rand_alpha19

joined 4 months ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago

The best way to "try before you buy" is to go to keyboard meetups in your area if they're available. Unfortunately, that does leave a lot of folks out, but if you live in a city that will probably be your best bet.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

I have a split ortholinear keyboard that I made with parts from Keebio, I fucking love it. It has really reduced wrist strain for me.

It's the Levinson Rev. 3, which is relatively cheap (this is an expensive hobby just FYI) if you want to get into keyboards.

Edit: Levinson Rev. 3 was discontinued but the BFO-9000 is still a good option for a no-frills dip into things.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Maybe you could read the article and learn something:

But the tiny electronic devices remain a vital means of communication in some areas - such as health care and emergency services, thanks to their durability and long battery life.

"It's the cheapest and most efficient way to communicate to a large number of people about messages that don't need responses," said a senior surgeon at a major U.K. hospital, adding that pagers are commonly used by doctors and nurses across the country's National Health Service (NHS). "It's used to tell people where to go, when, and what for."

Smartphones do a lot of things that might not be needed (look into how many different sensors they have). Sometimes a person doesn't have access to a charger or time to charge a device and running out of battery could mean someone dies.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

You say that like I'm unaware - maybe I should needlessly remind you that most of these fines are generally in the millions of dollars. A step in the right direction is not a bad thing.

Regardless, I'm not sure shareholders will think of it that way if the anti-trust practices continue and the fines accrue. The EU likes to be punitive when their orders are ignored.

[–] [email protected] 67 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I'm glad that corporations are actually receiving fines that are commensurate with their earnings and scale. Hopefully it's enough to get them to not do this shit.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

That's great - I am obviously not talking about you in that case. I understand why people want to use it, I just don't think Discord's features are good enough to justify the mass adoption and the walled garden and UI are bad.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

Yes, that's how I ended up there too. At the time, Skype sucked and Mumble/Ventrilo/etc. were seen as too old-school for my friends (and a lot of them didn't have PCs, just smartphones). We also tried Google Meet, Zoom, and Facebook Messenger at various points but Discord always seemed like the most reliable.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago

Yes, exactly! At this point, some of these communities have been on Discord for years and have specialized bots for certain tasks. They don't want to start over, and I don't want them to either - there's tons of real work that these communities have put in. I think that these messaging services that want to make headway in the space Discord occupies need to reduce the friction in switching because a lot of Discord admins do believe that the feature set is better, they just can't easily move over.

This happens to organizations all the time and it's a known issue - Discord communities are no different. I'm hoping something comes along in the next few years if it doesn't already exist in its infancy right now. Even at the user level, I know many people are confused about Matrix. I don't know how exactly to fix these issues, but they need to be priorities.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

My wife and I really like Agricola. It's a farming-based people-placing game created in Germany for 2-4 players (with the base game), but there is an expansion for 5-6 players. We do play with a decent amount of house rules, though.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago (2 children)

We're not fixing Discord's problems, oh my god. We're trying to get their existing users to go somewhere else even though it's what's familiar and Discord works for them.

Also it's definitely possible to code an import tool that scrapes a given server for info on how to structure things on the new platform, so idk what you think you're gaining by insulting my comparison to an aspect of a service that makes users motivated to switch.

I don't know who shat in your coffee, but get a fucking new cup.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Unfortunately, a lot of fandom communities, video games, and (ugh) hobbyist development projects have Discard servers instead of a forum or similar.

It provides a weird IRC-but-not-really type experience that is similar to MSN in some ways. A lot of younger people flock to it because they find computer stuff difficult and they just want it to work, be easy, and have an app. The UI is trendy even though it's horrible to actually navigate due to all the wasted space and buttons.

I really just think it caught on at the right time, though the video calling is pretty good. What I have a problem with is that you need to join a server to access any information inside of it, so it's not searchable from outside of the Discord ecosystem. For dev projects or large communities, that sucks and makes the internet a worse place.

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