# 2024-12-02 - Read [Where to draw the line? - by Gordon Brander](https://substack.com/home/post/p-150515044) - About [[complex systems]], modularity, compositionality, and boundaries. - Not a fan of [[Substack]], but always enjoy [[Gordon Brander]]'s writing on [[systems]] and adjacent topics. - A shame that Gordon canned [[Subconscious]]. - Note that [[Substack]] has it's short form posts now. - A decent move, a combining of elements of the garden and the stream in one service. - Essentially another walled garden version of what [[IndieWeb]] does. - I love using [[spacemacs]] and [[Emacs]]. - However, one big negative - I'm always scared to update spacemacs to latest, as well as packages from Melpa. - Pretty much at least one important thing breaks every time that I do, and as I need this for my work, I can't often spare that time. - So I tend to put it off and lag behind. - I imagine there's things I can do that would mitigate the risk and friction - I should look into those. - One simple idea is just to have two version running side-by-side. I might be able to do that actually, I think there's a flag you can pass Emacs to say where to look for your conf folder.