|
| jon-wood wrote:
| Something that leapt out and resonated with me here was the
| conscious decision not to bother with automated tests (at first?
| maybe they exist now). Its taken me quite a while to get over the
| feeling of dirtiness that comes with not writing tests, but I now
| take a similar approach when building toy projects for personal
| use after too many of them got killed by the first ~day of
| development, when I should have been focusing on gaining some
| momentum before I lost the will to build whatever it was, instead
| being spent putting together test infrastructure and CI
| pipelines. I now work on the basis that tests can be added once
| the lack of them becomes an issue for me.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| It's easily lost that development best practices are a function
| of scale.
|
| What's absolutely necessary to get anything done in a large
| mature project with many developers and a sprawling code base
| may be cumbersome in a small single-developer project.
| acedTrex wrote:
| I'd argue a function of scale as well as a function of
| criticality. Not all projects need the same level of care put
| into them as the blast radius of bugs is... negligible
| sometimes
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| For larger projects, even trivial bugs can waste an
| enormous amount of time, since the number of places they
| can hide is much larger, and fixing them may mean blocking
| other work. Means that at such a scale, optimizing for
| correctness at all times makes sense.
|
| In a small project where bugs are easy to identify and tend
| to be an easy 10 minutes fix, foregoing the correctness tax
| and fixing bugs as they become apparent is the more
| economic choice.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| The inverse is true as well: for a project regardless of
| size that's part of a medical device, the economic choice
| isn't allowed for certain classes of bug.
| facundo_olano wrote:
| (I'm the post author). I agree with this. Perhaps I'd
| emphasize larger in terms of people working on it rather
| than codebase size. Once you have competing "mental
| models" about how the code works, the problem of silent
| bugs can escalate quickly.
|
| So I do think the "always test" mentality is a reasonable
| default for the non-prototype type of work. There's a
| tipping point where going on without testing can get the
| project out of control and it's hard to tell when that
| is, so in contexts where you care to avoid that risk it
| makes sense to be strict about it. I didn't care for that
| risk in this case, so it made sense not to bother and
| focus on building momentum. I'd probably add some
| integration tests now if I wanted to try a significant
| new feature or refactor, or if I had to consider
| contributions from other developers.
| chefandy wrote:
| Beneficial processes without sanity checks become dogma.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| And function of ease of manual testing. Some things are
| impossible to manually test without changing the actual
| code.
|
| For example, testing access permissions. Your UI isn't
| gonna display data or operations you don't have access to.
|
| But that doesn't mean your back end is honoring
| permissions.
|
| The other thing to take into account is how noticable the
| bug is. You should inch more towards writing tests for bugs
| that are less likely to be noticed by someone.
| vidarh wrote:
| For personal projects I start writing tests when I run into
| something that is difficult to get right. Not before. I then
| focus on adding tests ad hoc when I run into problems.
| ravenstine wrote:
| I generally agree, though it depends on the nature of the
| application.
|
| A couple years ago, I was working on a personal project where
| I'd built a respiratory gas analyzer and needed to write some
| software that could interface with it over Bluetooth and
| display the data in real time. Unit testing for various
| functions that needed to accurately perform scientific
| calculations was very beneficial, but in retrospect, writing
| tests for other aspects of the interface was pretty much a
| waste of time. I ended up getting rid of the tests entirely
| once I had confidence my functions wouldn't be changing by that
| point. It turns out that when you're a solo developer, manually
| testing your application can be perfectly adequate.
| ceritium wrote:
| Hi, I want to comment on the "readability" package. I am using
| it, too, on my bookmarking project.
|
| The main project is on Ruby on Rails, but I have a microservice
| on node just for the "readability". I also extracted another
| service that would need a lot of memory and run only
| occasionally.
|
| Those microservices are only needed from time to time, and I call
| them from a background job, so I let them autoscale to 0 on Fly.
| balder1991 wrote:
| What I'd like to see nowadays for such a tool would be having an
| LLM as an agent that I could get summaries and ask questions.
| That would be awesome.
| ssgodderidge wrote:
| Oh that'd be cool. It could provide consolidated summaries of
| all of your sources as well ("here's what was shared today"). I
| would use that for sure.
