Having as many followers as he does on the fediverse right now is difficult. There aren’t any tools or options to reduce the flood of notifications you get or do do any sort of sane filtering (especially on mastodon) so i totally understand why he often reacts the way he does. You cant feasibly block or de-federate when your reach is so large.
The political aspect is especially true. The FOSS confusion is often similar to the communism confusion, especially when it comes to small-scale things.
Take the concept of a neighborhood garden that no one is expected to pay money into, for instance. “Wait, so the people here who like gardening don’t expect me to pay or provide labor unless I’m able to? What do you mean i should take only according to my needs? What about Jimothy, he never helps but he takes way more than I do! What do you mean Jimothy contributes as he is able or in other ways? How can i trust everyone to be fair?”
Take the money for goods/services exchange out of the equation and it can really throw people off.
I was going off the picture where they are holding the open-bolt smg-like gun, which I assumed was a transferrable mg given the rest of what they said.
That tracks. I didn’t really examine that picture and I totally see it now.
I watched the vice video segment a few weeks ago. I found it rather well put together, and I think it is well timed. Guns are divisive among the community, for valid and justified reasons. I grew up around them, but ive kept a lot of distance in the last decade. I’ve been feeling more and more the need to become familiar again. If not for myself, at least to be a resource for others if things go really bad. In some ways, becoming more in tune with my identity has made it more… obvious(?) that safety is not guaranteed, and being more public and true to myself, at least for the time being in the US, does increase chances of encounters with bigots. The perspective of the ranch members that training and aiding fellow community members for the possibility is (unfortunately) increasingly necessary for safety as a state of mind. They made the choice to move there. It was probably ill-advised. But there are also many who have little to no choice in their living situation, so i think the point stands.
Re: the rifle. If you watch the vice video accompanying the article, its a lot more clear that the trainer asked her to fire three times quickly, not that it had a burst or auto fire control option. In their context of training for an actual, ever-present threat, I do think it makes some sense to reach for the AR-15. It is designed to be ergonomic and, at least in my experience, the assumption that a wood-stocked rifle, something lower caliber, or a pistol is less-dangerous or even easier is not representative of reality, nor is it really a fair comparison to say its a supercar vs a normal car. Part of the danger AR-15 and similar firearms represent in the hands of bigots is due to the ease of use and reliability, not that it is inherently more powerful or demanding of training. All firearms are dangerous, no matter the caliber, size, or public opinion. (If your experience is different, I respect that)
I have not explored Trillium enough, but from what I know, it seems to be an excellent choice and worthy of mention and advocacy. I did not say that Trillium was bad.
Unless obsidian goes fully foss, and gets way way more stable, i’ll be using the genuinely better choice, thanks though.
I’m glad it’s a better choice for you! Replying to you doesn’t mean I was saying your choice was incorrect for you or others, merely that I wanted to discuss in context of your comment. Apologies if you read that from my response. I do not think I can declare a genuinely better choice. In my opinion, the most important thing with note-taking is whether you keep returning to do it and can easily find past notes.
You’re doing that thing where someone starts going to bat and listing off this that or this other thing to rationalize their own choice or rationalize the choice for others.
Ok? I don’t recall saying Obsidian was THE choice, nor that your reasons were incorrect, so I don’t know why you’re casting me in that role. Generally I lean towards self-hosting and foss options for the reasons you describe, but this is an instance where I calculated differently, and I just want to provide context that, compared to other proprietary options, Obsidian is way less a concern. I’ve personally gone down rabbit holes with foss alternatives because i’ve been overly concerned about things and ended up not being productive. I’ve also chosen foss tools before that I thought would be safe or easy to migrate out of, and then ended up having a terrible time anyway when the day came that it became abandonware or a new maintainer took it in a different direction.
