the proponents (i.e., those representing the majority vote) to defend it in SCOTUS. Then SCOTUS determined the prop 8 voters didn't have standing to defend prop 8, essentially defaulting the decision through a perverse chickenshit technicality and remanding it back to the lower courts.

SCOTUS did not find gay marriage bans unconstitutional in that case. Only the 9th circuit did, and California intentionally stopped defending it at the 9th circuit because the 9th circuit is and was pro gay marriage.


> C. Scott Grow

Reverse nominal determinism


Grow, Scott, grow!


> isn't seen by politicians as a motivating vote driver ... It got through via a ballot initiative

Those two seem a little at odds. People are going to vote against it, but not when it's specifically on the ballot?


It's not.

If 90% of party A supporters support the issue, and 70% of party B supporters support and issue and the election is close to 50/50 with B in power. B putting forward the issue can make them lose the next election because that 30% will either withhold their vote or vote for the other party.

But if that same issue is a ballot measure, then the 90% of A voters and 70% of B voters will overwhelmingly pass it.

This is what I mean by a motivating issue. Nobody will withhold their vote if MJ stays illegal. But there are certainly people (mostly religious) that absolutely will withhold their vote if a politician makes it legal. Even if that's a super popular move.

That's why pretty popular things aren't done. It's also why unpopular things can be easily done. If nobody withholds their vote because of the "send the kids to the mines" act (because they are happy about the mandatory Bible study), then a politician can get away with really horrible things so long as they make the core of their voters happy. After all, you aren't going to let the other guy win now are you.

It's what's broken about parties and FPTP elections.


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