| fassssst wrote:
| Here you go, an RSS GPT for ChatGPT:
| https://chat.openai.com/g/g-QibjxlGmU-feed-buddy
| badlogic wrote:
| Heh, I built myself leddit.lol for the exact same reasons.
| flpm wrote:
| "How to do nothing" by Jenny Odell is such a great book. Probably
| not for the usual reader of Hacker News, but I strongly recommend
| it to anyone who also starts to feel the fake "productivity"
| pressure imposed by the attention economy.
|
| Also worth checking more about Jenny Odell's other projects, like
| The Bureau of Suspended Objects (https://www.jennyodell.com/bso-
| cjm.html)
| Amorymeltzer wrote:
| Indeed, although I would add to clarify that it's not about
| "digital detoxing" or something for increased productivity, but
| rather more philosophical, more of a discourse.
|
| In that vein, I'd also recommend another of hers, "Saving
| Time," which is (quietly?) incredibly radical. Personally, I
| found it the better of the two, with more of a focused
| narrative.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I agree. I bought the book twice. Bought a paper copy, read it
| and gave it to a family member. Recently I bought it again on
| Libro.fm as an audio book.
| flpm wrote:
| Yeah, I also have the paper and the audio versions. I did not
| like the narrator in the audiobook too much, I wish she had
| narrated it herself.
| firewolf34 wrote:
| I have an Audible membership, they've seemingly given it to
| me as some sort of free inclusion with the membership, if
| that's useful to anyone else in the same boat.
| ssgodderidge wrote:
| Big fan of the "feed" mentality over the checklist of things to
| read/consume. I have picked up a few RSS readers over the years,
| but haven't stuck with them. Who needs another inbox to manage?
| I'll definitely check out
| feedi!(https://github.com/facundoolano/feedi)
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| I'm exactly the opposite. Having an RSS reader means that I
| quickly process all the "new" stuff, and then proceed to hack
| for a while. Before setting this up, I'd find myself aimlessly
| clicking about, thinking I might find something new here on HN,
| maybe there on Reuters, or even over yonder on ... etc. etc.
|
| my experience matches
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38642092
| RecycledEle wrote:
| > I was disillusioned with the software industry. There seemed to
| be a disconnection between what I used to like about the job,
| what I was good at, and what the market wanted to buy from me.
|
| If you have not figured it out yet, they would make more money
| having you do what you love to do, but the sadists in HR want to
| destroy your soul so they push you to do things you hate.
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| Those HR bastards manipulating the customers into buying adtech
| when everyone knows the real profit^H benefit to humanity would
| be if I made an indie game in straight C
| Onawa wrote:
| I mean, the 3 devs who released Battlebiht Remastered seemed
| to have had it work out well.
| chefandy wrote:
| No hard numbers, but I reckon that wouldn't scale well most
| dev organizations.
| borg16 wrote:
| i had a similar experience a few months ago where I wanted to
| have just an RSS reader be my go to homepage.
|
| miniflux as a self hosted option worked out perfectly for me (I
| used pikapods to host them).
|
| It almost feels like reading newspaper, checking off one page at
| a time and when done - I move on to my other work/daily duties.
| No more random/aimless scrolling or visiting multiple pages.
| cxr wrote:
| > I tried several Python libraries to extract HTML content, but
| none worked as well as the readability one used by Firefox. Since
| it's a JavaScript package, I had to resign myself to introducing
| an optional dependency on Node.js
|
| Mmm, no you don't. In fact, even if you install it with NPM--
| which you don't have to do, of course--Readability was designed
| to run in the browser, not on Node.
|
| The "JavaScript" - "Node" logical leap that people make (even in
| starkly inappropriate circumstances like this one) shows how much
| damage the warped traditions of the package.json cult have done
| to good, clear-thinking reasoning.
| facundo_olano wrote:
| fwiw my reasoning wasn't javascript -> node, it was more that I
| was biased towards doing all significant work on the backend.
| So it didn't even occur to me that I could add some ad hoc
| logic to fetch the article HTML from js, pass it to readability
| and insert the in the UI, which I guess is what you suggest.
|
| Having this logic available in the backend was convenient for
| me, anyway. I'm using it also for the "send to kindle" feature,
| which I couldn't have if content cleaning was done browser
| side. Having it in the backend also opens the option to save
| the content in the db to skip loading/parsing latency and
| preserving it long term.
