In a chart of accounts you might have a Travel/meals/lodging account. The IRS will allow you to write off an employee's meal if it meets certain requirements, but as a company, if your policy is to reimburse employees for meals regardless of the write off, you'd need two sub accounts:
Now let's say I get a government contract where I'm contractually allowed to bill certain items to the program, but the contractual definition doesn't overlap with IRS definition, such that I need four categories to track all my expenses:
Travel Meals Lodging (Program Exempt, IRS Exempt)
Travel Meals Lodging (Program Exempt, Non IRS Exempt)
Travel Meals Lodging (Program Non Exempt, IRS Exempt)
Travel Meals Lodging (Program Non Exempt, Non IRS Exempt)
While this technically works, it feels very wrong. I'd love a tool that would let you reconcile the general ledger against more than one Chart of Accounts, or even tag expenses for reporting purposes.
You are correct in your example and yes, it should feel wrong. That workaround is totally fine though and most small companies will do something like how you have described.
In your example, using multidimensional accounting you could book one entry to "Travel Meals Lodging" GL account and have the dimensions "Program", "IRS Exempt", "T&E Subcategory". This creates a one-to-many relationship with the transaction instead of having 4+ GLs. You could book to one GL "Travel Meals Lodging" with the dimension values "Program Non Exempt", "Non IRS Exempt" and "Meals". You could design the dimensions differently, but I am just trying to give you an example.
No, I am not aware of an SMB package that supports this. It probably exists but from what I understand it makes the database more complex (cube?) and everything more compute intensive on the reporting side. Thought I haven't looked into it much - if you find anything, let me know.
I have a couple projects running on GnuCash, but it doesn't support dimensional accounting. Netsuite would work, but anything Oracle is a hard sell in my space.
Do you recommend any resources for implementing dimensional accounting? Articles? Example schemas?
If you are coming from GnuCash, Netsuite is probably overkill and/or out-of-budget. Even if you had the resources, I would probably consider Sage first.
Multidimensional accounting is in effect supplementing the GL with additional data. For each transaction, you could have a database table that adds a column for each new dimension. Or if you don't prefer a relational structure, a json object attached to each transaction. Outside of setting that up, the problem probably becomes the user experience ie. how do you add that information at the same time as posting your entry?
If you wanted an even more "hacky" way, you could embed the data into the memo/description field or another available field. Unfortunately, the off-the-shelf reporting would not be useable because it would not know how to parse the embedded data.
Unfortunately, the multidimensional accounting space is dominated by enterprise accounting system offerings. So I don't know of any resources for implementing it outside of switching to those systems.
One can do this with budget codes, instead of via accounts. Where you can add essentially unlimited extra information into any transaction. Many western governments use this method.
I believe Odoo does this. They tag transactions and even if you have a chart of accounts for your reports, the tags allow these kind of customizations IIRC
> broad support in the US for gutting the national government
I support balancing the federal budget. Since the US government spends roughly twice its revenue, achieving balance would realistically require unprecedented "gutting" of some agencies.
However, I question the idea of "broad support" for such gutting. Regardless of who wins elections, the federal deficit, federal budget, federal employment rolls, federal tax code etc, have only ever increased. Nothing has interrupted this pattern for as long as I've lived.
I don't know of "broad support" for anything except complaining about it.
The hardest part of configuring the services you list is not the networking, but all the non-networking topics you need to be familiar with: zone file syntax; cipher suite selection; OS-specific security policy and permissions models; PKI administration; PXE ROM peculiarities, etc.
Once you're confident with arp, addressing/subnetting, routing tables, and a few other tools like netstat and `dig` you can quickly eliminate the network as the cause of the issue and focus on grokking the application itself.
Then we have different definitions of the word. That's fine, the top comment at the time of my posting made it sound like "networking" was understanding the interactions of optical repeaters on the glass cable. To me "networking" means actually using network applications for my benefit.
For practical performance of alternate intonations, you can tune a guitar so that a particular chord shape presents perfect roots and 5ths, while arranging for a single string to be a perfect third (e.g, a few cents "flat" compared to equal temperament.)
When playing this same chord shape (or an appropriate derivative) up the neck, the relative intervals is maintained for other chords, allowing perfect intonation not just of the root chord but of other chords in the key family.
