Possibly even as far as feedback, but yeah not really recursion.

I have friends that daily drive BSD, but I never have. For me it’s because Open Source is already a small field, and Linux solves all the problems I have, while also having the most mind-share, focus, and community. I want it to be FOSS for ethics, which Linux is, but otherwise don’t need anything that BSD offers, so there’s no reason for me to attempt anything more. If there’s even one compatibility problem, it’d be one too many for no benefit.

That having been said, I do donate money every month to one of them, because I like that they exist. So that’s probably weird…

Similar to others here, but slightly different: start with what you’re most excited about. There’ll be some shitty parts where you’re confused and frustrated, and if you feel like you’re just doing something you’re “supposed to do”, it can feel like a job for no pay. Pick something you have an inner thrill for, and maybe that fire can carry you through the dark.

I hope I’m not missing a joke, but if you’re curious in my accent (Ontario, Canada) it would basically always be “bi-sickle” and “moter-saikle”

Thank God I never got around to learning the International Phonetic Alphabet, or that might have been too easy and more useful!

Oh clearly! It’s just simple science! Philia are stored in the balls. 😉

If I remember correctly Sexologist Dr. Lindsey Doe has a story from her time as a student where she was in a lecture where a dude was talking about there being no evidence of a G-Spot, and joking about squirting as a concept being a made up porn gag, and she’s sitting in the auditorium being like “but I experience G-Spot orgasms and squirt, like… often” 😅

Now, to be fair to the field at least a little bit, I understand why maybe she didn’t want to stand up and shout “I routinely hammer my G-Spot and squirt all over the place” in front of her peers, and even in a clinical environment I could imagine it’s not the most orgasm-conducive setting to have a bunch of electrodes and cameras and stuff setup and then to be like “okay, now please show us all what it’s like at home. Anytime. We’re all ready to watch”

We, as a species, have basically failed to build a single one quantum computer that does anything. So… that’s why they’re not everything yet. It’s because there are currently approximately zero.

And the few there kind of are are massive and requires liquid helium to cool them to ungodly cold temperatures. And even then they don’t do much, besides allow researchers to test stuff.

A protocol is a shared set of expectations that allow two or more things to communicate. It says “I will announce myself in this way” and “these are the responses you should expect to this request” and “here’s the list of all the things I know how to do”, and if we both follow the protocol, then we both understand what’s going to happen when we communicate.

Other people have said some things, but I’ll say some things too:

1. I think it’s easy to look at the titans of success and assume it was inevitable, but in the middle were lots of corporate failures. Google failed to beat Facebook with Google Plus, MySpace was massive and is now basically dead, Vine started up and died, Vimeo failed to defeat YouTube, and while I can’t quote their names there were other “Facebook but…”, “Twitter but…”, and “YouTube but …” companies out there that sprung up with VC backing and died irrelevant. Meta currently has threads as an attempt to compete with Twitter, and probably that’ll be gone and forgotten soon. So in a sense the fediverse is beating MySpace and Threads and Vine and GooglePlus by having an alternative that’s running at all. Not all victories are assured simply by existing or being “better”

2. A lot of it is Network Effects. People go on PeerTube, there’s nothing they want to watch, they leave. Twitter has been around in the tech space for like 20 years, because other tech people at the same conference as you were on it, but most normal people weren’t on it until celebrities started signing up. Because otherwise they’d show up on the home page, not see anything they cared about, and then leave. Most platforms these days explicitly prevent interoperability, and the law allows them to, so it’s hard to migrate slowly.

3. The fediverse is explicitly anti-control and anti-centralization. This means it’s aggressively and purposely fragmented, which normal people don’t care about, but does bring a host of UX problems. Any attempt to paper over these will likely be met with hostility by the existing community and projects, because the solutions to these “problems” tend to involve central authority of some kind or another, and with centralization comes power, control, and attack vectors

4. The fediverse, similar to above, is pretty anti-profit. That’s why it’s an alternative to the big popular ones, but it also means it’s harder to have solid paid maintainers and disk storage and stuff, compared to something like YouTube or Facebook which are among the most valuable companies on this Earth. It also makes it hard to buy ads, or airtime, or grassroots astroturfing, or celebrity endorsements, etc, which might reach a broader audience and draw people in. That all takes money that the fediverse simply doesn’t have.

5. The fediverse is pretty anti-algorithm, or at least the way the other platforms characterize “The Algorithm” which is to say anti-dark-patterns. We do this both because we are care about our own health as people, so if we’re running something for ourselves why would we dark-pattern ourselves, but also because we aren’t driven by profit motive, and so usership costs money and gains us kinda nothing, so there’s no incentive to “addict” our users. I’ve seen multiple accounts, and also seen first-hand, people join Pixelfed from Instagram and bounce off pretty quick. And it’s not just the network effect, it’s also that Instagram and its algorithmic feed is constantly trying to trick you into watching more and more and more. Pixelfed says “what do you want to see?” and the user goes… uh… I don’t know. Maybe cats? And Pixelfed says “okay, here’s some cats and nothing else. Let me know if there’s anything else you want, otherwise bye thanks for coming”. Like, people want a firehose of attention, but the platform doesn’t want to subject you to that, and doesn’t benefit from it, so it goes “that’s all I have for you now. Come back later” which other social media never will.

That last one I think is really a big part of it. You have to ask “Why are so many people on Twitter? What do they do there?” and then wonder if them doing that on Mastodon is better? It’s obviously philosophically better for them to spend their time on a freedom-respecting platform than a for-profit exploitation machine, but they could also use neither and that would probably be better too. They could go to a library, a cafe, and a park. Is Mastodon essential? Why do you want it to be used by millions and millions of people? What do you get out of it? What does Mastodon get out of it? What do the maintainers of the instances get out of it?

