I don't understand the appeal of any of those, least of all Discord itself. It's unsearcheable, focused on immediacy, confusing and full of blinking things. The old Reddit interface (or current HN one!) are unsurpassed IMHO.
Most people are on Discord, joining servers has very little friction (no separate accounts), there's decent bots and mod tools and such, ability to create as many channels per server as you want (e.g. for discussions, media, music, whatever) and participate in text based conversations more or less live. It's also easy to jump into a VC and chat while you play games with friends, share screen, stuff like that.
Most alternatives suck for that purpose. There is search for server members and the "blinking things" keep you up to date with where the new stuff is and I presume give you dopamine hits. It's simply not old school forum software and considerations that'd make sites like that good don't enter the equation at all - which also makes attempts at turning Discord into a support forum for any "organized" group or project misguided at best, but also great for the more casual gaming/interest oriented communities.
It does have a weird source of friction. The need to find an invite to the "server". Sometimes you'll find one but it will be dead. There's no way to search to find a server then join it as far as I know.
That's because you're not in the target market. And I guess not interested in the space.
Discord's key value proposition is that it's a trusted zero friction voice chat with a lot of features.
The workflow that made it huge: organizer creates a server for a game, creates a short link for a voice channel. The organizer then goes to play their game, shares the short link with their group.
The members click the link, write whatever they want as the name, click join and are in the voice chat. Say hi and go into the dungeon to have fun.
Need more? Just share your screen with one click. Streamer mode kicks in and hides all pii in the discord interface. Easy global bindings for push to talk.
If the outing is fun some of them will create profiles and stay in the server and play together again.
It's all very organic and easy, while being trusted as a brand so people don't have to hesitate to click your jitsi.weirdgamer.tk link.
I agree with the previous commenter - I hate Discord for all the same reasons. But you said: "That's because you're not in the target market. And I guess not interested in the space." and this is the bit that frustrates me... I must be the target market because several services I use try to get you to use Discord for support, and some will only provide support via Discord.
Yes! If Discord's appeal is that it's a tool/space to just have fun together in the moment, then fine! but that's exactly the opposite of a support system.
I'm making a suite of simple Windows tray apps that do just one thing. They often have existing equivalents but I think my version is better and/or simpler ;-) All work starting with Win7.
The first three are:
- miniWake: keeps the computer awake
Alternatives: Powertools; USB mouse jigglers
Features: installs without admin rights; triggers invisible mouse events; turns off at LOCK, turns back on at LOCKOFF (saves battery); manual turn off or on via double-click on the icon
- miniRec: records system audio + microphone to mp3/wav
Alternatives: various utilities like Voicemeter, AudioRouter, or some DAWs
Features: does not require any special driver; installs without admin rights; light on resources; "invisible" to third parties (video meetings); auto turn off after 5 minutes of silence (configurable)
- miniCron: system scheduler as a service
Alternatives: NSSM - the Non-Sucking Service Manager; Splinterware
Features: launches any program at any given time (cron like but without cron syntax); kills the current task when the service is stopped; reads and logs stdin/stderr; very light on ressources and very simple
Ah yes, it's a good idea to record microphone and system audio to different files but I ruled against it for simplicity's sake. I wonder how you deal with offset, esp. when the mic comes from a Bluetooth headset? I added an offset option in the config file as this can be up to 2000 ms (2s) in my tests! Also, a console app may frighten the non-technical, casual user?
The talent of Epstein was to offer to each prominent people things they cared about. To Chomsky it was "linguistics"; to Jack Lang (a very public figure, former Cultur Ministry, who just resigned from his position yesterday because of the scandal) it was to make an "art foundation" of some sort, and a movie about his (Lang's) life work.
Bezos paying tens of millions to Trump's current wife to make a "documentary" about her hats is similar. The only difference is, Bezos is not (yet?) accused of statutory rape. But the idea is the same.
You never "bribe" people up front, offering them money in a direct, obvious quid pro quo. You're sincerely excited to contribute to their pet project.
Not OT at all. Emojis everywere are ridiculous. And coding agents love them! They put emojis in Python log lines which inevitably break the console, and of course in web pages. Logs don't need emojis. Not sure if anything does.
I have a very vague idea about how consoles work (I mean we're talking about terminals, like, terminal emulators right?), so probably that's why I don't understand how the usage of emojis break one.
I use a lot of different OSs, and none of the default terminals seem to have any problems with emojis, even cmd on windows (which isn't even default anymore?).
So detaching from the main theme of if the use of emojis is a good idea from the start, may I get more details on how your console breaks? :)
I love using emojis in my log lines, especially symbols for info/warn/error, but it does add another layer of complexity as you have to go through so many things to make sure the text is now rendered in the right font, has Unicode support enabled, etc, etc.
> it doesn't make much sense for the majority of startup companies until they become late stage
Here's what TFA says about this:
> Cloud companies generally make onboarding very easy, and offboarding very difficult. If you are not vigilant you will sleepwalk into a situation of high cloud costs and no way out.
and I think they're right. Be careful how you start because you may be stuck in the initial situation for a long time.
Yes, I too hate all notifications; I don't want to have anything pushed in my face; if I need something or some information I will go look for it.
That said you can do many things with tray apps and tooltips, if you really need to. I have been making Windows tray apps lately; they're nice to make and to use.
I wonder if there would be an interest for a tray app that would pull some specific (configurable) information at regular intervals, that would be discoverable via mouseover?
> I’m a little puzzled about the balloons’ telemetry messages received on the WSPR network, as they have been few and far between.
But wouldn't there be a way to send messages to Starlink satellites instead of WSPR? Is it a problem of power consumption? (It would be great to be able to transmit images, not just GPS pings).
I wrote some code to send SSTV because everything was either proprietary and didn't work, shareware and didn't work (and often with the original author gone Silent Key so no way to get the real version), or under some vaguely-specified licence and written with Tk widgets in Fortran or some damn thing.
I wrote it about 25 years ago and can't currently find it but it's one one of these hard disks in these here blue moving crates somewhere. It'd take less time to recreate than find, I suspect, especially if I also wanted to make it build nicely in gcc from this decade.
It just grabbed from a V4L2 source, and emitted a burst of Robot36 over the soundcard. In conjunction with a heavy-duty Tait T2000-family transceiver I used it to livestream a drive across Glasgow, slowly and noisily, sending one picture per minute which gave the poor PA transistor time to cool a bit ;-)
Starlink is totally oit of picobaloon range by orders of magnitude - we are talking hundreds of mW at most.
At the same time it is true the board (rpi pico usually) could totally support a camera or other high bandwidth instruments - it just does not have the bandwidth to send the data over wspr, possibly with the exception of some flags based on local processing.
AFAIK some poeple have built dual APRS & WSPR pico baloons, but you will still get pictures back only over populated areas due to APRS having in general much shorter range than WSPR.
What makes things count is most often precisely the effort spent on them.
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