Hah, I recently had to setup a cronjob that rsync's my org-mode files to iCloud. (iCloud didn't work with symlinks, but I needed to somehow sync my org-mode files to my phone.) Anyway, my org directory happens to be a git repo, and I rsync the whole repo including .git, so that's technically something you can do. :)
I didn't know about the --force flag. You can also whitelist files in .gitignore with !filename.[0]
Is there a reason to avoid symlinks? I've been using this setup for a few years now, (using an artisanal, home-rolled script before I discovered stow) and it's worked superbly.
Just don't push to GitHub. :) You can also pick and choose what you want in the repos with this method. It's a very useful technique for tracking and rolling back changes to dotfiles that you care about. You can even make backups of the directory which can help you bootstrap new machines really quick.
In a similar vein, I also have a git repo containing my todo list, journal, etc. and review and commit the changes once a week. Very helpful for catching accidental deletions/modifications. I have never been tempted to push these repos.
> My own death, of course, which I learnt will come when I least expect it, when everything is going right for once - that when no threats are apparent and I feel I can relax a little, it will be then that I choke over a tin of spinach, or mistake a blue e for a blue o, or a pink h for a pink h.
Just recently my wife developed a sudden and very aggressive infection. She's healthy and it totally came out of left field. Then it spread to me. It was definitely humbling. I don't believe in living in fear, but it's funny how everything can change in an instant.
I have to commend the title though:
> You have a sad feeling for a moment, then it passes
Coming to understand the ephemeral nature of emotions is what finally allowed me deal with them. They're still real, but they always pass, no matter how strong they seem in the moment.
Grief is an enormously complicated emotional state that cannot be pithily summed up like that sentence. It's just a quote from a game.
In my experience, it doesn't pass, as in disappear. Instead, the fact of the loss slowly becomes a new fact of your reality. The newness of it will pass. The rawness of the pain will fade - most of the time. There will always be things that bring the person right back sitting next to you. But you begin to re-make your life.
If you continue to struggle and haven't already done so, I can recommend talking with a counselor (I hate the word therapist). Sometimes we just need to unload, but don't want to unload on/burden the other people in our life. Grief can be isolating in this way.
I feel the same way - at least once a week I think to myself, I should tell my mom about something her grandchildren did, and then I remember she's not here any more.
Death usually is not that sudden. Only 20%-25% of deaths are surprising and occur 24 hours or less according the Nuland's "How We Die" and other studies. The other 75% are slower processes giving us plenty of time to contemplate death, make peace or anger.
Can you learn to navigate by searching for the text you want to get to?[0] Or does your editor provide any facilities for jumping directly to the desired location?[1]
[0]: Beginner's Emacs tip. Should apply in other editors.
I've been programming in Vim for a very long time and even though I use some of the available jump commands, I still find it very useful to have a fast key repeat rate. In most cases it's simply faster to start going to where I want to go, instead of calculating how many character to jump left or right, how many lines to jump up or down or find the closest unique pattern of symbols to search for.
It's just bizarre that Mac OS has such a small cap on the Key Repeat rate. Wondering if there is a way around this.
Edit: I do have a powerful plugin [0] for jumping which I often use, but still - in some cases I just want to scroll all the way there. Fast.
It doesn't even have to be a monorepo to see the speed difference. In Emacs I frequently invoke a thing where it searches my codebase as I type. With ripgrep, the results update almost instantaneously. ag, the silver searcher, is the second fastest thing I've used, but there would be a noticeable lag in updating the results as I typed, even for smaller repos.
I totally understand the desire to keep a record of the past, and space is cheap so why not. I used to be a big "digital hoarder", virtually never deleting anything that might be a bit interesting. But a couple years back I deleted most, though not all of the "archive" of past me. It was a great decision that I don't regret. The important things you did will still surface from time to time. It's also always cool to accidentally find a photobucket or google docs account you forget you had and look through it for 10 minutes. But I just don't find value in intentionally preserving a digital record of myself, and instead allow serendipity to poke my nostalgia centers on occasion. Sorry for the violating the spirit of the thread with a contrarian opinion. My point is just that I've done the digital hoarding thing for years and it turned out to not have value, for me.
I am myself dealing with the effects of my digital hoarding and trying to delete as much as I can, but I do think that is different from this.
1. Photo apps like iCloud Photos, Google Photos, and Photo Prism are getting much better at auto organizing/cataloging what photos are and surfacing them together in much more interesting ways. More photos is now a plus instead of a minus.
2. You can always delete, but if you never record you can't go back and record (often).
So I take a Marie Kondo "Keep what Sparks Joy" approach and delete anything I find that I do not care for when I find it. I also sometimes pick an area of stuff I have and try to aggressively delete things I don't care for.
