I use Kiwi to create a personal wiki on my phone. It sits in a Dropbox folder I always have open as a project in Sublime. It’s also the folder that my NotePlan app uses - so my todo list, calendar, and wiki are all the same set of markdown files.
It’s super portable (just a pile of markdown docs in a Dropbox folder), does knowledge base management, and ties my knowledge base directly into my todo/project management/time management. And it costs peanuts (kiwi is buy-once; I don’t remember what I paid for NotePlan).
People remember wikis, right? “Interconnected markdown” isn’t some new feature, and sure isn’t worth a monthly subscription fee.
Can you link to the Kiwi you're talking about? I found https://github.com/danielwertheim/Kiwi but it hasn't been updated in 7+ years, so I'm not sure if it's what you're talking about..
NotePlan looks interesting though. It's not free, but it's on my list of things to try now.
I don’t know when it was last updated, but as far as I can tell, it’s feature-complete for my needs (with zero lock-in).
I actually just tried out OP’s Obsidian and ... it’s nice. In my workflow it would replace Sublime, as the desktop wiki editor sitting on my existing folder of wiki files.
There isn’t any of the lock-in I was getting concerned about from peoples posts here, and personal use is free. I’ll continue to play with it.
It makes me sad to read that statement - strangers are insulting James Somers (the original author) simply because I posted one of his articles in this forum.
He's written articles like https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship... which was one of the best pieces of writing on technology and humans that I've read recently. This is not the work of a recluse (the undesirable negative connotations aside).
I mean he's the one telling people that they're doing their hobby 'wrong'... I’m sure he can accept criticism if he’s going to issue it uninvited himself.
I used to work on a software development team with James Somers and I can attest that he is both a great writer and able to handle criticism, valid or otherwise. I think he would appreciate the debates he is generating.
But a big part of how it’s doing that is using technologies to unbundle functions, that used to be bundled for practical reasons, to create new efficiencies and value.
> On the other Hand people like Dr. Erickson get censored, because they simply dare to question the lock down
Erickson, among other things, makes provably false statements about the prevalence and mortality of covid19. You’re allowed to be misinformed as a private citizen; you’re not allowed to grandstand in public as a physician and spread misinformation. He’s lucky he only got deplatformed, rather than have his license taken.
You make it sound like he was expressing an unpopular interpretation of the data, rather than actively spreading untrue assertions.
> you’re not allowed to grandstand in public as a physician and spread misinformation
For all I know Erickson is saying no one died of Covid or something that ridiculous/obviously false, but labelling statements as misinformation and censoring them instead of retracting endorsements and getting others to realize those statements are false is an aggressive seize of power by authorities over what is or isn’t true.
I realize authoritative knowledge is necessary; not everyone has the time or ability to parse through medical information and come to reasonable conclusions.
But authoritative bodies should have to earn their authority from the public, not use censorious platforms to assert it. The fundamental problem we’re running into now with misinformation is a lack of trust, not a lack of information. Forcing people to listen to sources they don’t trust and blocking sources they do trust will make the situation worse.
If people trust a crackpot more than they trust an established authoritative body, that authoritative body should take a real hard look at themselves in the mirror and ask themselves why that’s the case.
I read the linked article and it was terrible. It kept playing a sleight-of-Hans between him being an example of what monopolies empower (which he is), and he as somehow the cause of monopolization (which it doesn’t support at all, it just makes meaningful glances in that direction). Quite a lot of its arguments boil down to “he’s rich,” as though that were a sin in itself.
No one who went into that article without a pitchfork in hand is likely to emerge with one.
CMS, as a regulatory agency, does have a high priority in making sure it’s got the legal right to make regulations pertaining to a thing. Because otherwise those regs are illegal, which causes lawsuits and chaos.
You make it sound like they spent months trying to finagle a way out of working.
"... the federal government is quietly seizing orders, leaving medical providers across the country in the dark about where the material is going and how they can get what they need to deal with the coronavirus pandemic. Hospital and clinic officials in seven states described the seizures in interviews over the past week." [Emphasis added]
I meant that aside from the conflict over PPE - which has happened more than once - I am not aware of instances of the state and federal government working against one another.
As someone who was involved in the evolution of HL7 from the policy/medical side, I can tell you:
EMR systems lock us (healthcare systems) into proprietary formats to make migration to new clients difficult; likewise, we don’t (didn’t) push for interoperability because exporting data to other healthcare systems cost us more than it benefited us (we didn’t fight it, we just weren’t gonna spend our money to make it happen).
HL7 and other interoperability tech only emerged because CMS reps made their way to -a lot- of conferences and, with varying levels of bluntness, said “find a way to improve interoperability on your own, or you’ll see it show up in federal regs 12 months from now.”
