Split transactions: When summing or counting transactions, filter "is_parent": false to avoid double-counting. A split parent holds the total amount, and its children hold the individual parts — including both counts the total twice.

Here the example: Transaction: Hotel (7 nights) | Category: Holiday | Subcategory: accommodation

Categories that are not currently needed can be hidden by using the down arrow by each category name. An example is budgeting savings for a large cost (e.g. washing machine). After the purchase is made, the category can be hidden.

Your budget is not static, so there will be times when you do not have enough budgeted for your spending. When one of your categories is overdrawn, increase the budgeted amount for that category so it is 0 or greater.

Generally, banks do not let their users share their transaction data with third party apps in a secure, standardized way. Instead, you have to give your bank account credentials directly to third parties.

The SimpleFIN Bridge is a success when it is turned off because banks have implemented SimpleFIN themselves or a universal, better alternative.

We want to be in a world where banks let their users share their transaction data with third party apps without giving those apps your bank account credentials!

Zero-based budgeting requires every expense to be justified for each period, starting from a "zero base."

ZBB involves analyzing and justifying each cost

Wayland does not let a client register global hotkeys, so you bind the wrapper to a key combo in cosmic-comp.

Each iteration went through a planning process and was developed on a separate branch. All plans are available for review under .claude/plans. An iteration history is also kept.

The app was developed with Claude Code through a series of planned iterations. My original plan was to use this project as a way to learn libcosmic app development. However, as I dug in, it quickly became apparent that developing an app switcher would cover much more than a regular desktop application. It would involve a deeper review of the compositor, its protocols, and how it works with Wayland. These aren't topics I'm familiar with. Furthermore, cosmic-comp and cosmic-protocols are still in rapid iteration, and documentation is minimal. All of this meant that, even as a seasoned developer with a few Rust projects under my belt, it would take more time than I had on my hands. As someone who's been developing software for more than 25 years, I am of course concerned about and wary of AI slop. My hope here is that process and oversight will minimize it (though of course I may not catch everything). Each iteration went through a planning process and was developed on a separate branch. All plans are available for review under .claude/plans. An iteration history is also kept.

However, it’s important not to confuse the concept of being scammed (social engineering) with being hacked (technical breaches).

Can be self-hosting scammed? Yes, absolutely. In fact, many scammers use self-hosting solutions. They set up their own servers and trick users (often targeting seniors) into installing custom clients that connect to their self-hosted servers. However, it’s important not to confuse the concept of being scammed (social engineering) with being hacked (technical breaches). Self-hosting, when properly secured, remains a safer and more secure solution compared to SaaS, as it is harder to hack.

For remote access to your Pop!_OS machine, I recommend RustDesk for personal and home-lab use in 2026. I have been using it on my own machines for months and it works flawlessly on Wayland.

au·to·trophan organism that is able to create it's own food from sunlight or chemicals (like plants and algae!)

An AI model, also called a neural network, is essentially a mathematical lasagna, made from layer upon layer of linear algebra equations. Each equation represents the likelihood that one piece of data is related to another.

Consider uninstalling the malicious Stylish extension. In 2016, with no input from the userbase, through some guy, pretending to be an independent developer, it basically was sold to a shady web analytics company, Similarweb. Since then, it is actively sharing your entire non-anonymized browsing history demo with them, assuming you ever clicked on one of the flashy "Agree" buttons. It initially did this without even asking for consent, and was banned from extension stores afterwards. Currently, it still breaks store policies, yet is not banned for unknown to me reasons. This website only works with the Stylus extension, which is an open-source privacy-friendly fork of the now-malicious Stylish extension.

Cloudflare is an evil company which uses legitimate traffic to hide nefarious clients. They also have a history of taking no responsibility for hosting illegal content. Plus, they’re overselling their “privacy” stance. How can anyone trust a company that lets their clients host “Adobe Flash Updaters” in the name of “free speech”? Or that never answers questions unambiguously?

Markdown became the default AI output under three assumptions. All three made sense in 2022. None of them hold in 2026.

