One of the things that stands in the way of this (for me) is that I've been out of academia for nearly ten years. I never even got verified for submitting CS pre-prints https://arxiv.org/ for example, which I should have done before leaving school.

+1 from another RPI alum. One of my big regrets from college is missing out on doing undergrad research with him. https://www.cs.rpi.edu/~cvarela/research.html

This Guy Steele talk is related to this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lw6TaiXzHAE

A good watch for the fine people in this thread (and please ignore explicit or implied linkages to Java--it's full of the broad concepts, not narrowly JVM stuff)

I'd love to hear if anyone has other alternatives. I'm finding myself in a similar place as you do. I found on the About and Terms pages a few software projects listed, which the author claims are what powers Slimvoice:

  - https://www.blender.org
  - https://www.gimp.org
  - https://golang.org

General tech ^ and libraries:

  - https://github.com/aymerick/douceur
  - https://github.com/jung-kurt/gofpdf
  - https://github.com/lib/pq
  - https://github.com/qiangxue/fasthttp-routing
  - https://github.com/valyala/fasthttp
  - https://github.com/valyala/quicktemplate
  - https://github.com/bamiaux/rez
  - https://github.com/MithrilJS/mithril.js

And lastly, fonts:

  - https://github.com/rsms/inter
  - https://github.com/IBM/plex
  - https://github.com/weiweihuanghuang/Work-Sans

Aggregated from from:

  - https://slimvoice.co/about
  - https://slimvoice.co/terms

Copied URLs just in case those pages go kaput.

It does sometimes cost money and time to open-source something like this.

i.e. something that ran a business, and could run another (in time)

Has anyone reached out to the author and asked if they'd be willing to toss a few things into a repo between now and April? I'm not asking for open-source maintenance, but it would be nice to self-host something Slimvoice-like on my own domain.

I'm curious how it's implemented--maybe https://weasyprint.org/ for the PDFs?

I think the author deleted herself / himself everywhere. I'd like to know if I could buy the service and leave it online.

If someone has contact to the author, I'd be pleased for some details.

It's ran by Sensor Station LLC, email seems to be `lookout@sensorstation.co`

Also this seems to explain why everything is gone (snippet from his site winduptoy.sensorstation.co):

> we go to great lengths to avoid being tracked, marketed to, and information being sold. we started using dumb-phones, deleted Google, social media, and SaaS accounts, and self-host whatever we need. we choose open source software whenever possible and max-out our ad blockers when on the web. we subscribe to zero subscription services.

Since Slimvoice removed the Google login for privacy reasons, I'm not surprised they've escalated their idea of living off the grid. Their ideals have left us out of their great service, and honestly it doesn't bother me but they should have at least left it self-host.

How can your Photos library be real if our eyes aren't real? /s

> How can [X] if [false premise]?

By the principle of explosion[0, eg].

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_explosion

I think it's a notably funny coincidence that "contact finance" is the prefix for some pretty expensive real estate.

Especially if this is long term, this is a great tool:

https://github.com/hound-search/hound#hound

It would be great if someone integrated this with tree-sitter plus something to make the search semantics a bit smarter about usages of X:

https://www.etsy.com/codeascraft/announcing-hound-a-lightnin...

Screenshots:

https://jaxenter.com/hound-go-react-code-search-engine-15008...

Another trick I use for Java: javap all the Enums out of the compiled artifacts; these indicate weird things like "modes" that you can use to start asking questions relevant to the domain. Like "why are there four ways to reprice an invoice" or finding the "types" of fees or w/e in a billing system. (assuming enum classes are used)