shagie
@shagie@programming.dev
- Comment on Lemmy developer, @SleeplessOne1917, argues for the killing of Israeli civilians and children 1 year ago:
You can decouple it by looking to include people who have a broader range of political ideals rather than hiring people further and further to the extremes.
We’re here, we’ve made peace with that the original authors of the project created it because they wanted to have some place where they wouldn’t/couldn’t get kicked off for their political views. That’s fine.
However, as they’re seeing donations from the public and they’re looking to hire people, and the candidates are further to the extremes - that makes this more of a political project than not.
Yes, we can ask our server admins to defederate from those instances… but as long as a criteria for getting paid with the money that Lemmy gets as donations or grants is that you have anti-western views then it is a political project first.
- Comment on Lemmy developer, @SleeplessOne1917, argues for the killing of Israeli civilians and children 1 year ago:
When people make their professional (developer contributing to FOSS software) and their personal identity the same - especially when there are a limited number of people as representatives of the project or organization the personal views run the risk of causing issues for the professional organization.
This was seen before when Richard Stallman’s less than savory views on some current events of the time came to light and the blowback on FSF.
Having the two original developers be pro China at the time, with funding from NLNet is one thing… but to be actively seeking donations and looking to get enough funding that they can hire more developers - and that may include this individual… that runs the risk of bringing more politics into the core group. That in turn runs the risk of having this be “we’re looking for donations to pay these people.”
We’ve seen it in other companies - where someone on social media representing the company says something “off” and gets fired.
The only way for a financial contributions to “fire” a core group contributor is to withhold funding from the project.
I’ll say it quite frankly - I do not want one iota of any donations that I make to go to this individual.
- Comment on What will happen if we put a semi-colon after a for loop in C++? 1 year ago:
Some time back there was an attack on Lemmy where (if I recall correctly) HTML embedded in emoji allowed tokens of users viewing the emoji to get stolen… which included administrators auth tokens. There was much havoc wrecked that evening.
The mitigation for this was “all HTML entities are escaped”. Doesn’t matter where they are - they’re escaped. This sometimes leads to them being doubly escaped when rendering. Less than, ampersand, and greater than all get doubly escaped ( > & < ).
- Comment on Best free (preferably FOSS) Rust IDE for MacOS 1 year ago:
Jetbrains? Good choice.
They’ve recently released a Rust specific IDE - www.jetbrains.com/rust/
- Comment on Lemmy instances that are focused on mirroring Reddit content? 1 year ago:
Python isn’t a language I am deeply familiar with.
I am more interested in Lemmy growing on its own, in a different direction than reddit - rather than trying to copy reddit and its features (and problems).
This looks like it is going to run smack into TOS problems. You can claim that its going to be playing whackamole with instances, if it is sufficiently problematic then lawyers can get involved.
Creating these copies of reddit content makes Lemmy look like a ghost town. Copying content from people who didn’t consent to having their content pushed onto the Fediverse and federated across multiple instances (how would you handle a GDPR request?) leads to other problems.
I’m not worried at all about the implementation. I believe that its goal and means are flawed and counterproductive to the growth of the Fediverse as its own thing rather than a making Lemmy hollow budding of Reddit.
People point to early Reddit and say “see all the bots and fake accounts that were created early on? That’s a bad thing - we’re better than that.” (How Reddit Got Huge: Tons of Fake Accounts)
This project is copying a reddit in content and culture.
- Comment on Lemmy instances that are focused on mirroring Reddit content? 1 year ago:
If 90 accounts over the course of 15 minutes comment on a post in Lemmy, how many notifications would be sent to the person on Reddit? How frequently? Does it honor the reddit feature of unselecting “notify me about followup comments?”
- Comment on Lemmy instances that are focused on mirroring Reddit content? 1 year ago:
This is why the next part of the work is to build a bridge to send notifications to the people on reddit.
You do realize how fast this would be used to spam users on Reddit and then how absurdly quickly it would result in the API keys getting restricted?
- Comment on Which programming language is hard to understand? 1 year ago:
APL and J have made there appearance in here with their awkward syntax and have the advantage of being practical languages in actual use.
Esolanguages are often things that are designed to be difficult in some way, shape, or form. Brainfuck is awkward, but it’s the source of some interesting problems that are only practical because it is such a simple language.
The thing is, once you get your head around it, it isn’t too bad of a language.