Premise 1: Humans hand-edit content. Markdown was designed for people who write and revise their own text. That’s how blogs, docs, and READMEs still work. But agent output is different. You send a prompt. The agent generates a 2,000-word analysis, a code review, a project plan. You read it, maybe share it. You almost never open it in an editor and start rewriting paragraphs. The format’s core value proposition — easy to edit by hand — no longer matches the use case.

Premise 2: Content is small. A 500-word blog post renders fine in Markdown. A 3,000-word agent-generated implementation plan with architecture decisions, trade-off tables, and code samples does not. Past about 100 lines, Markdown becomes a wall of text. No navigation, no collapsible sections, no way to jump to the part you care about. Thariq’s observation is blunt: “Nobody really reads a Markdown file longer than 100 lines.”

Premise 3: Output is read-only. The old workflow was linear: prompt, generate, read, close. But the agent era is pushing toward something different. Users want to interact with the output: filter a table, adjust parameters, compare options side by side, export a subset, feed the result back into the next prompt. Markdown can’t carry interaction. It’s a one-way street.

The second wave was knowledge workers. Through the 2010s, tools like Notion, Obsidian, and Jekyll built their entire editing experience around Markdown. It became the default for wikis, note-taking, and static sites. The appeal was the same: human-readable AND machine-parseable. You could write it in any text editor and render it anywhere.

Yeah, and it's like -- that is an interesting potential possibility, I guess... Talking to people about partnerships, or "Do we want to have an official hosted version?", open sourcing is a little bit risky, because somebody could technically go along and do that. We talked about licensing issues, maybe there is a license that I could use to prevent that... But really, when it comes down to it, after talking to people, there's not really -- I think you burn more goodwill with weird licensing issues like that, than trying to prevent that. \[01:00:01.19\] So I think the best thing to do is just to get out in front. And if we're going to do that, then we just need to do this sooner rather than later, and prevent some side company from trying to take this and do that.

I was pretty burned out on just the whole... I just want my time at night back, because I have a full-time job, too.

Yeah, I think it's just the loneliness problem. I think there was almost such a point where the thought of having 3,000 users or 800 - I just literally cannot support that by myself.

Yes, I had a Slack that was pretty active, and now I've moved to Discord when I open sourced it, because Discord is just way, way better.

and it's like "You're almost making half of what I make." But when you think about it as a business income stream, suddenly if I have to hire one developer even just part time, there goes almost all that money. That's not even enough to hire a developer part-time, somebody who would be really skilled enough to work on Actual. And so money from a business perspective, having to set aside $20,000 to invest in development for a couple months - if you're a business and you can't afford that, that's a huge problem. But 20k for a personal -- you know, if I'm about to buy something for 20k, I agonize over that for week. I hate buying cars, because they are so freakin' expensive. But 20k in business money is nothing, right? I mean, for most businesses, that shouldn't be anything, if you're doing it right. So 3k - a lot of people were like "Dude, you're giving up $3,000 a month." To me, it's just like, you don't understand the burden, because I was lonely, and the next thing I really needed to do is either find a co-founder, which I couldn't do, or hire somebody else to help development. Like, properly hire; don't outsource some cheap labor. Properly hire somebody to help development. And $3,000 a month is not anywhere close to being able to hire somebody out. So you're kind of stuck in this awkward middle phase, which I think happens with bootstrapping, right? You've got to really bear through that awkward phase where you make enough money, to get to the point where you can start hiring out.

So it wouldn't have felt good to have this small exit, plus maybe alienate some of your most loyal users... I understand why that is not the best route. And so open source is the path that you chose. And of course, that's the opposite of alienation. It's inviting everybody in, right? To a certain degree. You do have the ones that don't want to set it up and can't code, and all that. But instead of spending your goodwill with a sale, you're almost buying goodwill with open sourcing, because now you're just giving a gift to the world.

