The act of creating something deserves to be celebrated, even if it doesn't meet your standards for quality! Good job!
3,881 karma · joined August 8, 2015
Using a free(er) platform like Android (compared to iOS) affords me this opportunity for customization.
SS13 is a wonderful game, but it's so old and its codebase is so messy that people have been trying to remake it for years. Attempts had mostly gone nowhere until all of a sudden SS14 took off with a few dozen OSS developers. Now they're making fantastic progress (see [1]) and have a game that isn't just playable, but enjoyable! (Not to mention being almost completely on-par with SS13 at this point, with several distinct maps and hundreds of items ported over.)
[0]: https://spacestation14.io [1]: https://spacestation14.io/post/22-05-25-progress-report-34/
A few years out of date...
At one point I did a project using Inform 7's world modeling as the underlying "details engine" for a game, to help make the game world feel more realistic. It was somewhat clunky, but the potential is there for someone to do something like this in the future :)
Agile processes definitely provide some of the structure mentioned here, but I've found that they lack sufficient guidance on the optimal size of work chunks- this article provides a compelling case for work chunks (milestones) of a specific size, and that alone is quite valuable to me as a concept.
It's a competition where kids learn not just how to program the robot, but important critical thinking skills, how to appropriately attack a problem, and how to make a measurable impact in their communities.
FIRST makes it easy for parents to start a team for a small group of kids in your neighborhood, and provides structure, mentorship, and the competition format at the end of the season.
Disclosure: I occasionally judge FLL events. These kids are some of the most amazing and inspiring children I've encountered, and I recommend it simply because I think it's a fantastic program.
If the new Apple TV can actually pair with those, that's a big deal.
Does this go to some sort of nonprofit or holding entity that's governed by its members? Or do people have to trust the owner?
Strapi [4] is much less stable than it looks. It's pretty buggy, isn't designed very well, and is just all around messy. I used it in production once and never will again.
Next.js [2] is well designed and well maintained, but is totally a frontend framework. It's not just "missing a few things" on the backend side, there is no backend side. Works great if you already have an API (JAMStack) but can't stand alone in the way that Rails or Laravel might be able to.
Despite being the youngest, RedwoodJS [1] is the best option here. I was actually involved pretty early on as a contributor on the project before I had to step away (unrelated, personal reasons) and was seriously impressed by their progress. TPW runs a tight ship, and all of the devs that work on the project are smart and amazing. They ship very quickly and it's rapidly growing into the closest thing to a Rails competitor in Javascript. I wouldn't be surprised if it takes the JS world by storm in a year or two.
When people complain that people are increasingly finding themselves in echo chambers, and that "people don't talk to people from the other side," connectedness across the graph is dropping, while connectedness within cliques remains strong or increases.
Under the heading "Why Facebook Doesn't Ban Everyone", Lincoln explains how social network theory can identify individuals in networks that are influential. This isn't an exaggeration - basic graph heuristics (such as comparing in/out degree of an individual relative to other parts of the social graph) can easily identify such individuals. Censoring those individuals can have an amplified effect on the graph structure as a whole.
For an example of how just a few individuals can make a big difference on graph structure, check out Watts & Strogatz's 1998 paper, Collective dynamics of 'small-world' networks [0][1]. I'd highly recommend reading it - it's very short and easy to understand.
Essentially, a small number of connectors connecting with random individuals can seriously reduce the average number of steps to connect any two individuals. If Facebook wanted to stop the spread of a narrative that they didn't like, censoring just these few individuals would make it much harder for information to flow through the graph as a whole, and hardly anyone would notice (since Facebook's only censoring a few people.)
Scary.
Yet the large actors still publish malicious updates to extensions. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Extensions these days go through a rigorous review process, and Google regularly shuts down / imposes arbitrary restrictions against extensions due to changing policies.
I understand the importance of strong moderation to protect users from malicious extensions, but I believe Google is using that as an excuse to further lock down their store, increasing barriers to entry and making it harder for developers to build software to extend the most popular browser in the world without Google's blessing.
Firefox also permits self-hosting extensions signed through their store, providing more freedom for extension developers.
Chrome has features to dissuade users from installing extensions from outside the Chrome Web Store. If you load an unpacked extension, Chrome will issue an ominous warning (something like “this extension is untrusted, click here to uninstall”) on every launch.
One could argue this is for security, but this change was implemented around the same time that Google disabled the ability to self-host extensions that install into Chrome. Really this is a mechanism to shut out independent extension developers from any potential plausible third-party distribution method that doesn’t rely on the Chrome Web Store (which Google controls and aggressively moderates.)
Use Firefox.