| cxr wrote:
| > it didn't even occur to me that I could add some ad hoc
| logic to fetch the article HTML from js, pass it to
| readability and insert the in the UI
|
| I don't know what you mean by "ad hoc". Again, Readability
| was written to run in the browser. It operates on the DOM,
| not HTML. If there's anything ad hoc going on, it would be
| (a) the fake DOM that Gijs wrote[1] so you can run it when
| all you have is HTML instead of an object graph, and (b)
| logic involved in shelling out to a separate NodeJS process
| from Python. These are hacks on top of hacks.
|
| > which I guess is what you suggest
|
| I wasn't suggesting anything. I'm making an observation about
| how illogical the JS,-therefore-Node cliche is. If I were
| going to suggest anything, it would be "don't use
| Readability" since it isn't a good fit for this use case. If
| "use Readability" were a requirement, then I would suggest,
| for the benefit of yourself and your brethren, rewriting
| Readability in Python or creating a binary Python module
| using either QuickJS and Readability plus Gijs's fake DOM, or
| Haxe.
|
| 1.
| facundo_olano wrote:
| > If I were going to suggest anything, it would be "don't
| use Readability" since it isn't a good fit for this use
| case.
|
| It is a perfect fit for the user experience I was going
| for, even if it adds development and operational complexity
| --both of which were a lower priority for this project, as
| I stressed in the blog post.
| cxr wrote:
| > a perfect fit for the user experience
|
| That's not what I said. You're moving the goalposts.
| jalada wrote:
| It's looking dated now but I built https://www.rivered.io 10
| years ago, based on the same theory, inspired by Dave Winer's
| discussion on the topic:
| http://scripting.com/2014/06/02/whatIsARiverOfNewsAggregator....
| giantrobot wrote:
| I miss the various *planet feeds. I've started but then stopped
| building copies over the years. Whenever I get interested I
| don't have time to do the work and whenever I have the time I
| don't have the interest.
| schemescape wrote:
| It looks like the author added authentication to support
| accessing the app from anywhere.
|
| Would it instead be possible/easier to throw it on a VPN and make
| the VPN accessible from anywhere?
|
| The reason I ask is that I want to be able to access personal web
| apps securely and I'm trying to figure out the easiest approach.
| Every time I look at authentication, it's a labyrinth of
| concepts, protocols, and libraries. I don't want to maintain
| that!
| rkangel wrote:
| The gold standard easy way of doing this is tailscale. I have a
| few apps hosted on a Raspberry Pi at home (like home
| assistant). I have tailscale on that Pi, and on my phone and it
| works very well. The only auth you have to do is "log into
| tailscale on each machine".
|
| I really cannot recommend tailscale enough for how easy it is
| to set up a secure network of your own devices.
| schemescape wrote:
| In that setup, how does your phone know to access your Pi
| over the VPN, but use the regular connection for everything
| else? Subnet mask?
|
| Edit: any pointers on how to set this up would be
| appreciated! Maybe I'm using the wrong search engine, but I
| haven't found this scenario laid out clearly, yet.
| rkangel wrote:
| In detail, yes the underlying network routing on your
| device will route the target it to the right network, which
| means it goes through the tailscale encryption.
|
| In practice though - you don't have to worry about any of
| this! These are the steps:
|
| * Create a tailscale account (there's a good free plan)
|
| * Set up server. Give it a hostname (I'll use "mypi" in
| this example)
|
| * Set up your web service on server - check you can get to
| it locally (e.g. connected by wire or just on
| http://localhost on that computer)
|
| * Install tailscale on your server, and log in to your
| tailscale account (tailscale login and follow prompts)
|
| * Install tailscale on your phone/laptop. Log into to
| tailscale
|
| * On your phone/laptop go to http://mypi and it should Just
| Work!
| dunham wrote:
| On my iPhone I have a wireguard VPN set up with "Allowed
| IPs" 10.200.200.0/24
|
| When the VPN is on, the phone directs any traffic for
| 10.200.200.0/24 through the VPN and the rest of the traffic
| through the normal network stack. This is often called
| split vpn or split tunnel.
|
| The other end of the VPN needs to be running wireguard and
| accessible from the internet. I have a VPS for this because
| my desktop is behind a firewall. But I can connect from my
| desktop to the VPS over wireguard (same setup) with
| keepalive, and they can all talk to each other over that
| private network.
