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re: Discourse: What does it take to make FLOSS good? 

@Angle I feel that there is a frequently-overlooked option that doesn't necessarily increase work, but only *feels* like it does: developers interacting more directly with users, and providing non-judgmental assistance.

Very often developers take an attitude along the lines of "I don't want to have to deal with users, that's somebody elses job", or if they *do* provide support, it's often in a very patronizing way that scares people away and obscures a lot of the details of the problems that they run into.

I feel that if developers learn to change their attitude on this, and provide end-user support from the perspective of "if someone has a question, that must mean there is a problem with the UX or the documentation somewhere", that could meaningfully improve things.

This *seems* like it's demanding extra work from developers, but in practice I've found that it mainly helps to catch problems early and keep them from spiralling into problems *at scale* - by doing a bit more work upfront, it prevents a lot of confusion, miscommunication, remediation work, redesigns etc. down the line, and the end result is that in the long term it *reduces* the total workload.

The biggest hurdle here, I think, is actually convincing developers to change their attitude in these matters, because that "don't want to deal with people" tends to run pretty deep. The flipside is that this is a change that can be made today, in existing projects, without any extra organizational complexity or costs.

@serapath It does, but I'm already using that and it's not a cool new language :)

There have been a lot of interesting improvements in language design since then, some of which are difficult or impossible to backport into JS, so I'd like to experiment with some newer stuff too!

TIL if the water between denmark and sweden freezes and a swede crosses the ice by foot, danes are legally allowed to beat them with a stick. this is in their constitution

@jon Aren't they just using "TGV" as an abbreviation there? IIRC it stands for "train grande vitesse" or so, ie. "high speed train".

@mynameistillian I enjoyed the TV series and especially the movies, but I was a kid at the time, and I'm not sure I would *still* enjoy it today. I did play the shit out of the Gameboy games also though.

@Quenby I would explicitly add to that that it also doesn't matter whether you actually *have* work right now, as long as you *need* it

@bananas Specifications that determine how to convert from one (version of) a type to another, so that you can interoperate between nominally incompatible but semantically compatible types, which is one of the possible ways to deal with the nominal typing problem

@bananas Not unsolvable, though, and I'd be perfectly okay with stuff like "having to manually specify type adapters", because that still causes way less pain than juggling transitive dependency versions forever

My kingdom for a cool new programming language that doesn't have a flat dependency space and actually supports conflicting versions of transitive dependencies

Thinking about what it would take to make the real world into the "Star Trek future" sort of place where it would be safe to introduce new technology and it wouldn't just be used to oppress

The most essential step in keeping a #journal is simply to write the date each day. It's OK if you don't write anything else. Doing just that says a lot.

Though, often with the date written you can write a bit more. Or draw something.

I used to keep journals for all of my projects but fell out of doing it in my 30s. I've gotten back into it recently and I'm shocked at how powerful of a tool it is to keep focus from one day to the next. To set and reach goals. To process emotions and ideas.

This is extremely cool: keacher.com/xmas24/

It's a PCB-based 'christmas card' with lights, except it has no battery and pulls energy from radio waves in the air, and you can both power and control it by eg. holding it next to your phone.

From what I understand, the control of the lights doesn't use any actual data connection or pairing, instead the page encodes a modulated signal directly on 2.4GHz by opening a websocket and sending / not sending data in patterns, that the card then extracts and reads!

where are like all the south asian western diaspora trans-femmes who had their gender and sexuality discovery stunted by a mix of garbage media representation and toxic parenting from asian traditions?

like statistically I can't be the only one, there must be others in my situation? no? or am I truly uniquely messed up in this regard?

I feel like I'm screaming into a void sometimes~

So basically if you're vegan, remember to check the label on your margarine! It might be much closer to butter than you realize!

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practically complete extinction of an ethnic group, russia, war in ukraine 

just received news that one of the ppl who died in the invasion against ukraine was Ivan Taigamyr, who belongs to the Kerek people, who are one of the Indigenous nations that live on the territory of so called "russia".

There are only 23 Kerek people left.
None speak the Kerek language fluently.

i read that on the wiki page for Kerek people and my heart just sank.

meduza.io/en/feature/2024/12/1

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kereks

practically complete extinction of an ethnic group, russia, war in ukraine 

this fascist machine, and its actions in ukraine, does not only threaten ukrainians with extinction, but also destroys indigenous, nonwhite and minority nations in russia by conscripting people who belong to them disproportionately, leaving them to die.

pbs.org/newshour/show/russias-

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practically complete extinction of an ethnic group, russia, war in ukraine 

THIS is why i am telling yall that russia is a fascist force. it's a fascist, white supremacist force that mows down everyone who opposes it or in any way isn't russian, white, cis, abled, heterosexual, christian. it's a fucking nightmare made reality.

so many of western leftists online engage in their bullshit campism so much that they decenter the victims of russian/soviet imperialism

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