For chord shapes where a flatted string cannot be used as a 2nd or 3rd, it will sound objectionably flat, but for many chord shapes it's possible to fret the flat string with additional pressure to bring it back into tolerance.
Mastering this technique makes the guitar sound much more in tune with itself which is a wonderful sensation as a player.
The fight increases the faster/further you jump around the circle of 5ths. The 12TET fret spacing aligns octaves and 5ths with JI, so if you tune for a JI `I` chord, your other chords will be internally JI but only your `V` chord will be spaced perfectly from the `I` chord. The other chords will be closer to perfect JI the closer they are to `I` on the circle of fifths.
This microtuning isn't perfect in theory, but it's a favorable compromise for a lot of western music, especially for legato strumming where the inter-string intervals are heard more often than the inter-fret intervals.
Most guitars are not properly in equal temperament intonation, because that requires compensation at the nut.
In particular, an unwound G string can be off. I got sick of three decades of listening to that out of my main guitar, and earlier this year finally did something out of it with satisfactory results:
Without this string, I cannot get these G and D power chords to be in tune simultaneously:
G:
E |---|---|-*-|
B |---|---|-*-|
G o|---|---|---|
D o|---|---|---|
D:
E x|---|---|---|
B |---|---|-*-|
G |---|-*-|---|
D o|---|---|---|
If you tune the latter D, then the open G is too flat in the former G. If you sharpen the open G, the latter D is out of tune.
The problem is that when we fret the A note on the G string near the nut, it stretches; the string goes sharp. So the interval between the nut and that fret is wider than a tone, without the compensation that shrinks it.
The other strings have the problem, but the unwound G has it worse due to lower tension relative to mass. I'm so happy with the G compensation on that guitar, that it needs nothing else.
Anyways, there are videos out there which do A/B comparisons between ordinary guitars and just intonation. They feature uncompensated guitars, so they perpetrate a fallacy.
The guitarist must experience a properly intonated guitar with nut compensation first, then decide whether going to exotic intonations is worth it.
(In case you didn’t know, it’s fun that) Jacob Collier plays a 5-string guitar in a tuning that takes advantage of this trick exactly. IIRC, from lowest to highest he tunes them a fifth, a fifth, a fourth and a fourth apart. By flatting the middle string a dozen cents or so, you can get a root-fifth-perfect tenth voicing of a major chord. Neat trick.
Speaking of Jacob Collier, this is a good time to mention the song where he “hacks” equal temperament to modulate to G-half-sharp without anyone noticing.
One more Jacob Collier mention: also generally releases albums using just intonation, I think, and especially does hand-tuning of thirds etc. I like his description of having to "monkey swing" when an e.g. flattened third needs to become a new root note.
Stockpiling is a valuable technique to limit/defer the risk of being deprived of (whatever you're stockpiling,) while incurring a different set of costs (the time, energy, storage space, and inevitable degradation of the good you've stockpiled.) Set limits on these costs, e.g, "I'll stockpile no more than I can fit in my spare closet" and you can rationally stockpile within those limits to your heart's content.
I wanted to serve content to a regional area but avoid discovery by spammers and wasting bandwidth on crawlers. I didn’t need SEO as I had a separate channel to notify users my site existed. At first I thought I’d blacklist the bots: no Google, no bing, no OpenAI. But I realised that a whitelist would be much more effective.
The process I used was to gather the ASNs of every local ISP where my users are. Thanks to BGP looking glass services, you can convert this to a list of every advertised prefix. You can coalesce this into an optimised data structure using “ipset” to build a firewall rule that affects only addresses you whitelist.
I also found a data center offering colocation which is directly peered with every major ISP in my area and a few of the minor ones.
Any visitor that doesn’t match my whitelist sees a decoy page. For the protected content, I set IP TTL just high enough to deliver only within the service area.
One drawback of this approach is it’s difficult to include local mobile users (without including their entire parent network) because they will need higher TTLs and come from a network with many prefixes. I’d be interested in an iptables rule that can drop connections after a few packets based on an RTT heuristic.
This approach is the opposite of “zero-trust” and it fails as soon as your threats start moving into into your user’s network.
Local business owners I've talk to who have splurged with an SEO marketing firm this decade regret it almost across the board. After spending many hours adding blog posts and videography to their website to impress the google bot (but which add ~0 value to real clients) their conversions didn't improve noticeably over the simple business card website they'd had before. And the clients they do get are much more trouble than the referrals they get through satisfied clients.