|
| I don't usually have this on, but occasionally if I want to
| ssh back home from my kid's soccer practice, I'll use it. I
| ssh to the 10-net address for my laptop after bringing up
| the split vpn.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| My RSS reader runs on my home computer and I log into it with
| Tailscale.
| pertique wrote:
| It'd definitely be possible although, if you're not already
| using a VPN, I doubt it'd be easier. You could do it a few
| ways, but the gist would be running the VPN endpoint and the
| web app in the "same place" (same machine, same network, etc.)
| and restrict access to the web app from anywhere else.
| schemescape wrote:
| My thinking was that you could avoid setting up a domain and
| VPS as well. But you might be right!
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| I have been quite happy with Basic HTTP authentication for most
| uses. It's still almost universally supported, thankfully.
|
| For "securing" my application which hosts text snippets I've
| clipped from other websites and nothing else, it is sufficient.
| poidos wrote:
| I have wireguard and caddy set up with docker on my server:
| version: "3.7" x-common-variables: &common-
| variables PGID: 1000 PUID: 1000 TZ:
| America/New_York services: caddy:
| container_name: caddy image: caddy:2.6.4
| restart: unless-stopped environment:
| <<: *common-variables HOST: "redacted"
| LOCAL_IP: 192.168.1.2 ports: - "80:80"
| - "443:443" - "443:443/udp" volumes:
| - ./appdata/caddy/Caddyfile:/etc/caddy/Caddyfile -
| ./appdata/caddy/site:/srv -
| ./appdata/caddy/data:/data -
| ./appdata/caddy/config:/config wireguard:
| image: lscr.io/linuxserver/wireguard:latest
| container_name: wireguard cap_add: -
| NET_ADMIN - SYS_MODULE #optional
| environment: <<: *common-variables
| PEERS: myPhone,myLaptop ALLOWEDIPS: 0.0.0.0/0,::/0
| volumes: - ./appdata/wireguard:/config
| - /lib/modules:/lib/modules #optional ports:
| - 51820:51820/udp sysctls: -
| net.ipv4.conf.all.src_valid_mark=1 restart: unless-
| stopped
|
| Then in ./appdata/caddy/Caddyfile: (config) {
| @internal { remote_ip 192.168.1.0/24
| } handle @internal { reverse_proxy
| {args.0} } respond 404 }
| mySecretService.{$HOST} { import config
| "{$LOCAL_IP}:5678" }
|
| So if I'm not on my VPN (or at home) nothing is shown. Other
| considerations:
|
| - You may want a VLAN or separate guest network depending on if
| you allow guests on your network, what type of services you're
| running, etc.
|
| - Many of the things I run at home have password authentication
| and I use them in addition to the VPN restriction.
|
| - This was the first thing I thought of and may be insecure for
| reasons outside of my expertise.
|
| - The nice thing about this is that I run pihole in the same
| compose file so when my phone is on my VPN I get remote ad-
| blocking "for free".
|
| - Tailscale is easier and nicer (UI-wise) to set up, but I
| stopped using it because it's a battery hog on iOS. The
| "trusting someone else's server" thing is also an issue, but if
| not for the battery issue, I would probably still be trading
| the added risk for the convenience. This was not too bad to set
| up, though, and I'm happy with it for my simple needs. The
| Tailscale app also doesn't have a convenience feature that the
| Wireguard app does: I can tell Wireguard specific networks that
| I don't want it to run on (i.e. when I'm home) so that it
| enables automatically when I leave and turns off when I'm home.
| vfclists wrote:
| What markup do you use to obtain the fixed width font for the
| yaml/json code?
| huevosabio wrote:
| Neat.
|
| But I want to go further to not only be a personal feed but also
| time limited and distraction free.
|
| I want to build a feed of all the written content I follow. And
| every day it selects the combination of items that together make
| for about 30 minutes of reading. This should include blog posts,
| articles, tweets, everything.
|
| It can use chatgpt to filter what is the most "nutritious"
| content, or whatever other tool, but it should give priority to
| valuable content over flame wars.
|
| Then this should be delivered to my Kindle or my remarkable
| tablet. Away from colors and flashes and away from fast internet.