I was introduced to FRACTRAN (wiki) in Project Euler - projecteuler.net/problem=308
That one… still is beautiful and confusing. It’s based on the manipulation of variables through Gödel numbering (wiki). The program: ( ^455^/~33~ , ^11^/~13~ , ^1^/~11~ , ^3^/~7~ , ^11^/~2~ , ^1^/~3~ ) will multiply the exponents of 2^a^3^b^ leaving the result in 5^ab^.
The program ( ^17^/~91~ , ^78^/~85~ , ^19^/~51~ , ^23^/~38~ , ^29^/~33~ , ^77^/~29~ ^95^/~23~ , ^77^/~19~ , ^1^/~17~ , ^11^/~13~ , ^13^/~11~ , ^15^/~2~ , ^1^/~7~ , ^55^/~1~ ) will loop forever, however as it runs the state of the program will occasionally be just a power of 2 with all the other powers (variables) being zero. Those values are: 2^2^ , 2^3^ , 2^5^ , 2^7^ , 2^11^ , 2^13^ , … and so on. It computes prime numbers and stores them in the power of 2 before going to compute the next one.
While I understand the idea of Gödel numbering, the manipulation of those numbers through this process still is difficult for me.
- Comment on Which programming language is hard to understand? 1 year ago:
www.rosettacode.org/wiki/Category:APL and www.rosettacode.org/wiki/Category:J for fun links.
ackermann←{ 0=1⊃⍵:1+2⊃⍵ 0=2⊃⍵:∇(¯1+1⊃⍵)1 ∇(¯1+1⊃⍵),∇(1⊃⍵),¯1+2⊃⍵ }
Traditional APL required its own typewriter ball for printing out programs.
- Comment on Advice needed, son wants to learn how to program 1 year ago:
He has an iPad 6
I believe you’d be able to load up Swift Playgrounds on that now as a “here’s a place to start” - www.apple.com/swift/playgrounds/ - it is a very safe place to start.
In general, I’m gonna ask “why?” for loading up a Linux distribution on a Mac unless there is specific software that you’re after that only runs on Linux. For the most part, launch a terminal and you’re getting 90% of what the Linux experience has to offer (Mac OSX is a unix certified operating system).
I’d look also for games that are programming under the covers or related. Factorio (circuits) and Minecraft (red stone logic) are two that come to mind first.
Shenzen I/O (and the rest of Zachtronics) along with Human Resource Machine and 7 Billion Humans might be a bit more, but also something he could “grow into”.
I would suggest staying as far away from Roblox as possible.
- Investigation: How Roblox Is Exploiting Young Game Developers - youtu.be/_gXlauRB1EQ
- Roblox Pressured Us to Delete Our Video. So We Dug Deeper. - youtu.be/vTMF6xEiAaY
- Comment on Advice needed, son wants to learn how to program 1 year ago:
I wrote this a while back… I still think it’s true (though I don’t think its “finished”)
Factorio
So there’s this game I play… just a little bit. Factorio.
In playing this game, I’ve realized that there are several parts of the game play that are directly applicable to software design. The idea of Patterns becomes more clear on how to explain them and how to use them in regular software when one can point to something a bit more concrete (all be it a construct in a virtual world). A visual example of reasonable design and problems of scale are also software design issues that become more apparent with factorio.
Patterns
Patterns are a favorite rant of mine - that developers are asking for a pattern to do something and you take a Something and a SomethingElse and link them together and you’ve got a working application.
Factorio gives me a better way to explain what a Pattern is.
One of the problems that I’ve had in factorio is a pump that flickers on and off rather quickly. This made a mess of the power display (a very high frequency sine wave was evident - determining the actual overall power consumption over time became more challenging) and lights that were hooked up to it to indicate that the pump was on were flickering at a high frequency (a rather annoying strobe).
The cause was that the pump (and light) were connected to a tank containing refined oil. The pump was to pump off excess when it got to 24,000 units. If the tank was at 24,100 units the pump would pump off 200 units putting it at 23,900 and shutting off. One sixtieth of a second later, something would push another 200 units of refined oil into the tank and the pump would trigger on and off for a sixtieth of a second - the flickering and the high frequency showing up in the power.
The solution to this is to use what is known as a Schmitt trigger. This is a circuit that feeds back to itself with a positive feedback loop. When the trigger turns on at a given threshold it will remain on until the value drops below a different threshold. The way that the trigger was set up was so that when the material reached 24,000 units, it would turn the pump on until the level was at 22,000 units.
