I love it. The world needs more magical things and less legalese.
I also added "you can't use this to make money" in my license [1] but I was a bit more specific, and I don't think I'm quite finished with the language yet. It feels a bit too specific but also not specific at all, weird mix. Also mine is in a purposefully-unenforceable version of legalese. I really like your magical approach. I've been describing myself as a metamagical artificer for a while now. You might just inspired me to rewrite mine.
Mine goes a bit more extreme than yours though. Not only does mine disallow parasites from using my software, it also disallows abusers of every kind. Bigots too. And the state. In fact lawyers and governments are explicitly disallowed from interpreting or enforcing my license.
I was honestly never sure how much of a joke or how serious I wanted it to be. I do intend on using my own license for my own code, and those are more-or-less the terms I place on who can use my software and who can't. I don't want my stuff being used for profit or to harm people. If someone came and asked me "hey can I use your X for Y", this document is the things I'd tell them no about.
I explicitly reject legalism and fully intend on having as a condition of the license that it cannot be interpreted by legal professionals, and I fully intend on it being invalid in a court of law, and I fully intend on never trying to enforce it.
Those are "serious" stances of mine, but a consequence of having those views is that I can't truly take this class of document seriously. I already knew it was useless to follow legal protocol to the letter in my license since it's inadmissible, so I thought why not have some fun with it.
A lot of the weird characters are vaguely related to the concept on that line of the license. The 3/5 symbol is the index for the anti-social-hierarchy clause. The lambda is the symbol for the recursive (infectious) license clause. The $ is the anti-money clause. And so on... Not all of them are related to something, some I couldn't find any good symbol for.
I'm toying around with HTMX for my website. It's going to be sort of a wiki but a little different; the public exports from my internal knowledgebase with some extra crap mixed in.
I have lots of notes of varying types and formats. Org-mode files are all pretty standard, but there's like 3 different Markdowns and an untold number of randomly-formatted .TXT files. I want to generate their webpages on-the-fly and not have to worry about exporting it.
One of the "crap mixed in" things I want is to integrate parts of a gitweb-like interface into the notes. I reference repos and commits regularly in my notes. Would be neat to mouse-over them and get a little popup with basic info about it.
I also like that the author refers to themselves as a Technomancer. Personally I'm an metamagical artificer. I love meeting fellow adventurers.
- formal logic, set theory, category theory, number theory, type theory, model theory, graph theory, complexity theory, information theory, combinatorics, universal algebra
- systems theory, algorithms, data structures, cryptography
I have a lot of (legally acquired) shows and movies. I like making playlists with many shows that fit a theme (e.g. a cozy sitcoms playlist with MASH, Sanford and Son, Seinfeld, etc.). Some playlists have over 5000 episodes. I calculated one and it was almost a year of playtime if I only let it play while I'm sleeping (my primary use-case).
I want to shuffle the shows I'm watching, but I can't stand standard shuffling in VLC because it puts, for example, S8E4 before S1E1. Total loss of plot. So I wrote a shuffler that shuffles shows but keeps the episodes in order.
It deploys symlinks numbered 0-n, as well as an index of what episode each number corresponds to. Then I just slap the whole folder in VLC and let it play until I get bored of that theme.
I just make a copy of the script for each playlist and put it in the playlist folder. It has to be run as administrator on Windows, which is unfortunately where it's run at the moment because my gaming PC is also my TV for now, although I did just migrate everything to a Debian NFS server so I'll need to address that probably.
This, especially the "Definition of Conscious Intelligence" section, somewhat relates to a current project of mine, writing my own personal software license[1]. I needed to define "person" in my license for reasons, and it was really difficult for me to capture the full idea in words. I finally worked out a horribly long definition, but I might revisit it and steal some bits from this.
In a nutshell, I have an extremely broad definition of person. Cats are people. Ant colonies are people. Slime molds are people. Forests are probably people. Per my definition one could argue that Earth is an emergent person. And per my license you can't use my software if you abuse any person. Per my license if you disagree you can fight me about it.
It also reminds me that I never did fix that font issue between my website and my git server when displaying raw txt files. The one on my website[2] garbles all my weird symbols, and those are absolutely essential to the function and meaning of the license and other work. Need to work on that but fonts are so confusing.
I'm on this team as well. Been trying to explain this to the guys at work (fabrication/CAD work). They argue that "we already do have a system, we put projects in the customer folder".
Here is a sample folder structure (from memory, not exactly the same):
/Customer/Project/:
./.190 - STEEL - QTY - 3 - CUSTOMER - PART#.dxf
./.190 STEEL - QTY 1 - CUSTOMER - PART# DO NOT ETCH BEND LINES.dxf
./LEFT SIDE BRACKET B.sldprt
./PART 3.sldprt
./PRJ001.sldprt
./PRJ002.sldprt
./PRJ401.sldprt
./ALL PARTS PUT TOGETHER.sldasm
./FINAL ASSY.sldasm
./STEPS ASSY.sldasm
Keep in mind they also have a /Customer/Project REVISED - USE THIS/ folder, a /Customer/Project 4-13-24/ folder, and a /Customer/Project UPDATED/.
They also have (ON PURPOSE!) a system where they have 3 sources of truth so if any of them don't match we have to stop what we're doing to double check what's actually correct :|
While they didn't take my suggestions on this particular thing, my expertise has been noted for when there's a need for printer troubleshooting...
One of the playlists I made with this actually includes Seinfeld, Friends, and MASH. Also includes Andy Griffith, Blackadder, Sanford and Son, The Munsters, and WKRP in Cincinatti. Overall an extremely cozy channel.
I have a bunch of (legally) ripped shows. I use VLC to watch them. I like to make big playlists full of many shows like a TV channel.