|
| Finally, for step two, is I want to be able to subscribe to my
| friend's feed and get "guest" content from their feed every now
| and then.
| mejutoco wrote:
| This matches some vision of the early Internet and agents
| (having programs browsing the internet for you to do useful
| tasks). I thought it was Douglas Engelbart but I cannot find
| anything about agents. Maybe it was some other technology
| expert.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Microsoft (also?) said we would all have a dog or something
| sniffing up stuff on the Internet for us and bring it back.
| Back when Windows 95 was cool, IIRC.
| jaredwelch wrote:
| I've been working on some side projects for this sort of thing.
| Would you be interested in trying out a beta of this? I really
| like the idea of adding some summarization with gpt and if
| others are interested maybe I'll wrap it up and share it?
|
| Now it's just a simple JavaScript app I use locally but maybe I
| should make it cooler... this idea sounds cooler than what I
| was thinking
| huevosabio wrote:
| Absolutely! I would love to try it.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Would love to chat with you about this -- contact info is in
| my profile.
| rambambram wrote:
| > I wasn't interested in implementing the "social" features of a
| fully-fledged indie reader. I didn't mind opening another tab to
| comment, nor having my "content" scattered across third-party
| sites.
|
| I did the same thing with my feed reader (where I'm subscribed),
| which sits nicely combined with my timeline (where I publish) in
| the same website system that I built.
|
| Although the option to immediately reply to posts in my reader
| (by means of webmention) is very attractive, for now I don't mind
| clicking and visiting external websites and maybe leaving a
| comment over there.
|
| For the rest, this article really hits home for me. I'm also
| dogfooding and trying to make it work for myself first, although
| my pub/sub functionality is part of a larger website/homepage
| system.
|
| I'm really happy that more people are building this kind of stuff
| to be able to ignore algorithmic timelines, ads and other
| enshittification.
|
| edit: Some kind of automatic reader is next on the list. I want
| to have that filter on keywords I entered upfront. In the
| background, this automatic reader should collect interesting
| articles/posts and create a sort of Newspaper or Magazine, which
| periodically presents itself to me as a sort of surprise.
| JZL003 wrote:
| Sort of related but I've really enjoyed setting up a urlwatch -
| https://urlwatch.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ - setup. Especially
| once you get past the boilerplate of pupetteer and can boot up a
| chrome instance to scrape websites with javascript. I start to
| feel like I'm taking control of the web in a push not pull way
|
| There's an amazing power to just monitor websites with no sweat
| and skim in the morning
|
| - new job openings for companies you like
|
| - new job openings/closings from your current company
|
| - products you're waiting to go on sale/back in stock/available
| refurbished (got 70% some nice headphones)
|
| - covid sewage stats, if you want to know about spikes
|
| - apartment listings
|
| - github releases you care a lot about (<3 yabai)
|
| - legal-ese for critical websites
|
| Personally I rent a little digital ocean droplet for $5 since I
| also self host a RSS reader, personal telegram bot, etc (and it's
| very useful to set up little http site for experimentation) but
| could do it on your laptop since it doesn't have to run every day
| at the same time
| toddmorey wrote:
| I love it! I'm doing something similar: using playwright as a
| headless browser to log into twitter a couple times a day and
| pull news & updates for me from saved searches. It's just for
| me: gives me a digest of twitter updates about the topics I
| care about without having to endure the site, toxic debates,
| and annoying ads.
| Vinnl wrote:
| Heh, I wrote [1] specifically for the "apartment listings" use
| case, but instead of notifying you by email, it uses GitHub
| Actions to create an RSS feed from a couple of CSS selectors.
|
| [1] Feed me up, Scotty! https://feed-me-up-
| scotty.vincenttunru.com/
| raybb wrote:
| I love this and have been using more RSS myself lately.
|
| The one thing that drives me crazy is that there is still no way
| to get posts from facebook groups into any sort of rss feed. Does
| anyone else have this problem or know a solution? The rss-bridge
| for FB groups has been broken for years b/c the FB redesign in
| 2020 made scraping harder.
