Dhavan
985 posts


Built a native macOS viewer for ledger plain-text accounting file format.
Most expense tracking apps are built around lock-in. Proprietary formats, mandatory accounts, servers you don't control. When their VC funding dries up, they shut down or pivot, and you start over.
Plain-text accounting takes the opposite approach: your finances live in a .ledger file. Open it in vim. Query it with awk. Put it in git and get a full audit trail of every change you've ever made. It's just a plain text file.
Ledge is just a lens over that file. Fast, native, no cloud. Following @kepano 's file over app philosophy
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@scaling01 It started telling me to "let it simmer", "let it brew in the background, no need to decide now" etc.
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Dhavan retweeted
Dhavan retweeted

Exactly that sort and no others, please. I am with @realGeorgeHotz on this, per youtube.com/watch?v=6yQEA1…

YouTube
Nate Soares ⏹️@So8res
Neil deGrasse Tyson ended tonight's debate with an impassioned plea for an international treaty to ban creating the sort of superintelligent AI that could kill us all.
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Dhavan retweeted

I know there is some overlap between open source and anti-AI activists, but I have a hard time reconciling it. My million+ open source LOC were always intended as a gift to the world. Yes, I would make arguments about how it would strengthen our communities, and the GPL would prevent outright exploitation by our competitors, but those were to allay fears of my partners to allow me to make the gift.
AI training on the code magnifies the value of the gift. I am enthusiastic about it!
Some people do look at open source as a tool for social change, career advancement, or reputation building, but those are all downstream of the gift.
Rich Whitehouse@DickWhitehouse
Genuinely devastating take to see from someone who popularized the GPL across so many communities. Fails to appreciate the social and cultural importance of the license.
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Dhavan retweeted

File over app
File over app is a philosophy: if you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you this freedom.
File over app is an appeal to tool makers: accept that all software is ephemeral, and give people ownership over their data.
In the fullness of time, the files you create are more important than the tools you use to create them. Apps are ephemeral, but your files have a chance to last.
The pyramids of Egypt contain hieroglyphs that were chiseled in stone thousands of years ago. The ideas hieroglyphs convey are more important than the type of chisel that was used to carve them.
The world is filled with ideas from generations past, transmitted through many mediums, from clay tablets to manuscripts, paintings, sculptures, and tapestries. These artifacts are objects that you can touch, hold, own, store, preserve, and look at. To read something written on paper all you need is eyeballs.
Today, we are creating innumerable digital artifacts, but most of these artifacts are out of our control. They are stored on servers, in databases, gated behind an internet connection, and login to a cloud service. Even the files on your hard drive use proprietary formats that make them incompatible with older systems.
Paraphrasing something I wrote recently:
> If you want your writing to still be readable on a computer from the 2060s or 2160s, it’s important that your notes can be read on a computer from the 1960s.
You should want the files you create to be durable, not only for posterity, but also for your future self. You never know when you might want to go back to something you created years or decades ago. Don’t lock your data into a format you can’t retrieve.
These days I write using an app I help make called Obsidian (@obsdmd), but it’s a delusion to think it will last forever. The app will eventually become obsolete. It’s the plain text files I create that are designed to last. Who knows if anyone will want to read them besides me, but future me is enough of an audience to make it worthwhile.


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