The way this was implemented was to use a decider combinator which takes a signal as input (the amount of material in the tank) and sends a signal as output (the value 1 in a given channel) based on some logic (the amount of material in the tank is greater than 24,000). Then a second combinator - an arithmetic combinator - would take that signal of 1 and then multiply it by 2,000 and send that result into the input of the decider combinator. The result would be that the signal is now 26,000 and it would run until the material drops to 24,000 in which case the signal from the decider would switch from 1 to 0 and the arithmetic combinator would stop sending the additional 2000 units as a signal… and we would see the real value of the tank at 22,000.
The Schmitt trigger is a Pattern.
It is silly to be suggesting that one would design something based on the answers to “what are useful Patterns when creating an oil processing area?” One doesn’t add something unless its necessary to solve a problem. And one doesn’t go looking for places to use a Schmitt trigger or other Pattern - they are tools for solving specific problems.
Reasonable design
The first base that a person builds is often what is known as a spaghetti base. The layout is ad-hoc. As you need something from somewhere (some iron plates) to get to somewhere else you split off from a convenient, nearby belt with some iron on it and run it over to the place it is needed. It sounds ok at first, but doing this a few dozen times the layout becomes more and more convoluted.
Enter the main bus.
The main bus is a design where there is a large number of belts running down the center of the base and things tap off of it perpendicular for specific factories that build a given item.
The taps off are well researched designs that have a specific fraction of the items shunted off to the factory. Instead of trying to figure out where the iron came from and how to get more iron down to that place maybe a few hundred tiles away, one can look at the main bus and see a dozen tiles and understand what that sub factory is making and how many resources it needs.
The reasonable design allows one to more quickly fix issues of resource starvation and allocation along with refactoring of specific areas of the overall system without worry about impact to things downstream. The base is reasonable.
Problems of scale
After playing a bit and winning the game a time or two, one gets the urge to build BIG. Not these little “launch a rocket every couple of minutes” but rather “launch a rocket every second.”
The design for the one rocket every few minutes is fundamentally different than the design for one rocket every second. The layout of the base for a simple mainline works well - but it doesn’t have the throughput for materials that would enable the launch a rocket every second goal.
For this, one starts building outpost factories that do one thing, and one thing well. This outpost takes iron ore and produces iron plates. That outpost takes iron plates and copper plates and produces green circuits. So on and so forth.
This is a very different design - switching from a main bus to train logistics (trains become the way to move massive amounts of material). The very structure of the base for a megabase vs a regular base shows differences at every level.
Many times one reads about developers having difficulties with microservices and trying to build something to scale to 1000 users per second. And then comes the moment when they are asked how many users per second they’re currently getting and the answer is something along the lines of “Um, we’re getting maybe 5 a second on a good day… but we’re getting ready for being Amazon or Twitter scale.”
Design for what works. It is often easier to redesign a working system up than it is to try to start out with the megabase or amazon scale system and fight all those little problems of outpost base train networks and microservices that you haven’t encountered before in a working system.
- Comment on [Lemmy active users] 28th of September was the only day with more monthly active Lemmy users than the previous one, probably thanks to the release of Boost for Lemmy 1 year ago:
To be frank about it, the clips of porn needs instances to follow the steps needed for Section 230 to protect them (see EFF : User Generated Content and the Fediverse: A Legal Primer) otherwise it becomes a huge liability for every site admin who federates with such instances. I am not aware of any instances that have taken the step of registering a DMCA agent with the US Copyright Office.
Additionally, given the nature of the people commenting and the possibility of “oh, I’m 17, is that a problem” without the corresponding tooling for age verification and approved users, the moderation tools need to really get a focus for how to create them, implement them, and federate moderation events out reliably.
Furthermore, a significant amount of porn on Reddit is from amateurs who are trying to monetize or advertise. So far, the Lemmy user base has taken a dim view monetization (other than donations) or advertising. This makes it so that it’s just not worth it for an amateur to need to maintain another social media presence that has little return.
- Comment on What do y'all think about mailing lists and IRC as sole communication channels? 1 year ago:
IRC is fine for almost synchronous communication - but dealing with things that work on the timescale of days or weeks, IRC becomes difficult to maintain a discussion about a fix or feature over that timeframe that includes all the interested participants.