| bergie wrote:
| Wow, that's remarkably close to what I've been thinking we'd need
| on our cruising sailboat. We have intermittent connectivity,
| especially when offshore, and so couple of additional things
| would make this an exact match:
|
| * Being able to say "sync now" when we have a moment of
| connectivity (for example, passing an island with LTE)
|
| * Being able to Readability and local cache all content
| (including images) by default so one can read when offline
| TheCapeGreek wrote:
| This was a breath of fresh air. I've been on a very similar
| burnout/recovery path in the last year. Building useful personal
| software let me enjoy my work again.
|
| The other main benefit for me is also being able to play and use
| any "unconventional" tech I care for. Building new-fangled
| single-binary PHP executables, using sqlite in prod, deploying
| WITHOUT Docker: these make it enjoyable for me.
|
| What I've noticed is that this also has a knock-on effect on the
| main work for me - personal use repos often have new techniques &
| optimisations I can add in.
| mxuribe wrote:
| Some parts sounded like you were talking about me! :-)
|
| Its funny, how many technologists play with stuff on the side,
| derive learnings from these experiences and end up bring
| something helpful, even valuable to their professional
| jobs...but employers sometimes - at least in some of my cases -
| disparages such efforts, or often block such enthusiasm. Then
| again, maybe i'm just working for the wrong kinds of orgs. ;-)
|
| I'm glad that you have been able to reap the benefits of the
| knock-on effect; kudos to you!
| johnwatson11218 wrote:
| Nice project, I have been working on something like this using
| pyqt6, something that scans news sites, dumps the urls in a
| locally running Postgresq, and can grab urls for me to display in
| a built in web renderer component.
|
| I have lots of ideas I want to implement inclcuding storing all
| this data using embedding layers and the ability to deconstruct
| the html in use.
|
| My last thought was that I want to take the 'articles', pull out
| the content, redisplay using django or a smaller web server, and
| replace the ads with positive affirmations such as "you are doing
| great!", "great job on your excercise". I figure I can even use
| deep learning to generate fake ads that look like normal ones but
| only serve to uplift me!
| anonL01V wrote:
| New anon account so I can speak openly about the future.
|
| My jaw is on the floor because this post seems like it could have
| been written by my future self. I can't believe how much in
| common I have with the author.
|
| I've realized I'm burnt out and have been planning to quit my job
| early next year (wanting to state this is the reason for the anon
| account).
|
| But there's a lot of people who are probably feeling this same
| way. What's astonishing to me is what the author did is almost
| exactly what I've been daydreaming about doing in my time off.
|
| I've also been thinking about the open/IndieWeb and how I'd like
| to engage with it. I was planning to build some sort of app to
| experiment in this space.
|
| There are similarities even down to one of the specific problems
| in this space: how to prevent infrequent posts from being lost in
| the flood. And technical considerations: what languages and
| technologies to use. I had also been considering building
| something using modern web technologies, where I'm about 10 years
| out of date on web development.
|
| In some ways, I'm delighted there's another person out there to
| provide some validation to what I've been thinking and feeling
| recently. It makes me feel like I'm going to head down the right
| path.
|
| In other ways, I'm upset and jealous the author got there first.
| facundo_olano wrote:
| > In other ways, I'm upset and jealous the author got there
| first.
|
| Don't be! the whole point of this was to build something for
| myself, and use the process to reflect. There's no reason why
| trying something similar shouldn't work for you, I certainly
| wasn't the first to implement a personal reader.
|
| Fun fact: I just skimmed through one of the indie web posts I
| linked (which I had read months ago) and it struck me how much
| of their ideas I just replicated almost verbatim in my post:
|
| > Firstly, don't try and make your software work for everyone,
| or just for a specific set of people you think may be
| interested. Make it for you.
|
| > By making it generic and possible for others to work with it,
| you'll make tradeoffs that may make things worse for your own
| usage, or may even design for an imaginary user that may not
| even exist, or build a system that with 17 different
| configuration items you could have a completely different
| system. Be selfish and make it more useful for yourself.
| anonL01V wrote:
| > Don't be! the whole point of this was to build something
| for myself, and use the process to reflect. There's no reason
| why trying something similar shouldn't work for you, I
| certainly wasn't the first to implement a personal reader.
|
| Thank you for the encouragement! I do intend to still do
| something in this space if only for no other reason than to
| go through this process myself with the hopes of rekindling
| my interest in technology and software development.