Perhaps you are doing that thing where you forget that not everyone can easily use a fully foss option and that not everyone can reliably install a tool from github in the event it isn’t available on an app store or via an installer? (I’m certainly guilty of this sometimes myself)
Even for a tool like Trillium, while it wouldn’t enshitify the same way a proprietary tool could, it could also just be abandoned, no forks could arise, and someone without a ton of self-hosting/compiling/cli-based install troubleshooting experience would be in just as bad a situation for migrating or going elsewhere. Even right now, Trillium is technically unsupported on macOS, so it’s not a great option for some out the gate. (Nor does that make Obsidian automatically better)
100% agree that Notion is fantastic compared to OneNote. I also switched back in 2018.
Unfortunately, their mobile app is still fairly sub-par, their data format is proprietary and not markdown, and it is only slightly cheaper than Obsidian Sync. Also, their integration system has basically gone nowhere. Which sucks because it could be good. I also have lost data on numerous occasions due to their sync system and their official policy is “oops”. In that respect, OneNote is better.
I used Notion for about 5 years before switching to Obsidian recently. Notion was far better than anything id used and generally it is a good tool, but i also was never able to make notion work as well for me as Obsidian, esp. in a way that i optimistically keep information in it. Notion often was just enough effort (esp when on the go with mobile) that i just simply could never use it to its full potential.
However, obsidian, imo, does require some plugins to meet my needs. But i think this is a good thing. Projects basically does everything i like about Notions databases. Dataview takes care of database views.
Might as well switch now to something which largely works better and is more feature rich.
Which is relative to personal taste and needs.
If I was going to trust obsidian, their code would be fully foss.
I definitely agree that I wish it was fully foss, but i also think it is a far better option than notion, onenote, etc for most people (as long as it meets their needs and preferences) since with obsidian you do actually own your data and you don’t need to pay unless you want their sync.
Since it isn’t, there is nothing future proofing my notes in their software.
Even if, worst case, Obsidian enshitifies, all the notes are markdown or json (json for config and things that don’t work in markdown, but the community and the devs work hard to keep that to a minimum) so you can still access your stuff in any text editor and it will be fairly easy to get the important data migrated into anything else. (I often use vs code to manage my notes, for instance, esp for big find and replace or re-org tasks) Even the non-standard markdown from obsidian and the most popular plugins reads well and could fairly easily be replicated with remarked or other markdown libraries. In this way, i think Obsidians approach is far superior to a tool which uses a database to store its data, since a database would require some effort to use standalone, or some work to migrate it to another tool or some sort of minimal client interface.
By its design, Obsidian could also be replaced by reverse engineering their api. If obsidian takes the dark path, we will probably see a foss community grow from the plugin dev community to replace it and be as compatible with plugins as possible, even if its just the basic text and display components. Tbh, it could totally be a vs code plugin, an emacs mode, [insert any text editor with plugins here]… thats how portable the data is. The obsidian devs know this, and they are intentional about staying this way. A shift in attitude here would be noticed by the community very quickly.
Not a solution to your current problem, but an alternative to consider depending on your network setup.
I've been running unbound as my DNS via OPNSense. Same capabilities for blocklists, plus some nice privacy benefits with DoH/DoT. I think you can use unbound with pihole too, fwiw, i just don't have a need for that.
Personal experience bias in mind: I feel like owners and managers are less interested in resolving tech debt now vs even 5 years ago… Business owners want to grow sales and customer base, they don’t want to hear about how the bad decisions made 3 years ago are making us slow, or how the short-term solution we compromised on last month means we can’t just magically scale the product tomorrow. They also don’t want to give us time to resolve those problems in order to move fast. It becomes a double-edged sword, and they try to use the “oh well when we hit this milestone we can hire more people to solve the tech debt”… But it doesn’t really work that way.
Its also possible I’m more sensitive to the problem now that I’m in them lead/principal roles rather than senior roles. I put my foot down on tech debt a lot, but sometimes I can’t. Its a vicious cycle and it’ll only get worse the longer the tech sector is stuck in this investor-fueled forever-growth mindset.
Too much “move fast and break things” from non-technical people, not enough “let’s build a solid foundation now to reap rewards later”. Its a prioritization of short term profits. And that means we, the engineers, often get stuck holding the bag of problems to solve. And if you care about your work, it becomes a point of frustration even if you try to view the job as just a job.