Mailing lists often come with an archive and a sufficiently large project will have multiple lists for different aspects of the project. Consider gcc ( gcc.gnu.org/lists.html )and you’ll see that bugs and patches are their own lists. Going into there you can also see the archives for the project… and if the mailing list software has support for it, viable by thread gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc-bugs/
lkml.org/lkml/2013/11/25/519 is another fun read (that entire thread).
git has support for (and was originally used via) email.
git send-email(docs) andgit am(docs) are part of its original functionality and that workflow can make use if it.I’m personally most comfortable with GitHub or GitLab, followed by email. An IRC or discord project lacks the ability to properly research the “why was this done that way back in 2016”… unless the project doesn’t aspire to be a long lived open source project.
Managing email is something that should be considered as part of this. Setting up a separate email address for that project, or using the + addressing as part of the email to make it so that your email filters can operate on them better (Exchange, gmail). This may require deeper familiarity with email clients than is common today - smart mailboxes in Mac Mail, client side rules in Exchange, or old school procmail with a shell account.
- Comment on Is lemmy.ml turn into authoritarian? 1 year ago:
It started there, drifted mainstream, and is drifting back.
- Comment on I just developed and deployed the first real-time protection for lemmy against CSAM! 1 year ago:
Reddit didn’t try make it. It’s a free service from services such as Cloudflare and Google (Reddit uses the google one).
- Comment on I just developed and deployed the first real-time protection for lemmy against CSAM! 1 year ago:
Child Sexual Abuse Material
The Cloudflare tool developers.cloudflare.com/cache/…/csam-scanning/ and blog post blog.cloudflare.com/the-csam-scanning-tool/
The tool that Reddit and several others use from Google: protectingchildren.google
- Comment on I just developed and deployed the first real-time protection for lemmy against CSAM! 1 year ago:
NCMEC is very different than reporting to your local PD office.
- Comment on I just developed and deployed the first real-time protection for lemmy against CSAM! 1 year ago:
www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2258A
(a) Duty To Report.—
(1) In general.—
(A) Duty.—In order to reduce the proliferation of online child sexual exploitation and to prevent the online sexual exploitation of children, a provider—
(i) shall, as soon as reasonably possible after obtaining actual knowledge of any facts or circumstances described in paragraph (2)(A), take the actions described in subparagraph (B); and
(ii) may, after obtaining actual knowledge of any facts or circumstances described in paragraph (2)(B), take the actions described in subparagraph (B).
(B) Actions described.—The actions described in this subparagraph are—
(i) providing to the CyberTipline of NCMEC, or any successor to the CyberTipline operated by NCMEC, the mailing address, telephone number, facsimile number, electronic mailing address of, and individual point of contact for, such provider; and
(ii) making a report of such facts or circumstances to the CyberTipline, or any successor to the CyberTipline operated by NCMEC.…
(e) Failure To Report.—A provider that knowingly and willfully fails to make a report required under subsection (a)(1) shall be fined—
(1) in the case of an initial knowing and willful failure to make a report, not more than $150,000; and
(2) in the case of any second or subsequent knowing and willful failure to make a report, not more than $300,000.Check with a lawyer if blocking an upload that your server has access to because of suspected CSAM constitutes “actual knowledge or any facts or circumstances”.
- Comment on The only thing doing tech tests has taught me is that I'm too stupid to do the job I've been doing professionally for the better part of 2 decades. 1 year ago:
I looked at it when it came out. The problem is that taking classes back in the early 90s with computer programming - the CS department was an offshoot of the Math and Statistics departments rather than engineering (the engineering department was hardware focused - designing chips and circuit boards)… and so I don’t have the deep physics background that the FE exam expects you to have prior to taking the PE exam.
If I had taken electrical and computer engineering… well, assuming that I got through the math (had to take the CS numerical methods class three times)… maybe. But if people want to complain about the irrelevance of reversing a list or describing two different approaches to balanced trees… they’d probably complain more about being tested on generators and RC frequency response in low pass filters even if you only have to take it once.
- Comment on The only thing doing tech tests has taught me is that I'm too stupid to do the job I've been doing professionally for the better part of 2 decades. 1 year ago:
nspe.org/…/ncees-ends-software-engineering-pe-exa…
The Software Engineering PE exam, which has struggled to reach an audience, will be discontinued by the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying after the April 2019 administration. The exam has been administered five times, with a total of 81 candidates.
NCEES’s Committee on Examination Policy and Procedures reviews the history of any exam with fewer than 50 total first-time examinees in two consecutive administrations and makes recommendations to the NCEES Board of Directors about the feasibility of continuing the exam.
