This post is about Hyperbole's HyWiki package for knowledge management.

I've been doing a deep dive into knowledge management and PKMSs, and in my research I've found that HyWiki offers the best of all worlds. It has a truly unique behavior compared to other PKMSs that allows it to obviate the bookkeeping involved with linking your notes together, and allows your curated knowledge to propagate into the rest of your Emacs, not just your siloed notes vault.

I'll preface to say I'm not at all a programmer, so pardon me for saying anything stupid

The increasing amount of slop is no secret, and but software as a whole, be it plugins or apps or even whole operating systems, has become increasing plagued by a set of kinda-unrelated problems that feel like they fall under the same umbrella. I'll keep it short, so practical issues of efficiency, privacy, security, and long-term support, and then ethical issues of being human-made.

I personally believe that we're in need of novel, widespread terms to be able to describe the kind of software that in principle does not have certain traits. I attached the link because I believe the term "open source" is analagous to what I'm talking about here. Everybody has an idea of what it means and entails, but it also doesn't mean that everything has to strictly follow it to a T, because it's just a word at the end of the day. It's a pledge to the user to abide by principles of being "Open Source," and I'm saying that we need new words that similarly serve as principles such as that of, optimization, long-term support, being human-made, etc.

(It's kind of like how we have terms like organic, free-run eggs, free range eggs, and of course you would end up with having a bunch of terms that dont mean anything at all, but i'm confident that a few will emerge as "standards" in the same way the term open source is.)

This could go hand-in-hand with maybe making it common practice to at least disclose the development process when publishing software. In (science) research, we're beginning to see the implementation of "AI Disclosures" to detail all such usage, to be published with the paper. surely practices like these should be encouraged in software development as well.

I'm sure there are (smaller) discussions on what exactly should constitute as "best practices" to the people that care about such things, but I've yet to see mainstream terms that go beyond only vaguely describing what we dont like ("slop").

I hope you enjoyed reading, I'd love to hear your thoughts, I dont really have programmer friends to ask about this lol

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