SEO is no longer influential over the kinds of clients you want.
I'm not sure whether it's SEO or AI that is to blame but in the past few years it seems like almost every article on the internet repeats itself in some form at least three times. Most blog posts about a topic feel like they were written as a High School English project. It's actually quite astonishing how bad the internet has become at conveying information compared to what it could be doing.
So I'm tossing around an idea in my head, of implementing a search engine that computes a 'redundancy penalty' on every web page it indexed. The measure of redundancy would need to be multi-scale and consider repeated phrases, points made, and paragraphs as well, so not necessarily a simple problem.
If you think this is something worth pursuing just let me know by commenting below.
First, effective writing will almost always restate the main idea somehow; you'll want your algorithm to be more sophisticated than "demote content that seems to repeat itself."
Second, your novel algorithm will be expensive to compute, so you'll need some other signals to filter out very low value pages before you pay to analyze others.
Finally, your technique will be valuable as a ranking signal until you (or someone else) begins to use your algorithm to help steer non trivial purchasing decisions. At that point, someone will dress up their low-value (or negative value) content to appear "high value" to your algorithm and your output will be filled with spam. You can delay this effect by keeping your user-base small, so consider selling private access to institutions who want a unique view of the internet for research or intelligence purposes.
> someone will dress up their low-value content to appear "high value" to your algorithm
You are falling into the trap of thinking that Google and its competitors are victims of this. They are not.
They are knowingly letting themselves get "exploited" because it turns out that those spam sites contain ads (that may be Google's) or analytics (that may be Google's), or make the search result page ads (from Google) look good in comparison and more likely to be clicked.
The heuristic to detect and block spam in general is very simple. Spam is there to get you to either buy something (the signal is the presence of a credit card form, "buy" call to action, or links that ultimately lead to the former) or view ads (signal there is presence of ads).
This would be very hard to game because those signals only work when they are visible (and obnoxious), which also makes them trivially detectable purely at the visual level by a crude classifier (trained on website screenshots with ads vs the same page with an ad blocker).
The resulting penalty score can be used as a ranking signal, so that all other signals being equal, a result without ads would rank higher than the one with ads for a given query.
This is not rocket science. The problem is that the mainstream search engines have the same business model as the spammers (and profit off each other), so there is no reason to suddenly slaughter the cash cow. The myth that search engines are "victims" to spammers/SEO provides very convenient plausible deniability so they have no reason to disprove that either.
This scoring is awful. Literally what you have done here is incentivise sites from well funded bad actors, or sites that push more elaborate scams on elderly people.
A plausible and sustainable funding model is a good sign for sites.
It's about incentivizing sites to do what the user wants them to do. As a user, 99% of the time I am not out to buy something, so all sites that do try to sell me something are just wasting both my time and their server resources.
This isn't a complete blanket ban on ads or the commercial web. If there isn't a profitable way to run a website that provides the content matching the search query, the ad-infested website will still come up first.
But now, a hobbyist, non-profit or even commercial enterprise that doesn't directly sell to you has a chance to outrank the ad-infested garbage.
First, effective writing will almost always restate the main idea somehow
Effective corporate writing.
This goes back to the era 50 years ago when public speakers were taught "Tell me what you're going to tell me, then tell me what you're telling me, then tell me what you just told me."
It works fine for certain long-form speeches, but as the length of the document/talk decreases, so does the need for repetition.
For the length of 90% of what's on the internet, repetition becomes redundancy and nuisance filler.
Not just length, but interactivity too. That suggestion makes sense for a long monologue that is ephemeral, but in the modern age where the content consumer is in the driver's seat and very little is actually "live", they can scroll/seek back, rereading or relistening to earlier portion, and review the summary and comments to regain context.
Initially snarky/amusing but the post you critique is a well written paragraph in which there is a clear progression and elaboration on one major idea.
Sentence 1: specified that quote is about one specific kind of speech.
Sentence 2: explains origins of the quote - history. It is the history part that makes this sentence valuable and adds something to the reader (me).
Sentence 3: states that this is not effective to the kind of content we talk about - internet articles.
Sentence 4: concludes that repetition is irrelevant and wrong.
-----------------------
The way you tl;dr it, the poster would need to completely change the topic to "not repeat themselves". What they did was saying something new with each sentence, just keeping the "repetition" topic on.
