Not OP, but I use canvas all the time (Thank you!) in preference to something like Miro because I really value the open format and being able to keep the file. Something that really holds me back is the inability to use different shapes for the nodes - a use case for me is creating flow charts and process diagrams, so being unable to use the standard shapes for those is a challenge.
I'm not sure why it popped up today, but it's nice to see it on HN again! A brief timeline with some links to past discussions:
- 2022: The .canvas open format was created for Obsidian Canvas [0].
- 2024: Official 1.0 spec of JSON Canvas [1].
- 2024-2025: A number of apps/libraries built up around conversion, storage, and import/export [2].
- 2026: Obsidian Skills [3] includes support for .canvas (along with .md and .base) to make it easy for LLMs to read/write JSON Canvas, and opens interesting visualization/interaction patterns with agents.
Hey thanks for [3] obsidian-skills, I've been using Obsidian for years and Claude for months and it's time for them to meet! Stoked to check it out. :)
Oh, thanks. Those buttons seem designed to be as inconspicuous as possible.
This just looks like a pretty normal homepage. It was not obvious to me at all that the homepage was an actual dynamically rendered canvas, as opposed to just canvas-"themed".
ah ok, sorry about that. I didn't really look at that part of the UI much, noticed it had some zoom stuff, noticed I couldn't zoom normally and scroll to where I wanted to read, was somewhat miffed.
Curious to know what “zoom normally” means for you. For me, it’s ctrl+mouse wheel or maybe two finger pinch/pull on trackpad. I am thoroughly confused as to why GitHub’s mermaid integration doesn’t seem to support any zoom outside of the overlay controls which…ick
zoom normally for me is cmd+, the and in my statement meant that when I zoomed I could not scroll to where I wanted to read, hence "I couldn't zoom normally AND scroll to where I wanted to read", I didn't try the zoom buttons and see if I could scroll because I just checked if I could zoom normally, could, but could not scroll to read parts that were now outside the view.
But later I did check using the buttons and it still doesn't allow you to scroll to read parts of the screen that have moved outside of the view because one has zoomed in too far.
Browser was Firefox Dev, OS MacOs. Did Not check if it was specific to the browser OS combination but that is because I doubt it, given my experience that most of these kinds of applications always end up screwing with the scrolling to some extent.
Notice that the JSON spec box on the front page could scroll up and down, but the readme part could not, furthermore the json spec box if I was zoomed in too far was also rendered partially outside of the view horizontally, and could not scroll horizontally. This is of course on the whole window, not individual parts, that scrolling did not work as it should. I'm sure I could go into the page code and find why I could not scroll and then fix it so I could scroll, but I would rather that the whole thing allows scrolling on the window without my help.
ctrl+mouse wheel triggers the application zoom in most cases. However, if my mouse is over the scrollable node, it invokes the Google Chrome window zoom (so I end up with two competing zoom transforms). It also zooms relative to the upper left corner, rather than relative to my cursor (seems the app doesn't support panning?). The background dots also move and change size as I zoom (subtle but somewhat distracting).
> If your data is stored in a database that a company can freely read and access (i.e. not end-to-end encrypted), the company will eventually update their ToS so they can use your data for AI training — the incentives are too strong to resist
Yes I think you are right. Even a super ethical company can be taken over. There may be exceptions but it is more luck. I work for a SP500 that absolutely won't dont this and locks down prod access so a rogue staff can't do it. But if Larry or Zuck or Bezos buys them out, who knows.
I'd rather the symbol be there and occasionally see this discussion happen then the symbol be omitted and occasionally have the discussion where we try and figure out if the person was serious. When talking in person there are all sorts of visual and vocal cues and the speaker has cues in response to confirm the sarcasm was received. There are two parties that can correct that misunderstanding and have well established tools to do so.
/s is basically the internet-enabled equivalent of a sarcasm tone or a wink - it is much more difficult to detect genuine subtle sarcasm on the internet because of the absence of common communication tools. /s is also a valuable accessibility tool for those that might have difficulty with social cues and subtlety so, for all my autistic friends, I'm happy to defend it.
I think the sarcasm indicator is useful especially for some neurodivergent folks who may not pick up on social cues well. And the sacram indicator does not in any way detract from the joke.
Yeah it does. If you have to explain the joke, it makes it not funny. In the real world, people don't have explicit sarcasm markers, you have up deduce it. As a neurodivergent person, I reflexively downvote on /s because coddling people isn't going to help them grow or deal with the real world.
In the real world we have things like intonation, facial expressions, body language, and other indicators to denote sarcasm.
On the internet it is very possible and often plausible that someone can very much believe what may appear to a reasonable person to be sarcasm. Having a crutch online does not equate to an equivalent crutch offline.
Anecdotally, neurodivergent folks I know prefer, and some even require, a sarcasm indicator online.
There's even more to it — real conversations are interactive, so if a statement causes confusion, it can be cleared up immediately. Forum posts, however, must stand alone for the most part.
You probably also know the person you're talking to irl, so it's way easier to make the judgement call on whether they're serious or not, compared to a random person online.
I'm sure had you omitted it - instead of that reply there would have been a series of comments talking about how Microsoft actually has a track record of doing things like this. It's impossible to please everyone on the internet but I very much appreciate when people lean towards making their communication clearer.
The “do it first, apologize later” will be the general principle with anything. It’s going to be hard and futile to prove even if they don’t do it through ToS first. Amazon has one of the largest corporate training sets out there:)
I’m still concerned about MS using the code I write on my laptop to train AI. Tinfoil hat wearing Linux users are starting to make a lot of sense to me.
It's been interesting the past year or so watching myself turn more and more into one of the tin-foil wearing linux users. I'm not sure how it happened, but self-hosting became more and more alluring and hyperfocusing on taking as much data as I can offline became worth spending entire weekends on.
