I used Zotero quite a bit in the past, the thing that ultimately drove me away is that when synchronizing you couldn't easily access the PDFs just via the filesystem. I use a nextcloud and also wanted to access PDFs from devices without Zotero installed and this turned out to be a pain at the time. Is this possible with more recent Zotero versions? Is the sync still cumbersome with a zotero account + self-hosted webdav?

I have a similar setup (Zotero + dropbox). Zotero syncs the entries and any notes, but dropbox takes care of the pdf storage. You can swap out dropbox for your storage of choice.

I use zotfile (http://zotfile.com) to handle this.

Files are all stored in a single folder (which can be in different locations depending on computer) which I point zotfile to. Inside that each paper is put into a folder based on author names. And each pdf is then renamed based on authors, year, and title.

All of the above is customizable and automated.

I can’t recommend ZotFile enough. It, along with Zotero, have basically solved cross-platform cross-device reading and reference management for me.

Another +1 for Zotfile, but Z6 looks like it bakes in some of zotfile's features.

I'm glad it includes some, but perhaps not the feature of storing pdfs in a different place so they can be easily synced via Dropbox? While I'd like to have as few extensions as possible, maybe I'll neat to keep Zotfile around regardless.

There is a plugin called Zotfile that makes this easier.

But in some ways Zotero 6 makes filesystem workflows more complicated, in that PDF annotations don't get stored as actual annotations in the PDFs.

You don't have to use their system, you can just use your standard pdf viewer too.

Zotfile is an extension that automatically converts internally stored pdfs to links in a filesystem directory -- the latter can be synchronized and accessed however you please.

It's been working great for me, although recent versions have a problem that it no longer recognizes the root directory and pollutes the zotero database with machine-specific absolute paths ((

You can still access the pdf file via the file system by right clicking on the item and 'show file'. The files names may not be user friendly though.

There is handy functionality to rename pdf files based on parent metadata. I think you can set this up to be done automatically on import too.

This is great to have consistent filenames from lots of different sources. Of course if the metadata is wrong or missing, it won't help.

zotfile plugin, mentioned above in this thread, makes file names user friendly.

Sadly many countries have 0 education on this topic and it might not be straightforward to get hold on good information about the subject.

Just logged in to say that this work is amazing and that I really like your style :)

I also keep coming back to generative art and think about getting a pen plotter for years already. Now I am getting one!

Many people here say that slowing down is a must -- and I agree it's probably the best solution -- but surely there are more approaches we could think of:

* Not allowing packages with similar names to popular ones

* Not allowing packages creation to be anonymous (in the extreme case you would require to validate your passport or similar)

* Automatic detection of malicious code

* Central auditing organization ...

This is just on top of my head, there must be many more ideas.

The website says "ZOOMQUILT 2 An infinitely zooming painting created in 2007" (Version 1 is from 2004) and on both pages it says "A project by Nikolaus Baumgarten". So it doesn't seem to be the case that we compare two eras of web-dev here.

Indeed, the original was in Flash, it was only ported to canvas much later.

I can't even notice the load on the system - Chrome's task manager tells me it's using 10% CPU, and I'm running on a 4k monitor.

EDIT: just tested with Firefox on MacOS and it's incredibly choppy and CPU-hungry. the `drawImage` call always goes over budget for RAF, there are a ton of open issues about it: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1602299

Drawing at half scale gets it back to 60ms with time to spare:

    window_w = w * dpr / 2;
    window_h = h * dpr / 2;

Seems fine on Safari for me.

60fps*

Very interesting article, thanks for sharing the information.

FWIW, I used to be very happy with the Gnome environment but 2 recent (nautilus related) changes frustrate me incredibly:

* Copy / paste file paths from nautilus to terminal is broken. (You get this extra meta information in the path starting with `x-special/nautilus-clipboard`)

* Type ahead is gone. Previously you could type the first letters of a file / folder and select it this way. Now typing automatically triggers a search (equivalent to ctrl+f), which is much slower.

These might be minor things but I hit them so often that I was driven away from Gnome.

If you don't mind pulling a bunch of cinnamon dependencies along with it, you can use nemo (the cinnamon file manager) as a nautilus replacement in gnome. The search behavior you mentioned in particular is very annoying with nautilus.

Thanks for the tip. I'll probably give this a shot.

> My answer: you will suffer from brain drain.and reputation loss,when you buy a smaller company,consumers assume that brand is now dead.

Not so sure about that. Maybe if you read HN a lot, but I think most users won't even notice.

"Facebook bought WhatsApp - guess we're moving the family group chat to Signal"

if that anecdote was applicable to the broader market, wouldn’t we have seen WhatsApp’s numbers decline and Signal’s numbers rise after the acquisition?

Signal is very popular but whatsapp was aquired before Signal was well known (2014-15 I think) and their user base mostly don't even know it belongs to FB. I have had multiple people act shocked when I tell them whatsapp and Instagram are FB.

I was being sarcastic

Considering Star wars media continues to print money for Disney, and core Star wars consumers were appalled at the franchise before the acquisition (prequels), that's not the best example.

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction."

This. A 1000 times.

Nobody really wants to focus too much on build configurations when working on things, they should 'just work'.

And CMake, although I am using for a long time already, is not the offering this 'just works' experience I am afraid. It is so easy to introduce side-effects, and figuring out the intended way to include a project can be a big pain when documentation is sparse. Sometimes I wished I had a CMake debugger. And with modern CMake I feel like this got worse to some degree.

CMake may "just work" without you investing much/any effort - in the future.

For now, the situation is that if you invest in your CMake - blood sweat and tears - then the build itself will "just work" on many/most/all platforms. Which is already pretty good - compared to being stuck with Makefiles.

Also, CMake is essentially its own debugger, because almost all state is just a bunch of string variables.

Is someone here running an Anki sync server[1]?

I would be keen to know about the experience of setting it up and maintaining it. The github project doesn't seem active, which I always find fishy for server applications.

[1] https://github.com/ankicommunity/anki-sync-server