Daeraxa

Can confirm that the mach 70+ winds are so strong that it strips the flesh from the bone.

I knew somebody who used the more British version in a game - Hugh Jarse

Its the leaves that have a lot of oxalic acid, the stems are edible raw, just utterly unpalateable. Although if you have a miracle berry first it is apparently delicious - https://youtu.be/hgvRoCY0hNA?t=10m26s

Magazines are Kbin’s name for communities

On the plus side, the fact they stopped Atom development has allowed our community fork of Pulsar to flourish and it has seen loads of active development over the last year. I do find it hard to blame the original team, it was clearly a Microsoft thing to make sure they put all focus on VSCode.

The moment I see the same question popping up more than a couple of times is an indication that it should be documented by somewhere that is actually indexed by search engines, normally the website/faq/docs/wiki as it is clear there is something missing.

To me, as part of a small team/project, it feels so much better to be able to use chat for every day communication just as I would at work. It allows a lot more expression in communication than forum posting. It has really helped us have a good sense of community and teamwork we might have not otherwise had.

I don’t think much in this is specific to Discord so much as it is to chat/IM in general. Honestly we use both chat (yes via Discord although I’d love to move to Matrix) and forums. They just serve completely different roles. Traditional style forums (whatever it is, Discourse, Flarum, Github Discussions) work really well for “long form” topics and asynchronous conversations. i.e. if there is something to discuss that is complex and can attract valid conversation over the course of days/weeks/months then it is ideal.

Chat on the other hand is great for co-ordinating and asking quick one-off questions that will get you an answer really quickly. We use it all the time to just discuss general plans, ideas etc. and answer simple questions like “how do I do x?”.

I think most of the (justified) hatred is to those projects that only have a community via chat which is valid - on big projects it can be somewhat difficult to get a word in and get noticed if you have a “simple” question which wouldn’t be a problem on a forum.

I understand the mentality but depending on the project it can be a struggle. If I was going to set up a brand new software project then sure, I’d be going all in on Fediverse and open source platforms. Forge? Codeberg. Chat? Matrix. Forum? Discourse/Flarum or maybe just Lemmy. Microblog? Mastodon.

However it isn’t easy to be that idealistic all the time and sometimes there is a degree of needing to do stuff against your ideals. I’m part of the Pulsar editor team which is a fork of the Atom text editor that got discontinued and we had to get things moving as quickly as possible in the time period that GitHub set until they pulled their services completely (along with their package backend). We needed the least friction possible to get things in motion and get as many people from the community involved as possible.

We needed GitHub - unsurprisingly Atom had close ties with GitHub anyway so moving away wasn’t ever going to be quite that simple and we would have needed to migrate an awful lot of repos within the org. The entire Atom package system relies on GitHub - people published their packages to atom.io but the actual code was on GitHub - something not fixable in the short period we had. We also needed it because this is where the Atom community was gathered around - at a period where we needed things to be as simple as possible for people to find out about and get involved with the project, moving to another forge may have just been the end of it.

We also use GitHub Discussions for our forum - as we are already tied to GitHub for the time being we might as well use that platform as well - it is a lot easier than trying to maintain our own forums which wouldn’t be seeing that much activity. The team behind Zed found this out; they set up a Discourse forum and barely anyone used it so they just went back to GitHub Discussions.

We needed Discord because it was simply the most commonly used platform. Pulsar split off from Atom-community which was already on Discord so it was a natural move that meant little disruption or friction to anyone wanting to get involved with the new project. We have been looking to make a Matrix bridge but honestly there doesn’t seem to be all that much desire for it - we had some initial enthusiasm to create a Lemmy community but when we did it barely sees any activity (other than me posting updates there).

Would I love to move off of these platforms? Absolutely. However we simply have bigger fish to fry at this point in time for the project itself so it is going to be slow.

So whilst I love to be idealistic about what platforms we should be using I also heavily sympathise with those who use those “less than ideal” ones - there could well be some very good reasons behind it that might not be obvious to you.

I’m not certain if it can work with third party apps but Tuta (previously Tutanota) is a great alternative to protonmail. They also make their client open source so it would be possible to build email clients or bridges fairly easily.

Bob. Always Bob.

Non fiction: Physical all the way Fiction: Whilst I like physical books I rarely make myself time to read them so I mostly consume them in audiobook format.

I’ve never really got on well with ebooks, I had a cheap kindle about 8 years ago and I think I maybe read about 3 or 4 books on it - in fact I think it was Hugh Howey’s Silo series and nothing else.

Seconding this, deb-get needs more love. We are using it as an official distribution for a project im in and it has been working flawlessly for me.

I have to admit I probably would have read yellow in that context to mean ‘cowardly’ rather than with racist connotations but I can see how it could be taken that way.

The webbed fingers are an evolutionary advantage for paddling in the broads

Do people think they make vscode out of the goodness of their own hearts or something?

Open source hardware is a thing, there are tons of projects on places like Hackaday but it feels to me like it will never quite reach the same level of success as open source software simply because it is much harder to do.

The main exception to this is obviously 3d printing where people happily share their designs and things for people to print and “remix” (i.e. fork) under CC licences.

The problem I think is that electronics is difficult and expensive (especially for “one off” orders for things like PCBs) for the most part which is why you seem to end up with two camps.

1. Hobbyists making their own electronics at their own cost and making stuff available. If you are lucky there might be a company willing to make batch orders of the custom parts along with the rest of the components as a DIY kit (which, depending on your soldering skill might be easy or extremely difficult with the possibility of ruining it) or they might pre-assemble the kit for you.

2. Companies making OSH products but there is little appetite for anyone to fork it or create a competing version in such a niche space. ClockWorkPi come to mind here with some neat little hand held computers they sell but also make the plans available for. To date I don’t think I’ve heard of anyone making a clone from scratch or forking it to make their own modified version as the cost would be so extreme compared to just ordering the original.

So yeah, I think there is appetite for open source hardware but the high costs, practical electronic skills and ease of damaging expensive parts means that I think things will stay less active in that space. I’d love to see more, for example if super cheap prototype PCBs and pre-assembled kits could be ordered at far cheaper prices than are currently possible. Or an easy and cheap “PCB printer” with associated parts picker/placer/soldering machine to make the process of prototyping a project as easy as just ordering a bunch of generic and off the shelf parts then downloading a file or two to send to the machines. I can dream can’t I?

Edit: Seems desktop PCB printing may be possible for a cool $5k (https://www.voltera.io/v-one) or £11.5k (https://www.fortex.co.uk/product/sv2-pcb-printer/). Maybe we might see a revolution in this space in the not to far future like we saw with 3d printing that brought the technology to the masses.

Edit 2: Somewhat meta - a hackaday project for a pick and place machine - https://hackaday.io/project/9319-diy-pick-and-place

Some of us say anticlockwise instead

No its a very high pitched ‘weeoooweeeeeee’. Her sister does more of soft mew followed by a brrp.

I’ve got two cats who are sisters and they indeed have very different meows, not just sound but how they use them. One has a very distinct greeting meow literally only reserved for when she hasn’t seen me in a few hours that is isn’t in any way replicated by her sister.

Sounds like Plymouth. I think i counted 15 Turkish barbers