There are definitely groups out there pushing a religious or prudish agenda.
I'd like to offer my own anecdote, as a completely secular person whose lifestyle would probably invite condemnation, if not horror, from e.g. LDS. I won't describe exactly why they might feel that way, but let it suffice to say that I have spent non-trivial time around people who have done what some call victimless crimes, among other and more legal behaviors.
I find that I feel better emotionally and perform better professionally (and academically, when I was in school) when I refrain completely from this vice. I also find that I have much less intrusive thoughts of the sexual variety, especially at inappropriate times about inappropriate people.
I understand your concern that pseudoscientific and/or religious groups might be exerting this influence. I just wanted to give an example of the opposite.
See these videos [0] [1] where people in the gaming community (which in my experience is very often agnostic, if not atheist) have essentially a group coaching session with a psychologist for their undesired relationships to porn. Very rarely do they mention religion, but quite often do they mention emotional distress, life difficulties, social struggles, and difficulty stopping a behavior they find distressing. Whether or not it's an "addiction" (and scientific discussions related to the debate) I find irrelevant -- they personally wish they could stop and have trouble doing so.
I appreciate your efforts to, as I perceive it, point out potential sources of bias or misinformation. I just wanted to offer a totally secular view of the benefit of and reason why an app like this might have funding and a market.
Have you considered they might be trading off on aspects that you don't care or don't know about?
As a sibling comment noted, a BOM might be $X compared to buying premade packages from Adafruit/Sparkfun at $X0. But paying $X0 means skipping over $X00 worth (or even $X,000) of schematic capture, board layout, design review, PCB fab, assembly, bringup, and fixing bugs.
I use vanilla* VS Code with the built-in Markdown previewer. My notes are a flat structure of Markdown files (personal) or a single folder for each project (work).
*I have a plugin called Markdown Paste[0] to use a keystroke combo to save an image from the clipboard into a designated subfolder and insert the corresponding Markdown underneath my cursor. But it's nothing that can't be done by manually saving an image into a folder and typing the corresponding Markdown by hand
I've used Privnote[0] to easily and quickly send self-destructing text-only notes with sensitive information to users both technical and not. Their privacy policy[1] explains how the information is kept safe.
I personally use keepass, but could make a case for why one would prefer a subscription tool over Bitwarden:
I feel confident that I could look up a few articles and self-host Bitwarden on either my raspberry pi at home. If not at home, then I might pay for a DO droplet or something, and at $5/mo that's back to $60/yr already, might as well just pay and have the whole thing taken care of for me, besides downloading an app and logging in. That's assuming I have the technical familiarity. If I don't even have that, I'm probably not likely to care or even know if my tool is proprietary or open source.
SFTP access, file upload, very cheap pay-as-you-go (traffic spikes will hit the $0 floor and stop incurring charges), email/password login.
They do not provide a static IP but do attempt to cover the seemingly most-common case where clients request it: "The most common reason people request a static IP address is to point external DNS at a site hosted with us. As part of our hosting service, we provide our own special DNS records for each site that you can link to external DNS using the CNAME capability that work even better than static IPs. These records preserve full fault tolerance and load balancing."
You're right, it doesn't. It's the principle I wanted to point out. How can there be meaningful or good-faith discussion if one party's perspective is misrepresented?
I really like the referencing and transclusion features of Roam. Being able to reference any fragment of text anywhere else, and edit them them in-place with all changes propagated to every other reference... it's the defining feature that I'm willing to pay for once it monetizes.
Much of my job is embedded engineering, to establish a bit of credulity for the following recommendations. My employer is partial to ST Micro and Renesas, so keep that in mind. Others may suggest Silicon Labs, Microchip, or Texas Instruments. This will also be biased by my own education and work experience (e.g. no robotics, more sensors/lights stuff).
I'd recommend getting a dev kit like the STM32F4DISCOVERY (https://www.st.com/en/evaluation-tools/stm32f4discovery.html). ST Micro's boards are often used for courses (https://www.udemy.com/course/cortex-m/) so you may like to take some of those courses. You'll often hear about the TI MSP430 as another microcontroller but AFAIK it's beginning to be a bit dated. Although come to think of it, there's probably more educational material out there for it, if you're willing to search.
Grab a kit like the Sparkfun Beginner's Kit (https://www.sparkfun.com/products/13973) and read some of the tutorials on their website about creating circuits. Tutorials or courses for your dev kit should get you to a point where you can light an LED controlled by the micro.
From there, you may like to do more advanced stuff like communicating with sensors over specific protocols (Sparkfun's Tinker Kit and associated guides may be of use https://www.sparkfun.com/products/14556 though you will have to translate from Arduino to C code, which can be good practice for knowing how Arduino works under-the-hood).
At this point, you'll probably know whether you want to keep learning more about sensors/lights/IoT type stuff, or want to branch out to other embedded-related topics. More advanced IoT material will be things like taking sensor measurements, storing measurements to memory, interfacing with displays, sending data via WiFi or Bluetooth.
Edit: I skimmed over a lot to keep it short. There's a lot hiding behind how casually these recommendations are made, so feel free to reach out with any questions (email in profile).
This is a cool example of science progressing in real time. I had heard previously that the hippocampus was related to navigation (the taxi driver study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC18253/).
On the Wikipedia page for 'Retrosplenial cortex' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrosplenial_cortex#cite_note...), the intro text pulls on a source from 2009 to say, "its location close to visual areas and also to the hippocampal spatial/memory system suggest it may have a role in mediating between perceptual and memory functions."
And here there's new research making that link between perception and memory more clear!
My org has just started using Slack (probably like many others), while I used it before because of my college capstone team -- hoping this helps incentivize them to adopt it!
> I agree with you that this needs to not become any kind of a racial thing against Chinese people.
It already is. My (conservative, right-voting) non-Chinese Asian parents are slightly nervous about being in public in our town, and my dad's car's mirror was smashed a couple nights ago.
> But I'm going to stick with the facts, especially when someone is trying to paint a counter-factual lie of a narrative.
COVID-19 is its scientific name: Coronavirus Disease 2019.
If you say covid-19, you can still disagree that it can be a dogwhistle, you can just say it that way because you want to stick with the scientific facts.
> And I think there is some value in factually pointing that out, and not letting the government of China create some it-was-some-US-soldiers fairy tale.
I agree that there's value in this. Letting Chinese propaganda and digital interests (continue to) run rampant is, from my layman perspective, a mistake. See TikTok and Discord for examples.
I also think it can be done in a way that doesn't catch families like mine in the crossfire: e.g. "that article is wrong, covid-19 actually started in China."
It's not a fancy dashboard, but has the most granular and up-to-date info that I've seen specifically for chips and electronics so far.