And in many ways it actually is remarkably meaningfully decentralized - or perhaps "effectively" decentralized - in terms of every node having a full working copy of entire repositories that can be trivially cloned to another provider or stood up on a self-hosted server.
I’d say the opposite. Git is defacto centralized. And I’d go further and say that attempting decentralization is the biggest problem with Git. It maybe makes sense for Linux. But for 99.999% of projects it makes everything so much worse.
I found Reminders to be unreliable and foolishly designed. It only works for must-do tasks. It uses repeating-period instead of time-since, so it can't handle repeating tasks that are optional. If you fail to mark off a repeating task, the next instances stack up and crash the notification cycle.
I'm familiar with the pain point you're describing. In general, I would say a recurring calendar event is a better solution for your particular preferences. Personally my mental model is that the act of deciding to not do an optional task constitutes completion of the reminder for that occurrence. And if I forget or deprioritize that decision, the reminder still hangs out in my Today list until I do as a mitigation.
I still use my calendar for routine time-window reminders. But when I tried timeboxing tasks for after work, those don't stick because my daily work hours can shift by as much as 2 hours, depending on how many pre-work-hours meetings I have that day.
I'm a big fan of automation, so half of the fun with that project is setting it all up.
If you work at an office, you can set your reminders to be location-based with daily recurrence so that you get reminded when you leave the office or arrive home. I imagine you can also integrate Reminders with IFTT if you want a "Done with Work" button on your phone if you WFH.
Ironically the Reminders app sucks at reminding. I use the Clock app for my todo list; it makes a pretty loud noise pretty reliably, which makes it pretty good for reminders.
Reminders is not the job of a todo app, it is the job of a calendar app. For a todo there is no now, it is pick the best thing todo next. I need to be interupted for my dentist appointment. However I don't need to be interupted to buy milk, I need a remineer when I'm at the store anyway to also get milk. If the reminder was 'i see you are going in the direction of a store: we need milk if you have time to stop' that would work.
Certain tasks have deadlines - can you really have one of those without some concept of time? Creating a calendar entry for those doesn’t make any sense to me - they are not events happening at a point in time with a given duration, but things that need to be done BEFORE said point in time.
Hence scheduling, which leads to agendas, the midway point between a calendar and Todo list.
I used to use an org agenda view for this, now I just use a caldav calendar and trillium. In the morning, I check my to-do list, which has been being created for this day over the last couple weeks or months, I look at my agenda to see what meetings or appointments I have, and I slot todos in between them. I might even be doing so for the whole week or month, moving tasks around as needed. I take a look at my week and month todos and see that something is due in two days so slot it in for today. Similar to how a project manager might do with sprints and tickets I guess.
I think the critical aspect of any functional Todo system is active review, at least daily if not more so, plus regular weekly and monthly cleanups.
A reminder makes no sense because while there is a deadline there isn't a must do now time. What they need is a regular review so as you go about your day it is still fresh, and maybe in a plan. Often those are things that can be done when you have a free moment as well.
I don't know that app, but I don't want a specific location - milk can be had at hundreds of different stores in my town. While it isn't all the same there are only about 4 different suppliers to all those stores.
> Reminders is not the job of a todo app, it is the job of a calendar app.
Ehh. The thing with a calendar "reminder" is that calendar apps assume that any such reminder is irrelevant once the time you set for the reminder goes by. They exist to remind you that some time-sensitive real-world event is starting, in time to be ready for it; but once that event has ended, you must have either done it or missed it — so either way, the calendar forgets about it.
Whereas a reminder / "todo with a date" object in a reminder/todo app, makes a different assumption: that you still need to do the thing, even if you didn't interact with the reminder when it first popped up. So the reminder is still there, glowing brightly, and often pops back up with further notifications, until you complete it.
Three examples from my own calendar of the type of reminder I'm talking about here, if you can't yet picture what I mean:
• It's time to replace the filter in my cat's water fountain [and take apart and scrub all the parts of the fountain while I'm at it.] (This isn't urgent — there's no particular need to do it exactly when I'm reminded of it — but it grows more urgent the longer it is left undone. The persistence of the reminder helps me to remember to do it, if I was busy when I first saw it.)