This is a change that came from active regulators doing their jobs correctly, in spite of the active efforts of the tech industry and the indifference of the hospital industry.
That’s one of the dumbest platitudes ever deployed to deflect criticism, and I wish people would use it correctly.
“This thing has absolutely no evidence of reliability or safety in a critical environment” is not criticizing it for being less-than-perfect. It’s criticizing it for being possibly inferior to the status quo.
Here’s one simple example:
Staff gowning up for routine rounds are much more careful, and safe, than staff rushing into an emergency code. If this thing throws up even the occasional false alarm, its cost to staff (in exposure) could easily outweigh, massively, and reduced rounding requirements.
That’s not “oh, well that’s not perfect.” That’s “oh, that might be worse, masquerading as better.”
“Perfect is the enemy of the good” is a wildly irrelevant comment.
> The deadly virus can infect you with a very small mistake. As healthcare workers, our frontline has to wander around the isolation wards to check vital signs of a patient from time to time. This task involves disposing of the protective gear after a visit. All just to check some reading on a device.
> A request from health authorities reached us to develop a remote monitoring system for isolation wards. There are expensive softwares to remotely monitor them. But Sri Lanka might not be that rich to spend such amount of money.
I think you're misunderstanding the critique of the parent... In the software world we often tend to interpret "The perfect is the enemy of the good." as "If it's the only software solution it most certainly must be a good one.". But sometimes there are non-software solutions that are even better suited to solve the problem - engineering wise that MUST(!) also be taken into account.
What makes you think the team covered enough edge-cases to be "good enough" software? Do you think the presentation in a single blog post is enough information about a system to determine its quality and reliability?
> If it's the only software solution it most certainly must be a good one.
We have different interpretations. For me, TPITEOTG means:
Choose one: a solution that works well but is clearly not perfect, or no solution at all.
> Do you think the presentation in a single blog post is enough information about a system to determine its quality and reliability?
Epilogue FTA:
> We created this software on a request from healthcare staffs. It is not a commercial application. Even with this system, we strongly suggest doctors to visit their patients, take real measurements.
> As this software was developed fast due to prevailing pandemic situation, we released it with the most urgent feature monitoring. We tested this for long run, with multiple devices as well. So far it worked out well.
> It does not indicate this is perfect, we are working on improvements and fixing bugs until its very stable.
> Thus we have adviced doctors to use this with CAUTION
Many of the complaints in the OP were specious for the situation in play:
> You're storing patient information in postgres. What certifications do you have to assert that the patient data is stored securely, in line with your government guidelines on patient/medical data? There's a damn good reason this is the "holy grail" of information security certifications.
This is monitoring data from dying patients in a third world country. Do you really think that they should have spent a couple months making sure hackers couldn’t access patients’ vitals before putting into use?
> You've got critical alerting built into the browser window using JavaScript.
Yes, because that is the language of the UI toolkit they are using.
> This "alerting" is the kind of critical thing that sometimes needs immediate" intervention, or someone could die. What happens if your browser experiences a JavaScript error blocking processing? And your alerts don't fire?
The alternative appeared to be that those alerts might not be noticed anyway because they might not have the staff to gown up and go into each room frequently enough.
> What happens if they fire too often and you get "alert fatigue" because they're not tuned correctly or in line with the other alerts available at the bedside/nursing station?
What happens if the device in the room fires too often?
> How much testing have you done to correctly assert that you're interpreting the HL7 or other specs correctly? And aren't misinterpreting data for some conditions or types of individual?
They seemed to find that it was accurate enough for the crisis* at hand.
> The "throw things together quickly" startup mentality might (I stress might!) Be okay where it's the difference between nothing at all and something that can save lives, in a country like Sri Lanka, during a global pandemic, fine.
Whelp, here comes a “not perfect but good enough to use part
> <further hand wringing on future concerns irrelevant to the situation under discussion>
You gotta start from something. That is progress. You made improvement overtime. Sure, in the worse case people can die, that something you have to accept.
I use Kiwi to create a personal wiki on my phone. It sits in a Dropbox folder I always have open as a project in Sublime. It’s also the folder that my NotePlan app uses - so my todo list, calendar, and wiki are all the same set of markdown files.
It’s super portable (just a pile of markdown docs in a Dropbox folder), does knowledge base management, and ties my knowledge base directly into my todo/project management/time management. And it costs peanuts (kiwi is buy-once; I don’t remember what I paid for NotePlan).
People remember wikis, right? “Interconnected markdown” isn’t some new feature, and sure isn’t worth a monthly subscription fee.