SamWhited

Yah, it's not the distance of the houses that matter (well, it does, but it's not the whole story), it's the distance between amenities. Like I said, the actual town I grew up in was terrible. It's 30-45 minutes to get anywhere and most things are stand alone. There's a shopping mall kind of development (Walmart, chain restaurants, etc.) on one side of town, but to get to most of the housing you have to drive 30 minutes. The nearest coffee shop is in another development at least 45 minutes away from both of those places, etc.

Meanwhile, the other nearby town I mentioned has plenty of outlying farms that are pretty far away, but when they do go into town to go to the grocery or whatever they can also walk into the coffee shop, or the little stores or whatever and have chance encounters with their in-town neighbors. Even among the farm areas there's a coffee shop / pub that everyone goes to at the end of the day. There's even a dance hall that used to be a one room school house and now gets re-purposed for monthly dances. You don't get that in the suburb I live in now where having anything like that in a residential or agricultural area is forbidden by the zoning code.

Similarly, back before cars sure you didn't pop into town as regularly, but everyone knew when events were happening and when you did go into town for something everyone was there and things were relatively close together and easy to get to (once you were there already, I mean).

no that's fair, it's been a problem for a long time.

yah, absolutely; like I said in another post, small towns near where I grew up are frequently that way. You enjoy the city vibe you live in the apartments or houses right off the square. You don't, you live on one of the outlying farms (and even those in one case that I can think of have small neighborhood establishments; they all use the same farmers machine shop to fix stuff in one case, or there's a random coffee shop/pub way out that the surrounding places frequent, etc.) and when you go into town to go to the hardware store or the grocery or whatever you still have lots of opportunities for chance encounters because of the mixed zoning and way everything is built fairly close (so sure you have to drive to get to town, but then once you're there you walk around, do errands, stop in for a coffee, etc. without having to think about how you're going to get around as much).

As opposed to the actual town that I grew up in nearby where everything is spread way the hell out and you have to go on a giant 5 lane highway to get to walmart on one side of town and the hardware store on the other and 30 minutes in another direction to get to a coffee shop, etc.

It likely depends on the rural area. In the middle of North East GA where I grew up, it's about the same, social isolation is becoming a huge problem because you're forced to drive long distances and plan ahead to meet with people.

In another small town right up the street they have a thriving main street area and the housing is mostly built around that with the exception of outlying farms. It's a smaller town, but chances are you can walk over to the square and everything you need is right there, so they have a much more vibrant feeling town even though it's smaller.

I'm not expert though, that's just my suspicion for why they're different having grown up in the area.

Outside of the software world I'm also working on opening a Bike Shop and frame building studio. I'm hoping that one day I can actually make a small living on frame building since I don't do software for my day job anymore, but I'm not quite ready to build for other people yet (so far I've only built frames for myself and I'd like to thoroughly strength test them before I risk putting someone else on one of my creations!)

If you're in the Atlanta, GA area and need bicycle work done, hit me up! No job is too big or too small. I particularly enjoy building wheels if you want a sweet custom wheel set, but I do it all (including Mountain Bike fork and suspension work that many shops won't do).

https://www.atlbikeshed.com/

As a personal project during my free time I'm currently working on adding more accessibility features, specifically screen reader compatibility, to my Terminal User Interface XMPP/Jabber client, Communiqué. Unfortunately, as far as I can see there's no actual way to make a TUI compatible with screen readers (reach out on the issue tracker, fedi, or xmpp, see link below if you know otherwise or have experience here, please, I'd love to pick your brain!), so my current plan is to re-write the UI with whatever TUI toolkit makes it easiest to also have a CLI/prompt mode that we can specifically design to be reader compatible.

https://codeberg.org/mellium/communique-tui/

At least in the U.S. (and likely elsewhere) the design of the suburbs encourages neighborhoods with individual houses and very little walk able space (occasionally there are sidewalks or parks in the richer areas, but developments may be large and they're not evenly spaced throughout). Exclusionary zoning in the U.S. has also reduced the number of "third spaces" (coffee shops, malls, grocery stores, barber shops, etc. where people congregate and meet) near or in neighborhoods. This means fewer chance encounters since you have to plan to both go out in a car to meet. You have to find a friend then say "let's go get drinks at 13:00 across town at this place" instead of just happening to walk into the small neighborhood grocery and seeing each other. It's even worse in the exurbs where large housing developments have been created with no amenities nearby, sometimes within upwards of an hour drive!

There are a number of good books on how the built environment affects our social life, if you're interested. It's not specifically about suburbs but "Palaces for the People" by Eric Klinenberg is one of my favorites that covers a lot of this sort of thing.