• I've gotta either pick the specific meals going into my meal-box subscription service box by midnight Saturday, or skip the week (or the service will pick randomly for me, giving me things I really don't want to eat, and I'll torture myself trying to motivate myself to cook those meals anyway, because I don't want to waste money/food.) I set this one to go off with two explicit "pre-notifications" twice — once at 7PM on Thursday, and again at 9PM on Friday. It then goes off again on its own, a little bit before midnight, and that's the final warning. (And, of course, if I check it off before then, the other notifications associated with that instance of the reminder won't fire.) I also usually just leave the Friday 9PM one unacknowledged + open as a toast on my computer until I've picked it, to ensure I won't get distracted and forget about it.
• Pay my credit card bill. (I have monthly autopay set up, but my understanding is that they still get to charge some minimal amount of interest for any charge that remains posted + not paid down for 21 days. So I set a reminder to pay the card down every 14 days. Again, not urgent per se — the worst that happens is that the 30-day autopay kicks in. But I find it a convenient time to review the last 14 days of charges for any strange activity; and the longer I go without doing that, the more of a schlep that starts to feel like — so biweekly is actually good here.
To be clear, I had all three of these set up as calendar events before — and they didn't work very well that way! Repeating reminders have much better semantics here.
Being pedantic, based on your example, I think the Reminders app does a good job at reminding, but a bad job at alerting. But that’s because a reminder to me is a gentle concept.
I believe the Reminders app, when used alongside Notes and Calendar, is becoming a strong competitor in the productivity space. One feature I'd love to see added is persistent nudging reminders that keep alerting you until you manually dismiss them.
Things 3 is another excellent third-party option in this category. Together, these apps form my essential productivity stack. I honestly can't function without them.
Yeah I think this is a result of the attention economy, there are 75 million notifications per day that someone somewhere wants to push in your face so we've gotten really good at cutting them out. But the counter-swing is also too big and now critical things like calendars and reminders are buried in a list we never look at.
I agree it would be nice to have more alarm-like notification options. Flagging, setting as high priority, and assigning a date/time and getting in the habit of checking the Today category regularly all help mitigate; a bug-me-until-this-is-done feature would be a welcome alternative. (I will note that the GP's emacs stack isn't even close to offering native mobile push notifications, to state the obvious.)
Reminders.app does a great job when I want create lists and inventories! I use it for groceries and webpages too. For example, I've sent many of the Emacs-related links to my Emacs list in Reminders, where I know I'll be able to find them the next time I forget Gall's Law and look for a more-complex system to replace my current one: writing things down; thinking about what I've written; redrafting; and repeating.
Now that we've established that, what's your decisive and ambitious action you've made towards addressing climate change, so we can learn from the example you've set?
I don't necessarily disagree (or agree) with the calculus that we arguably could and should be injecting SO2 into the stratosphere right now as an emergency measure, but your acquaintances are certainly not the only ones thinking about it. As the first article I linked mentions, the idea has been around since at least 1965 and references a 2021 landmark report. The White House OSTP also released their own 44-page report on it in 2023 (https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/30/white-house-releases-report-... , https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/ostp/news-updates/2023/...), pursuant to the research plan from the 2022 article I initially shared.
I'd also probably agree that there is likely misguided opposition to it as a tool in the climate change arsenal as well from "climate advocates" (taboo). The same could also be said for fission nuclear power which, unlike SO2 geoengineering, would substantially address the root cause of the problem - emissions - with fewer risks and unknowns. (France, for example, being a real-world example of how many countries could almost completely decarbonize their electric generation in a proven and scalable way with nuclear fission.)
If we further broaden our scope of misguided opposition from just "climate advocates" to voting polities in countries that are positioned to meaningfully address climate change at a global scale, then we're really getting to the root of the issue. The single most impactful action the average person could take to fight climate change in the US is to vote blue. It's an effectively binary choice to give badly-needed societal support and investment to climate-relevant initiatives like your friends' and so many others.
I vote blue but I don’t see the dems fast-tracking fission! Or really anything else particularly effective about climate for the last 30 years.
anyway my model is: we just have to survive a few years before Wright’s Law pushes solar+batteries so cheap that fossil is priced out of the market. Thus aerosol injection to bridge the gap until drawdown
If you can link me a credible model that shows we can get to net zero that way, then great. Otherwise my understanding is we need all the solar+batteries we can get but it won't be enough to meet even 1/3 of projected demand by 2050.
Sometimes I have a hard time wrapping my head around reconciling that with the estimated number of protons in the observable universe which is "only" ~10^80 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddington_number). Seems like it "should" be much higher, but orders of magnitude are sometimes deceptive to our intuition.
Unrelated, but I moved to a more rural area a while back and I’m surrounded by orchards and fields a fair amount of time, and my mind just can’t wrap itself around the scale of agriculture.
