Build Golf! Code Golf, but for Builds! Uhhh, that’s sort of it.

I remember being very slightly intrigued by the concept of code golf a long time ago. But I mostly took notice of people taking it in very esoteric directions, and even before that it was pretty much orthogonal to writing the kind of useful code I care about.

But just now my brain rubbed 2 neurons together, and made the connnection to another problem that has bothered me quite often. How do you do a minimal build of some thing without some “helpful” 300 LoC boilerplate. I want like, 2 files with 3 lines each and one command to run.

Okay, there will be a couple complications to consider to avoid this going down a hacky direction like Code Golf. Like, how much tooling do you depend upon? Do you have to install a package? How many (hundred) packages does that depend upon? (Looking at you React.) But the general idea is, how to you get (for a specific task or category of tool) in a minimalist way from plain-text in git to running machine code? (or like, HTML if you’re building for the web) It’s a challenge of taste more than discrete optimization! If tools will reign over others in this sphere, it should be because they cater to refined tastes!

Soooo, that’s my prompt. Ideas in all directions welcome. Concept for actually practically realizing this? Overly complex unworkable scoring rules? Personal fave minmal project templates? Feel free to evolve on this, or not, I’m not your boss.

Dear god. Why are note-taking projects such a magnet for slop bros?

I’m on a bit of a quest to build up some self-hosted services for me and friends & family, partially because Ad- & AI-infested big tech slop was making me sick and also to become a better sysadmin. General requirement was notes available anywhere and decent editing on mobile.

I was about to rip my hair out, when every session for weeks digging into options ended in frustration. Every project with somewhat decent features had some meh aspects and became worse the longer I looked. And there are so many of them. You can drown your self in “Best FOSS Note-taking App in $(date +%Y)” listicles. Here’s a list of over a hundred projects.

I suspect it’s a bit of the shopping list problem. It’s such a basic idea, that every ambitious clueless dev has it once while picking a hobby project. But note-taking also definitely has a place in toxic self-optimization / hustle culture. Some of the more developed project strike me as that.

I won’t mention every basic note-talking project with a CLAUDE.md that I stumbled on, but here’s some of the more disappointing lowlights:

• Joplin main developer was one-shot. Added agent instructions to the repo this year and some provisions for his personal vibecoding rig to .gitignore. Also it’s not a bug if the AI chat button is visible even if AI features are disabled, because how would people find out about the AI features then?
• Notesnook seems okay-ish, but they’re part of the mall ninja club. Business partnership with Kagi & Tuta.
• Standard Notes was the least suspect to me. Later found out they Copilot-Review all of their PRs. (same as Notesnook btw)
• I even considered going with a self-hosted binary of Obsidian. They don’t get instant-disqualified by promoting themselves as AI-anything. And if you don’t have a project you can trust, you might as well throw yourself at the most established option and pray.

I was running out of places to look for alternatives, when I remembered Open Slopware. You can guess how shocked I was, when note-software made up one of the biggest sublists in there. Through the shortlist of recommendations I ended up looking at Flatnotes. That project might be just enough notes for me.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.blahaj.zone/c/onehundredninetysix/p/449615/antiruleist-advent-calender

Antiruleist advent calender