There's a quote from Bill McKibben's forward to "Creating Cohousing" by Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett that I think about every time someone brings this up (it's about the U.S., but it applies to lots of other places and you may recognize your own countries development model here too, or not):

"For fifty years, our economic mission in America, at its core, has been to build bigger houses farther apart from each other. And boy have we succeeded: a nation of starter castles for entry-level monarchs, built at such remove one from the next that the car is unavoidable."

You're a person after my own heart; thanks for working towards a more connected world!

In school I worked as an intern for a U.S. defense contractor (which I feel rather bad about now, but that's neither here nor there). Every now and then some important general or captain type would show up for a meeting and walk around and look at what all the various labs were doing. When they came to the room where all the interns sat we would all pull up hacker typer and just furiously type away while they were looking in the door.

The important person would always be very impressed and say what a good job we were doing, and our boss who was showing them around (and knew exactly what we were doing) would have to nod and sweat bullets and then would get furious with us afterwards (but it was worth it and we did it every time we knew someone was coming to do an inspection).

ouch; that does sound unfortunate, I'll look into it, thanks.

In the U.S. it really depends what state you're in. Some states have co-ops as a specific business vehicle and in many of them the co-op model is very different. There are big farm co-ops, EMCs, etc. in the U.S. (Land-o-Lakes and Florida Natural Oranges come to mind, I believe they're both fully farmer owned), but I'm not super familiar with them or how their model works, but in Georgia where I am at least co-ops tend to work in one of two ways:

For smaller co-ops that don't bring in members very often or who are just getting started they often create an LLC and put in the articles of incorporation that all future members will receive an equal share and equal voting rights. This does require filing paperwork for every new member, but keeps taxes easy.

For co-ops that expect to have lots of members rapidly (consumer co-ops that sell shares in their store to whomever wants one, for example) they normally form a corporation and allocate a certain number of shares up front and indicate that any member has equal voting rights, etc. this makes the taxes harder, but is a lot less paperwork since you have to file stuff about the number of shares sold at the end of the quarter (or whenever, I forget the exact reporting details, been a while since I've done this) but not every single time you add a member.

Georgia (and a lot of other states) also have specific laws for EMCs and other specific types of co-ops, so it's really fragmented. Take this with a grain of salt, it's just two examples of how a lot of smaller co-ops do things.

I know they said they test with skin stand-ins, but I still feel bad for all the grad students who had to handle and try to delicately slice with all that paper. You know they got a fair amount of real world data too doing all that!

There's a specific comment in the middle that I think the title refers to where someone mentions that this has already been merged into the paid version, but now suddenly they can't get reviews for the free version:

https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/pull/24257#issuecomment-23...

I don't know how they're run internally, but they seem to have merged a lot of good features that the Codeberg folks developed, so they must do at least a bit more than bicker.

What controversial PRs have they merged? I haven't heard about that and it makes me a bit nervous, but I'm not finding anything obviously wrong searching for it.

Start.coop (https://www.start.coop/) comes to mind, but I know I've read about others as well. I don't recall what their exact model is, so it likely doesn't match perfectly with what you're describing.

The article talks about this extensively; both the benefits, and the difficulty hiring American workers because of our (I'm assuming "our", but I suppose I don't know, there are plenty of other countries with similar cultural norms) more individual, selfish, culture.

There are more of them, but good design "just works" and so goes mostly unnoticed.

Actually, I wonder if there's a word for this effect?

By the members; we all pay a tiny bit into the co-op each month. Most people pay 1 USD or GBP per month, if you use some of the other services we offer through organizational memberships in other co-ops (ie. we're a member of meet.coop for video calls, May First Co-op for Nextcloud and email and what not, etc.) then some people pay a bit more (normally no more than 3 to 5 USD or GBP).

Don't do all the businesses in Paris, just do the ones you frequent the most. Google doesn't have all the businesses in Paris either (or at least, in Atlanta I run into ones that they don't have too or that they have but it's completely wrong, at an old location, etc. fairly frequently).

Interestingly, in Atlanta I've had the opposite experience. In town OSM always seems to be better (Google has a lot of outdated open hours and the like). Outside of town in the cheaper burbs which is the only place I can afford to live though few people are editing OSM and it's pretty out of date.

That being said, I switched to Organic maps years ago. For 90% of places I go, it turns out I go to them repeatedly day-to-day, so I added them to the map the first time and update them when I go there and the hours have changed. Then they're on the map the rest of the time when I need to look up hours or what not so I rarely have anywhere around here that I go to that's not on the map anymore. When I do, I add it and next time it's on there and it works well enough 99% of the time.

I'm struggling with what you meant by "it's just a language thing", that is of course true and what I was pointing out. For the purpose of good communication, everything is a language thing and language things are important.

