Subject: Reorganizing my digital life
From: [email-masked]
To: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 17 Apr 2023 15:44:23 -0000

I've spent a few years pondering and thinking a lot about networks, both
digital and otherwise, and as a software developer I've built a lot of
bits of software that used networks. And as a sometimes avid writer and
journaler, I've thought and written to myself a lot about networks and
things. I've even written in here and other Internet places about
networks and networking.

Life, of course, is (sort of) more than just networks and networking -
but I do feel like that's a pertenint part of why I write. Anyway, all
of this is related to digital organization, because I have a lot of
pieces in different places around the Internet and Sneakernet. Then my
life is a hybrid of digital and physical -- sometimes one, sometimes the
other, and sometimes both.

Being a sundog, it should come as no surprise that I'm also a massive
command line nerd. Vim, ed, POSIX-compliance, I love it all. In fact,
the more I've used higher-level tools, the more convinced I am that it's
all a bunch of hogwash. I'm not saying that people don't derive some
benefits, but... it's still all hogwash.

I watched the [Adam Conover+Cory Doctorow][conorow] interview and
Doctorow mentioned that Facebook and friends actually have to *fight* to
prevent interop. Literally the way the Internet is designed is to
facilitate the free transport of information. And if you have only a
rudimentary knowledge of the Internet, that should make sense.

On the hogwash front, look at popular technology. Twitter. Facebook.
Google. GitHub & frienemeies. IFTTT. YouTube. Spotify & frienemies.

Most of these things could be replaced with a very small shell script.

Honestly, almost everything that exists on the Internet today could just
be a combination of:

- Your Favorite DVCS
- RFC 1436 (Hi!)
- RFC 1459
- RFC (2)822
- RFC 4287 (or RSS)
- RFC 9110, if you must
- man

Throw in some data store (e.g. Postgres), encryption, and automation like Salt, Ansible,
Chef, or Puppet, and... you pretty much have everything you should ever
need.

I mean, don't get me wrong - touch interfaces are handy for doom
scrolling or playing around for games or whatever... and fancier UIs
can be super handy for discoverability, but they're not, strictly
speaking, necessary.

HTML taught us that, but WardCunningham showed us that we don't even
need <a href="...">WardCunningham</a>. We can use conventions. We can
use our conventions to produce a fancier UI if it turns out to be
helpful, but honestly that should all just be built on simple text-based
backends. 

Emacs' [org-mode][org-mode-manual] and [Jeff Huang][text file] have
informed my thoughts that mostly that can even just be a single file and
we're fine. At least where plain text is concerned. Or I guess it would
be more correct to say non-visual information. Because there is
information that can be stored in text that isn't, strictly speaking,
text. For instance, 2023-04-17 14:46 is information that's encoded in
text but isn't really /text/. It's text representation of numbers that
are arranged in an order that could represent a date and time. But
that's getting a bit meta to the point of silliness.

At least when it comes to re-organizing my digital life.

Zettelkasten and Johnny Decimal are two other prior works that inform my
thoughts and ideas.

All of that preamble to the point that organization is not an end state,
it's a process. Life, as well as data, trends towards entropy. Things
desire to be in a state of decay and chaos. Is desire the right word
there? It does imply an intrinsic motiviation, but perhaps that's not
precisely correct. It's more like a gravity well.

A popular understanding of the space-time continuum is that it's not
entirely unlike a trampoline. If you put a bowling ball on a trampoline,
the fabric warps and stretches. If you put a couple of pool balls on the
trampoline they will also deflect the fabric, but mostly they will tend
to fall towards the bowling ball. If you give them some momentum,
though, they can begin to orbit the bowling ball. And if you fling this
bowling ball through an impressively large trampoline, along with the
pool balls at the correct orbital velocity, it will be a significant
time before they physically touch. Even better if there's almost no
coefficient of friction between the balls and the fabric. Which is
fortunate enough for us, since the Earth winding down would probably
have some deleterious effects on human life.

Anyway, decay or entropy is more like a gravity well, and stuff near to
decay will move further and further towards entropy unless acted upon by
an outside force. And the further decayed it is, the more effort it is
to escape the entropy well.

---

When I was young, we had 5" floppies and 3.5" floppies.

It's rare these days to even get *access* to a floppy drive. If you had
data that was stored on a floppy drive, even though the disk was
probably stable, the medium it was stored on has fallen into an entropy
well.

Then we had CD burners and Zip disks. Heck, these days there are
computers sold without even a USB-A port.

Even my old hard drives require a special IDE to USB adapter.

Entropy wells! You can't escape them, only orbit them for a while.

On the plus side, however, digital media offers trivial lossless
copying.

On the plus side, however, digital media offers trivial lossless
copying.

That was just as easy as 3yyP. It's not very much more difficult to copy
massively larger amounts of data - time is your main limiting factor.

    dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb

Will faithfully copy, bit for bit, the data from /dev/sda to /dev/sdb.
Partition schemes and all.

So I've gotta fight entropy.

[conorow]: https://youtu.be/vluAOGJPPoM
[org-mode-manual]: https://orgmode.org/org.html
[text-file]: https://jeffhuang.com/productivity_text_file/