Would the world be a better place if all Twitter users were Mastodon users, or if all Twitter users simply didn’t use either?

Also, people today have a Facebook account, and a Twitter account, and a YouTube account, and a Reddit account, and each of those services does a different thing. You mention how there’s no events built into Mastodon. Sure, but there’s no events built into Twitter, Reddit, or YouTube either. There’s no marketplace integration into frendica, but there’s no marketplace integration in YouTube either, Reddit doesn’t have hashtags, Facebook doesn’t have playlists of videos, Twitter doesn’t tell you people’s birthdays, etc.

Just because different fediverse tools use ActivityPub, it doesn’t necessarily mean they all must interoperate. It can be neat sometimes, and sometimes it basically happens by accident, but a lot of the time it just doesn’t make sense.

Yeah, like other people covered, it’s unfortunate but also very important. It’s easy to tie “visible wifi networks” to “surprisingly precise location on globe” in many places, so the permission is named for the worst case scenario. Yes, the app might just be looking for a wifi, but it also could use that same information to locate you, so it’s the location permission. Sensible.

If they wanted to support just this one feature without requiring a location permission, they could maybe have an API that is “are you currently connected to this opaque token” API where the app can ask “am I connected” and is just told “yes” or “no”. That’s probably safe enough. And then I could register the app with my wifi without the app even knowing what my Wifi is, it just gets a unique but random string.

The same is true of bluetooth. If I can list nearby bluetooth, I can see that speaker and this TV and guess location. But there could be an API that hides that, there just isn’t currently

I’ve encountered it very little, but when I encounter it it’s because I try to do something and it doesn’t work. So I check the permissions with ls -l, and it all seems reasonable. Huh, this should work. Try again, nope. Hmm. 20 minutes of trying random variations, strange results. Oh fuck, is this SELinux? Shit. Where do those configs exist again? How do I configure that? Google “SELinux cheat sheet” hmmm, I don’t have enough context to use that, Google “SELinux getting started”. Read tutorial, try to skim just enough to figure out what’s going wrong for me.

So I don’t hate it, I just haven’t ever had a use for it, but it has surprised me in a bad way before and cost me a lot of time and confusion, but I’ve never spent the time getting familiar because I’ve never had a use for it. And it comes up rarely enough I never remember anything about it by the time it bites me. I can’t even recall now what I was trying to do the last time I bumped into it.

Huh, that’s some fun psychology. Donations make me feel guilty and uncomfortable 😛

Good to know someone enjoys them!

To devil’s advocate in a different direction, most projects aren’t setup to actually do anything with donations. They could be, like if they had a stable income source they could hire people full time as a job rather then relying on volunteer time. And some of the larger projects are already at that point, and so maybe having more money would allow them to expand the team further. And some projects have a particular goal they’re trying to fund, like an external security audit, or some kind of certification process.

But for most projects, sporadic donations are like “hey cool, I guess. I’ll go out to dinner tonight” gifts of appreciation, because up until they become a solid full time wage, they’re not a solid full time wage. And once they are a solid full time wage, any further donations are like “hey cool, I’ll go out to dinner tonight” until they’re big enough to be a second wage 😛

I’m not saying we shouldn’t donate stuff, gifts of appreciation are still appreciated, I’m sure. But they don’t produce output.

Hmm. I’ve been in math, computer science, and computer programming for 20 years in English (Canada) and I’ve never heard “denary”. It’s cute, but never once heard anyone say it. So they’re not interchangeable to me 😛

You could check out “FAR: Lone Sails”. It’s a pretty chill game where you have a machine that you’re sailing/driving through platforming actions to the right. It has cinematic feel and a kind of environmental plot, but I don’t think there’s any way to lose or anything…

And if you like it, there’s a sequel “FAR: Changing Tides” that is very similar, but longer and with a more complicated machine to manage.

I could see people being bored with it, there are “puzzles” but they’re super light, but maintaining the machine scratches something within me.

It’s nice of this poster to ignore the $181m spent on “other projects” and conclude this is some kind of scam. If we include the Linux Kernel with the other projects part, that’s about 67%, or two thirds, of their expenses are paying for various and assorted open source projects. Among them the kernel. So if you’re a “cash and cash alone” person, then 2/3rds of your money is still going as cash to software projects.

And if we include things like community tooling and project services, which may help a project in ways beyond just cash that becomes about 78% in total, or over three quarters.

That’s pretty good, I think, but to each their own.

Yours is, I think, the only account I check in on by name on this platform. I’ll sometimes be like “what’s that wild girlie cookin’ today”!

So, like, don’t keep posting just for me if it’s not fun anymore, but block the haters and keep cruisin’!

I am not aware of this setup, and so I’m musing and winging it, but I think what they’re saying is that if you point at the paper and say “is this a sheet of paper” they’d say yes. And then you point to the crease and say “is this a crease” and they’d say yes, so it has identity, separate from the paper (as in creases and papers are not synonymous), but given that it’s not counted when listing things in the room, it’s also not a thing.

But I think for me it’s not that tricky, because it’s a feature of the paper. Like if there was a coat in the room with buttons, and you asked me what was in the room I wouldn’t say a coat and three buttons, I’d say just a coat. And the coat has three buttons, but those are properties of the coat, not the room. And buttons are something that can stand-alone!

But if I had a sheet of paper with a button placed in the middle of it, but not attached, I wonder would most people say it was a sheet of paper and a button, or a sheet of paper with a button?

I know words are squishy… but are these… films? It seems a bit strong to use that word to describe my glasses recording me peeing or whatever…

Yeah, 2 was just 1 again, with all the same jokes but in reverse. But 3 was legitimately different and better, so it saved the whole thing!