I bet if I had sold, it would have been even... Like, there's a lot of people who reacted to open source where they are worried about not being able to set things up themselves, and it totally makes sense, because they're not technical users, but they're happy for that direction. I think if I had sold, it would have been a very similar response from a lot of people, where they're going to leave the app... But it would have been like an angry response, which - I mean, honestly, a lot of apps do that. Things change and things happen. But I think it would have -- I think there's a lot of trust in there that it's like I've been saying I'm in it for the long haul, and then you turn around and sell it... Which, you know, it would have been my right to do to be honest, but it still would have pissed off a lot of people, and I didn't really feel like dealing with that.

But development is expensive. So unfortunately, that is the cost there, where it probably requires very highly skilled developers to actually really be able to dig into the hard parts of this.

Totally. It's actually the most scalable architecture you could possibly have, because you don't even need a server.

It is a cross-platform, local-first API that works on the web as well... Getting that to work required significant investment and novel research, requiring new ways of doing things.

But to be honest, somewhat groundbreaking innovations to use SQLite in a persistent way in the browser, but it stores the file chunks in IndexDB, and it actually blows away IndexDB's performance. It's a significant undertaking; we're dealing with writing C code to optimize file disk access, so that it works better with IndexDB. So it's not something that's a typical SaaS app that a company is going to come in and buy, and then suddenly like "Let's ramp it up to get 20,000 users and just scale it out in all of the ways that are normal, that we're used to."

one thing that I would say is if you are building a product, or if you are trying to achieve anything, try to do it quickly, and make quick decisions, and move fast... Not just so that you will make progress fast, but when something kind of slows down... Like, if I was a year into Actual - when you've been doing something for a while, it's really easy to just keep that pace. It's really hard to -- I don't know, if I have a problem on my house, like fixing a toilet that's been broken for a year, there's something about the psychology of it that's like "I'll fix it next week. It's already been a year, I'll fix it next week." Whereas if it broke yesterday, I'll probably go out to Lowe's this weekend, come back, it's a 15-minute fix, and I'll fix it, right? There's some psychology there that's interesting, where if you aren't acting on things fast, they just sort of become this pile of responsibility behind you that you just sort of ignore. I think that's one thing that sort of happened, to me at least. It's like, "I've already been working on this for so long... Let's just keep building a couple more things."

The start of the idea is if you've got a broken window, you can fix it right now. Because if you leave that broken window broken, I think it's a signal, and maybe a signal to the outsiders that no one's taking care of this house, or something. But also, it's kind of like, you know, then the next thing breaks, and you're like, "Well, the window's already broken, too." It's kind of like "Well, I'm already not taking care of this, and so..." Adam Stacoviak: \[32:18\] Yeah. Jerod Santo: Oh, here, we've got "Neglect accelerates the rot faster than any other factor." That's Jeff Atwood talking about the broken window theory, so I've found it a little bit. So there's a little bit of that going on there. I definitely understand how that is. Adam Stacoviak: It's a metaphor that leads to the disorder, essentially. If you have a broken window here, in this house - well, then your neighbor is gonna be okay with their lawn being not so good. Or your neighbors don't want to deal with their landscaping, so you don't... It's almost like osmosis, in a way. You sort of do things based upon other things happening around you... It's disorder that happens because of other disorder. It's kind of like that.

...and it's not getting features for a month or two... It's very hard to context-switch between development and all the other stuff, because you've got to be on top of that sales, developing those relationships with those bloggers to get featured... It's hard to do it.

Right. Well, especially when you are a developer, and you love that part, the first move is to hire the not-that-part; the other parts. Either the things that you aren't as good at, or the things that you don't like to do.

I finally found a good service, who helped me find a personal assistant, a virtual assistant, who helped manage support. And she was amazing. I was feeling very guilty, because I had, I think, 200 unread emails that I just lost track of over a month or so, that I hadn't responded to. In two days, she brought that down to zero. Just answered everything, and categorized everything, and just really cleaned it up. And then at that point, she would take on support, and that was a huge help. So that was good. It's not development, where it was super, super-expensive. I think you can find places to pull off and get help that isn't going to drain your whole finances like hiring other developers, or something.

