Why do all these Notion “replacements” seem to think Notion is just an MD editor and note taker. It seems the unique position of notion is the ability to integrate databases into documents much less within each other. That’s the feature most of these replacements are missing.
Honestly if Notion would offer a self hosted version for companies, that would be a killer feature. Until then, I’m waiting until a feature for feature open source replacement appears.
I think the project mentioned here is very cool and something I am looking for, will definitely try it out. But highly agree that calling it a Notion replacement/alternative is mislabling it. But I've seen this often on HN nowadays, any note-taking application = Notion.
> Honestly if Notion would offer a self hosted version for companies, that would be a killer feature
Cloud hosting is the killer feature. No one wants to be in the hosting business. There are enough other things for a company to worry about.
Managing servers, deployments, zero downtime upgrades, security patches, monitoring CVEs, auth, 2FA, lost passwords, DDoS attacks, database maintenance, sharding, migration, load balancing, caching, DNS, reliability, latency, uptime, load testing, a million different dashboards, 24x7 on call... Paying $10/mo to offload all of this is a steal.
Not true in my experience. A lot of companies make self-hosting a requirement since they're working with sensitive data that they want to keep on premises.
That is so not true. At least here in germany cloud for any reputable company is at least difficult. Even with compliances in place.
Self hosted is the prefered option for every company I worked for.
Self hosting is a must for many companies working with strict regulatory compliance and security requirements. This is not exclusive to Germany and something I’m dealing with daily in the US..
The actual "word processor" or editor of notion is hot garbage, especially for software/keyboard people. Try out something like https://ckeditor.com/ and it is infinitely better.
By this logic, we should be putting a higher tax on commercial vehicles then. Except the proposed bill exempts commercial vehicles, so...
In Virginia, I pay a lot higher rate for my EV than my wife does for her ICE vehicle. Which, I agree with another comment that I may be paying more than if I was paying the gas tax, but I understand the reason for it and don't have a problem paying for it. That being said, VA does have a program in place for the rate to be based on "use" (or mileage), but I haven't fully investigated that yet.
I wouldn't have an issue with a more Use based kind of tax for ALL vehicles as long as the money is specifically keyed to infrastructure (ie roads) spending and not a pot of gold for other programs to take from.
However, where this proposed bill really grinds my gears is that they're proposing having it pegged to inflation, which seems no problem for them to do, yet they haven't figured out how to peg the Minimum Wage to inflation yet, so...
I think the Game of Thrones type entries still are calendar entries to block time for personal events and not really To-Dos necessarily. I know plenty of people who block their calendars for personal time.
I recall an experiment with bees I read about where the bees were in a box. One path went to food, another to little balls which had no value to bees. Yet the bees would go “play” with the balls. The article and scientists state that this may show that bees make time for entertaining themselves.
I think it’s arrogance to assume only mammals can have consciousness just because we don’t have the ability to understand what that actually is. Yet, humans throughout history have used that belief to wreck havoc on the planet, other humans, and animals without regard for the consequences.
Play appears to be an adaptive behavior (i.e. something that evolved due to evolutionary benefit), and helps us learn via curiosity/exploration, as well as form social bonds with others seeking out those experiences.
It's not apparent why play (an energy-consuming behavior) would evolve in a species where there was no benefit to it - one without ability to learn as a result of the new experiences encountered. While bees do have limited learning ability, I doubt it is this general, so it seems more likely that behavior that appears as playful (bees "playing with" balls) is really some other instinct at work.
Plently of animals truly do play though - e.g. crows have been observed sliding down snow-covered roofs on their back, then flying back up to do it over and over!
Also as humans, we're incredibly good at being able to suspect all kinds of beings for having a consciousness, except the ones we tend to use for food or work. For example, folks are way more comfortable talking about cats and dogs having feelings vs. say cows and horses. I'd hate a future where we finally realize that they were all conscious, all the time, just differently than we are.
>folks are way more comfortable talking about cats and dogs having feelings vs. say cows and horses.
Please control your observations for the people that spend time around cows and horses vs cats and dogs. As someone who has met a few farmers in their time, folks who keep livestock will tell you that cows & pigs have feelings. Sheep, ehh less than those two. And chickens? Even less.
>> folks are way more comfortable talking about cats and dogs having feelings vs. say cows and horses.
Our family cat has empathy. It often acts like the stereotypical asshole - feed me and leave me alone - but when someone is feeling down, that cat will come lay close and rest a paw on them.
I suspect those folks have not spent a considerable amount of time with either cows or horses, and thus they do not know that they too have feelings. Horses absolutely have feelings...it used to be a war tactic to scare horses.
