My wife has worked in restaurants AND in TV, and the first two seasons had her absolutely entranced (I … am not a TV person, though it’s impossible to say that without sounding smug). This season? “They started sniffing their own farts,” was her reaction after the first couple of episodes, after which she stopped watching.

Actually, more context: my Floridian spouse is weirded out that I wear shorts in the cold, but I picked that up in a cold climate on a farm: my legs don’t get cold, and wearing pants to throw hay at cows doesn’t really check out.

It’s always amused me that there is this bizarre (to me) subculture that is militantly anti-shorts. It’s always someone from like Scotland or New Hampshire. My dude, I’m not wearing pants in Florida from April to October unless I have a funeral, wedding (maybe!), court appearance, or in-person business event. And I’m only wearing socks if God appears and instructs me to do so in person–which, given I am entirely unreligious, isn’t much of a risk.

My wife and I have a saying we find ourselves using far, FAR too often: “Conservatism lurks in the most unexpected places…”

Keeping in mind that “knowing and believing what they do” is itself a perilous notion because one of them might be a “Post-Madrid 1933 purple throated” Marxist while another might be a “Modernist new path” Marxist (I made those terms up). I mean I know “lol factions” is an old discussion with the farthest left, but they can’t even agree with each other.

That’s what I enjoy about kagi: because I can block and rank sources, I get to do some reverse-SEO, and the results are really good with remarkably few adjustments.

I’ve switched to another email/calendar service, and I don’t use Google Search (kagi ftw) … but I can’t get rid of my Workspace account because I’m the admin for the rest of the family (who won’t leave gmail). Still, anything that further fragments Google’s information about me is a net plus.

Whenever this topic comes up, I find myself wondering what these folks do all day. Not in a Boomer “don’t these people have jobs?!?” way, but more … what is it like to be them? Do they just sit in front of the computer looking for conversations to disrupt? What is their daily existence? Because I find their volume and dedication to what they do fascinating. Cancerous and absurd, but also fascinating.

One of the more annoying things about living in Florida is that we have closely related animals that are nearly identical, but they don’t have glow-butts. (At least not down in the bottom half of the state.)

I’ll wait for someone from like Lakeland to say they have them.

Pretty sure the motivation here is more along the lines of “double tap so they don’t get up.”

Sort of, but the notes aren’t organized in the filesystem. So you point to a location where the files will live and it creates, e.g., journals and pages folders into which journals and pages are dropped. Each is one flat directory (which seems like a scaling problem after a while, but I’m nowhere near that being an issue).

Because logseq doesn’t do freeform markdown by default, you cannot just open any arbitrary markdown file in it. Or, rather, it will give unpredictable results if you do. If you’re used to a free-form editor that organizes files hierarchically, that is going to seem very, very strange and may not be what you’re looking for. My preference is to spend zero time organizing files and organizing text, so logseq’s choice to make both a non-issue is an absolute godsend. Open the app, start typing. It’s great (for me).

Logseq is really, really close. It’s basically a page I can start writing on, forcing minimal organization through bullets but otherwise freeform. Backlinking, plugins (meh), plain markdown. It’s just so good. It doesn’t require me to do anything other than write. It used to be entirely browser-based, syncing through a github repository. They could have released a self-hostable version of that and I would have been over the moon. Or, alternately, a self-hostable version with non-local storage so I could store my notes on a notes server I control. But they went with the app + sync service route. Understandable but sad.

So I just rolled my own sync through a git server and it works fine (other than iOS, which requires a maddening setup, but that’s not logseq’s fault).

I looked at Zettlr once or twice (thank you for mentioning it). Obsidian makes me crazy with all the UI fiddly bits and configuration. I tried. Oh how I tried. But it just didn’t work with my brain. (It’s the exact same reaction I have to KDE – there’s just TOO MUCH and it sets me off in unproductive directions, and that’s not a criticism of either project as such.)

A while ago, I started keeping a personal library/journal/etc. using Logseq. I could fire up Logseq in any browser on the planet, connect to my notes, and jot down whatever idea I had in the moment, all in a FOSS journal that stored my notes in plaintext markdown.

Then … I don’t know what happened, but 100% of their effort went into building an app, which then required them to build a (paid, proprietary) sync service, all rather than just releasing a self-hosted build of the web interface so I could spin up my own note-taking server. (Please don’t suggest alternatives; I’ve probably tried them all.) To “preserve privacy” and promote “local first”, I had to download an app and rely on a closed-source backend to do something I could trivially accomplish on my own. If my platform doesn’t support the app, no notes, unless I rely on the increasingly unmaintained web “demo” that does exactly 100% of what I need from the service, despite dozens of features missing compared to the app version.

But the kicker is that I cannot install things on my work computer. At all. Not portable apps, nothing. I will get a phone call from infosec if I even try, because we are a heavily regulated company. So if I have a bright idea at work, a thought I want to preserve, find a good article, etc., I have to go to another device. I have to interrupt my workflow, change my focus completely, and, probably, lose half of what I wanted to capture.

The thing is, I don’t think they’re data farming. I think they’re running a really good project! Users were begging for an app. “When are you going to release an app?” was a common question forever, because a whole generation of dingleberries cannot be bothered to go to a website that does the same thing, faster, and better than any app.