Hi y'all, today I'm sharing Jot, an offline, source available note taking and personal assistant app. You can read all about it in the blog post. This is definitely an app geared towards privacy and free expression.
The main question I expect I'll get is, "but what about Obsidian". Yea, Obsidian is cool if you want to work primarily in markdown and with tools that support it. I wanted to make something with a bit more rich content, experiment with local LLMs and really lean into user friendly text editing. Jot's my take on that problem!
Btw, these social media giants curate content wayyyy more than you'd expect. TikTok curates it's trends and gets it's biggest influencers to engage first. Pinterest seeded it's network with a few noteworthy creators. Even Airbnb famously took pictures for the top stays in NY. Curation is now just more opaque. Even in the AI age, human in the middle is going to be pervasive.
Popularity aside, I have been feeling lately that cross-platform and familiarity are reducing in importance. LLMs make it easy to pick up something new. Maybe "right tool for the job" will win more often over "familiarity".
This honestly. I honestly think this is so easily solved at the OS/browser level. Apple already does parental controls. Just pass 'Can view adult content' and 'can watch ads' from there to the browser. Don't even expose the actual age.
I'd just describe this job market as competitive and every company appears to be looking for some specific persona now. Believe it or not you could thrive in this job market. For you, I'd say you'll have figure out what you love to do, figure out how to speak positively/enthusiastically about your previous experience, and find companies that value what you bring to the table. AI is not taking all the jobs yet (seems clear that it produces garbage code that's untenable at scale), and neither is off-shoring (it's very out of trend).
Question - what can you actually control about companies you're applying to? The answer is not a whole lot, so why stress about it? What you can control is a funnel:
1. How many jobs you've applied to
2. What quality those companies are
3. How much they're aligned with your skill set
Other than that, you're stressing about stuff you can't change. Let it go, gain inner peace. There's a lot to unpack in your post, step back examine the stories you're telling yourself. Are they actually real? Is there something more nuanced going on?
Another solution - drop numeric phone numbers all together and switch to alphanumeric or verified contact only. With numeric, sequential phone numbers you can just robocall all the numbers until you find a victim. Making the search space significantly larger should solve that attack vector. Of course, this will effectively be the same as transitioning from IPv4 to v6 - with all the same associated pain
It'll help with so many things:
- in contact syncing systems you can't rainbow table your way to decrypting numbers
- numbers can be permanently burned once they're released or deemed as spam. This means every service could ban spammers safely without fear of burning a real user.
- people could more easily have alt numbers, non-voip numbers for untrusted services.
Fair, but you could throw away numbers more easily in this situation due to data breaches. You could also "update trusted parties" with a new improved scheme overall.
The biggest midwit vibe is throwing everything out when the pendulum swings to no process mode and then adding a whole bunch of process/methodology when that doesn't work.
Step 1: The main folks you should convince to get onboard are actually the designers. The argument I've seen work pretty well is "having a consistent design means your designer don't need to QA quite as often and it raises the baseline quality for everything." Finally "we will have shared components no matter what, we want you to influence them"
Step 2: Just start building the components. Don't wait for approvals. With enough of a foundation you can show some value and go from there.
Step 3: Show evidence of time savings, how many of those components are used by how many projects.
Step 4: Share a vision and strategy. I really like how others said "don't be the bottleneck" the component library will be left behind if it turns into that. Encourage contributions. Share your roadmap. Encourage incremental and experimental components so that people can share less refined components. Finally clearly indicate what isn't shared and what it will take make something "shared".
I think getting too bogged down in reusability of lots of things is eventually the downfall of component libraries. Additionally, "too much categorization" is also problem. Atomic design for instance is great but I feel like it's a concept to teach designers how to think about componentization and for engineers it actually ends up getting in the way.
If it's going about 70% well at that point, the thing to take it to the next level is to collaborate with design leaders to get them to hold their designers accountable for matching to the design system. They may end up needing to recreate a version of those components in something like figma. If there isn't support for this, the whole system will be a pain till the end of time.
There are likely ways to have your cake and eat it too. Rather than replace the existing system, consider augmenting it with your own and then eventually, over time replace the existing system.
Showing short term and long term wins concurrently is a good recipe for success for tech as much as it is for business.
Some questions that may help you:
1. What are the biggest problems with your existing system and how does that relate with the biggest problem for your business?
2. Is there an API or any manual process you can use to communicate between new systems and the existing system?
3. Is there an engineering leader you can bring on to help or consult?
At this point GLTF seems pretty darn good and seems broadly usable. It embeds the mesh, textures, animations right in a single file. It can represent a single model or a scene. I also has a binary format.
3d need not be so complicated! We've kinda made it complicated but a simplification wave is likely coming.
The big unlock for 3d though will have to be some better compression technology. Games and 3d experiences are absolutely massive.
The main question I expect I'll get is, "but what about Obsidian". Yea, Obsidian is cool if you want to work primarily in markdown and with tools that support it. I wanted to make something with a bit more rich content, experiment with local LLMs and really lean into user friendly text editing. Jot's my take on that problem!
Would love any feedback yall have - comments here are welcome or on our feedback page https://jot.canny.io/features-bugs
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