Is it arrogance? It's a huge uphill battle to prove that bees moving a ball around are "playing" and not just misapplying some other ingrained behavior, such as landing on a flower. It seems more like just pretending that animals engage in human behaviors because it feels good and satisfies our sense of pride.
You could say -- and people do -- the exact same thing in support of the opposite argument, i.e. that it feels good and satisfies our sense of pride to pretend that humans are the only ones with such complex inner lives. So I think the "arrogance" claim should be retired, as it clearly doesn't add any value.
And the fact that humans have feelings does not mean we can’t use them as slaves when needed.
See? Ethics are like that: there must be something we give value too, if we want to stop somewhere and build something. In that case, the core value being raised is that the ability to be aware, suffer and have emotions is morally valuable.
Treating people decently is a part of social contract that no other animal can comprehend and accept, that's not playing with a ball, but that's not even the true reason this social contract exists.
The societies that have this social contract outdo those that don't, simple as that. If your version of treating animals was an advantage, Jainist countries would dominate the world. Yet they don't.
Eating other species is the quite natural for omnivores... Remember that if a chicken was big enough to eat you it would ! (most birds ard opportunistic omnivores)
Preaching for veganism is preaching for the genocide of those domesticated species because if they weren't raised for food they would not exist !
I concede that the existence of the animals raised in industrial condition is deplorable but the existenceof the beef and chicken I buy from a local farmer is pretty good: ample space, quality food, grazing in the summer, no predator... and the way it's killed is doesn't leave time for suffering.
Cow raised for milk in place where they don't use hormone also have a great life because when they are not well treated the milk production is suboptimal.
Animal rights activists, should focus on banning growth and milk hormones, ensuring adequate space and socialization, and minimizing transport of living animals. They should be killed on site and transported dead and refrigerated to the meat processing facility, something that is prohibited for no justifiable reasons.
>Preaching for veganism is preaching for the genocide of those domesticated species because if they weren't raised for food they would not exist !
They existed as different, likely healthier versions of their species in the wild before we took control of their fates. If the original wild species died out since that time, then the genocide was already commited. If the original species still exists in the wild, then that proves your claim wrong.
Also, all we've done is made genocide perpetual. So instead of allowing the remaining ones to die, is it somehow kinder or more justifiable to perpetually slaughter untold generations of them?
Beyond that, we've now caused mass extinctions of other species in pursuit of raising these animals for slaughter (see: loss of bio diversity or clear cutting of the rainforests for ranching). So when do we stop acting like this endless cycle of genocide is somehow justifiable for the sake of avoiding genocide?
Perhaps it is possible to eat them in an ethical way (like only eating them if they've died of old age), but as it stands, the number of e.g. cows that are raised and slaughtered in deplorable conditions make up the vast, vast majority of total cow 'lives' and there's no way we would have the space/resources to maintain the current populations in the conditions you describe as being acceptable.
>Animal rights activists, should focus on banning growth and milk hormones, ensuring adequate space and socialization, and minimizing transport of living animals. They should be killed on site and transported dead and refrigerated to the meat processing facility, something that is prohibited for no justifiable reasons.
This is a false dichotomy. Why not both? Most animal rights activists I see advocate for better conditions for the animals as well, if we are going to slaughter them anyway. And who even says we would have to let these animals die out entirely if we stopped eating them en mass?
I think this anthropomorphizes consciousness too much. We tend to attribute aspects of behavior to consciousness, but I think those are two separate things. An LLM can be playful, but is likely not conscious (but hey, maybe they are).
Chemical interactions isn't the same as conscious. I would say that it is exactly the opposite: consciousness is the capability of ignoring your chemical reactions and do what your will says. For example to not eat when hungry, an unconscious animal can't do that.
No... basic life support functions/instincts are controlled by the evolutionally older parts of the brain, but can be overridden by the the cortex (or equivalent).
The word "consciousness" is all but useless in discussing brain function, or even subjective experience, since it's overloaded and covers so many diverse phenomena. Good luck finding any two people who agree on exactly what the word means!
You seem to be talking more about "free will" than any aspect of consciousness, although there is no scientific basis for thinking that free will is anything other than a subjective illusion. Your cortex is able to override basic instincts, but is still doing so via neural outputs and chemistry. Why one person's cortex might override hunger in a given situation, while another person's cortex doesn't, really is not something they have any control over. It's chemistry and physics (not magic and "free will") all the way down. Your cortex does what it does because of how it is wired, which is a result of your personal life history. It's funny that we can often recognize this in others - guessing with high probability what they are going to do in a given situation, while still thinking that we ourselves are not controlled by our past and have the "free will" to do whatever we like (but in reality what we like is controlled by our past - there is no escaping it).
