Much Blog, Such Wow

RE: the switch to Oragono

All of the questions I'm about to pose start the same: Why?

Why replace charybdis with Oragono?

Why have an internal IRC server when the tilde.chat server exists with a private channel for ~town?

Why not use something that will let you talk with people outside of your own bubble?

For a while now, I've been asking myself that last question: Why is town a bubble? It's like an exclusive club: you can be "safe", with only supportive people around. But why not use tilde.chat? After all, it DOES have a per-tilde private channel (for the sake of town specifically, since nobody else on the planning crew had an issue with all-public channels), and there isn't much of a reason to maintain a private-by-default IRC server except for one reason: (you ready for this?)

town doesn't want outsiders.

They really don't.

tilde.town expects, by virtue of keeping people safe and inside the bubble by default, that they won't have bad people.

The problem is, once bad people exist within ~town, there's no escape.

For now, I'll do my part to continue running ~team and the greater ~verse in ways to promote adoption.

At least you can remove the bad people without being exclusive.

(Postscript: After a while, I've calmed about this. I'm just posting this so you all know my beliefs at the time, no matter whether or not I still believe this. I was going to include some less-than-objective stories with lots of speculation required, but I'll leave it out for the greater good.

Don't see this as an attack.

See this as a wake-up call from a decently long-time member of tilde.town.

--minerobber)

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An open letter to Satya Nadella and Microsoft RE: the acquisition of GitHub

Dear Satya Nadella (and all of the fine folks in charge at Microsoft),

I don't want this to go sour.

Within minutes of the first reports, back when Microsoft buying GitHub was nothing but a rumor, people were already planning to jump ship on a platform they loved beforehand. People were scared, angry, and most of all, upset. When it truly was real, GitLab posted a video on how to migrate to GitLab from GitHub. I don't want petty acts like this to split the open-source community. Everyone in the chatrooms I was in either complained about MS owning GitHub or didn't say anything. In the chatrooms I was in, I was the only one arguing a 3rd standpoint: "Maybe Microsoft can actually pull this off and not ruin GitHub." While I understand that a big company owning GitHub (or any other open-source project) seems bad, I'd like to point out that GitHub is already closed-source, so not much can change. Atom can be forked, and GitHub isn't in charge of much else. If people are truly 100% against this acquisition, I'd point out to them that companies can buy up hosted projects like GitLab and similar. The only way to prevent corporations from getting their hands on your repositories is to host your own Git service, using GitWeb, Gitea, Gogs, or similar.

In few words, I'm going to see how this works out. If Microsoft ruins GitHub, I'll move my repos. Until then, to anyone who is angry about the acquisition, be easy on Microsoft.

And to Microsoft:

Don't fuck this up.

Sincerely yours,

Robert Miles ~minerobber

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AGDQ 2018 and the Future of AGDQ

So AGDQ 2018, as of the writing of this article (01/12/2018 9:14PM EST), has hit $1,012,750. This is a significant moment in any GDQ event, as the passing of $1 million is a huge milestone. However, there's still a problem. You see, GDQ events often pull in $1 million dollars the Wednesday, or Thursday, or even Tuesday of the week they occur. However, this is the Friday of the AGDQ 2018 week. This has only happened once before, coincidentally at the last GDQ event, SGDQ 2017.

Also, at both this event and the last one, there has been one form of controversy or another. At SGDQ 2017, the controversy was a runner being kicked out because people on his couch put on MAGA hats. At this event, the controversy was the chat being put into submode, which prevents non-subscribers from talking in chat.

So, what do I think of the future of GDQ? I feel that the future of GDQ is bleak. As one commenter on Kotaku put it, "Even assholes who troll chat, donate." Because said "assholes" weren't able to participate in chat, many simply didn't watch or donate. GDQ gets 14% of every donation, so not only does the charity lose some of the money it would normally get, the lack of donations also cause GDQ to lose money.

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On religion

Yes. I'm a Christian. No, I don't hate gays. Genesis 1 and 2 don't contradict each other because Genesis 2 talks about plants with thorns, which didn't exist before sin. I'm a Christian, but I'm not a bad person because of it.

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