frog 🐸 @ frog @beehaw.org

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2 yr. ago

I wasn't overly familiar with this project, but now that I've read up on it... what in the actual fuck? You could offer me the entirety of Elon Musk's hoard wealth and it would still not be enough to convince me to step foot in that claustophobic death trap.

The thing that really strikes me is that there seems to be very little difference between Musk going "I know how to build transport tunnels better than any of the countless engineers who have built them before!" and that Titan submarine guy going "I know how to build deep sea submersibles better than any of the countless engineers who have built them before!" And it seems likely that Musk's death trap will have a similar ending, only Musk won't be inside it at the time. Techbros seem incredibly unwilling to consider that there are often reasons why things are built the way they are.

Social housing is where it's at! Local government builds the houses, and maintains ownership of them, but rents them out at what is essentially a relatively nominal figure that covers maintenance, admin costs, etc. Everybody that needs a home is guaranteed to get one, and the tenancy is guaranteed to last as long as they need it.

There are many European countries where social housing works very, very well, without those countries not having capitalism. It just requires governments that can be held to account when they don't provide enough housing. This is why social housing floundered in the UK compared to other European countries: a rigged voting system meant it became harder to evict the pro-landlord Conservative party.

“Alice closed her eyes and sighed, savoring the moment before reality came back crashing down on them like the weight of an elephant sitting on them both while being eaten by a shark in an airplane full of ninjas puking out their eyes and blood for no apparent reason other than that they were ninjas who liked puke so much they couldn’t help themselves from spewing it out of their orifices at every opportunity.”

So the dataset included a lot of fanfiction then?

Seems reasonable. Block the doors, but let ventilation continue, and rig up a system to deliver exactly the right amount of food and water to keep them alive. After all, we're not murderous savages. They'll just have to learn to live with sufficent rather than extravagant.

It depends what kind of happy I'm looking for.

Townscaper - this is my go-to for just kind of chilling out. Just plonking down buildings and seeing what configurations they make is just so relaxing. There's no points, no goals, no competition, not even any citizens with needs that must be fulfilled. You just build nice cities.

Slime Rancher - the slimes are cute, and just so happy to be alive. There's something about a bright pink slime bouncing past, with a massive smile on its face as it cries "wheeeee!" that reminds me there are indeed reasons to live.

Maneater - this is a different kind of happy. A cathartic, violent, murderous happiness, as I pop inflatable unicorns, sink yachts, and launch myself at unsuspecting golfers.

Yep, the divide between the 90s and now is so huge! Most of our old content does actually work in modern browsers, surprisingly, but we definitely get some weirdness - alignments of various elements just get completely thrown off, for example. As you note, it's definitely partly due to larger screen resolutions. Where we're running into problems is basically the older WYSIWYG editors just can't handle any of the newer web standards properly, so as soon as we try to make things that have... let's call it the same aesthetic as the late 90s/early 00s, but with adjustments to make it more modern-browser-friendly, the editor can't render it properly. So I'd been hoping to find a modern editor that knows what the current iterations of HTML and CSS are, but will still let us work visually!

Shockingly, it is possible to get the early 00s versions of Dreamweaver and Frontpage working on Windows 10/11. There's a couple people in the group with Dreamweaver from back then, and I managed to get the 2003 version of Frontpage working. They just don't have any clue what to do with CSS that makes, say, navigation easier or the site more adaptive to desktop and mobile screen resolutions. I remember even in the late 00s, Frontpage was struggling with CSS.

I've actually tried out the most current version of Dreamweaver, too. I decided to go back to school last year, and the university gives everyone the full Adobe Creative Cloud suite, which includes Dreamweaver 2021. And it does actually do the job it's supposed to do reasonably well - apart from this bug that just drives me nuts, where it basically just multiplies spaces in the middle of blocks of text and then will not delete them. But obviously even though I have access to this, it's proprietary software requiring a monthly subscription, so it's not a viable option for the whole community.

I might buy that argument if our community was trying to build commercial websites that need a lot of functionality. But we're not. It's literally just a hobby sharing art and writing, for which we need a functional WYSIWIG editor that isn't locked behind a paywall, doesn't try to tie us into a particular hosting platform, and which is compatible with the current web standards.

"Just learn to code" is not particularly helpful advice for a community that is trying to balance an enjoyable hobby (not career) with careers and families.

So I've got a nice idea. If all the billionaires go and live in their bunkers, separate from the rest of humanity, they're not going to need the rest of their stuff anymore, are they? So clearly it should be taken for the public good.

That's fine for those of us that know (some) HTML and CSS, but not so much for those that don't know any. Plus there's also the fact that we just don't want to spend our time writing code, because that takes time away from the actual purpose of the group, which is art and creative writing. A WYSIWIG editor handles the code for us and lets us focus on the part that's actually important to our community.

Well, they did specify that the facial recognition software was there to activate the purchasing interface, rather than to advertise the machine's contents, so I'm not inclined to cut them some slack if the real motivation was to show adverts to people when they're claiming it needs to recognise faces because otherwise no one can purchase anything. (Why can't the purchase interface be activated all the time, rather than requiring sight of a face? Do they think someone other than human beings is going to try to buy something? Is there a widespread problem with squirrels and pigeons buying from vending machines, which requires machines to know when it's a person trying to buy something?)

Exactly. Vending machines have never needed complex ways of detecting when a customer is ready to buy something, because there's really no need for anything beyond having a button available for customers to communicate to the machine "I'd like to buy something". What it sounds like to me is they're using the facial recognition technology to track the demographics of who buys what and how often. Do men like X snack more than Y? Do women buy more in the morning or afternoon? Stuff like that.

The technology acts as a motion sensor that detects faces, so the machine knows when to activate the purchasing interface

This sounds like an excuse to me. I'm a university student in the UK. Our vending machines use a very effective means of letting the machine know we're ready to buy something without using any facial recognition software at all. What we do, right, is press the letter and number buttons that match up to what we want to buy. The machine says how much money the item costs, and then we tap our bank/credit cards to the contactless card reader, just like we would in any other shop. Then the machine dispenses the item.

It's really, really clever how they've invented this way for us to purchase afternoon snacks to help us cope with how annoying our classmates are, and we don't even have to have our faces scanned! Truly the kind of innovative technology you'd expect to find in a university.

Thank you! :)

What about a WYSIWYG editor app like Dreamweaver? I don’t know if there’s any good free ones any more though, now that FrontPage Express is gone.

So weirdly enough, I posted about this earlier today in a different community. My use-case is different to OP's, so I don't think any of the options I'm investigating now would suit them, but the long and short of it is free, standalone WYSIWYG editors are really few and far between now.

We have actually tried WordPress! I think one person is still using it, but the rest of us had various issues with it, whether that was an inability to export to a basic format, or security issues. The last straw for me was when I couldn't log in for a week because one random file had an exploit that was being bombarded with attacks, and the security plugins did their job and blocked logins, but that also locked me out as well. My feeling is that WordPress is just so widely used that it's a big target for attacks.

But thanks for the suggestion! :)

I'd already checked the alternativeto lists prior to posting; sadly all the options either have one or more features missing, or else have been discontinued.

I am a bit short on MPDEWAKEHVHIUCVJTWCJIJ if you still have any? 😁

It's not quite what I'm looking for, but thank you for the suggestion nonetheless. It's good to have more options to investigate! :)

Definitely something to be proud of! :D

It's not quite what I'm looking for, but I appreciate the suggestion. I'd rather look at options that turn out to be not quite right than not have any options at all. :)