It does reduce the possibility of highly on rails campaigns and instead requires more of a sandbox plan with one page dungeons and stuff. Even so, it seems made to solve this exact problem.

> “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be”

Excerpt From Mother Night Kurt Vonnegut

This is often quoted from Mother Night but it’s actually in the preface so I don’t know how many people actually see it within the work. Anyways, rather than self aggrandizing in the way the linked article is, the story in the book is a cautionary take. The book is about a Nazi propagandist that is secretly an American agent feeding broadcast lines to the Allied forces in subtleties in communicating his propaganda like pauses in between words and other tics.

The idea in the book is what does it matter to be a good person in private but a driver of evil in public? How much bad does it take to outweigh good and if you do bad things to effect something positive, are you absolved of those bad things anyways?

No, I think not. If you do ill to achieve good you are accountable to both. It is easy, sometimes, to imagine that some thing you’ve done has overridden and eliminated some other thing you’ve done but it isn’t really true. You’ve done both. I recognize I’m speaking in circles a little but I think it’s important to confront the idea that the things you’ve done are not undone by other things you’ve done just because you feel the ends have justified the means.

Remember that who you think you are is a private fantasy. Who you actually are is how you are experienced.

Is the cost of AI useful if all you're doing is something like 'linting' the extraction? How do you guarantee that people really, truly, are doing the same work as before and not just blindly clicking 'looks good'. What is the value of the AI telling you something when you cannot tell if it is lying?

Personally, I use lazyvim in neovim and doom emacs in emacs and just kinda switch between the two based on what I feel like in a given day. NeoVim tends to have better treesitter/LSP stuff as well as marginally better performance, doom emacs has way better test running and org-mode and it is only a little behind neovim in that other stuff.

All the above is to suggest I think the question is flawed. BUT! To answer the question literally, my favorite thing in org mode that I've never seen anywhere else is the ability to dump babel blocks in my notes with code samples that are actually runnable and the output is able to be piped somewhere else.

ETA: I wonder perhaps if the job posting is in some kind of pre-published state? Or maybe something in our resumes is catching on some kind of spam filter. I sure hope not for the latter

In this way services get freedom to define their stack while still neatly fitting into the suite of services, products get a tidy interface from which to query everything, and because the GraphQL consumer is more akin to a regular database consumer, the database muscle memory kicks back in.

I’ve also grown to prefer bespoke backends for each client over a super backend that tries to anticipate all of the needs of all the clients. It just opens too many holes and what it buys in versatility for the client author it also gives to the exploit author.

I still keep eMacs open every single day though and use org mode religiously and I am not opposed to digging through a project with eMacs because the code navigation is ever so slightly preferable. I think if it was just _slightly_ more popular and there were a few more hands on the doom eMacs project it would be no contest.

It definitely can be sudden and debilitating but for most of my teenage years I had mistaken the pain for ‘sleeping wrong’. Sometimes when I would bend over and then stand it would feel like someone had stapled my back together at the bend and I had to rip it out. It hurt, but not anything like what I expected. A couple of years later I wound up having a few stones that had grown to larger than an inch.

If you have unusual and unexpected pain it’s definitely worth getting checked out. I didn’t have health insurance at the time and since the pain was intermittent I never suspected anything serious and just chalked it up to sleeping in a poor posture or maybe not getting enough exercise to be limber. It almost killed me!

https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town

https://alpinejs.dev/globals/alpine-data

All that to say that I don't think Level Two is fully intractable. I think it depends a lot on the opportunity density. In our field, for example, going through Level Two to work at a desk job where you don't particularly care where you end up or what you're doing is not that bad at all. In fact, it's just plain ole job hunting. But for sure in creative skills like musicians or classical art or any other skills where there are a few elite that have made it into Level Three, it is much more challenging to find your way through Level Two. There just isn't enough opportunity that can hoist you out of it.

At the end of the day, that’s what makes an iPad unappealing for me as a development machine. If I am going to pay for an iPad and then rent an affordable VPS just to dev on then why not just buy a computer I can develop on locally right away? Sure, LTE is cool but it probably is more cost effective to go the other way and pay for a hotspot plan for your phone and tether your computer that way.

That being said, I do occasionally feel cool doing dev on my laptop remotely from my iPad using a combination of tailscale, tethering from my phone and using iSH to ssh into an emacs session.

In particular, every GitHub wiki belonging to an organization or a public project itself is a git repo of markdown files that you can clone and commit to. I probably would use that for per project documentation w/ a separate folder for managing broader notes. I think it's important to separate the markdown from a project's code because otherwise you can have important markdown updates trapped in a branch that hasn't been merged yet and because git works by line rather than by word you can get into complicated merge conflicts by features that touch similar business concepts.

Org mode happens to add some niceties on top in that you can have an example code block (roughly comparable to a triple back-tick code block in markdown) that also can be executed. The example code block can take some arguments like what interpreter to use and will paste the output into another code block underneath the source code block.

Because org mode is also used for organizing tasks it is easy to use it as a scratch pad as you grind through tasks and if something turns out to be useful you can promote it to a top level note (or org-roam node). And even if it's not obvious that it's a note candidate, just thinking through problems 'out loud' in org means you can search and find it later when the same or an adjacent problem comes up.

Another favorite feature I like in org mode is that in any code at any time I can tap out 'SPC n l' and it will capture a reference to the file and the line in the file and allow me to link to it in my notes. It doesn't capture by line number but by copying the literal line, which means that as feature updates push the line number up and down, it still will be able to find exactly the right file in exactly the right line as long as the line's content hasn't changed. It also serves as a rather nice canary because if the docs link to a line that no longer exists, then the documentation has probably gone stale.

The last major win with org mode vs markdown is with org-roam, which borrows the ideas from the standalone program Roam Research (which also is very similar to notion). Every 'node' you make initially is a file and you can fill it in as a wiki type structure. Everything is flat on the filesystem and has a unique id prepended to it so you can't overwrite it with another node of the same name. There's also a UUID associated with each node so if you move from one place to another, none of the links need to be updated. Contrast that with a regular wiki or markdown where when you move a file to a new folder you either have to leave a redirect behind or go through and update all of the back links.

You can also start a node as a subheading and later on promote it to a full file with all the backlinks still working correctly.

I started using org mode years ago with spacemacs, got frustrated with spacemacs, and gave up until earlier this year when I found doom emacs and gave it another spin. I wish I had a better recommendation for an alternative but after looking for 4-5 years for something as good as org mode, I could never find anything. Notion seems like a popular alternative but there's also a lot of shiny bells and whistles in it that can cause 'productivity procrastination' where you spend time configuring and turning knobs instead of actually using the system. Ironically, the second best tool I found was plain pen and paper using a minimal bullet journal technique and taking special care to do indexing. Of course, you can't share plain pen and paper in that way, but the name of the game for personal use is low friction and ready access. The better a system scores on those two in term of note-taking the more useful it will be.