IonicFrog
@IonicFrog@lemmy.sdf.org
- Comment on Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy 3 weeks ago:
Do what rich people do and set up shell companies. There are law firms that specialize in this kind of thing.
But if that is a hard requirement is a Lemmy instance the right tool for the job? Wouldn’t something on Tor be better?
- Comment on Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy 3 weeks ago:
People forget that user experience isn’t just the stuff on the screen you interact with. There is a governance piece that is lacking in a lot of instances, and in the open source community as a whole. A lot of the successful projects out there are backed by some kind of foundation.
Take a look at the latest Hexbear drama. Some person out there owned the domain for their instance and let it expire. Now they are in a bidding war with a crypto site with a hexagon-related name. If they had formed some kind of organization or entity that registered the domain and owned the instance, this probably wouldn’t have happened. Their users wouldn’t get redirected to a domain auction site when trying to access the site. That’s not an ideal user experience. It destroys trust.
SDF being a 501©(7) is one of the reasons that it’s my home instance. For me, it provides a level of trust that an instance run by some random person on the internet doesn’t. If there is a big federation/defederation debate, then it’s really up to the membership to decide, and not a collection of admins or a single person getting the vibe of the users.
Another thing to remember is that Lemmy really shouldn’t be competing against Reddit. The purpose of Reddit is to have the user generate content in order to keep the user’s attention on the site so they can sell targeted advertisements. This is the basic business model for all of commercial social media. It has nothing to do with creating communities. That is secondary. If you want more people on Lemmy so that there is more content for you to consume, just stay on Reddit or TikTok. They need to sell ads in order to fund model training to keep your engagement up in order to sell more ads in order to provide quarterly growth to their shareholders. If you want more people on Lemmy because more brains mean better communities, then focus the communities.
The real opportunity for the fediverse is getting a lot of the existing non-profits, social organizations, and other types of communities to set up their own instances. This answers the “what instance do I join?” question by joining the instance associated with the community you’re already involved in. Another reason I’m on SDF is retro computing. If you’re really into your local makerspace, then you probably have a community ready to go for a Lemmy instance. If you’re involved in your HOA and you all have a Facebook page or are all over Nextdoor, maybe set up a Lemmy instance. In all these cases, the organizational infrastructure is there for the administrative stuff like getting a domain and paying for hosting.
Also, I’m old enough to remember that Facebook took off when everyone’s parents started joining. Imagine if the AARP rolled out a Lemmy instance. They are big enough put some serious money into development. You would probably get a lot of accessibility improvements.
- Comment on Microsoft releases MS-DOS 4 source code on GitHub — 45 year old code now open-source 10 months ago:
I wonder if they licensed the source of 5.0+ to someone and are still getting paid for it. If so, it’s probably something ubiquitous and critical that nobody would think of like traffic lights or water treatment plants.
- Comment on Struggling database company MariaDB could be taken private in $37M deal 1 year ago:
- Comment on Fans preserve and emulate Sega’s extremely rare ‘80s “AI computer” 1 year ago:
That actually makes a lot of sense. Board revision was a lot more difficult back then.
- Comment on Fans preserve and emulate Sega’s extremely rare ‘80s “AI computer” 1 year ago:
I would have like to been in the meeting where they discussed putting the keyboard cable on the front of the keyboard.
- Comment on Would the world be a better place if Google bought Gitlab? 1 year ago:
Google is an advertising company. Something like 80% of their revenue comes from selling ads.
How would spending money on Gitlab support their primary business.
- Comment on Tips on how to get clients as a freelancer? 1 year ago:
What industry do you work in? I would focus on that. The truth is that programing is somewhat of a commodity, and a lot of your value is going to come from industry knowledge.
- Submitted 1 year ago to programming@programming.dev | 2 comments
- Comment on Advice needed, son wants to learn how to program 1 year ago:
Don’t worry about Linux, and don’t try to over complicate things. If you are set on going the Linux route, get a Raspberry Pi. It will give him something really flexible and cheap to experiment with later on.
Look into modded Minecraft. There is a mod called Computer Craft where you can write programs in Lua. One of the things that makes scratch so good for kids is that the results are instantly visible. This is important for kids.
www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/cc-tweaked
There are programs to control your reactor > www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9fC3khXuj8
Unmodded Minecraft has Redstone where you can build logic gates.
Outside of what you already have check into a maker space or a computer club at school. Here in Atlanta there is www.codeninjas.com. Maybe there is something similar in your area.