One avocado tree can produce around 200 avocados per year, and the orchards around here are probably around 150 trees/acre, so 30k avocados/acre/year.
Each avocado has about 250 calories (and that is just the parts that we eat, the tree has to put energy and mass into the pit and skin etc). These are food calories / kcal, so that’s 250k calories per avocado, or ~7.5 billion calories per year per acre.
7.5B calories/year is just about exactly 1kW, so that orchard is converting sunlight (and water, air, and trace minerals) to avocado calories at a continuous rate of 1kW. It’s incredible. The USDA says that as of 2022 there were about 880M acres of farmland in the United States alone.
1 acre is about 4,050 m^2, and incident sunlight has an average intensity of 1kW/m^2.
So your avocado orchard is converting incident sunlight to food calories with an efficiency of about 0.025%.
(This ... isn't wildly inefficient for photosynthesis, though typical values range from 1--3% AFAIU, though I've not computed this on a per-acre / per-hectare basis.)
Mind too that you're getting more than just avocado meat, there are also the skins and pits as you note, as well as leaves and wood, all of which could be used as fuel should we really want to.
Ecologists look at the net total energy conversion of ecosystems, often expressed not in terms of energy but as carbon fixation --- how much CO2 is captured from the atmosphere and converted to biomass.
And that amount is ... surprisingly limited. We'll often hear that humans use only a small fraction of the sunlight incident on the Earth's surface, but once you start accounting for various factors, that becomes far less comforting than it's usually intended. Three-quarters of Earth's surface is oceans (generally unsuitable for farming), plants and the biosphere require a certain amount of that activity, etc., etc. It turns out that humans already account for about 40% of net primary productivity (plant metabolism) of the biosphere. Increasing our utilisation of that is ... not likely, likely greatly disruptive, and/or both.
Another interesting statistic: In 1900, just as the Model T Ford was being introduced, and local transport (that is, exclusive of inter-city rail and aquatic transport) was principally dependent on human feet or horse's hooves, twenty percent of the US grain crop went to animal feed. (And much of that ended up on city streets.) We had a biofuel-based economy, and it consumed much of our food supply.
(Stats are for the US but would be typical of other countries of the time.)
This isn't an argument that fossil fuels are "good", or that renewables are "bad". It does point out, however, that changing our present system is hard, and any solution will cause pain and involve compromises.
It takes a bit to accept your (10^0 m) place in the universe on the length scale between the Planck length (10^-35 m), the width of a proton (10^-15 m) and the diameter of the observable universe (10^27 m).
Well the ratio of the strong force, vs electromagnetism and the speed of light define the size of the atom. Life requires machinery to self replicate and the distance between a DNA base pair is a sugar molecule attached in a chain so that's about as small as possible. Intelligence requires a certain amount of complexity of something like a brain, and it has to be made of cells and doubtful it could be made more than an order of magnitude smaller.
Could intelligent life exist based on some other physical phenomena than a self-replicating string of atoms? Maybe some unknown quantum phenomena inside neutron stars or something big and slow on galactic scales or something new which fills the dark matter gap...
But otherwise it's physics driving where units of "stuff" can exist, and the correct scales for long term complexity/turbulence can happen, like the thin film of goo on the outside of the frozen crust of a molten rock we are.
As someone with decades of software engineering under my belt, my opinion is they are the best IDEs out there by a comfortable margin. It's possible the issue you're encountering when accidentally opening them is due to index updates which would occur disproportionately often on startup for people who otherwise never use them. Other than that, performance is more than satisfactory 90+% of the time in my experience.
That's what I would have said about Eclipse about 15 years ago.
I rarely have performance issues with Jetbrains IDEs, and even rarer still that they bog down the whole machine. Get a properly specced computer (32+GB RAM, 10+ core chip) if you don't already have one. Also try adjusting memory settings - https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/increasing-memory-heap.h...
Putin has convinced Trump, both overtly and covertly, that Trump can have what Putin has - personal control over a country of oligarchs. All Putin has to do to pull strings is feed Donald pointers that he willingly laps up.
Is it really a compromise if the opps (or should I say: "opps") are deliberately welcomed in with open arms? Granting Russians access here wouldn't even crack the top 10 gifts this administration has given to Putin in the last month.
Reminder that Trump wanted the US to partner with a foreign country to protect American elections (!?) and the country he wanted to help "secure" fair elections was the Russian dictatorship. (!!)
Scam culture thrives on apathy and ignorance, just count this as yet another win for the bad guys who profit immensely off our increasing societal stupidity