What we subjectively feel as ourselves making a decision to do something is really just us observing our own thought processes, over which we have no control. This is really the only place where anything that I would label as part of that fuzzy word "consciousness" is coming to play - this ability to self-observe.
This ability to self-observe and feel as if the observer (which is also just our cortex) is in control, is perhaps based on specific cortical pathways that evolved to further our cortex's predictive purpose/function. However, it's certainly possible to imagine a brain that was wired differently and didn't have this ability, although maybe in reality all animal brains with a cortex/equivalent, even a more primitive reptilian one, do have this ability?
Finally, getting back to the topic of this thread, it seems highly unlikely that insects do have this self-observational/awareness aspect of consciousness, simply because they don't have an advanced enough nervous system/brain to support it. You can't think about something if you don't have anything (cortex) to think with. Animals as simple as inspects are really closer to what we think of as machines (although it seems this metaphor/distinction is rapidly going to become useless).
Agree entirely about free will, though I think the continued illusion of it is probably necessary to keep human civilisation running.
When I read about people (scientists, no less) apparently arguing that chimpanzees might not be conscious I wonder what planet they're on. It seems quite clear that every mammal is conscious in a way that most humans have always understood.
Apparently some ants pass the mirror test, so it should probably be uncontroversial to say that insects are conscious. Unless we think that also means ants have free will, that is - and for me, mulling over that problem is what led an acceptance that free will is not a thing for humans either. The usual belief in it results in the mess philosophy got itself into and has yet to extricate itself from, which feels a lot like how we spent thousands of years trying to explain God, a thing that also does not exist.
> Finally, getting back to the topic of this thread, it seems highly unlikely that insects do have this self-observational/awareness aspect of consciousness, simply because they don't have an advanced enough nervous system/brain to support it. You can't think about something if you don't have anything (cortex) to think with. Animals as simple as inspects are really closer to what we think of as machines (although it seems this metaphor/distinction is rapidly going to become useless).
I'm glad that after your "rebuke", you concluded the same thing but called it "self-observational/awareness aspect of consciousness". Only a conscious animal could do that.
You're using a circular definition there - "only a conscious animal can do consciousness stuff".
My "rebuke" wasn't intended as such - it was meant as a break-down of the mechanisms involved, and basically defining what this relevant aspect of "consciousness" (self-observation, in the way I described it) means.
Note that consciousness wouldn't actually be needed for an animal to override instincts - you could still imagine an animal that had a cortex but no self-awareness. I tend to doubt they exist, but not inconceivable. There's a medical condition called "blind sight" were patients report being blind, but can still navigate a cluttered corridor of obstacles, or gaze track moving objects, without being aware of it (i.e. they can see, but are not consciously aware of being able to see).
Agree with this. In the Louvre, there are many pieces of art not protected from potential damage that people who didn’t care could have protested at. Given that it was the Mona Lisa, I’m sure the thought that the protest would make a statement but not cause damage was considered.
New categories of hardware don't need a killer app at launch to be successful.
VisiCalc wasn't available day one of the Apple II being released. What was the Macs killer app? Laser Printer? Adobe photoshop? The killer app for the iPod? The dock connector and iTunes for Windows. iPhone? The App Store itself.
Meh. This is just latching on to some large companies (Netflix, etc) who already stated they won't be building custom apps for it. Netflix doesn't even have a native Mac app, so it's not surprising that they wouldn't have a native app for the Vision Pro, especially if the built in Safari can do everything a native App could or would.
Now, if there was an advantage to building an app for Netflix, et al then they will. I suspect that the success of the device (or failure) will determine if/when these large companies start thinking more seriously about native apps.
Many companies jumped on to the Apple Watch bandwagon only to find its limited nature hindered app development too much. Apple pitched the use case for the Watch in 3 areas, turns out it thrived on notifications and fitness tracking.
Talk to me after the Vision Pro launches and users start providing feedback on needs, etc and what the actual use case is.
> This is just latching on to some large companies (Netflix, etc) who already stated they won't be building custom apps for it.
Incorrect. They could have allowed their iPad apps to run on Vision Pro, but they specifically chose not to.
Developers who offer software for the iPad automatically see their apps pop up on the Vision Pro App Store. That is, unless they opt out — as Netflix, Spotify and YouTube are planning to do.
Netflix, Spotify, and YouTube are neither building custom apps nor enabling their iPad apps for use on Vision Pro.
It is not only NOT in their interest to do so (and users can use the web anyway; the download use case is a vanishingly small market segment), but it is ALSO a way for them to speak truth to Apple's power w.r.t. their draconian in-app purchases policy. Game on.
Media companies are really going to regret their choices to intentionally give up the entire market to Apple, because that only helps Apple build their walled garden just that much higher.
