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dotdi commented on Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts   daringfireball.net/linked... · Posted by u/robenkleene
dotdi · 3 months ago
When Gruber mentions that he never uses Markdown outside of his blog, and hinting at the fact that it was not intended for text editors (and other apps), there's one important point I want to make.

Yes, Markdown has disadvantages, and a few rough edges for uses as the format for editors et al, but there are two very big advantages and/or sideffects of it's widespread use: (1) it's cleartext and therefore very good as a measure against vendor lock-in and (2) it has, to some extent, dampened the rampant "not-invented-here"-esqe tendency to use proprietary formats. Even in open-source apps, proprietary formats make it hard for non-dev users to get their stuff out. If it's markdown (or at least supports markdown export) from the beginning, at least you know you can take your data with you.

dotdi commented on If you are useful, it doesn't mean you are valued   betterthanrandom.substack... · Posted by u/weltview
dotdi · 3 months ago
> I had become the go-to person for making things run smoothly, for fixing urgent problems, for delivering. But every time I pushed toward more strategic and ambitious directions, there was a lot of can-kicking and “let’s think about it” that went nowhere. I was incredibly useful to the organization, but not necessarily valued, and at some point, I started feeling a sense of stagnation. Compensation was good, the actual job was aligned with my interests, but that sense of being just a useful caretaker was hitting my motivation. In the end, I had to move on to another role.

this hits home, hard.

dotdi commented on Space Station Flight Was 'Wilder' Than We Thought   science.slashdot.org/stor... · Posted by u/pain_perdu
dotdi · 5 months ago
I haven't been on slashdot in a long time, and boy is it a shitty experience.

Using Orion browser with uBlock Origin, initially the site loads fine. Then it tries to load ads. It detects that the ads don't load, so it displays an overlay that looks like a crash modal "oops, something went wrong", shaming the user into believing THEY did something wrong.

Dismissing the modal reveals that the CSS was unloaded in the background.

Thanks but no thanks.

dotdi commented on Executive wealth as a factor in return-to-office   twitter.com/EthanEvansVP/... · Posted by u/kappi
dotdi · 6 months ago
I feel like this is a huge load of crap.

These are highly intelligent people. They got to be very high up in the food chain. They are driven. They are smart.

Yet, the claim is that they can't imagine there exist people not like themselves? Sorry, not buying it.

More plausible to me is that remote work will hurt their bottom lines because they (and their superiors, investors, board members, etc) heavily invested in real estate.

Means, motive and opportunity.

dotdi commented on When Professor Bryant Lin got cancer, he taught a class about it   nytimes.com/2025/02/26/us... · Posted by u/danso
dotdi · 6 months ago
I studied molecular biology 15 years ago. Recently I realized that I started to forget more and more about it, like how the rooms looked, names of professors, (obviously) a lot of the material I learned, etc.

But I can't forget about our professor of Genetics: he was suffering from lung cancer, so when he talked about cancer, it had a tremendous impact. He also used to be a smoker and was quite outspoken against that too.

dotdi commented on Show HN: I built a modern Goodreads alternative   kaguya.io/... · Posted by u/vasanthk1125
dotdi · 6 months ago
I came here to ask "how is this better than StoryGraph", but before I could hit send, it occurred to me:

This doesn't need to be better than StoryGraph. This just needs to be different, cater to different persons, needs. Maybe not even that. It can just be there next to StoryGraph.

My gripe with GoodReads is not that it didn't evolve, or that the UI is dated. My gripe is that it's owned by Amazon. So to the new kid on the block: Godspeed.

dotdi commented on I Went to SQL Injection Court   sockpuppet.org/blog/2025/... · Posted by u/mrkurt
EMIRELADERO · 6 months ago
Am I the only one slightly perplexed/worried by the point-blank source code exemption?

It's easy to imagine a scenario where the city decides to develop a specific software in-house and hide the "biases" in the source code, or any other thing one might not find desirable.

Hell, they don't even need to make everything from scratch! Could just patch and use a permissively licensed 3rd-party component.

In my opinion, the proposed amendment does not go far enough.

dotdi · 6 months ago
That's why it's important to push for "public money - open source" initiatives like some countries in the EU are trying to implement.

Off the top of my head, I think the last (now failed) German coalition had this in their programme but didn't deliver. Maybe the new government will.

dotdi commented on AI cracks superbug problem in two days that took scientists years   bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c... · Posted by u/monkeydust
dotdi · 6 months ago
Maybe this is too tin-hatty, but sending the unpublished manuscript from (or to) a free Gmail account gives Google the right to use it, and therefore also to train whatever AI model they want with it.

Sounds like all of those claims where ChatGPT allegedly coded a flappy bird clone from scratch. Only it didn't, it just regurgitated code from several Github repos.

dotdi commented on We don't need startups, we need Digital-Mittelstand   mertbulan.com/2025/02/24/... · Posted by u/mertbio
jansan · 6 months ago
I realized a few weeks ago how broken IT in Germany is when I talked to a guy who turned out the CIO of a known German retail company. We did not talk about technology, exciting projects, ideas or similar, but about the complexity of the privacy act and "Scheinselbständigkeit" (false self-employment, which is a huge issue for start-ups and self-employed people in Germany). Out brains are so busy thinking about stuff that should just not have that much brains share, that we have not enough time to think about innovation and technology. I really wish they would drastically cut bureaucracy, but I just don't see it.
dotdi · 6 months ago
I think you got this wrong. Laws against Scheinselbständigkeit are protecting individuals from being exploited, and it's one of the things that characterizes the EU.

Don't forget that outside of Europe, most big economies were built on the ongoing exploitation of the working class. I am not saying this didn't happen in Europe, but at least there are efforts to curb this.

So a CIO complaining that he can't exploit people for cheap labour is not an argument for broken IT laws. It's an argument for seeing that it works as intended.

u/dotdi

KarmaCake day1688April 15, 2014View Original