I tried out a contributor model where people were just interested; people would ask a lot, actually, "How can I help contribute?" And so I'd bring on some people, and then obviously, as just a free contributor, they do a little bit of work and then they just kind of fade away. It's just how it is. And then at that point, it's something even else more for me to manage, helping them, getting them running, sort of mentoring them and helping

I would love to take Actual, if somebody was going to do this, is to focus less on the zero-based budgeting - and if any Actual users are listening to this, don't freak out; that's always going to be there. But there's totally a capability for this to be a more generic transaction management tool

it turns out you can actually edit rules, and do complex rules, and you kind of can unpeel the layers

For example, local-first. The app is just -- Jerod Santo: Fast. James Long: ...fast by default. I mean, it's no question. That's the first thing that everybody always says when they try the app. They feel it. They feel their data sitting right there on the hard disk. And I don't have to think about it. I can run 100 queries straight from the frontend, not even in the backend. So there is kind of a frontend and a server process running, but that process is always a local process. I can run queries, send them to the server, and I can fire off 100 right from the frontend, and you don't feel that at all. It's one of those things that just changed the whole experience of the app. There's no - you do a bulk edit of your 3,000 transactions in an account, because you're doing something crazy and you're really restructuring things, and you bulk-edit things to add a note to these 3,000 transactions, so you select them all and type "archived". It happens in 200 milliseconds. Whereas you go to any other app and there's this huge cliff of anything that's outside of the ordinary workflow that they've specifically manually optimized - suddenly it has to span their five database clusters, and it takes you'll see the loading spinne

So that was Mint's deal. That's what really put them on the scene. And then they started just layering on kind of upsells and other things. I eventually was like "Yeah, I'm done with Mint", because it got yucky for me as a user.

When entering new transactions, and when exporting transactions to CSV, having multiple subcategories with the same name, such as "Work Expenses", but different Parent Groups, such as "Me vs Partner" causes confusion.

I'd vote against this change. It can be really useful as-is for certain groupings. For example, I often type "inc" when categorizing to bring up the income categories. The current behavior is also how it works in YNAB: The "which are not selectable" point in the original comment is valid though. YNAB handles this by shrinking the text size of the category group names, as you can see in the above screenshot. Maybe this Issue could be modified to be a UX change (shrinking the category group name text) instead of a functionality change, such that it's clear the category group names are no selectable.

This repository uses lodash style issue management for enhancements. That means enhancement issues are automatically closed. This doesn’t mean we don’t accept feature requests, though! We will consider implementing ones that receive many upvotes, and we welcome contributions for any feature requests marked as needing votes (just post a comment first so we can help you make a successful contribution).

Using Hold for Next Month will ensure that the funds are no longer available to budget in the current month but can still be allocated to the budget in any subsequent month. This will be particularly useful for those who are looking to stop living paycheck to paycheck and instead gradually get one month ahead i.e. living on last month's income rather than this month's.

Here's the important part: your budget is not static. It's not something you set and forget. Maybe you check in and realize your food budget is busted because you hosted a dinner party. No problem — just move money from somewhere else to cover it. Maybe when the next month starts, you see that your budget didn't really work. Make a new budget based off what you learned!

We find the best way to track your money is rooted in something called envelope budgeting. Instead of predicting how much you'll make and spend and trying to reconcile that with what actually happened, envelope budgeting embraces real income as the source of your budget instead. This means you can only budget money that you already have. You can think of categories as little funds that you deposit money into. Combined with our rollover system, it provides an intuitive way to handle a lot of things that come up in life. And you know it's always accurately depicting your finances — there's no made up numbers.

That's why we automatically sync all of your data to your selected server in the background. You get the best of both worlds: all data is local by default, but if internet is available, your data is seamlessly backed up and synced to all other devices. This is the opposite of most apps which heavily rely on the internet to be available.

