What I find incredible is just how slow-moving and cruft-filled it has become.

For example, DotNet has had string interpolation since C# 6, back in 2015. That’s a decade, already.

Java recently yoinked their implementation because they just couldn’t make it work.

That’s damning.

Right now - ignoring the wider ecosystem and looking purely at the core language - I am seeing the very latest LTR version of Java as being on-par with C# pre-2010 in terms of continual material improvements and ease of use.

Yikes.

I still use Java, but… yikes.

Another tool is yWriter.

This isn’t a tool for everyone, because it is research-first focused.

What I mean by that is that it’s a little clunky because background/research data is meant to go into it first, and then you are supposed to lean on that content to write your book second.

So for a non-fiction book, you would add all the data and facts and references, for a fiction book you would put in all of the important characters and plot points and things that the characters interact with.

This is so you always have a body of references to work off of so you don’t introduce inconsistencies.

Some people might find this software useful because assembling and fleshing out the underlying data is loads of fun and/or how they prep. Others might need this feature just to keep track of everything that goes into their book, as they might not be able to keep track of things like character quirks very easily in their head.

YMMV.

Confer the right to a portion of the profits, distributed as dividends. Or anything else, really.

Tell me you know nothing about stocks without saying you know nothing about stocks.

A company can create classes of stocks that confer zero ownership in a company.

False equivalence. Many co-ops have a top-down hierarchy for exactly this purpose: execution speed. But the person “at the top” is there as a navigator, not as a captain. They are there to make those quick decisions based on the will - and projected/estimated will, when time is of the essence - of the actual owners, the employees.

There are also many instances of companies - and even entire countries - going months to years without “top leadership” because the entire framework has been effectively empowered to make critical decisions. The effectiveness of the U.S. Military is also based on this doctrine. This allows a company to respond to market forces purely via effective communication between employees and managers coordinating across the different components of the company.

Multiple types of stock. One would be limited to employees, another would be open for purchase by anyone.

The key is in how the various stock types are structured. If control can be monopolized by a non-employee stock type, is the business truly employee owned? I would posit not.

Employee-owned businesses would be the thin edge of the wedge in favour of socialism/communism. It would be a “bridge system” whose purpose is to demonstrate the societal superiority of socialism/communism.

As such, I see your metaphor as being mostly inaccurate. The purpose isn’t to create more tigers, the purpose is to create more house cats. A house cat can still do damage to people, but at a much lower level than any tiger. House cats also provide many benefits even in a fully feral state, by lowering the population of vermin such as rats and mice, helping to blunt the spread of disease and crop/property damage.

Going directly from capitalism to communism is a bridge too far; not enough people know how to do communism correctly, and there would be far too much resistance by those whose greed is benefitted by capitalism and who control the public narrative through media and education (or lack of it).

In fact, as history has shown us, the only way to take that route in a single step is via authoritarianism - to force the population en masse - whereupon authoritarianism gleefully remains resident (as those who are corruptible remain in positions of power that they are loathe to relinquish), invariably employing violence to ensure compliance, and ending up royally f**king up the entire implementation.

With an intermediary like employee-owned businesses, we can both educate and expose, providing society with tangible, real-world, immediately-obvious benefits of communism that erodes resistance and shows people how to be communal in an effective manner.

And there would be other stages beyond that, gradually ratcheting society into a pro-communist state in a careful and thoughtful manner that allows us to build anti-greed, anti-corruption, and anti-authoritarian systems into the mix, to avoid outcomes such as pretty much every other “implementation” to date.

Will have to look into that, thanks.

One of my key implementation requirements, however, will be resiliency, which means simplicity will be a core feature. The more “moving parts”, the easier it will be to break.

flip phone

Almost all such phones are actually smart phones in a flip phone Edgar Suit. Especially if it has maps or YouTube or any kind of an App Store. I see a crapton of flip phones that run Android, which has all sorts of Google spyware piggybacking along.

