All of dvf's Comments + Replies

dvf10

The more nebulous, the fewer contributors. I certainly would prefer to contribute to properly licensed projects; I've had the fun of putting work into a project that for silly license reasons couldn't get into Debian/GSOC/... I'm willing to forgo it in the future.

I haven't done any deck making, so give this low weight, but I imagine a truly collaborative and creative joint project where making up, say, fallacious arguments -> fallacy name notes that are actually challenging is half the fun, and the benefit of copy-pasta is small anyway.

dvf00

My proposal doesn't seem to me to compromise human readability and editability (and certainly doesn't compromise version control) so just to make sure we mean the same thing, an example:

space update mydeck.spc

where mydeck.spc = "

The [quick] brown fox jumped over the [lazy] dog.
;UID=SDFGHJKERTYUICVBN;

Three commonly-used nonsense variable names:
1. foo
2. bar
3. baz
;;
OCaml :: A fast, functional, strongly-typed programming language.
;;"

would find in the deck the first note using the NID, and then add the second and third (having no NIDs, they... (read more)

0[anonymous]
I do, for the following reasons: * Space shouldn't mutate the file in the general case, because it should be possible to check out a repo of Space files, run Space over all of them, and not have any changes in your tracked files. * Currently, ;; is a separator; it's optional after the last card. The change you propose is backwards-incompatible with existing Space files. This is only an issue for me, since I'm likely the only human with a lot of space files, but it's a pain point. * Those IDs are not human-readable. You could do high-entropy human-readable IDs with work, but they would necessitate shipping a dictionary with Space. I don't mind doing this so this isn't really a rebuttal. Generally, the first bullet point is the only really hard problem. There's no global name scheme we can use that will allow people to put global IDs for cards into a Space file. This is reducible to the problem that Bitcoin solves, so we could solve it with Bitcoin, but that'd be a massive pain. There are hackier solutions, but they're hacks, and I'm really hesitant to include something that doesn't get it right the first time because in the very unlikely case Space explodes in between the hack and the fix for the hack, Space will just be crippled forever. Notice that I can't reply very frequently because as an open feminist on Less Wrong, I'm targeted by a large amount of actively anti-feminist users who downvote productive comments like the above.
dvf00

I've tried space. About sharing: how about having unique textual IDs (say, UUIDs) for each space entry, that get carried around in cards and used to update cards in place?

Then space entries.spc deckname would update the entries in deckname, but also invent and add such IDs to any entries in entries.spc that are missing them. Then all we need to take care with is to only check in spc files that have IDs for all entries, which also serves to ensure the spc file is used at least once before checking in.

Since the ID is per space entry, not per card, need to... (read more)

0[anonymous]
The problem is that the Space file format is intended to be human-readable plain-text. I'm not willing to compromise on that personally; I want to have plain-text files that I can check into a repository. Without this, I think the best thing you could do is fuzzy matching on the content, but I'm not sure how well this would work in practice. That said, you could adapt the markup language for use in Anki's editor, storing it in something structured like XML or JSON that would have UUIDs of the type of propose. Also, thanks for trying space! It's not really polished or even finished and portable, but it's really gratifying to see people touching things I've made.
dvf10

Though, honestly, what matters more, copyright law or raising the sanity waterline?

The choice you offer is false, in my opinion. If you violate copyright law, you will never gather a community effort, because who wants to work on something that can get DMCA'ed out of existance at any moment?

I think CC-BY-(maybe SA) will work fine, and just use appropriately licensed basic sources like wikipedia.

0[anonymous]
Plenty of people will work on things that are in legally nebulous territory. That's the entirety of the WINE project, ReactOS, and a large number of modding communities. In practice, it's impossible for any of these projects to die, because the material they hack on is distributed between all their members and there's no single point of failure.