In 2013, the software exam became the latest addition to the family of PE exams. The exam was developed by NSPE, IEEE-USA, the IEEE Computer Society, and the Texas Board of Professional Engineers—a group known as the Software Engineering Consortium. Partnering with NCEES, the consortium began working in 2007 to spread the word about the importance of software engineering licensure for the public health, safety, and welfare.
- Comment on Stack Overflow must change its attitude towards users. 1 year ago:
You can do at most 40 reviews per day (to avoid people going on autopilot) but you are no more rewarded for doing 40 reviews in a day than you are doing 1 review a day for 40 days. The only exception to the 40/day limit is for diamond (elected) moderators.
Furthermore, you’ll note that the review that you recently did (first posts) you were rewarded for doing it for the firs time… and your review action (which is public) was “looks ok” rather than down voting it or flagging it (though the answer you review wasn’t upvoted… so its ok, but not ok enough to up vote?).
The goal of the review queues is to get people to just check to make sure things are going ok.
If/when you get to 3000 rep, you’ll be just as rewarded for casting a close vote in the close vote queue as you would for saying “leave open” - or going into the reopen queue and casting a reopen vote.
The point is that the one sided statement of “SO rewards tagging and closing questions” doesn’t properly capture what you are doing. Additionally, the rewards for doing reviews (badges) is completely separate from the rewards that drive the rest of the site (reputation).
Overall, the system of voting, curation, and moderation on Stack Overflow has broken down. There are not enough people doing these things on a regular basis and so the actions that are taken to keep Stack Overflow from becoming Yahoo Answers are predominately “close” rather than “cultivate and curate” because there isn’t enough time for people who are able to do those tasks to do so and make a meaningful impact.
Your next badge would be to help out in the first posts review queue another 249 times.
The badges are there to help guide new users to discovery of the site as they participate more on it. Voting everyone does and understands, but few people see the review queues unless guided there by badges and blame “the moderators” (which is everyone on the site with sufficient rep to do reviews) for actions.
How do you get users who have participated enough to get 1000 rep to do a first posts review? Or 2000 rep to help out and check the suggested edits? Or 3000 rep and see if things should be opened or closed other than with the badges prompted prompted by reaching various reputation thresholds?
Forums for helping others existed for decades before SO and even now a lot of stuff has moved to discord, Reddit, Zulip, and slack and they still have moderation and most people actually get answers to their questions.
I’m sure that people still go to javaranch.com to view posts like coderanch.com/f/33/java for getting help and searching for answers.
Zulip and Slack and discord are quite good for interactive help with someone on a problem now. They’re absolutely a non-starter for searching for past issues so that you don’t need to ask someone to get interactive help now.
Reddit is ok as it’s indexed by google… until people go through and delete their old content. Sure, that’s fine and it’s their content, but it also means that you’re asking questions there. And you’ll also note the curation and formatting of in www.reddit.com/r/javahelp/ isn’t exactly up to Stack Overflow standards.
The point is that these are different systems with different goals and are trying to do them in different ways.
Reddit doesn’t care about the long term searchable value of a question or answer as much as Stack Overflow does because once it drops off the page it’s gone and no one is going to find it again. Stack Overflow had a different goal.
blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-c…
Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit. It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal.
It’s fair to argue if its by programmers anymore - but that was its goal and its a very different goal than “help each person who asks a question.”
- Comment on This comic was published less than ten years ago, and it's wild how obsolete it is 1 year ago:
Off the shelf… no… though I’ve been rather impressed at the accuracy of the iPhone. There’s this little
iin a circle that has a star in the corner which will do a “let me try to match this”. I believe its only a matter of time before this becomes more accessible.Attempting to match a purple flower on the side of a bike trail
- Comment on Unity Silently Deletes GitHub Repo that Tracks Terms of Service Changes and Updated Its License 1 year ago:
Maybe one easy thing us gamers can do is to block unity domains at the network level. I’m not sure how they track installs but I’m guessing it must include some kind of phone home.
Consider that pirated installs are now not just lost revenue but ongoing costs as Unity charges the developer for an install.
- Comment on This comic was published less than ten years ago, and it's wild how obsolete it is 1 year ago:
www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1425:_Tasks
A month after this comic came out, Flickr responded with a prototype online tool to do something similar to what the comic describes, using its automated-tagging software. According to them, the bird solution “took us less than 5 years to build, though it’s definitely a hard problem, and we’ve still got room for improvement”.
