I will forever mourn the general demise of server browsers. Too many games require you to use matchmaking systems, which means it's very hard to build up a small community in-game anymore. You either have to rely on forming small parties with people you've stumbled upon one by one, or you have to seek out people from some much larger area like Reddit or Discord. It takes a lot of the serendipity out of the experience. Without a small community it becomes much harder to ensure you're not playing with people who make the game less fun by whatever metric you care about.

I used to be an admin on a group of about 18 or so connected Counter-Strike 1.6 servers called T3Houston*. We ran modified versions of various Warcraft 3 mods which added persistent XP/leveling, as well as integration with an external item store and player database the owner maintained. Most of those servers were filled to the brim during peak US gaming times, and our forum was quite active.

There aren't many games these days where you could do something like that. I discovered the community because one day I was just looking for a server with open slots for me to join. I was fairly skeptical of whatever a Warcraft mod would be like, but ended up enjoying it so I added it to my favorites. Eventually I got to know the regulars and joined the forum. Notably, the place felt far less toxic than the average server I'd join back then. I can completely believe this is just me looking at the past through rose tinted glasses, but it feels like the general toxicity has gotten worse at the same time as we've lost a lot of tools to manage it.

* If anyone else here remembers the name T3Houston: hi! I'm Stealth Penguin

Reading through the comments under this thread, there are many users who swear by a plain text file, but who then build quite a lot of snowflake software to regain functionality offered by more structured TODO applications. That includes:

- having your computer alert you to things that come up

- being able to tag notes

- being able to add events to a calendar

- being able to set priority of tasks

- expecting prioritized/currently relevant tasks to be at the top of the agenda

- being able to add recurring tasks

- full-text search (grepping)

- formatting features (markdown)

Some of the laborious (or, in my opinion, plain unholy) solutions include:

- feeding TODOs to an LLM to filter for the currently relevant ones and send Telegram notifications

- hand-copying currently relevant tasks to the top of the TODO list

- running a script on a VPS to sync notifications

- set up cron job with git commit

- writing post-it notes by hand

I would encourage everyone to try out emacs with org-mode. It takes some time to get used to the editor and its keybindings (though provisions exist for vim users), but _every_ item on the list above is handled out of the box, or is offered through a free and maintained plugin.

The author of the OP claims to have tried _every_ todo app, and has afterwards moved (regressed?) to writing notes in a plain text file, but there is a path extending from this point that the author has not walked yet. I strongly suggest that, especially for people with a computing or technical background, it is an undisputed upgrade. https://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html being the bible, of course.

The Alien, Terminator, and Matrix franchises have similar problems.

Aliens successfully changed genres, from horror to action. But subsequent movies could never recapture the primal horror of the original or the fun action of the second. It's almost like there are only two local optima in the Alien movie universe and Alien + Aliens took them both.

Terminator is the same. The first movie was a perfect sci-fi action movie, with a trippy premise and loads of fun. The second was a subversion of the first: the Terminator is the good guy! And that worked too. But after that, where else can you go?

And, of course, they never even bothered to make sequels to The Matrix.

I was in the audience, asking the question at the end of the video!

I didn't quite get the question across and got an answer to a different question, so to re-state my actual question (that I asked David later), I was curious how heavy a lift it would be to preserve enough information in production ClojureScript compilation to allow re-hydrating. The aim being to re-hydrate enough in production that e.g. in the event of issues or errors, you might attach a REPL to that production build and poke at it.

The answer (which I mostly knew/expected) is... quite a heavy lift. I can imagine some possible solutions, but I'm mostly-Rust nowadays, so no solution from me soon. :)

I also really recommend the other [1] talks [2] from this event!

[1]: https://youtu.be/8K4IdE89IRA (Aaron, on using lenses, this sorta stuff [3])

[2]: https://youtu.be/fcSJAuUGVs8 (Ben, on a core.async error handling strategy that I had totally missed and totally changes the ergonomics of using c.a!)

[3]: https://github.com/tekacs/factor/blob/master/src/factor/lens...

Macaulay is essentially a ripping good yarn. That's the problem with the Whiggish style of history writing: it's so entertaining that you forget the awkward parts.

He would write something cheerful like, "the proud Scots demonstrated the excellence of their industry in the cities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, and in the Americas" and then you check the dates and realize that he's writing about the period of the Highland Clearances.