I think there may be only two or three dumb flip phones or feature flip phones left on the market, and IIRC two are locked to specific networks.

If you want a bona-fide dumb phone, you might be limited to something like the rotary un-smartphone.

or toaster can’t do its basic job offline

pats my 1962 Sunbeam Radiant Toaster

Obligatory Red Dwarf toaster scene

Go for older laser printers. They’re bulletproof, cheap on toner, free of DRM, and even if they only come with an LPT port you can always build your own print server that gives you all the bells and whistles like AirPrint.

About 3-4 years ago I took a bit of a dive into the firmware of IoT devices. The utter lack of security and the amount of information being hoovered up to the mothership made me swear to never build anything “smart” into the renovations of my current home. Sure, there will be automation. There will be CCTV. There will be solar with battery backup for essentials. There will be conveniences of all kinds. But virtually all will be air gapped, incapable of remote rooting, and under my full control.

Hell, even my laser printers are HP models over two decades old - an HP 4050DTN and an HP 5000DTN - that are totally devoid of any DRM or “smart features” and can trivially take generic overstuffed cartridges that can do 20,000 sheets at 5% coverage.

Just to point out, many software dev places are trying to replace developers with AI.

I mean, that’s not going to work out well, what with the high rates at which AI hallucinates. But businesses are going to keep trying until they collapse from all the shitty code that’s been created.

I think you are ascribing to an entire community that which only a few descend to.

I’ve been a mod on forums before, and my only concern was keeping the signal::noise ratio high. In that regard, new “I’ve got the same problem” posts made many months or years after the current thread had gotten wrapped up only increases the noise; a new thread is far more appropriate for the latecomer and anyone who replies to them than continuing to use the old thread.

The difference is temporal, and dependent on the activity level of the forum in question: highly active forums should see new threads spawned after only a few days or weeks, slow forums could see follow-up comments in the original thread still being appropriate many months or even years later.

Being a good mod isn’t about power or control, it is ensuring the forum operates as effectively as possible for it’s users. Sometimes that means spawning new threads, locking old ones, or even banning bad-faith or misbehaving users. Once you moderate, you discover very quickly that moderation is a highly grey zone, with surprisingly little black or white.

This is the attitude that leads us to search results polluted with forum threads with bad, unchallengeable ideas (because they’re locked). Almost all web1 forum are becoming digital flotsam because of these bad moderator opinions.

I thing you replied to the wrong comment, buddy. Nothing in your comment makes any sense in the context of my comment that you replied to. Nowhere did I say anything about locking threads or moderation.

Quote above, reply below was the eMail and Usenet standard from the 70s until Microsoft introduced Outlook, and more importantly, bundled Outlook Express with Windows in the mid to late 90s. Those were the first products that automatically top-posted by default, and especially on Usenet, you could almost always correctly identify an Outlook Express n00b by virtue of them top-posting.

some guy asking your question and being told to start a new thread instead.

If it’s done within a reasonable time period, it’s understandable. Hours or a day or two later depending on the forum.

It’s different when someone saunters in years later with the “I’ve got the same problem!” quip to a post that may or may not actually be the same, and actually expects a response. That, to me, is necroposting.

Bottom-posting eMails and Usenet posts.

Fuck you, Microsoft. Bottom-posting replies is the correct way to reply.

For Photoshop alternatives, I’d start with GIMP for photo editing

I have always felt that GIMP was the ultimate software Camel. As in, designed by a committee to include everything and the kitchen sink without any coherent UI/UX.

It’s the software industry’s 1965 Lada masquerading as a 2024 model.

If it wasn’t for Paint.NET still missing vectorized/sprite-based text (it instantly rasterizes text the moment focus leaves it), I don’t think I could ever use GIMP.

Source: raised in the craziness

On the one hand, my condolences.

On the other hand, congrats at getting free.

On the gripping hand, you have the ability to pull others, who are still capable of being saved, from that cray-cray. You can leverage what you used yourself to help others.