Not sure about how "zero knowledge" figures into this; is the app merely E2EE? In which case, it's no different from Evernote?
And there is no open source server component, so you can't host this yourself. And say what you will about Evernote, I trust them to stick around way more than another random notes startup thing.
p.s. not to get too political but it seems like the founder is expressing some problematic views on his twitter account (https://twitter.com/thecodrr). Problematic as in, he's this close to being an outspoken supporter of terrorism and radical Islam.
sounds like you're mad because you don't understand simple game theory (and perhaps also jealous of his mental capacities and/or status?). Mr Neumann wasn't advocating for "genocide" (which is a completely false characterization, if not a hysterical one) as much as he was trying to save the world from much worse fate.
You’re overestimating the importance of business people. Viewing products from a business point of view inevitably leads to inferior products, as the focus is on purely making money. It’s not about making money or about the synergy of business and development. It’s all about creating useful shit for other people to use. You need domain expertise, good taste, and the ability to create value by building things. Focus on money and you’ll be cutting corners, trying to sell useless shit to people who buy it for others to never use.
While easy to understand, I’m constantly surprised to see this type anti-intellectualism. The fact that you don’t have the required prerequisites to understand a codebase doesn’t mean it’s bad. Educate yourself on Category Theory and functional programming techniques and learn to leverage these tools to your advantage.
Alternatively you can work in Go where braindead simplicity is the mandated norm.
Formal style guidelines and mandatory tests for everything are largely wastes of time and often detrimental to software development.
To elaborate: formal style guides prevent simple things like formatting code in a manner that is easier to read in some cases (“why is this newline here? Why did you column aligned this block of expressions?”), and more insidiously force you to write worse code because they constrict you. Style guidelines should be just that - guidelines and engineers should have the decency to not request stylistic changes during code reviews unless they spot code that is obviously sloppy.
As for tests: insisting on having tests for everything impedes development in the present as well as in the future. More crucially the compulsive desire to have everything testable makes you write worse code as you need to abstract away parts that would simply be function calls or use patterns that obfuscate the code. Some will claim that this results in better designed code, but realistically speaking it just results in more complex code, which is almost always worse. You don’t need to use abstractions everywhere. Developers should focus on making shit work well and not over engineering code because they want to feel smart all the while making rationalizations about testable code and whatnot. I digress though so back to my original point regarding tests: in order for tests to justify their existence they have to test something significant and/or test a module that provides a service (read: hidden behind well defined API, api which you test to ensure that it doesn’t break its “contract”)
Yes, this is why subsidiaries in the private sector are useful - when something goes terribly wrong with one, like it did with NSO, it doesn't implicate the whole of Israel/IDF - at least not explicitly.
Whoever wrote this sounds like an awful manager: extremely self-centered and mixes poor rationalizations with pseudo empathy so as to seem as a decent person. In other words, I find that managers with that much... personality are the hardest to manage (harhar!); they can be extremely flippant in their behavior and unpredictable with demands. Maybe they take the job too seriously? You just need to keep push some boxes around on zenhub and send some emails my dude, this isn't the crusade and you sure ain't no knight (lmao).
Vast majority of users don't care for the source code, nor even know what source code is. And personally, as a developer, I never bothered to look at the source code of software I've used, much less fix or extend it - and that goes for all the devs I know personally.