Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

@wyri @venite Ik geloof dat gecombineerde treinen in de planner staan met beide treinnummers, en als je dan naar de hele route van de trein kijkt, kun je checken of dat ergens in 1 treinnummer verandert - zo ja, dan is er een splitsing. Als ik het me goed herinner.

@frith01 Makes sense, thanks for the context and the answers!

@oliphant@oliphant.social When you've always lived in an empire, every community looks like an empire, etc. etc.

@cykonot @jonny Pretty much - inspiring confidence to *try* things, especially, and then building up a genuine confidence that derives from understanding (as opposed to 'false confidence').

It's more or less "teaching people to learn". There's remarkably little programming-specific learning involved, really 🙂

@jonny One detail I just realized I forgot: when they're going in the wrong direction, I don't usually tell them "that is wrong", but instead ask them a "self-reflection" question that prompts them to take a moment and think about it more. For example, "and if you did it that way, how would thing X change?"

It's less confrontational, and helps them to learn identifying the 'failure points' early, where they can catch themselves before making a mistake, by making self-reflection a habit early on.

@Lyude I feel like this doesn't quite address what I was trying to get at - you say "we", but who are "we" (ie. the people who functionally control the network) exactly, how are they organized, and what prevents a hostile takeover of some sort? Is it just a central organization? If yes, what legal form does it have? How do you ensure that those in power of it are universally deemed trustworthy?

The problem with things like "a widely used messenger" is that it becomes an incredibly appealing target to co-opt, and so you're going to have to deal with a lot more attacks than eg. your typical FOSS software foundation - companies trying to bribe contributors, legal attempts at takeovers on technicalities, sabotage, disinformation campaigns, and so on. The network effect is not just a barrier to adoption, it's also a large organizational risk.

Even if all of the people in power within the organization are absolutely spotlessly 'clean' and perfect (and that's already hard to achieve in this context), you're going to keep getting harassed by people trying to exploit the bounty of a large and widely used centralized network - whether it be corporations, governments, overt fascists, or whatever else.

A very big part of the motivation for federated networks (or fully P2P networks, but those introduce even more technical challenges) is precisely to address this problem; by structuring the system such that no one party holds outsized control, nobody is such an appealing target, and trying to take over *all* parties involved is very impractical and expensive.

So if we can't rely on that - because the premise here is to not rely on federation - then how do we address that risk in practice?

@Lyude I'm curious if you have any thoughts on how to reconcile "not in the hands of a company" with "should not rely on federation and should avoid the technical challenges it introduces"?

As historically, some form of centralization has been *how* these technical challenges have been avoided, but that then creates the risk of "in the hands of a company" again (even if you run it as eg. a foundation/non-profit, because that doesn't fully protect from this for various reasons either).

@foone Hilariously I bought a little TV box like this some 15-20 years ago, at Aldi, and other than not literally using VLC (I think...) it was basically exactly this.

It had an HDMI port, and an ethernet port, and some USB sockets. You'd plug in a storage device, and it would play arbitrary video files off it, in arbitrary formats, with a remote. Or you'd configure a Samba share, and it'd do the same thing off that. And that was *it*.

I think this was before Chromecast, Jellyfin, Plex, smart TVs, smartphones(?), etc. existed...

Should still have it somewhere. But it doesn't do HD.