commit 5c8ad2975f85d2dbe174a2b0688e84f27ac24675
parent b770e0f9aa6edbcd131ece2e104378b320d990e2
Author: Andrew Laack <andrew@laack.co>
Date: Mon, 18 May 2026 14:01:54 -0500
Some more wip posts
Diffstat:
3 files changed, 94 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
diff --git a/posts/wip/advertising.md b/posts/wip/advertising.md
@@ -0,0 +1,56 @@
+# Advertising
+
+I have always been detrimentally contrarian. This likely stems from a desire to feel in control of my choices, and by rejecting the propositions of others, it feels like I have control of my choices. Perhaps this may be incorrect, and I may be over-analyzing the root cause, but in any case, I have always been excessively contrarian, even now.
+
+## The Benefits of Advertising
+
+"If you build it, he will come" is an appealing notion, but likely not applicable to most endeavors. To some extent, gaining adoption of things requires telling others about them, not simply building it. Advertising is a common way to tell people about things. Advertising things that will help others is a win-win.
+
+## The Failures of Advertising
+
+I do agree it is a win-win if the builder and consumer both benefit from advertising, but this is so infrequently the case that I generally don't agree with it in practice. I used to see many advertisements, and they frequently felt like the following:
+
+> You _need_ to buy this thing because xyz.
+
+> We are the only people who can give this to you
+
+> You are incapable of doing this yourself
+
+This comes from reading between the lines, but no one advertises things that can be easily done by individuals. This is to say, advertisements sell solutions to your helplessness by first showing how helpless you are, and then telling you about their potion to solve it.
+
+Advertisements are not frequently this forward, but notionally this is what they are doing. Being excessively contrarian, having others tell me I am helpless and need them to do something for me is irritating. Sometimes my initial reaction is to do what they are selling without their help, but when so many advertisements are thrown my way, I would get stretched too thin.
+
+## Saying No
+
+I have stopped doing most things that will result in me being advertised to. There are certain things I believe are unavoidable advertisements, but in these cases I generally do two things:
+
+1. Be exceptionally rude about the advertisement
+2. Ensure I never support the advertiser in any way in the future
+
+The first is difficult because culturally advertising is acceptable, and confrontations are hard, but I so vehemently disagree with advertisements that I will express my discontentment face to face.
+
+The second is rather simple; any time you see an advertisement that you didn't implicitly agree to see by using an ad supported service or something akin, make a note of the company and ensure you never support them again. I was in San Francisco and saw Mullvad VPN advertisements on buses. At the time, I used their VPN because I perceived it as the best, and perhaps on merit it is still, but after seeing the advertisement I made sure to never use their services again, or recommend their services. If you want to use a VPN, use IVPN, Proton has similarly problematic advertising, or setup your own as I have taken to doing.
+
+## Acceptable and Unacceptable Advertisements
+
+Acceptable:
+
+- TV
+- Subscriptions that state they are ad supported
+- Services that are free with ads
+
+Unacceptable:
+
+- Advertisements visible to individuals who aren't partaking in a service supported by ads
+ - Billboards are not supporting roadways and by using the public roadways, I haven't consented to being advertised to
+- Public services
+ - Busses in SF are covered in advertisements, and simply walking on sidewalks forces them into my view
+ - SFO airport has lots of advertisements; that's a public place that has no business having random advertisements. If I see ads on a plane that's one thing (presumably my ticket was cheaper to facilitate that), but not in the airport itself
+ - Random events
+ - This is slightly different, but if I'm at something like defcon I'd expect not to be gratuitiously advertised to during talks. Stations are par for the course, but talks should be devoid of ulterior motationvs; be a human.
+
+A form of advertisement that bothers me is self-advertisement. People whoring theselves out to find a job at so-called "networking events" are one thing (simply don't attend), but if I'm at dinner with a group, I expect everyone to live in the moment, not try to get a job out of me or get me to work with / for them. It's annoying. I noticed this is especially bad in San Francisco, mostly because of how little I've noticed these annoyances in the midwest.
+
+## Sharing
+
+Moving forwards, I am going to maintain a git repository that catalogs every company that has unconsentually advertised to me to warn others about these companies, and to ensure I never patronize them.
diff --git a/posts/wip/dissatisfaction.md b/posts/wip/dissatisfaction.md
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+# Dissatisfaction
+
+It is quite dissatisfying to not feel in control. I feel this way when people try to advertise to me. "Buy our thing, it solves a problem for you, without us you'd never be able to solve it!", debilitating.
diff --git a/posts/wip/ideal-note-taking.md b/posts/wip/ideal-note-taking.md
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+# Ideal Note Taking
+
+The ideal note taking setup supports the users' preferred note taking modalities. For me these are textual notes, frequently taken in reference to an information source alongside planning for subsequent notes, information sources, and time allotments.
+
+Additionally, it must not be built into a text editor. My text editor (vim) is for editing notes, not organizing them.
+
+I use git for managing persistent, non-binary data, and so my note taking program should work well with git, but it shouldn't have a git integration because that seems beyond the scope of what a note-taking program should do. Similarly, it should be simple to encrypt my notes, but CryFS[1] does this for me, and it is very clearly outside the scope of what a note-taking program should facilitate.
+
+## Specifics
+
+The above is a high-level, these are the specifics of what I want:
+
+- Multi-directory support
+ - I have notes in directories with different threat models, and they should remain logically separated
+- Terminal-based
+- No built-in backups / synchronization
+ - I don't want sync functionality because that's what git is for, or network shares, or unison, and these add both complexity and support silly use cases like taking notes from mobile devices
+- To-Do tracking
+ - When taking notes I frequently find related resources or think of related note-taking topic, and I'd like a list of these things.
+- Stable and performant
+ - Apart from mixing concerns and being proprietary, programs like Notion and Obsidian are both unacceptably unstable and slow.
+- Scriptability
+ - It should be easy to write scripts for programmatic invocations of the program.
+- Archiving
+ - When I take notes I often want to archive sources for future reference, this should be supported by the program.
+- Interoperable
+ - The resulting directory structures should be reasonable for use with SSGs and other tools that have sensible expectations.
+
+## Implementation
+
+I want this to be performant so it must be written in a language that can compile to a sane binary. I don't want to become suicidal from using an object oriented language so I am going to choose Go.
+
+# Citations
+
+[1] - [https://www.cryfs.org/](https://www.cryfs.org/)