(the site parkorbird.flickr.com is no longer online)
- Comment on Stack Overflow must change its attitude towards users. 1 year ago:
I’m not sure how rewarding those are - or common. A total of 257k out of 21M doesn’t suggest many people are getting rewarded for flagging (and that’s just one). Raising 80 helpful flags (for example flagging spam or people leaving rude comments) is less than 0.07% of the user base.
The cleaning the queue is… Stack Overflow’s review queues have never been cleared. Today’s stats for Stack Overflow’s close queue ( with 3000 items in it that time out after 3 days stackoverflow.com/review/close/stats ) has had 273 reviews done (not all were close votes) done by 18 people (out of 21 million) and most of those people who have done the majority of the reviews received the marshal badge over 5 years ago and so aren’t getting any new rewards for doing more. You are equally rewarded for clicking “leave open” as you are for clicking “close” in the queues.
There is no reputation reward for any of the review tasks either.
- Comment on Stack Overflow must change its attitude towards users. 1 year ago:
SO rewards tagging and closing questions rather than answering the actually difficult questions.
I’m curious as to what reward you believe that people are getting from closing questions?
Though I’ll certainly agree with that it doesn’t reward giving good answers to hard questions enough and rather encourages easy answers to popular questions (even if the popular questions have been asked before).
- Comment on [deleted] 1 year ago:
Another thought is the two parts of locking it down.
How much local configuration would it take to make it so that Lemmy doesn’t show any posts to someone not logged in (since you know that if its on the web even under a really funky hard to type name… someone will find it)? Do you want your vacation planning available to everyone (“I won’t be home from September 15th through the 23rd, so Cousin Dave is going to stop by each day to walk the dog…”)
The other part is specifically against fediverse (which would be the reason for Lemmy rather than some other system) for such a private community. It again gets hard to lock down… not so much a “what gets out” but also a “what gets in”. … oh, Aunt Jane and Uncle John have subscribed to swingers that’s hosted on a nswf instance and that’s not about playground equipment. Meanwhile Aunt Dorthy wants you to do something to prevent Cousin Charlie from seeing all that “stuff” in /all fore Carlie accidentally calls him Uncle Long John at a family gathering. … and now you’re going through pics and finding pictures of your aunt and uncle that you really didn’t want to see (and you’re going to be going vegan before you want to think about that turkey baster next Thanksgiving).
And while these are solvable problems… it’s a question of do you want to solve them?
Simpler solutions will work better that you expand into other things as the need arises.
- Comment on Hypothesis: Insufficient moderation tools lead to instance protectionism, which leads to a decline in the overall discussion quality on Lemmy 1 year ago:
I’m going from:
I saw this post on another instance and tried to reply this exact message but got an error saying I couldn’t.
And suspect they were doing something like browsing Lemmy.ml / all while not logged in and saw it but couldn’t interact with it until they came back to lemmy.world where it was easy to find and interact with.
- Comment on Hypothesis: Insufficient moderation tools lead to instance protectionism, which leads to a decline in the overall discussion quality on Lemmy 1 year ago:
There is some friction of finding posts from federated content on your own instance, but you will note that I am posting from (and see this on) programming.dev rather than lemmy.world (where this community is hosted).
You need to be logged into your instance, search for the post on your instance, browse it via search, and then you can interact with it there. You don’t need to create an account on the other instance to interact with it.
And yes, that list of steps mentioned above is a lot of friction.
- Comment on Stack Overflow must change its attitude towards users. 1 year ago:
chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms/info/6/python and sopython.com/chatroom for SO’s python chat room.
Consider, however, “what if on every Python question on SO, someone left a comment to check out the python discord channel to ask their questions”.
Would the python discord channel be able to handle that volume of beginner questions (about 1 question every 5 minutes all day, every day)? And if someone did post that and try to encourage people to ask there instead, and would a representative of python discord go and ask SO meta to dissuade that user from doing so?
Sites like Stack Overflow, if they even point/redirect a fraction of their traffic at some other place can overwhelm the capacity for both support and moderation of that other place easily.
Part of the problem is also that many people asking questions don’t want help, they want copy and passable answers that involves them (the person asking the question) doing as little as possible. I realize that’s a controversial stance in some circles, but if you spend time trying to help all the users with low rep on SO (and even some with higher rep), it feels like they represent a significant portion of the people asking questions. Sampling bias? Confirmation bias? Dunno… I’ll admit to some bias somewhere… but I still know what it feels like.