In February 2025 the actual-server repository was merged into the Actual repository. The reasons for this change are as follows: Streamlines Development: Developers will only need to clone/sync one repo instead of two. Improves Debugging: It makes end-to-end debugging for server/client easier as they will be in the same workspace. Simplifies Desktop App Packaging: Enables the desktop app to embed the sync server. Ensures code consistency and reduces the maintenance burden. Simplifies the release process

YNAB expects you to put your money into budgets based on whatever money comes in. But that's not how Firefly III works. Firefly III works the other way around. At the start of the month, you decide what you want to spend. If everything is OK, your budget should at least match what you earn. So that's easy. But if everything is better than OK, you budget less than you make, and you save the rest. You can use the rest of the money to fill piggy banks or donate to me (kidding ;)).

Contrary, zero based budgeting keeps the focus on your paychecks and forces you to divide it over your budgets. Your primary driver becomes how much money you make and not how much money you spend. This is an important distinction.

Actual is local first; the database that powers Actual Budget, and ultimately your budget, lives on your device. It is not stored on a server. "Actual server" allows you to sync changes to your budget on different devices. To do this, only the changes to the budget are sent to the server. The server stores the messages, and the local client pulls down the change(s).

In this context, a custom importer is something that takes all of your data (budgets, transactions, payees, etc) and dumps them all into a new file in Actual.

But if you want to import all of your data into Actual, you can write a custom importer.

One thing to keep in mind: Actual is not like most other apps. While your data is stored on a server, the server does not have the functionality for analyzing details of or modifying your budget. As a result, the API client contains all the code necessary to query your data and will work on a local copy

Categorizing your transactions correctly is important and we've optimized this process.

Meaning: Happening without interruption. Think of a smooth, unbroken line moving upwards. It implies a constant flow of small improvements happening all the time. Focus: Maintaining momentum and making incremental changes consistently. It’s about embedding improvement into daily work.

With a zero-based budget, you’re giving every single dollar a job on purpose. It’s hands down the best way to take control of your money and feel confident every time you spend.

When two transactions are merged, one is determined to be the 'kept' transaction and the other is the 'dropped' transaction. Any empty fields in the 'kept' transactions are copied over from the 'dropped' transaction and the 'dropped' transaction will be deleted. So, if the 'kept' transaction is uncategorized or has no payee, the payee and/or category will be copied over from the 'dropped' transaction before it is deleted.

Vision Pro

I’ll be honest — tracking finances is boring. It’s the flossing of adulthood. Everyone knows they should do it, almost nobody actually does.

For decades, code contributions have been how open source projects learned who to trust. People would show up, do the work, take responsibility for their changes, and stick around. Over time, trust emerged from the work itself. AI tools have changed the economics of this very quickly. We use them ourselves every day, but a pull request no longer tells us as much as it used to about the person submitting it. A substantial patch used to imply substantial effort, and that effort was a reasonable proxy for good faith. That assumption no longer holds. For a browser, this matters. A browser runs untrusted input from the entire internet on the user’s machine, and one well-disguised vulnerability is all an attacker needs. We have already seen patient, well-resourced campaigns in open source to earn maintainer trust and abuse it. What has changed is how much faster and cheaper it has become to produce work that looks like a serious contribution.

At the same time, every change that enters Ladybird becomes our responsibility. It has to fit the architecture, survive future refactoring, interact correctly with the rest of the browser, and be understood by the people maintaining it. Whether code was typed by hand is beside the point. What matters is who is responsible for it once it enters the browser. Ladybird is becoming a browser for real users. The people introducing changes to it must be the people who decide those changes belong in the project, and who will answer for the consequences.

I'm sorry for anyone using it, but I no longer have the time to maintain it.

Releasing ALL tools and frameworks we build as open source.

We're hoping that together in the open-source, local-first community, we can build something better than any closed-source alternative. The code is open-source because I believe that fundamental tools shouldn't require trusting a black box. Companies pivot, get acquired, or shut down. But open source is forever.