|
| And thank you for sharing your experience with us! The
| validation and motivation I'm feeling after reading this
| definitely overshadows the jealousy. :-)
| ltr_ wrote:
| (im just going to ramble about it, cos im really mad about the
| state of IT right now and i cant articulate some ideas well)
| sometimes i fantasize about the concept of "your IT person", kind
| of your local barber, general practitioner, tailor or baker. that
| is on charge of some aspect of your digital life with their own
| local little infra, tailoring personalized feeds and takes care
| of privacy/health issues, and provides you with their own simple
| interfaces or "speak" open protocols that connects with your feed
| reader, from movies, written articles to memes and funny videos.
| the thing is to have a human being to talk about this. not an
| dark algorithm that is adjusted constantly for profit for a
| soulless company. Some other ideas revolt time to time on my head
| : community run local data centers(kind of libraries) or
| providing simple content services from your home internet
| connection (that's why i loved this idea:
| https://gitlab.com/veilid/veilid). Your personal digital
| human(but maybe AI assisted) curators,all part of a idealized
| "virtual solar punk world", sustainable, private and healthier
| with humans put first, far from the toxic fascination with
| disruption , profit, perpetual and global growth and all of the
| startup toxic crap, we have everything we just have to glue it,
| and i see people thirsty for a digital world like that.
|
| its not the first time i hear about feeling healthier after
| moving to the feediverse. i have my own set of scripts and mini
| apps running on top puppeteer with a local llamacpp for summaries
| and recommendations, its not perfect but im planning to put more
| effort on this and maybe look for OSS projects that are aiming at
| that (ie. (*arr suites, nostr, activitypub, veilid).) and offer
| that to friends and family members to see if they like the idea,
| also i have a name for all those scripts: "not a browser" the web
| without HTML CSS and JS served along with the data, just provide
| the data, how you displayed, its the user concern.
| anonL01V wrote:
| I can really commiserate with how you are feeling. Something
| I've done recently is set up a "homelab" server and running a
| few web apps on it of various functions. Nothing novel here,
| but what I really love about this is how all of these apps are
| user centric and open source/community built. There's no user
| hostile algorithms here or even ad based systems. Only software
| that tends to put the user first and tends to speak open
| protocols.
|
| This sort of thing is very achievable if you work in IT and can
| run your own server. But what about everyone else?
|
| Your idea of a personal "IT person", like your own personal
| barber or tailor, is very intriguing. I wonder if its feasible
| to provide a service like this to people who are of a similar
| mindset about disconnecting from huge tech companies/algorithms
| and using something more personal, but don't have the technical
| means to achieve this?
|
| I've also been thinking about the personal data aspect of
| healthcare. I hate that my medical records are stored in
| MyChart and a dozen other proprietary systems that I have no
| control over. Yet, I have a super computer in my pocket. Why
| can't I maintain my own copy of my records and selectively
| share data with my doctors when I arrive for an appointment?
| Why do I still need to have one doctor's office fax something
| to another's? I should be able to own my data and tap a button
| on my phone to do this. Only Apple's Health app seems to come
| anywhere close to providing a fraction of this functionality,
| but there seems to be 0 adoption of this within the US. Even
| then, this only benefits Apple users. Something like health
| data should not be locked in a propriety system, even one that
| runs locally like Apple Health. There should be some open
| protocol and an ecosystem of implementations.
| ssss11 wrote:
| I'm 100% in agreement, the state of IT makes me mad.
|
| We had something close to good for a brief window before
| marketing and greed took over the internet.
|
| I think if someone bully a synology nas-like product with apps
| designed to benefit the end user and people ("your IT person")
| to support you which wasn't aimed at fleecing all personal data
| and dollars out of customers it may very well work and would be
| utopia for the end user but the economics probably makes it a
| low margin business with lots of risks (e.g. liability over
| losing peoples files)
| password4321 wrote:
| loughnane yesterday at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38621025#38626979:
|
| > _I treasure my attention and so I 've spent some time to opt
| out of ads. 5 years ago I couldn't tell what DNS was, now I've
| got an OPNsense router at home running ZenArmor/Unbound and I can
| can link to it from my phone over wireguard._
|
| > _Using ublock I 've made a point to prune the pages I visit, so
| classes like "header" "breadcrumbs" "recommended" "sponsor" &c.
| are hidden._
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