I thought that’s more what the CoPilot change is really about - not your repo, but all the code CoPilot read while it is offering helpful completions, etc - so literally the code on your laptop. I cancelled my account.
You don't need a tinfoil hat so see the value in having a computer you fully own as opposed to one where some company can push whatever you want and all you get to say is "yes master" or perhaps if you are really lucky, "maybe later".
Back in 2003 he was advocating for legalization of child sexual abuse material. In 2006 he said he was skeptical of the harm caused by “voluntary pedophilia”, a statement that presupposes that children can consent to sex with adults.
About communication with other humans he’s pretty much always wrong.
Imagine we’d had a better communicator who wasn’t a gross toe nail picking troll fronting free software? It shouldn’t matter. Only the ideas should matter . But the reality is different.
Mass scale internet censorship in Russia also started with the premise of "protecting the children"
When you put in law that ISPs should adhere to some government-provided blocklist, this is already a game over. No matter how sane your government is. The government in 10 years might be vastly different, and the ability to control the ISPs is too alluring to not abuse
I'd rather live in a world where you could find words like "kill all russians", or child porn, or blatant propaganda than to live with the government censorship. I lived in Russia and the experience was nightmare. Who knows, maybe if the government didn't have the tools they had then the independent media would still be reachable by an average russian, the pictures of the pointless massacre would be public and the war would be over in a week
What have the proponents of those proposal done about Epstein's clients? I think that tells you all you need to know about how serious they are about protecting children which should then make you think real hard about what the real reason for those proposals is.
Thank you for your service. We really need more "canaries in the mine" giving out early warnings of things that might not be evident on a first glance.
Any takes on what 2029 will look like? (related to this topic, ofc)
Pro tip: You could instead spend that money to spin up a forgejo instance for as little as $2 a month https://www.pikapods.com/apps#development (not affiliated, just a happy customer)
I did exactly that. Containerized it and Forgejo simply became a small instance part of the fleet. UI is much snappier then GitHub. And more importantly: zero outages.
Huh? Care to elaborate how Gitea is an inevitable cashgrab? Sure, it's not strictly copyleft, but it is licensed with the MIT License, and that is also the most popular license on GitHub.
You don't have to use their free service if you don't like its terms. "Extortion" is a bit of an exaggeration here.
Yes, I know, it's dicey when people get used to a nice, friendly platform, and the platform gains lots of users, and then at some point (or several points), the terms start getting worse, and people feel misled and betrayed.
I get that. But this is a corporation. Hell, this is Microsoft. It's hilarious how many people think they've actually changed since their antitrust judgment in the 90s. I guess a lot of folks here are too young to remember it, even.
Companies exist to make money. If they are giving you something for free, they are either a) getting something else out of it already, or b) giving it to you for free now and looking for ways to get their own value out of it later. I don't mean that in some sort of cynical, "fuck the world" sense; that's just reality, and that's fine, for the most part.
If you don't like this, don't use free services provided by corporations. Host your own. Yes, I know it can cost money. Yes, I know it's more work. But that's life. TANSTAAFL.
I've had a VPS running for a couple decades on a small provider. These days it costs me a little under $200/year. Much cheaper options exist. I run a web server, gitea instance, matrix homeserver, and a slew of other things on it. It requires very little maintenance because I just run Debian stable on it, keep up with security updates, but otherwise leave it alone. It backs up the important stuff to S3 using duplicity, but -- knock on wood -- I've never had a catastrophic failure that required a restore in the ~20 years its been running.
Ehhh sort of, I see what you're saying about it maybe not meeting the technical definition of extortion but I think you're missing the forest for the trees a little bit. The whole point is that when a company tries to force you to pay them through manipulative practices, you should not do that. That when companies manipulate you even if it makes economic sense to pay you shouldn't. That's fully compatible with not using the free service if you don't like the terms.
Obviously the root problem is the incentive structures created by a system that relies on scarcity to assign value to things being applied to things that effectively cost zero to duplicate. Obviously companies are not my friends, I self host everything, heck I even have a local copy of my VPS, it's on solar, I'M fine. I don't expect Github to do good things and make good choices, but that doesn't mean I can't be mad about it when they do things I don't like. Also I live in the real world and have to deal with society and there would be friction I create for myself when I try to exist in tech and refuse to use github, might be a worthwhile trade but it IS a trade.
An enterprise licence won't save you, Google, Microsoft, et al have happily been breaking copyright laws for years.
If the publishing industry can't win a case against the AI firms then you don't stand a chance when you finally find out they've been training on your private data the whole time.
They can tell you one thing and do the opposite and there's effectively nothing you can do about it. You'd be a fool to trust them.
Github's enterprise version "starts at" $21.99/seat, and requires you to "contact sales".
And I don't see any mention that that exempts you from being trained on. (Yes, the blog says you're still covered, but at that price I'd like to see a contract saying that)
Or, they don't train on it, but who's to say they're not harvesting analytics which may or may or not code samples, prompt data, etc. Which are then laundered through some sort of anonymization pipeline, to the point where they can argue that it no longer qualifies as your data, and can be freely trained upon.
Conspiratorial thinking? Sure. But if you've been around for a couple decades and seen the games these people play (and you aren't a complete sucker), then you'll at least be aware that there's at least slight possibility that these companies can get things from their customers that they (the customers) did not knowingly agree to.
Nothing conspirational about it. Getting data that their users or customers don't actually intend to give is the bread and butter of these companies. And they will do what they can to get it.
Have you guys thought about extending version history beyond a year, or at least allowing users to export it so that it's not permanently lost? I'd subscribe to Obsidian Sync for the rest of my life if it wasn't for this one missing feature.
See also the original inspiration for the format: https://obsidian.md/canvas
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