my university email webapp's automatic correction makes a cowsay blush

hm I’m starting to have this feeling of “okay, I could learn this language, but I can’t really do anything cool with it can I? just a bunch of stuff that I can already do much more easily in Python”

so maybe learning new languages isn’t fun per se, and my next tech project could be learning to use the Löve engine or something like that

I’m actually kinda considering learning to do NES dev things, because I’ve been wanting to learn how to use 6502 assembly ever since it was in RedPower. and it would give me an excuse to learn C and use it for something cool instead of, y’know, the same things that I can use Python for except it feels like I have both hands tied behind my back and I’m worried about corrupting or deadlocking my OS or something

That’s right!

It goes in the HTTP protocol

@CIMB4 aw well you can still access it for now if that helps! (link is NSFW) and I’m talking to a friend about possibly hosting it on their server instead of the VPS, so I might be able to keep it running for free on there instead

I also just think that once you’re immersed in a FOSS project, it becomes hard to understand which parts are confusing or unclear to new users, or which parts of the documentation need clarification or rewriting, or even which jargon should be avoided for the sake of clarity. the illusion of transparency becomes a real problem

so I think it might be helpful to have new users do the software equivalent of playtesting where they record themselves setting everything up for the first time so that the devs can see which aspects of that first experience are smooth and which aspects are problematic

I shouldn’t be laughing this hard at this but I am

I have a suspicion that one of the reasons why FOSS tends to be Like That (user-unfriendly, often command-line only, difficult to set up and use, very picky about the environment it runs in) is because there’s a misalignment between the features that are most helpful and the features that are most fun to work on. like you know what’s really unfun to work on in a codebase?

• UI stuff
• UX stuff
• making sure the default behaviors are sane and work well on most people’s computers
• addressing new user pain-points
• fixing environment-specific problems when “it works on my computer”
• writing documentation and tutorials
• finding ways to minimize the tinkering necessary to get the software to work

but you know what is fun?

• adding new features
• increasing the complexity and depth of the system
• devs optimizing their own workflows
• making the system more robust or flexible for highly technical users
• fragmenting the ecosystem in various ways

and in my experience that first list is all things that FOSS tends to be bad at, and the second list is all things that FOSS very often does

I’m glad that a lot of FOSS has gotten very accessible at this point (GIMP and LibreOffice are great examples), but we definitely have a long way to go before FOSS adoption reaches a critical mass (year of the Linux desktop blah blah) and this might be part of the reason why

Spicy take:

Normal people shouldn't self host.

From an energy use perspective, the users per watt are WAY higher in a data center.

People are already awful at running patches and doing security updates.

OMG are people awful at doing backups.

From an ewaste POV, consumer electronics just don't have a very long lifespan, fail more frequently, are rarely upgradable, and easily broken. Enterprise grade servers in a data center are better.

Hosted services actually have a SOC to monitor what the fuck is going on and investigate unusual things. An individual normal user would never notice their self hosted server being popped for forever, and we already have far too many zombies.

Sure, megacorps aren't trustworthy stewards of key internet services like email either. But telling everyone they need yet another home appliance, but one you're going to have to fuck with several hours per month to keep running.

Dynamic DNS suck balls, IPv4 is running out, hosting shit being a NAT and reverse proxies and shch is its own thing, and lots and lots of people don't have very good home internet links.

Up front cost - yes, I know people "pay" for their social media and email with their privacy and advertising. But that means that saying they need to spend several hundred on a whole new computer and find a place to put it or rent a VPS or ...

Fact of the matter is, some sort of SaaS setup for web services IS the right solution for 97% of users. Scolding people for being abused by unregulated tech companies isn't solving anything. The right solution is to make people become more aware of the intentional and malicious enshittified bullshit techbros are cramming down their throat, and lobby the government to strengthen regulations.

@tempest ooh yes please! I’d love that if you don’t mind - I’m curious what it is and what it’s like

@desea omg interesting so the idea is that everyone playing on the server is also making mods for the server as part of playing?

@subG ooh omg Warp Drive sounds amazing - I’m going to look that up later. it sounds like exactly the kind of thing that I’d want

Apparently there’s another influx of new folks here, so I guess I should give my best tidbit of advice:

You have to really actively seek out people to follow here, much more than you’re used to — and until you do, this place will feel •dead•. Cool stuff isn’t just going to show up. You won’t get many helpful suggestions. No tech giant marketing dept is spending millions to draw you in. It’s going to be •work•. It’s kind of a drag, tbh.

But: your people are out there!! You just have work to seek them out, one account at a time.

it seems like #GAGSProject isn’t getting used very often at all, so I’ve been thinking about cancelling the VPS to save myself some money every month. I don’t really have that much income so it would be helpful to spend a little less

I would still keep the source code available on GitLab, and I might even share my server configs if anyone is interested in hosting their own version. but cancelling the VPS would mean that you can’t use GAGS anymore without hosting it yourself

I just wanted to mention this in case someone wants to talk me out of it or has a good alternative for me

okay so thinking about this more: Alkahistorian (stage three) rewards the player by giving them upgrades that automate certain aspects of the map. so the reward is a decrease in cognitive load, letting them abstract away those complexities as “this just makes more of the element that I need over time”

but what if that didn’t happen? what if the player had to be the one to automate those parts? so later on as you unlock new, more efficient recipes for crafting certain elements, those recipes would actually be more difficult to automate. encourging the player to rewrite their existing automation code to incorporate the new recipes

does this post make sense to anybody except me? I’m ngl I’m actually really really tempted to make a prototype of this idea, though I don’t know anything about game dev and wouldn’t have any idea how lol. but this sounds like the kind of mod that I would fucking love to have exist in the world

to me the fun of a game that lets me do programming inside of it is that the game will extrinsically reward me for my automation, but I feel like Minecraft programming mods don’t really offer any extrinsic reward for doing the actual programming, except for very very simple cases that boil down to something like “take items from spot A and put them in spot B”

maybe I should learn how to make Minecraft mods just so that I can add more complex stuff to automate, like a nuclear reactor that needs to be constantly monitored by a computer

ooh, actually, maybe I could make the Minecraft equivalent of the Alkahistorian games, where the pipes between elements (and therefore the reaction rates) could be controlled via redstone

every time I see a new Minecraft programming mod (ComputerCraft, OpenComputers, Integrated Dynamics, Hex Casting, etc.) my thought process is always:

• oohh imagine all the cool things I could do with this!
• wait… what would I do with this?
• Minecraft isn’t really complex enough for me to need this level of automation, and I don’t think there are any mods that add enough complexity to warrant this

like every time I install ComputerCraft or Project Red I’m always like “ooh I can’t wait to use this to automate something” but then I never need to automate anything that’s more complex than like, one boolean logic operation

I think it would be amazing if certain mods added stuff to the game that was deliberately designed to need automating. for example a reactor that needs a control loop system to keep it from melting down or wasting reactant. or maybe computer-controlled omnidirectional conveyor belts as the only way to transport items between machines

but as it is I feel like ComputerCraft, OpenComputers, etc. are power tools without anything to use them on and that’s such a shame