- Comment on Painting Apple hardware - what colour? 1 year ago:
Maybe this is helpful. imgur.com/a/TNpqz
If you find any additional information please share it with the rest of us. I have a really yellowed AppleVision 850 in the project pile. It’s too big to redrobright and get an even result.
- Comment on What benefits do you get for being on-call? - programming.dev 1 year ago:
I’m on a team of 5 and we don’t have an on call rotation since developers are not prod ops. But in a sense we are all on call all the time. The NOC has our phone numbers and if we are needed for something urgent we will get a call or a text for things like helping prod ops troubleshoot an issue if they get stuck. My boss has texted me while I was on vacation before. Usually it’s a quick question for something obscure. Once it was an escalation from a senior executive. I don’t have to respond if I’m on vacation, but if I’m getting a call they really need help with something. It also is a good opportunity to lay a guilt trip on your boss that results in a few reward points. Never had to actually log into anything though.
We also have BCP, business continuity plan, events. I work for a company that provides a lot of critical infrastructure. If the BCP event is really nasty, like a natural disaster, and our team needs 24/7 representation on the bridge, we take turns and will relieve each other. You won’t be expected to help out on a BCP event while on vacation.
Besides BCP we usually have to be available for certain production changes. Like a few months ago I had a DNS and load balancer change done. I wasn’t doing the work, but the team making the change wanted me available between 3 and 5 am to validate the change.
If I were paid hourly things would be more formal. I would get overtime(1.5 x hourly rate) + comp time. Since I’m salaried I just sleep in the next day. Our schedules are really flexible. We basically need to be mostly available for meetings for around 4 hours a weekday from late morning to late afternoon, and complete our projects on time. It was like this in the before times. Back then I would go into the office around 11 am for our daily standup. Get lunch with some team mates. Do some afternoon meetings then go home, and do my more focused work at home after dinner time. Most of my team mates did something similar.
Rest of the compensation is your typical American senior software engineer salary with a 10% to 20% bonus, 7 weeks pto, health insurance, life insurance, short term and long term disability insurance, 401k with 6% match, pension, retirement health insurance, pet health insurance, can use the corporate travel agent for personal travel. I actually like this perk a lot. You still pay for personal travel but it means a lot of discounts and upgrades. We also get to keep our various travel points.
- Comment on [META] What are the demographics of this community? 1 year ago:
About twice a week we would go to the computer lab filled with Apple IIes. Usually we had to play Number Munchers, Word Munchers, or some other game to reenforce whatever we learned in class. After we finished the game in the lesson plan, we could then play whatever educational game we wanted. Oregon Trail was a popular choice because nothing was funnier than having the game say a classmate had died or broke a leg. And the hunting and rafting mini games were the closest to arcade games.
Also keep in mind that the only exposure most of the teachers had to a computer were the mainframe terminals in the school’s office or the computer lab. MECC put together a lot of software and training for teachers. School building out an Apple II based computer lab with a bunch of MECC software as close to turnkey as they could get at the time. The documentation for Oregon Trail or Odell Lake gives you an idea of what it was like.
- Comment on [META] What are the demographics of this community? 1 year ago:
I’m in that weird group that’s between Gen-X and Millennial. I’ve seen us called Xennials or the Oregon Trail Generation.
- Comment on Tools for reaching consensus on software feature implementation? 1 year ago:
The way we do it on my team is debate and discussion. Debate can be tricky in a professional environment. Some people go into thinking they need to dominate their opponent and make it personal. Personally, I would try to avoid hiring people like that in the first place, but sometimes you got to make do. The thing to remember is that you all are on the same side and have the same goal.
- Comment on Android 14 blocks all modification of system certificates, even as root 1 year ago:
I heard this on the radio yesterday. Secretly ruthless is a good way to describe Google.
SHAPIRO: OK. So big picture on this anniversary, 25 years in, if you could describe Google’s legacy in a sentence, what would that be?
PATEL: Secretly ruthless.
SHAPIRO: Oh, that’s rough. Wow. Secretly ruthless - that’s even less than a sentence. Give me a little bit more. Why do you say secretly ruthless?
PATEL: Google has convinced everyone that it is this incredibly sincere and earnest company - that it’s just a bunch of goofballs making cool things. That is true. But I think if we just paid a little more attention to where Google’s money comes from - and it is almost entirely advertising - I think we would be able to see the company and its influence a little bit more clearly. But the truth is, it is an utterly ruthless advertising company that is very, very, very successful at delivering results to its clients.
SHAPIRO: But Nilay, you didn’t mention how cute the Google doodles are.
PATEL: Yeah, the - I understand. They’re very cute.