More and more flights (maybe 25% of my flights lately) have internet that is fast enough for and allows streaming video. This trend will continue I'm sure. Obviously downloads are still really beneficial but it's becoming less and less of an issue on flights.
Annoying, but if you're a first-gen user paying $3500 for the device, you probably either have Apple's TV/movies offering or don't care much about paying for it for your flight.
Not to be argumentative, just wondering, has there been a case related to iCloud access that Apple has ever blacklisted someone? Certainly, I've heard of Meta and other companies doing not, but don't recall Apple outside of security confirmation issues people are having.
If you have 2FA and lose all your 2FA methods, and didn’t preplan by making a recovery key and storing it in a safe place you can find again… you can be screwed. It’s not a blacklist, but the net result is the same.
I’m terrified of losing access to all my stuff because of forced 2FA I never signed up for. I get that it’s more secure, but it can be secure to the point of having unrecoverable data. All it would take is someone carelessly deciding to get a new phone number. I have a friend who recently talked about wanting to get a new number with his new phone. I asked about 2FA and he seemed to have no knowledge of it and said he didn’t have anything like that. He kept his number, but if he didn’t, I could see him easily getting locked out of his Apple account (which he has), and his bank.
Setting up a recovery key for an Apple ID is optional. You can still recover your Apple ID. Apple will ask for information that can identify you, like previous iPhone passwords etc. If you have hit your head to a wall and can’t remember literally anything afair you are asked to wait some <1 week amount of time before being able to access, to prevent account fraud. The process is so complex and evolving I’m probably wrong on many things, but the idea is: Apple ID isn’t a footgun for the user.
If you have recovery keys enabled, it’s a different story. Enabling screen clearly states that you can get locked out of your account without your recovery key. You can set up recovery accounts too, like those of your family members.
Apple blacklisted Parler in January 2020. Of course, they were an app store app, not a user, but they established the precedent that they ban for political views they don't like.
It’s amazing how little analytics there are on podcast listening by default as a standard that all apps should provide. Stuff like if an episode was started, marked as listened (but not actually listened to), etc.
I get the reason for this change in general and the idea behind it, although this still gives inflated numbers for a minimum of 5 episodes.
But if we put it on The Blockchain, you can mint PodCoins by listening to podcasts! Of course, to ensure you're really listening, you'll also need a secure cryptographic module installed in your auditory cortex. Depending on how well that surgery goes, maybe it finally can put the killer in killer app.
No, I fully agree, the idea being that there’s a standard set of analytics and a way to report on them that apps can openly support.
Granted the odd ball out would be Apple and if they’d support the analytics in their podcast app, but much like Apple’s podcast directory is the defacto directory, there’s an opportunity for a better, OPEN, solution.
EDIT ADD: I’d be surprised if every podcast app doesn’t already collect a robust amount of analytics on listening, they just don’t report it where podcast owners could see easily.
Spotify took a dear podcast of mine 'private' (it has since been freed). Some have their own paywalls. Even some 'smaller' podcasts now feature network leaders. Many thus feature localized ads.
Nothing wrong with paying for a product. A common method is a private patreon RSS (Atom) feed. It's still an open standard but the podcast earns money. It's at least a better option than the path Spotify took.
> Many thus feature localized ads.
I'm not against dynamic ads per-say, but it really reminds me of TV with the Ad's being wildly irrelevant to me and often being significantly loader than the actual podcast
That is because a podcast is just an rss feed of audio files… to get that sort of information (from all your listeners) you have to add to rss and break compatibility.
I think we have the capability in RSS since the age of blogs and RSS aggregators.
Basically the aggregator can grab the main RSS feed and tell the server "I'm not just one person, I'm actually serving this to {subscriber count} people" and the server can use that information if it wants to.
I’m sure they have incredibly granular information about exactly where in a video most people spend their time watching, where they stop watching, where they pause, where they fast forward/rewind, and probably more. As a company which has first-party content, it would be shocking if they weren't collecting it.
Some porn sites (i.e. PornHub) make info about where people spend the most time watching available in the UI in the form of a small graph over the seek bar at the bottom of the video. Even though the adult entertainment and sex work industry has historically been a pioneer of new tech, I don’t think they’re alone in tracking that stuff.
And I’m not thrilled about any of that. I’d be upset if my podcast app started reporting more info. I don’t really care about the specific privacy implications of knowing which podcasts I listen to, but I do care about the loss of privacy in general, especially because some people might be potentially more affected than me.
Why do all these Notion “replacements” seem to think Notion is just an MD editor and note taker. It seems the unique position of notion is the ability to integrate databases into documents much less within each other. That’s the feature most of these replacements are missing.
Honestly if Notion would offer a self hosted version for companies, that would be a killer feature. Until then, I’m waiting until a feature for feature open source replacement appears.