Just a stranger trying things.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • My number one gripe with organic maps is how fragile the search is. If you don’t write it exactly right, you get no or irrelevant results. Also, it seems to have no clue of what is popular and what people expect when they search for something. I’m not talking about personalized results but for example the following: searching for “Eiffel”, leads me to minor roads, restaurants and all kinds of results unrelated to the Eiffel tower. This is what is troubling me the most.




  • I think there are important considerations to keep in mind.

    First and foremost, Valve is not a public company. I don’t know if it has investors, but it is not driven by profits like many typical public companies are. These companies tend to allow themselves longer investments without any clear visibility of immediate profits. They also do things for the greater good, even though it does not bring profits.

    But also, I think the whole of valve is a set of gamers and people who genuinely care about the gaming business and making great products. I think they all share Gabe’s values and goals. It’s not like Gabe is the only one holding everything together or else it would instantly crash into the profit driven company it could be.

    Both of these scenarios keep me hopeful that this is a longer lasting stance and doesn’t hinge on just one person. It’s not a proof it will never be a typical profit company but these are barriers which are not typically present. Let’s hope for the best and keep rewarding them for their contributions to gaming, open source and for their good actions.






  • I’m sorry, I don’t have any specific suggestions for you, but I am wondering: is there no open source app you yourself wish existed because you would need it?

    Working on an open source app because some else (and not you) needs it, is not a good way of staying engaged and caring about the solution. Being the user and target of a project yourself is usually a much netter way of caring and proposing something tailored to at least one individual, maybe more.

    Of course, if you are looking for a programming exercise, go for it, but then you don’t need ideas, you can reimplement something which already exists, perhaps which you like, but in your own way. But if you want to have an impact in the open source, it starts by needing something which you don’t really find anywhere and taking matter in your own hands to fix it :) this is not meant to disincentivize you, quite the opposite! I hope you stay attentive to your digital ecosystem to see which holes can be plugged :)

    I maintain a private list of ideas I just think of as I go about my day, of things I would like to write/create for myself and while I won’t be going through with all of them, I hope to be able to pick up one or several of them whenever I have time. I can through some ideas here, not as a hint that you should do it (I’ll probably do them myself regardless), but just to inspire you, maybe:

    • I am subscribed to a teachable program which has no app and the program is just static information. I want to pull it all and represent it to me offline, not requiring internet to manage my progress. It is also intended to help me archive what I paid for and not depend on the goodwill of teachables to allow me to continue access the resource.
    • an RSS feed manager which uses embeddings to automatically organise the content by topic rather than by source.
    • an anki plugin to highlight content in the browser based on words from anki that I have and have not learned, to improve my language learning and reading ability.

    I have a few more, but this should give you some hints, I hope! Good luck!




  • There is a way to place the secret file (corresponding to the password) on a dedicated USB stick and have a script attempt to Mount it at boot to unlock the partition. If the USB stick is not found, it will revert to the password prompt. Perhaps this is the best of both?

    Make sure not to leave the USB stick plugged in, but rather only take it and and plug it in to boot then safely store it once booted, otherwise you are probably defeating the purpose of having an encrypted partition to begin with.

    I’ll add a link to read more about it shortly.

    Edit: here is one example to set it up (including to auto-decrypt ZFS) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xOLxCwdi-I



  • Well yes, but also no.

    Whenever you search for a solution to your problem, it stems from the realization that something is a problem. But sometimes, you have a thing which has been done for a longtime, it was a problem with no solution and you’ve had to accept that. How would you determine one day that things can be done differently and better without constantly reevaluating everything? It’s not realistic.

    In my view, it is a perfectly reasonable question to ask “what problem does waydroid solve?” To figure out if you have that issue and you didn’t know of this solution.

    Sorry, just my 2 cents.