A simple solution is to get an extra phone just for #emacs. An aged Android will do fine. Pop an updated LineageOS on there. Then run Emacs one of two ways:

• get UserLAnd (not a typo) and run emacs
• use Emacs for F-Droid as a native Android app

Use a Bluetooth keyboard, obviously. Keep the initfiles in sync with Syncthing. Done.

The screen is small, so you have to pick between cholera and the plague: either hurt your vision using this for long, or upscale the text far past practical limits.

It doesn't sound super useful, but an example legit use case is flashcards, if you prefer fully in-Emacs solutions like org-fc/org-drill/pamparam.

You can get more legit use cases if you depend on an elisp solution for something, e.g. RSS reading or a home-rolled incremental reading system. By ignoring the whole concept of a phone-specific operating system, you save effort on figuring out your infrastructure.

Ingredients:

• Old Android phone
• Phone-mount or holder of some kind
• Bluetooth keyboard (maybe learn to use a one-handed keeb like the FrogPad)
• LineageOS or postmarketOS

#slipbox

Looking on my old files, I always had tendencies to systematize my writings and work towards the ideal of something like a personal wiki, but there was always a QWAN missing. I would have been grateful to receive #org-roam many years ago.

Back then, I knew of wiki-style solutions for Org-mode, such as that automatic radio links thing with CamelCase, but they felt unnatural to me and many didn't extend outside of one file without some elbow grease. I was always forced to wonder if a new heading should be top-level or nested under some other or what – this is a waste of psychic activation energy. I continued to depend on filesystem hierarchy to some extent. It was difficult to find long-forgotten things among my writings – you can't ripgrep for what you don't remember.

The difference between back then and now is technologically a small thing, but it unlocked an explosion of productivity. It is the following, sorted by importance:

1. org-roam gives me a single hotkey for letting me pick from headlines known to the org-id database, to insert a preformatted link in one step (or to visit it)! Wow! This turns out to be crucial, and I no longer understand why anyone would bother to write anything without such a mechanism at their fingertips. If I could send just this component (org-roam-node-insert) to my past self…
   • It could be upstreamed into Org itself, it's not actually a Zettelkasten-specific thing.
2. org-roam doesn't mandate a hierarchy. I still use hierarchy many places by nesting notes, but I'm not obligated to make one up when there's no natural hierarchy to the topic. I don't have to think at all about where to put a new note, which turns out to be important.
3. org-roam has backlinks. I don't check them often, but the ability to check is reassuring.
4. the occasional visualization thru org-roam-ui – IMO a psychological big deal in the beginning

I was held back from adopting org-roam for a couple of years because it seemed to be a Big Thing to learn. In reality it's just two commands in day-to-day use: org-roam-node-insert and org-roam-node-find.

The moment I was sold on org-roam was seeing org-roam-ui visualize my own notes. That experience carried me over the threshold and lit the fire.

Noa: Well, simulacrum level 3 is worse! If they’re successful in defending the lie, they’re also confusing other people about what reasoning looks like. If people’s idea of argument is based on the kind of point-scoring that happens in a competitive debate or a courtroom, and they model their thinking and discourse after this, then they’re learning simulacrum level 3 thought patterns, trying to make a thing true by arguing for it, instead of using arguments to try to find out what’s true.

– www.greaterwrong.com/posts/KzAG4yWQJosmEjHe2/blatant-lies-are-the-best-kind

(This person's point touches the ancient discussion on Dialectics and The domain of rhetoric.)

Good to be aware of some dimensions:

• Decoupling vs Contextualising
  • e.g. G contextualizes and I decouple
• Ask vs Guess
  • e.g. G follows Ask culture and I follow Guess culture
  • Even better: Reveal culture
• Wait vs Interrupt
• Combat vs Nurture
  • not sure where I land here (too simple dichotomy)
  • Refined into two separate dimensions (Combat was adversarial-low, Nurture was collaborative-high, but G is better described as adver-high and myself collab-low)
• Attitude to joking about a serious matter

Once you and a friend have identified yourself on opposing ends of these dimensions, it could be good for both of you to talk about these dimensions one at a time, talk about how to interpret each other and formulate yourselves given that know you're on opposite ends.