It's not just a matter of deleting features. Any time I innovate a feature even slightly, I find myself doing something I don't have the skills for. I lost the first version of this comment thread, writing it on my Teliva-based editor (which provides character counts for chunks). Fucking stupid bug, and it was all me.
Software benefits from testing. If you use software with few users, it's almost certain to be under-tested.
I also can't just ignore all the considerations of industrial software.
I can't just do it from scratch because I don't have all the skills. Deciding what to depend on is also thorny. Pulling in irrelevancies vs excluding people.
5% of software lasts a long time. (Analogy with food breaks down there.) Hard to tell which 5% it is. (Analogy with building roads/bridges breaks down there.)
If I were to ever have any success, I'll be dealing with awkward requests, the risk of burnout.
One thing is clear: the dream/temptation to "scale up" is poison. But it's unclear what's left. We end up with a few people scattered in a humongous state space mostly building stuff for ourselves, nibbling at the margins of the software industrial complex, while unable to actually extricate ourselves from it.
You can have both kinds of software, the kind that's unreliable because the authors are indifferent/malicious or the kind that's unreliable because the authors don't have enough support.
"The more living patterns there are in a place -- a room, a building, or a town -- the more it comes to life as an entirety, the more it glows, the more it has that self-maintaining fire which is the quality without a name.
"And when a building has this fire, then it becomes a part of nature. Like ocean waves, or blades of grass, its parts are governed by the endless play of repetition and variety created in the presence of the fact that all things pass. This is the quality itself."
RIP CA
Beginnings of a way to link to arbitrary lines in a text file.
One thing Zettelkasten and Roam provide that my system of text files doesn't is the ability to hyperlink to an arbitrary line in any file in the corpus. I don't think Org-mode has that either.
Line numbers break if I go back and edit above them. I could maintain a table of line hashes somewhere, but that'll get thrown off by small changes to the line, or even reformatting a paragraph.
Idea: just pick the first letter of each word.
Here's how you turn a line of text into an id:
$ echo ' The quick brown fox jumped over' | sed 's/^\s*//' | sed 's/\([^ ]\)[^ ]* */\1/g'
Tqbfjo
And here's how you search for the file containing a given id:
$ grep "$(echo Tqbfjo |sed 's/./\\<&.*/g')" . -rl
If the line gets reformatted and the line gets split between two others, just search for prefixes or suffixes of the id.
As a fork of Lua, Teliva has always had a copy of the Lua manual. I finally brought it up to date.
Apps ship with source. To let you run without reading the source, apps run without any privileges by default. No files, no network.
You can grant broad privileges to a single function after reading just its source.
The issue: functions can be over-ridden, so you end up accidentally granting privileges to malicious nooks and crannies.
I need to go back to app-level permissions. Grant narrow privileges to the whole app, without regard to what function uses them.
A concrete use case for permissions by caller (now removed from Teliva)
By its nature, a file browser can list directory contents and open files all over the computer. How could we convince ourselves that it's only using these privileges to meet our requests?
My old solution: app is written in such a way that someone can grant these privileges to a single function after convincing themselves it opens a single file/directory every time the Enter key is pressed.
"Part 2 is tricky. The first output value 'cdfgba' could be either a 0, 6, or 9. To figure out which one it is I could do some fancy constraint satisfaction. That sounds hard. Or I could exhaustively try all permutations of the 7 letters. That sounds easy! Here's my plan.."