There’s a handful of us that do 50 for FOSS: https://50forfoss.org/

tl;dr: on the first Friday of the month we each pick a FOSS (free/open-source) project and give the maintainer $50.

Thanks and encouragement is great too. As a small-time open source maintainer, it seems awareness has been spreading over the last few years and people are going out of their way to be kind and respectful when they raise issues; it really makes a difference. But financial sustainability and community ownership are separate and arguably more essential issues if we want FOSS to survive over the long term.

I did have one maintainer turn down the $50 and ask me to donate it to UNICEF. It’s all the same to me as long as it makes the work more sustainable for them.

“If we run terabytes of text through a statistical model, then spend millions of man-hours labeling outputs, we can approximate the way humans respond to a prompt.” –OpenAI, more or less

Wow, what a surprise. I’ll do you one better: if you take me to a river, I can tell you where the water is going to go next! Maybe we can get some VC money by promising to deliver clean water to every business in the world without all the expense of pipelines and plumbers? I mean, just look at all this water. It may not go where you want right now, but let us dump sewage in it for a couple years and who knows what it’ll do.

This is why email never caught on. Who wants to choose between Gmail, Yahoo, MSN, Proton, and Comcast? A successful email service would be one where you can only communicate with users of the same email service. /s

As this thread demonstrates, there are plenty of ways to say “I’m doing terrible, actually” without breaking the social contract. If I’m having an awful day, my go-to is “hangin’ in there, how are you?”

The last part is important. Some people don’t want to talk about how you’re doing (maybe they don’t have the emotional bandwidth at the moment, maybe they’re in a hurry, maybe they just don’t care) so give them an out, a clear signal of something else they can discuss without seeming rude. The easiest way is to return the question, but you can also just jump into the imminent topic of conversation, like:

“How are you?”

“Keeping on keeping on. Hey, just wanted to reach out about that thing on page 4, do you have a minute?”

Or if they started the conversation and you don’t know what it’s about, there’s always “Takin’ it one day at a time, eh? What can I do for you?”

The biggest “risk” of this approach is that someone may offer sympathy or ask you what happened, which is a whole new set of protocols. But for me it’s worth it to not have to lie.

Kavita for my ebook collection—mostly tabletop RPGs, but some comics and sci fi as well.

I don’t actually use the web interface that often. I add books to my Kavita library, then scan the OPDS feed into my scratch-my-own-itch mobile app, Bookoscope, and download whatever I want to read onto my tablet from there.

Side note, PDFs are the absolute worst. Even reading them on a full-sized tablet is incredibly annoying. Anybody have any tips/tricks/apps for that?

Mosquito baiting

Is Unreal worse than Unity? I’ve only ever heard people complain about the latter

Ate the plane

https://youtu.be/B5zvp480jMc

That would be Edward Jenner. He saved more lives than anyone else in history, and that number increases by the day. If it were up to me, his birthday would be an international holiday and kids would learn his name in elementary school.

Holy butts, why has no one ever said this sentence to me before

“If you knew what it was, you’d be using it already.”

One of my best friends in high school was a Norwegian exchange student. He was easygoing and smart and we rode the bus together because his host family lived nearby. Some of the funniest conversations of my life happened on those bus rides.

When he went back to Norway we lost touch. I think it must have been difficult for him to be here—the isolation, the culture shock, the language barrier, I can only imagine. Maybe it was a relief to leave our little town in the rearview mirror. But I’m forever glad I met him.

This is a great concept. I hope it catches on.

I participate in a pledge called #50forFOSS. On the first Friday of every month, I choose an open source project and give the maintainer $50, no strings attached. It lets me target small projects that may not have a lot of users, but are valuable to me, as well as bigger ones with more expenses. My mindset these days is that I need to insist on paying for the software I use, because if I don’t, someone else will (i.e. advertisers and venture capitalists, which is bad) or no one else will (i.e. abandonware, which is worse).

Disclaimer: I started #50forFOSS and there’s a very small group of us who are doing it.

Only for the floors that are labeled correctly, though.

Tap-to-pay on credit card chips, too.

Please don’t make me work hard for my memes

True as that may be, I know how to add subtitles to a GIF from YouTube in 10 minutes or less. I don’t know how to do that to a video.

I’m with you there. The only explanation that makes sense to me is if they’re really hurting for cash. And if they are, I honestly don’t have a solution that falls between “go bankrupt” and “sell out our users in the least noxious way we can come up with.”

Do we think anyone would actually opt in?

I’m not saying you’re wrong, just that making it opt-in is probably seen in this case as equivalent to throwing the entire feature in the trash.

“I’m not owned! I’m not owned!” I continue to insist as I slowly shrink and transform into a corn cob