Just looked through the entire website to answer this question. Seems like they only accept english books :(
"Types of ebooks we don’t accept:
- Non-English-language books. Translations to English are, of course, OK."
(https://standardebooks.org/contribute/collections-policy)
I understand if the existing editors can't personally proofread the submissions, but that's why peer-review exists. Or an open-source project in general where people can post corrections. Jimbo Wales didn't need to speak a hundred languages to launch Wikipedia.
To me, that niche is already covered by Wikisource. Standard Ebooks as a project is very strict about conforming to its editorial and quality standards. On boarding more languages would require volunteer editorial experts in those languages.
Besides, projects in other languages can absolutely build upon Standard Ebooks work, but to expect Standard Ebooks itself to support other languages is just too outside the scope and expertise of the volunteers available.
If you were to find the expert editors for the other languages would you let them publish the works in those other languages on standards books website?
well, that would be up to Alex. but as that would require a pretty substantial organizational and responsibility shift, I imagine, no, he would not.
As it is now, Alex is editorially responsible for all output of Standard Ebooks. Changing that would require someone with the time and experience willing to take on all the responsibilities that Alex currently has for each of those other languages.
A well-defined focus can help management of a project, for example, by not having the participants spread too thin.
The website and toolchain are open source, so if someone would build an international version, and do it persistently, I'm sure they would link or maybe even merge the projects a bit.
Having had a regular Hibreak since last August, I would like to caution about the build quality: in those 8 months, the display adhesive is progressively getting off and I'm not sure how much longer this'll live...
That's likely my next device! I have a palma 2 and a unihertz Jellystar as my main phone. Might be a good merge of the 2. Phone + e-ink to help with phone over usage.
A mixture of both. Some of those were copycats and some of those came before me, (the iPhone app, but I didn't know about it when I made the website). The point I was making was there's lots of clones happening when you go viral.
Obsidian is on a fundamental level a very different app to Notion (you already mentioned the web app, databases, ...). It is also not even close to being "hackable to the core", it is not open source. That title belongs to Emacs.
> All the people who were working on Notion now can go get some on the job training to learn to farm.
This would only work if the government replacement would be more efficient than Notion (in the sense that the French government employs less people for a product of the same quality).
This one felt obvious, but it feels a bit hard to reason on.
How many sales people does this project need? It’s not zero because grants etc but let’s not kid ourselves.
I think this project will never spend as much money as notion on devs. Like ever.
I will grant that there’s a good idea around “well notion was doing operations for everyone at once so people don’t need as many tech/ops people ”. I’m hopeful that hosted variants pop up to help with this. I’m also hopeful that we can figure out how to make stuff easier to host when high availability is not a requirement.
So maybe we end up net more operators, and less sales people and devs. That’s kind of interesting!
If it feels hard to reason on, it might be a hint...
Sales people provide value. Maybe a sales person would have told this project to focus on being an alternative to Notion or Google Docs, as they are different apps/use cases.
The only reason why they might need less developers is because they are a copying an existing product, so less R&D. There is no reason to assume that the teams behind Notion, Outline, Google Docs ... are less effective than the French Government.
Several companies have tried to "reproduce" Notion and have failed. I don't like or use Notion but that is just extremely ignorant of the USP behind it. Dunning–Kruger much?
Do people really really agree with "Shorthand constructs that combine statements decreases difficulty"? The author even identifies a problem with the example from the original guide.
Everyone agrees that well made shorthand constructs decreases difficulty, since every programmer uses those every day. Things like function calls, while loops etc are all shorthands for different kinds of jump statements combined with register manipulation. Even assembly uses some of those, and I don't think anyone seriously codes in machine code.
No, almost everybody disagree with it as a general statement.
Some people disagree to a point where they want languages to have only a handful different constructs. But most people will disagree at some amount of language complexity.
This is my main problem with Ecosia as well.
I don't believe planting trees is really a good option to help the climate and I have zero trust in tracking progress of those projects in a lot of countries. I would much rather them e.g. investing in solar or sponsoring open source projects.
It seems they are also diversifying their investments into other climate impact projects like solar (see some of the projects here: https://blog.ecosia.org/climate-projects/).
