ZorbaTHut
2mo ago
Absolutely! I'm hoping to get a somewhat-serious public release in the next few months.
ZorbaTHut
2mo ago
Is he really busy with work? Life in general?
Pretty much, yeah.
(ping @TitaniumButterfly @Southkraut)
So, here, lemme give a sort of tl;dr of The Shape Of Zorba's Life.
I vaguely divide most of my tasks into a few categories. In no particular order, those are:
- Sanity
- Family
- Survival
- Professional hobby
- Unprofessional hobby
The tricky part is that I usually have time for at most four of them. Unsurprisingly, Sanity, Family, and Survival end up in those four. They're kinda important.
In my case, I work in the game industry. So "professional hobby" is making my own game studio. "Unprofessional hobby" is The Motte. I end up having to choose between them, and for a while, I was aiming most of that spare time at The Motte in the hopes I could make it start paying for itself; if The Motte could take over Survival (which more-or-less gets summarized as Money, usually in the form of Day Job) then suddenly "I have time for four of them" starts looking pretty good.
Well, I'm not going to say that outcome is impossible, but at the moment, it seems pretty unlikely. I took a serious shot, it did not immediately work out. This meant I had the long-term choice of sacrificing professional-hobby in favor of unprofessional-hobby, or vice-versa.
That whole "can I make The Motte take over Survival" thing also applies to the game studio, though. And I found myself in a situation where I had some really promising ideas and tools, which made it seem like I had a plausible shot at making Professional Hobby actually become my day job, thus subsuming Survival entirely, if I started working for myself and managed to get something viable before I ran out of savings.
And so that's what I'm fundamentally focusing on. If I can collapse Professional Hobby and Survival into one thing, then I have spare time to keep working on Motte stuff. But I just can't afford to get too distracted from this, because the bank account isn't going to last forever.
So the tl;dr is that I ended up needing to triage and The Motte got the short end of the stick. That doesn't mean it's abandoned - I really do want to work on it - that just means that there's enough stuff I have more immediate needs for that it has to be sidelined for now.
I will say that the mods have done a great job of keeping this place going. Its current survival is entirely thanks to them and I am extremely grateful. Fingers crossed that my current project is successful - in fact I'm looking at a major milestone coming up in a week that'll give me a much better sense of whether this is viable - and if it is, then I'll be able to come back to The Motte and put some serious effort into long-term plans that I simply never managed to work on.
Until then . . . keep it up, y'all.
ZorbaTHut
6mo ago
How do you in-person voters... remember anything meaningful?
I go over the sample ballot, make my choices, and either mark them down on the sample ballot or print them out.
Then I bring that in as a cheat sheet and just follow it.
I used to write it down on my phone, but the state I'm in disallows phones while voting, so, paper solution.
ZorbaTHut
6mo ago
@OliveTapenade It's treating it like a relative link; without an http:// or https:// in front of it, it's considered relative to this current directory. Note that it's not even The Motte doing this, The Motte is dutifully linking to whatever you ask for, that's web browser behavior.
If you paste it in raw, then The Motte says "oh shucks that's a website link isn't it? I'd better do all the appropriate processing!" and dutifully stuffs a http:// on the front of it.
Fix it by adding an https:// .
(click the "view source" button)
We should probably be autoprefixing it with https:// but I think this is literally the first time this has come up :)
ZorbaTHut
9mo ago
Looks like it blocks the post entirely. I can't find anything obvious that would cause notifications to not be sent - maybe @Folamh3 is looking in a weird place? Maybe there's a setting?
I vaguely recall trying to reproduce this a while back and failing. @Folamh3, if it's worth the time to you, you're welcome to make a few accounts on https://dev.themotte.org and see if you can figure it out. If you can come up with a repro case, that'll make it a whole ton easier to fix :)
ZorbaTHut
11mo ago
I've actually got a code review pending for it right now, but it's one of those annoyingly fiddly changes :/
ZorbaTHut
11mo ago
(whoops sorry this took a while to see)
So, the janitor system is actually working, mostly as hints to existing mods - I've never rigged it up to actually take actions, but it does give ratings on whether a comment is good or bad. It's pretty dang accurate! If it's uncertain, the comment is usually borderline, but there's a lot of comments that have extreme "this is good" or "this is bad" ratings and it's quite rare to disagree with them.
It will surprise nobody to learn that there are random janitor assistants who are actually more consistent than the mods. I did use this as a tiebreaker during the Doge process.