I hate the fact that when I shuffle, the shows end up in any old order. I could have S8E2 right before S1E1. Not cool.
So I made one that shuffles shows but maintains episode order between them, and takes number of episodes in each show into account to get an even spread so the playlist feels the same throughout. If a show has a ton of episodes it will show up more. Less shows up less. All my testing resulted in the top of the list looking almost identical to the bottom of the list. Mission accomplished.
It works by deploying symlinks to a playlist folder, all named 0, 1, 2, 3, etc. Slap all those symlinks in the VLC playlist and you got yourself a TV channel.
I made it for me, so it's designed for a specific file layout. It could be easily adapted to fit other organization methods.
I have plans to expand on it. I want to add functionality to detect multi-part episodes and keep them together, as well as some kind of "too many of one show in a row" feature.
Truly random shuffling is not very good in practice, really.
Way back in the day, before the current trend towards throwing all your MP3s in a pile and using id3 tags to hopefully sort it out, I had my MP3s in a directory structure by rough genre and album. I wrote myself a shuffler that would honor the directory structure; it would tend to stay in the same directory and use a record of the most recently played songs to avoid repeats, and only jump out if it needed to, or with some relatively smaller probability. Then there was a relatively smaller probability it would continue jumping up through the directories.
The idea is, if you have a multi-genre collection, you may want a "shuffle" but it can be jarring to whiplash between the various genres on every single song as a fully random shuffle would do. So shuffles would tend to honor albums, then honor genre, so that there was a small chance you might flip from techno to classical, and if you did, it would tend to stay in classical for a while, before flipping to pop music or whatever.
I do sort of miss it and sort of simulate it nowadays by just being a bit heavyhandedly intentional about the playlists I make for the day.
A few years ago I got a Chromecast, so I made a program that would cast one episode after the other of all the shows I had. It was fun to switch to the Chromecast and be in the middle of some show (I'd already watched them all), but it did have the issue you mention (it would play S02E03 and then S10E22), but it was fun to have my own TV channel, basically.
It was pretty janky the last time I tried it last year though. When it worked, it was awesome, but when things didn't work quite correctly (or at all), it was frustrating and difficult to figure out how to fix.
I'm also an org-roam and paper guy, but I've designed my system to be platform-agnostic. It's all in the naming conventions.
Files are named hierarchically with periods. I have top-level categories that have changed little over the years. `con.` for concepts, `lit.` for documents, `proj.` for projects... you get the point, I'm not listing all of them unless someone really just wants me to.
My go-to example is always Star Wars. `lore.sw` is my top-level Star Wars note. I also have `lore.sw.chron` which is the chronological watching order. There's also `game.sw` which contains a list of Star Wars games I've found.
This extends to non-note files as well. For images of something I use `.img.[date].#.[ext]`, so for example I have some pictures of my cat named `ppl.neck.img.2024.03.15.1.raw`. I have a video of him murdering a bird too, `ppl.neck.vid.2024.05.22.murdering-a-bird.mp4`... As you can see, sometimes I replace the number with a nice title.
The modularity of it all is great. I can add anything anywhere at any point in the hierarchy without having to re-name things. I name things exactly what they are. The hierarchy can be sparse, parent notes don't have to exist. I can name something `stuff.something.i-dont-know.gif` without having any notes for `stuff.` or `stuff.something.`
I have notes on paper as well, and they use the same system, with the hierarchical name printed in bold at the top of the paper. `self.passwords` is a paper note for obvious reasons. I also keep most of my `sys.internal.` documentation on paper because my computer might not work when I need it most, though a lot of them do have computer versions which I just print out when I change because it's too much to write by hand.
Replying to my own comment here. I decided to list all of the top-level categories because it's something I'm kind of proud of, as it seems to be able to categorize anything I can throw at it:
agenda.: single file, my main TODO. I can also add `.agenda.` anywhere in any hierarchy to make a topic-specific agenda.
archive.: I just slap `archive.` on the front of any filename I want to archive.
con.: notes about concepts
cook.: my cookbook
film.: movies, shows, etc.. Contains both notes and actual films
game.: game notes, downloads, old versions, mod version archive, skins, settings exports, etc.
grp.: social groups, movements, governments, companies, religions, etc. Mostly notes from school and research from work, but some political stuff too.
home.: my house
inbox.: single note, anything can go in here for later processing if I'm feeling lazy
journal.: journal, organized by date (journal.2024.08.27). Hasn't been used in years.
lang.: languages of all kinds; spoken, programming, everything. There's `lang.lisp` next to `lang.latin`
lit.: literature, documents, etc.. Organized as `lit.author.series.document.chapter`. I have a lot of books.
log.: logs, never used this one actually
lore.: research about fictional worlds (I'm into worldbuilding)
meta.: about this collection
music.: playlist dumps, song downloads
ppl.: people
prod.: products
proj.: projects
school.: school stuff, organized as `school.institution.course.unit.chapter.assignment.document`
self.: me
social.: social media
soft.: software
sys.: my systems
veh.: my vehicles
Bonus:
I also have `woodheart.` for my worldbuilding project, which contains a copy of most of the above categories within it.
I also added "you can't use this to make money" in my license [1] but I was a bit more specific, and I don't think I'm quite finished with the language yet. It feels a bit too specific but also not specific at all, weird mix. Also mine is in a purposefully-unenforceable version of legalese. I really like your magical approach. I've been describing myself as a metamagical artificer for a while now. You might just inspired me to rewrite mine.
Mine goes a bit more extreme than yours though. Not only does mine disallow parasites from using my software, it also disallows abusers of every kind. Bigots too. And the state. In fact lawyers and governments are explicitly disallowed from interpreting or enforcing my license.
- [1]: [url-redacted]