When we say "the police union isn't a labor union", we're people rejecting them from the classification even though they use the word because we don't think they fit in with our values. That's because we have labor (movement) values. You could also talk about any group of employees getting together and acting towards a common goal and call that a union, or a labor union, that wouldn't mean that everyone else automatically means the same thing. In this case, the poster didn't mean that.

This whole thing is a misunderstanding of how the US system works. None of this is a legislative function, it is a determination by a rule making body. While I agree that the courts are often overworked and we need to vastly expand the number of judges to make sure cases are heard on time, this isn't the root of the reason the functions of the NLRB or the SEC aren't handled by the judiciary. It's that they're simply not judicial.

Instead, congress has designated some rule making authority to a group of experts, this group of experts is an executive body doing executive work, so it's normally under the executive branch. This body makes rules that have to follow any laws set down by congress, which is one check, and the courts can settle disputes between someone who has to follow the rules and the rule making body, or congress and the rule making body, etc. which is another check. The rule making body makes the initial determination on whether it's rules have been followed not because they're taking on some function of the judicial, but because they're the experts who know what their own rules mean. If they get it wrong, willfully abuse that power, etc. the judicial is still there. It's separation of powers all the way down. If you removed them from the executive and put them in the judicial you'd be giving some judge rule making authority and the ability to interpret those rules later. The whole point is to separate that between two branches of government.

"Labor" isn't being used in the dictionary definition of "doing work", here, it's being used in the sense of "the labor movement".

There's nothing magical about a union, at the end of the day it's people working towards a common goal and it's only as good as the people in it who make it happen. If it's you and a few of your coworkers who are learning to work together and strategize towards common goals while you prepare for marching on the boss to try and make change, it will be a good organization. If it's a bunch of greedy cops who joined the police force because they have a power complex, it's going to be the same when they all get together too.

I mean, copy/paste is a thing, I'm not suggesting you have to always type out every single character. Just know what's being imported.

I have a distinct memory from the first Go contributor summit where I brought this up (I have no idea what we were discussing or what it was in response to) and the attitude of every other developer at the table was "yah, but we special cased this after it caused problems with crypto/rand, math/rand so goimports is fixed now and it's fine".

And then it happened again with every IDE. And with other packages that haven't been special cased yet. And with… I dunno, I never could convince anyone but it just seems like a terrible idea to me. Please just write out your imports, it doesn't take that long. :(

I really enjoyed this! I've only tried to do this once and it was a bit of a failure (nobody showed up on the day despite a lot of interest), but since then I've done a lot of organizing in other fields (political stuff mostly) and have a lot more experience planning events. The mix of general organizing principals (call people, they're way more likely to show up) and OSM specific stuff in this article (don't map eg. a mall, it's more confusing for newbies) was really helpful and I think there are a lot of tips for organizing other kinds of things; everything from lan parties to mutual aid could benefit from this. Thank you OP!

XMPP has threading at a protocol level, just like Matrix (and it has since the early days). I'm only aware of one or two apps that implement it though, and I'm not really sure why that is (maybe it's just a lot of old-school developers who like older IM clients? Unclear.). I really like the way the Cheogram app does this (it's XMPP under the hood) and am hopeful that other clients will see the way they've done it and start adopting it.

It's not less sustainable than most other FOSS projects, it's just that most other FOSS projects also don't have sustainable funding. If you're just comparing the actual implementations this is true of most XMPP stuff as well.

However, that's not what's being talked about here most likely (though it's unclear since when we just say "Matrix" or "XMPP" we're talking about a protocol, not a service, client, server, etc. so who knows). If you compare Matrix the foundation/company, they are VC funded (the foundation is a bit of a sham after community pressure, it's all the same people and accounts controlling it, so it's a step in the right direction but not really well established). The moment that funding dries up, or the Element people (who still mostly control protocol work) decide they want to monetize the users more, the whole thing will fall apart. That's unsustainable.

Meanwhile proper standards organizations like the IETF or XSF have been going for way longer than 10 years and have proven track records of sustainable funding and membership. People just like to pretend it's worse somehow because they're not building sexy looking software themselves with millions in VC funding. In reality infrastructure is never sexy, and if it's using unsustainable funding models it will fail. This seems like a good reason to pick something controlled by a real standards body over something that's not if you want a long-term community.

(P.S. Since someone once accused me of bias and deliberately not mentioning this even though I'm completely open about it: I have volunteered for the XSF and have done work on both Matrix and XMPP related products and open source projects; I chose to volunteer for the XSF after working on both protocols and evaluating their funding and leadership, so take that for what it's worth)

I would have said the same thing about infinite scrolling; that always feels like a dark pattern to me because it makes it hard to find specific results again, hard (or impossible) to get to any links in the page footer, etc.

I always just want a single page that I can link back to later :)