I really like hands-free voice dictation. For years, I relied on transcription tools that were almost good, but they were all closed-source. Even those claiming to be "local" or "on-device" were still black boxes that left me wondering where my audio really went. So I built Whispering. It's open-source, local-first, and most importantly, transparent with your data. ​​Your data is stored locally on your device, and your audio goes directly from your machine to a local provider

Independent software developers in China, like us, have 10 times more life pressure than Marak, the author of faker.js. Since ydotool has the opportunity to benefit large IT companies who won't pay a penny to us, we've changed the license to AGPLv3. These large IT companies are the main cause of life pressure here, such as the "996" working hours.

Article: "Open Source" is Broken

ydotool will then be rewritten in JavaScript afterwards, to enable more people to understand the code & contribute.

This is why I am very careful about how I make "useful" software and release it to the world without any solid way for me to get paid for my efforts. I simply do not want to be in a situation where my software that I develop as a passion project on the side is holding people's companies together. That's why I make software how and where I do. Like, no offense, but I really do not want to go unpaid for my efforts. The existing leech culture of "Open Source" being a pool of free labor makes it hard for me to want to have my side projects be actually useful like that unless you pay me.

If you want me to make you useful software, pay me. If you use software made by others in their spare time and find it useful, pay them. This should not be a controversial opinion. This should not be a new thing. This should already be the state of the world and it is amazingly horrible for us to have the people that make the things that make our software work at all starve and beg for donations.

There is this culture of taking from open source without giving anything back. It is like the problems of the people who make the dependencies are irrelevant.

GitHub stars famously cannot be used to pay rent.

Epicenter separates app-owned data from user-owned Markdown. App output belongs under apps/<name>/; folders you own stay ordinary Markdown.

Local-first apps that write to files you own. Your data lives on your machine as plain Markdown and SQLite: grep it, version it, open it in Obsidian. When an app stops mattering, your files don't.

The whisper-rs-sys and tokenizers crates use incompatible C runtime linking strategies that cannot coexist in the same binary on Windows.

Whispering is now part of Epicenter, an ecosystem of local-first, open-source apps. Everything else remains the same—same tools, same philosophy, same team.

Purposeful entry; looking for person of peace / houses of peace

NOTE: All generations counted are NEW believers and new groups/churches, not EXISTING believers and churches.Existing believers/churches are labeled Gen 0 indicating that they are the baseline generation from which we arelaunching.

0 - DMM Team in context but no purposeful DMM plan or efforts yet

In MultiplyUs Conferences, we consider the terms, disciple-making movement (DMM) and church-planting movement(CPM), to be synonymous. (We recognize this is not a universally-held view, but we believe it to be more inclusive. Tofacilitate ease of communication, we'll use "DMM" here, but we respect either term and use them both in training.)

the priesthood of all believers (1 Peter 2:5-9),

6. Reproducing groups or simple churches are intentionally formed as a part of the multiplying disciples process. Theintent in DMM approaches is that disciples, groups or simple churches, leaders and movements can multiply endlesslyby the power of the Spirit.

3. Each follower develops behavioral patterns of frequent and regular accountability for obeying God's instructionsand passing them on to others in a loving environment. This requires a participative small-group approach.

The focus is to make every follower of Christ a reproducing disciple rather than merely a convert.

The Bible does say that "the disciples multiplied," however -- Acts 12:24

4. Each disciple is equipped in comprehensive ways (such as interpreting and applying Scripture, a well-rounded prayerlife, functioning as a part of the larger Body of Christ, and responding well to persecution/suffering) in order that theymight function not merely as consumers, but as active agents of Kingdom advance.

1. There is awareness that only God can start movements, but disciples can follow biblical principles to pray, plant, andwater the seeds that can lead to (a) book of Acts type multiplying movement(s).

Disciples make disciples. That’s one generation. When a disciple makes a disciple who makes a disciple, that’s two generations. By the time you reach the third or fourth generation, the disciples may not know the name of the original disciple in the chain. Churches generate new churches. That’s one generation. When disciples who are part of one church make disciples who establish another church, and disciples from the second church make disciples who become yet another church, that’s two generations. This is how movement happens. This is how disciples and churches multiply into neighboring tribes and countries as the Spirit moves.