>It's also always cool to accidentally find a photobucket or google docs account you forget you had and look through it for 10 minutes.
I find that horrifying. I would probably scramble to delete that as soon as possible. Don't know about anyone else here, but having my junk float around the internet is mortifying. I delete unused accounts as soon as the thought of it pops into my mind.
Yeah like, dude deletes all his local files and is fine with personal stuff floating through the internets and randomly finding that stuff. I'd rather do it the other way round.
I used to save everything I did in the past. Over time, I've found that I almost never needed to access those files and most of that wasn't even useful for the kick of nostalgia.
Old games? I already replayed them to exhaustion.
I learned that the nostalgia is not about the files by itself but my life context at that time.
I don't miss old code or Old OS's. I miss that sense of wonder when I was less experienced and more naive, and everything was new.
>I learned that the nostalgia is not about the files by itself but my life context at that time.
I'm learning the same - whenever I feel nostalgic about playing an old SNES or PSX game, I've realized that it was just about that time in my life, and usually just watching a clip on youtube or listening to the soundtrack is enough to scratch the itch, rather than actually playing the game again
While your memory might be great now, it won't be so forever. Serendipity might not happen as often as you would like, and "important things" may not be all you want to remember.
I'm sure your parents or someone from their generation have actual, physical photo albums from their past - and that the experience of browsing through these photos brings back things that they haven't necessarily _forgotten_ about, but that they wouldn't have brought into active memory unless they were browsing through them.
Over the years I have experienced and built many things that I do not deem "important" to me, yet when I see them mentioned (even in writings by myself), it takes me back to that point in time - all the feelings, learning and discoveries that it brought to life.
An example is scrolling through a list of my repositories on GitHub. Some of the projects on there I have "forgotten" about, but with the mention of it I am instantly brought back and remember a whole lot more details - motivations, feelings, the ecosystem...
This is just the way I see it: unless you make a deliberate effort to scrub yourself off the Internets, most people leave a bewilderingly enormous digital footprint. I think that's what makes the analogy with the physical generation not really work: that generation had a scarcity of records, while we have an absolute over-abundance. For most of history, most of our conversations, creations, the way we looked, etc. were not recorded, so I just don't see this over-abundance of preserved records -- which is quite a novel thing -- as being important to the human experience. But definitely appreciate your perspective, thanks!
Yeah, I think it can be great if you're intentional about what you're preserving and why. To elaborate a bit, I went from having tens of thousands of emails a few years ago to "only" having about 5k now. I did that by adopting a strategy of aggressively deleting trivial emails. I apply "aggressive decluttering" throughout my digital life, with screenshots also (trying to stay on topic a bit), old conversations, failed creative projects, etc, and have found the benefits of less clutter to be profound.
I never really regret deleting something, but that could be because I try to keep my life simple, within reason, and focus on the future.
I also recognize, as you point out, that there are limits to this -- sometimes there is a genuine need to keep a record. As a programmer, my work is all tracked in git. For a creative professional, I assume that a basic requirement of that sort of job is an excellent backup system.
I.e. photos and important documents are only about 50GB so very easy to keep. This would be the things that I wanted my family to keep, If I died.
Then theres random projects and files that I keep in yearly archives, just to look and remember what I was up to x years ago. That's also not huge amounts of data (1-2 GB per year).
And then theres data which I didn't create. E.g. movies, game installer,... Where a loss wouldn't really be a big problem.
I used to feel the same way. Then the internet forgot the stuff that I thought would be there forever. Now only a few remanants remain. I still look at my DeviantArt and Livejournal accounts when feeling nostalgic. Those will also one day be relics of the past. I should back them up somewhere.
The "Virtual Trash Can" approach can be a middle-ground. You keep records, but regularly move them to a NAS or any other storage that isn't something you'd accidentally wonder into.
In day to day life these past record could as well not exist, but you still get to go look at them if you're willing to make the effort to do so. Also being willing to lose these items if something catastrophic would happen relief a lot of the archiving burden.
Yeah. I meant that I don't see the value in keeping those snapshots for years and years. Space is cheap, but for me there was something unhealthy about the practice, which is why I used the word hoarding. Deleting the hoard was actually quite freeing for me, and it was a little surprising that I never actually missed e.g. the hundreds of screenshots of in-progress games I was developing. So I just wanted to share that perspective, not really expecting people to agree (almost didn't post my comment at all.)
I actually like when such findings evoke older emotions in me, puts things in perspective for me, how much have I grown and how much I am still the same etc etc
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Email: marcin@realemail.net
Backend/frontend engineer with 7 years of experience (5 of those remote). Fast learner, high output (and high quality), good communicator.