> We'll simply cut the headlines from the offending website and past it into a search engine and find another site with the same or similar info but with easier access.

Where do you trust to read the news? Any newsrooms well staffed enough to verify stories (and not just reprint hearsay) seem to have the same issues.

The AP and Reuters are well-staffed and have functional websites. The sites aren’t great (they’ve been afflicted with bloat and advertising along with most outlets, just at a marginally lower rate), but they are at least usable.

I'm absolutely loving the genre of "chatbot informing user it messed up real bad":

> CRITICAL: Everything was destroyed. Your production database is GONE. Let me check if there are any backups:

> ...

> No snapshots found. The database is completely lost.

It's the still kind of uplifting tone that gets me. Like the task has finally been completed

It's unfortunate the Privacy Act included an exception for law enforcement. I imagine at the time it wasn't clear that every action taken by the govt would be called law enforcement.

There is an ethical framework for handling personal data collected and maintained by the US govt called the Fair Information Practice Principles (https://www.fpc.gov/resources/fipps/).

It really is too bad that "any legal purpose" is the stated boundary for our elected govt rather than a more noble appeal to public service.

Laws aren't the problem here. If the data exists it will be abused, if not by the government then by corrupt insiders.

Reminds me of a farmer who found a snake one winter.

The government is bound by acquisition processes for these large contracts: they put out RFPs and companies compete for the contract. All Google has to do is not bid for the next contract.

We have forgotten the simple, reliable solutions of the past - a grocery list on the fridge, a weekly planner, a weekly plan itself rather than constant coordination. Cell phones and easy communication led us here.

I'm curious what makes you think the solutions of the past have been forgotten or that they were somehow more reliable? (They're certainly simpler, I'll give you that!)

I have printouts of school/camp calendars taped to the wall, a weekly planner on the kitchen whiteboard, paper grocery lists on the fridge, and a pocket notebook for capturing random tasks. I used to believe that some lifehack, process, methodology, app, or modern jeejah would finally solve my organization problems. But as I got older I made peace with the fact that they're all limited by the same weak link -- me.

Ignoring the fact that OP does not know about existing solutions like Grocy where people do find value in the currently tedious setup of adding products and tracking their kitchens inventory, and just zeroing in on your first point. The paper grocery list is terrible

If you cook at all a solution like Mealie becomes your cookbook. Its trivial to create grocery list for when you take the time to plan out your meals for the day, week, or month. If you are not shopping by yourself, everyone on the app can just pick up things in the grocery store independently. Its an actual time saver

Mealie exposes an API so you could theoretically expose it to another solution like Home Assistant and have your grocery list sync with your errands list. Suddenly you have the ability so that anyone using Home Assistant could get an alert when they are nearby the grocery store or Costco to pick up things on this combined list. Maybe your partner is walking by a store you've created a zone for, with items on your master list, gets an alert, and they can mark off some things that they picked up and it syncs back to where the items were originally added. Your inventory is then updated based on marked off items.

Now imagine if you did not have to come up with the bespoke master list for all the stores you go to and it can determine when to send that alert. You can also just snap a picture of your receipt or shopping cart and it is all figured out for you.

But you could just use piece of paper with the magnet on the fridge.

Theres a lot of manual process that can be eliminated for things people already find convenient enough to do manually. Local models can easily handle much of this already.

the companies could merge or buy each other

For me the thing keeping me on markdown is Obsidian on mobile - no other note taking app comes close. If they made an actual Emacs for mobile (actual emacs complete with elisp support, not the existing org mode apps) that was a pleasure to use, I would likely switch to that.

As it is, the * vs # for headings makes switching between the two uncomfortable.

I have used Emacs on mobile for years. Works great in Termux on Android for instance. I use it daily and with the same .emacs.d (synced using git) as I use on computers, with just a few conditionals in init.el to not load too many bloated dependencies for things I am unlikely to use on my phone anyway.

I can second this, Termux + Emacs turned my phone back into a personal computer.

It is helpful to add extra keys to your touch keyboard, which you can do by editing your termux properties file (see https://wiki.termux.com/wiki/Touch_Keyboard). Helpful when you don't have a hardware keyboard available.

I’ve built a handful of org based iOS apps.

While my initial intention was to bring as much org support to iOS as possible (https://plainorg.com), my thinking evolved over time and I gravitated towards a different kind of mobile-optimised experience, and so https://journelly.com was born. I’ve recently added Markdown support too https://xenodium.com/journelly-1-3-released

I use Journelly the most and is also my most popular app.

I have an org scratch pad and also a habit tracking app https://flathabits.com.

Happy Journelly user here! Finally a great place to store notes/links on my iPhone in a simple but powerful app for rediscovery. That I can bring to my windows / Linux / Mac eMacs.

> an actual Emacs for mobile (actual emacs complete with elisp support, not the existing org mode apps)

There is an official fully graphical Emacs for Android (not just the terminal version in Termux).

> that was a pleasure to use

Oh... Well, it will probably get better in time, as new features are added. For now, it actually works great with an Android tablet of 8" or more and a bluetooth keyboard. The small screen of a phone doesn't lend itself well to Emacs's interface.

Btw, which other note taking apps worth talking about exist? I am aware of org-roam and scimax (?) and both look promising but I find that (at least for org-roam) there’s not enough big picture explaining what is going on behind the curtains. That somewhat discouraged me from spending a lot of time with it, but a quick glance did look promising.

org-roam is a very small and stable codebase, worth reading on its own simply for education, but I also find that if you're interested in the internals, it's pretty accessible.

> I was struck by how something as simple as text content could have such a big impact.

Truly a sign of our times

Those are Clover machines from a company they acquired like 15 years ago. They're very good and in my opinion a big improvement over their traditional batch brew-and-store coffee. There are more roasts available to order, the coffee is guaranteed to be fresh, and most of the time they still "skip queue" and hand you your coffee at the register.

"If a machine can do this assignment perfectly, why are you giving it to this student?"

This is Idiocracy in the making.