> First, effective writing will almost always restate the main idea somehow; you'll want your algorithm to be more sophisticated than "demote content that seems to repeat itself."
You very much not want it repeated the way it repeats now. Effective writing does not involve writing three similar paragraphs, it makes readers skip those paragraphs.
I’ve read some books where there where some major developments/ twists that were not clearly stated and not repeated. I had to go back and reread paragraphs to understand. If you read the Bible as a fantasy novel you will come across this several times
I would argue that the "were not clearly stated" is the root cause. There is also difference between repeating some fact a reader could have forgotten and repeating whole paragraphs of fluff.
The internet articles we complain about are in the latter category.
> almost every article on the internet repeats itself in some form at least three times
Even videos like YouTube shorts, which are meant to be short, have this problem. They are seriously padded with repetition. Here's thing, have you seen this before? Few people have seen this. Do you know how it works? I'm going to show you. People are surprised when they find out how it works. But I explain it.
There must not be stats on choosing "never suggest this channel again", I select that pretty consistently when I'm looking for short form content and these videos waste all that time.
I used to write blog and stopped as google algoritms changed. Basically, if you do not do SEO with artificial constructions, you was as good as not existing. I could not find my own post in search even when googling the exact topic.
I suspect that not coincidentally, blogosphere as used to be got much much smaller. Writing is not rewarding when no one finds it, so people just dont do it.
I think that AI will make it even worst. When everyone fires ChatGPT to get compilation of stuff, there is even less reason to write. So you dont.
> seems like almost every article on the internet repeats itself in some form at least three times
Spaced repetition, apparently it 'aids retention'. It's the same reason TV ads now run with a second shorter ad for the same thing later in the ad break.
I always recommend SMEs to not use _any_ form of tracking/analytics by default.
Just make the site useful, informative and well presented.
To find out how users interact with it: Ask them, and/or do tests. Use the actual relationship with users to improve the site.
Even ignoring privacy concerns, this mostly avoids bad UX patterns like "cookie banners", makes the sites _significantly_ faster and lighter. You end up with something that is higher quality.
Exceptions to the rule exist, but that is always my baseline recommendation.
Sounds needlessly extreme. Sure, don’t warp your site to please the SEO algorithms, but don’t plug your ears and cover your eyes to the basic info you’re already getting in your access logs.
Defguard looks great, it's got a similar architecture (local first, with a vpn) and your feature list looks like my todo list!
I could see recommending this product to others!
You have a few features that surprised me, like support for "authentication with crypto software and hardware wallets". This seems like the sort of thing a business would never need. Did you have users agitate for this feature? Or is it a direction you're trying to steer clients?
Overall, nicely done, I wish I'd known about this when I started!
Those features you’ve mentioned were done for some customers/projects that deployed defguard - but web3 stack (especially wallet libraries) are so… immature and problematic that we will be most probably removing those features.
Can you share your roadmap? Ideas? Seems we share the same mindset and vision, would be great to exchange knowledge, ideas…
This is a well articulated enterprise perspective; a huge part of selling "security" to people is trading on trust/reputation which takes time to build, and I would be starting from zero on that plane. And I also don't yet have vast flexibility in the products I offer. It's an uphill battle at first.
I could bypass this by partnering with a strong reputation. Alternatively, I could de-emphasize "security" in my early marketing as I build my brand: "Easy app deployments!" "Set-and-forget wifi certificates!"
Is there an SMB package that supports this?
In a chart of accounts you might have a Travel/meals/lodging account. The IRS will allow you to write off an employee's meal if it meets certain requirements, but as a company, if your policy is to reimburse employees for meals regardless of the write off, you'd need two sub accounts:
Travel Meals Lodging (IRS Exempt) Travel Meals Lodging (Non IRS Exempt)
Now let's say I get a government contract where I'm contractually allowed to bill certain items to the program, but the contractual definition doesn't overlap with IRS definition, such that I need four categories to track all my expenses:
Travel Meals Lodging (Program Exempt, IRS Exempt) Travel Meals Lodging (Program Exempt, Non IRS Exempt) Travel Meals Lodging (Program Non Exempt, IRS Exempt) Travel Meals Lodging (Program Non Exempt, Non IRS Exempt)
While this technically works, it feels very wrong. I'd love a tool that would let you reconcile the general ledger against more than one Chart of Accounts, or even tag expenses for reporting purposes.
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