Note: this isn't a critique of his choice, just a mention of something others might find useful.
Source: I had a T480, P51, X1 Carbon and now P1 Gen 6, they're pretty good. Also have a MacBook M1 Air for note taking and stuff.
12" is on the smaller side, but it's also a 2in1 that can be used in a desk setup as an extra monitor. I'd ship them a cheap lightning portable monitor, simple keyboard+mouse pack, and for $100 more they have a durable portable laptop and a simple two monitor desk setup for dev.
https://knowledgebase.frame.work/what-countries-and-regions-...
Surely, there are other places on the internet where NGO's are politely criticized for getting kids the wrong free laptops - those likely contain valuable advice on what brand of computer you can buy
Sounds untrustworthy. Bangladesh's standard of living is roughly on par with India's, so cheap Chinese laptops should be fairly common there, and repairs for such laptops should be pretty available.
So, instead of one MacBook, you could buy about 10 laptops for 10 Bangladeshi kids, and developing on them would be about as comfortable as on a MacBook.
I agree the critic sounds misplaced though, he wanted a Macbook. However not because all the other models are complicated to fix in his land.
Just takes them to hire the right marketing genius and suddenly you'll be subscribing to send more than 5 messages a week.
I do use discord myself. But as a company I wouln't put all my communication data in the hands of a company that could just do the same as Slack did, in some foreseeable future.
This shows that many people still have no idea what's going on. That you shouldn't use Slack OR Discord.
It's really incredible, although expected.
Inb4 "IRC sucks"... Jabber/XMPP exists since late 00's (at least ready enough compared to the first versions) and there are pretty fine clients for every OS.
I agree that walled gardens are a trap. But you're not going to convince people to move to free solutions without being able to recognize clearly why they walled gardens are so attractive in the first place.
Right, I misunderstood your last line. I initially took you to mean, "We've had IRC since forever and Jabber since the early 00's..." Reading it again, I now understand you to mean, "Before you say 'IRC sucks', which I agree with, better protocols like Jabber have been around since the early 00's."
IRC, because of its simplicity, can be layered, so adding encryption is trivial if we want to hide from the server (FISH). By default IRC servers show hostname of the user, but that depends on the network; for example LinkNet hides it.
"Lots of clients" -- that's actually a problem. "Oh, you want to have a quick chat with experts in our community? First, here's a list of 50 IRC clients, half of which haven't been updated since 2003, all of which have different advantages and disadvantages. Go through and choose one and go through all the configuration. Oh, and you wanted to be able to read something someone wrote while your laptop lid was shut? Like, maybe you're not in the same timezone as many of the contributors? You're going to need to find an always-on server and set up this IRC bouncer. Also, because of spam, we only allow registered users to post, so you're going to need to type these runes in the command-line and make yourself a certificate."
Matrix certainly had its warts when we switched, but it was still an immediate quality-of-life improvement, particularly for newcomers.
I mean, HAM radio is basically a chat room with an entrance exam; there's certainly something nice about having communities full of people with that sort of filter up front. And, for a charity designed to teach kids to code, maybe helping them munge around with IRC clients is a bonus. But for a normal community, IRC isn't the right tool for the job.
What's your definition of "engagement" here? Because it makes me think of social networking tactics to keep you ... well ... engaged ... the longest time possible.
So unfortunately Matrix is a dead end. The matrix foundation gave up control 2 years ago. Matrix is now controlled by Element.io corporation and they only care about their government hosting contracts. It's really only viable if you have a significant constant money stream to pay for the ever increasing server resources like governments/corps.
IRC persists. It is the text chat layer of the internet which is the platform. Trying to build the entire internet into your text chat platform, and storing everything, is the kind of insanity only for-profit operations do... and eventually die from. Whereas IRC being a dumb pipe with lists of IPs associated with sockets will live forever. And cheaply.
https://matrix.org/ecosystem/servers/
> and there's literally no way to trim data from the db in synapse or everything breaks.
https://element-hq.github.io/synapse/latest/admin_api/purge_...
https://element-hq.github.io/synapse/latest/message_retentio...
And your links to synapse features ("Please note that, as this feature isn't part of the Matrix specification yet, the use of m.room.retention events for per-room retention policies is to be considered as experimental.") may describe certain synapse functionality but in practice is doesn't work and the db keeps growing as does IO load. The compression thing is an attempt at mitigation because the protocol just doesn't handle it.
In my eyes they're practically the poster child for an organization who could (and arguably should) be running their own solution on their own servers.
Perhaps self-hosted Revolt Chat [1] which I've been keeping an eye on but I don't have any first hand experience with it. There are many more solutions in this space though.
Neither Revolt nor others are unfortunately at the right level of maturity to be adopted seriously. The team is doing a great job, but it’s still extremely basic.
Discord with all its warts is still the best way to have group calls in a casual setting.
Even under accessibility you can only change things like contrast
A quick Google search says that for iOS 15+:
>To change per-app settings for any application, including Discord, on an iPhone or iPad, go to the Settings app > Accessibility > Per-App Settings. Tap Add App, select Discord from the list, and then customize settings like Display & Text Size to alter the app's appearance or behavior without affecting other applications.
Unfortunately it’s still somewhat screwed up with the sidebar font being too big compared to the message text