I've wanted to rig this up to be more automatic - and also to do quality contributions - but life is unfortunately pretty packed right now for various reasons and haven't had time :/
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
I'm honestly impressed at how we can write rules that are so ridiculously lax that I would never expect anyone to run into them, and have people run into them anyway.
Just go post about something every week! Here's a nerd making goat noises! Here's some nerds comparing cards in a game they've never played! Here's another nerd taste-tasting AI-created cocktails! this is not hard
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
Alright that took longer than it should have, but it should be fixed now. Let me know if you have trouble!
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
Is this really where the bar of a slur is?
Yeah, frankly. We keep it pretty low.
Are you going to apply this level of sensitivity to everyone?
Yes. If you think someone's pushing the line, report it; if it gets approved and you disagree, you're welcome to ping modmail if you feel strongly about it.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
Alright, I actually am going to push back on this. (Ping @AhhhTheFrench so you don't feel like you're grumbling into the void.)
Courtesy is the first section in the rules. That's not an accident, it's literally the first goal. And yes, this sometimes - probably often - means that we tell people not to speak as if they're in a group of friends, but rather as if they're in a group of professional colleagues. The reason is that incivility gradually corrodes what we're going for here. Not all at once, but one step at a time; it gets normalized, it gets standardized, and a significant part of the possible community finds that the place is now hostile.
From the rules:
Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument.
Some of the things we discuss are controversial, and even stating a controversial belief can antagonize people. That's OK, you can't avoid that, but try to phrase it in the least antagonistic manner possible. If a reasonable reader would find something antagonistic, and it could have been phrased in a way that preserves the core meaning but dramatically reduces the antagonism, then it probably should have been phrased differently.
"Leftoids" is dismissive towards roughly half the population and there's just no good reason for it; you're not getting anything out of it for the argument, you're just using a slur against your outgroup.
Don't do that, please.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
You're welcome to give it a shot!
Note that the "new comment" markers are entirely clientside via cookie, we're not storing those serverside. There may be performance issues with trying to make this all work - I don't want one SQL query per user when someone reads a page, for example. But I'm pretty sure this should be solvable, and it will of course be easier to solve with a working prototype.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
They do, yeah - a character is a character, it doesn't do anything smarter than that.
That said, it looks like you're at 20k characters, which . . .
. . . okay, yeah, looking into it again, posts have a 20k limit and comments have a 500k limit.
Let me pester some mods and see if there's a reason we did it this way or if we should just go ahead and relax posts to also be 500k.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
Alright, so it turns out that it won't let you change nothing :V
If you add a single letter do you still have the issue? I'm currently unable to reproduce this locally, unfortunately.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
If you hit "edit" and just try to leave it as it is, do you still get the same error? It's possible editing is using the old wordcount limit, which should be fixed.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
repost because server wipe, if that’s cool with everyone
For what it's worth, I consider "the server got wiped so I'm reposting it" to be 100% justified.
. . . even if it makes naraburns's job a little harder from having duplicate copies of quality contributions.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
Target was algorithmically detecting pregnancy over a decade ago.
If Facebook doesn't have data regarding these symptoms, it's either because they haven't bothered or because they actively are trying to avoid it.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
I'm not convinced the work is worth it, given the development effort of putting this all together, the fact that some information is still missing, and that it'll just fall into the mostly-unknown chasm soon anyway.
If someone else wants to do the development work I'd strongly consider running it, though.
Here's the dump from the Quality Contribution database, for anyone who had one of those.
Also, pewrqqrwe did some work extracting posts from archive.org and ended up with this list. (Edit: revised version with more posts.)
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
Nah, this was honestly expected - the login system is based on user ID, and if the user IDs get reset and you get a token for a now-available user ID, that token is still valid once the site reboots. No particularly great mystery.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
I've tried that before and what inevitably happens is I just end up ignoring the success notices.
In this case, however, I'm using healthchecks.io to handle this; it'll start pinging me on its own if it doesn't get regular notifications of success. So unless that service goes down, we're good.
To be ever safer, the script that sends the success notification should pull some independent confirmation the backup actually occurred, like the output of ls -l on the directory the database dumps are going to, and should include this in the notification text. Without this, a 'success' email only technically means that a particular point in a script was reached, not that a backup happened.
Ideally, yeah. In this case it's worth noting that it's taking full drive images, so it's, uh, kind of hard to do an ls. I guess I could run it as root and do a whole loopback thing to mount the image but I don't think that's likely to be necessary.
I should definitely do that - I actually started a #workshop thread on a Discord for much the same reason, though unfortunately a lot of stuff that I'm doing is backend and hard to share in interesting ways. But I'll see if I can start posting there when I do have things of interest :)
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