At least up north around where I live manhole covers are often also either holes or bumps in the road due to things shifting around from the freeze/thaw cycles. Basically potholes with a purpose. Hitting bumps is bad for your car, so that’s a pretty good reason to avoid them. Though I’d never swerve around a bump if I was going to come close to someone else, since that’s much more dangerous.
This would be the sort of thing me, a cyclist, would stop for just to push the sign into the car lane.
The events are usually the first Friday of the month at the Brig Pub (in the Byward Market) but depending on who’s organizing they don’t schedule them very far ahead of time. There’s also been some debate about changing locations for the past few months so the location might not be there. There’s also a Signal group. A lot of the regulars have known each other for years (back to when the group was called GOSLING) so I think they have their own ways of getting in touch with each other. The main positive to Meetup is the discoverability aspect; it brings in a lot more people than before they were using it, from what I’ve heard. But nobody is really a big fan of it.
I have heard of OCLUG before but I’ve never managed to get their mailing list to work with my email so I always forget about them. I’m going to pin their website so I at least remember to check it for new events sometimes.
There’s also the Nerds & Nachos monthly meet up which often has a few local open source people (myself included), but it’s pretty casual and not project-focused https://www.meetup.com/opensourcenerdsandnachos It predates the Meetup group but that’s the most convenient link for it.
I live in Ottawa and work on FOSS hobby projects, currently https://git.ngram.ca/OpenJam/rc-servers . I’d love to see more talks and group events about FOSS!
Just one thing: veganism is not about protecting animals, just not exploiting them needlessly.
This seems like arguing semantics, but couldn’t that just as correctly be phrased as “protecting animals from needless exploitation”? Personally, I like to define animal rights as “protecting animals from humans” and human rights as “protecting humans from humans” because it’s a fun way to put it and reasonably accurate.
Getting nutrition isn’t ‘going out of your way’. This is something you have to do no matter what. Veganism is just going 1 or 2 aisles over in the supermarket and fetching the alternative to the animal explotation.
The same could be said about boycotting companies that are supporting Israel’s genocide, funding lobbying groups that support bad climate policies, or exploiting people in nations with less worker protections. Except perhaps in most cases it would be fetching the item beside it instead of an aisle or two over.
It’s just changing an action you daily take to another one with similar effort level.
That’s ignoring a lot of the challenges of going vegan. It’s not just buying different groceries, it’s also adapting or replacing recipes to work with the vegan products you’ve bought. It’s making sure restaurants have at least one vegan option when you go out (though you could be like me and just have “cheat” meals when you occasionally go out). It’s making sure your cosmetic products don’t do animal testing. Not that it has to all be done at once or at all, of course, but no matter how much you commit, it’s still a change. The food will taste different, the products will be different, the location in the store will be different.
The amount of effort is definitely greater at the start, but eventually it gets to a similar effort as the status quo as you get used to it (assuming there’s a decent & consistent selection of vegan options in this hypothetical person’s vicinity, which is pretty likely in the places most likely to read this comment).
Assuming you aren’t posting this just to preach to the choir, there’s plenty of completely valid reasons to not choose veganism. It’s also sort of the wrong question, because there’s a lot more people who choose to stick with their status quo than to change. In this world of endless causes, services, and distractions vying for everyone’s finite attention, what makes going vegan worth it? It’s not only a question of how or why to choose vegan, it’s also a question of why should people focus their attention on veganism over other things like volunteering for a local food bank, protecting people’s rights, stopping climate policy rollbacks, scrolling social media, or even playing video games? I’m sure you and I could come up a lot of good reasons, but we’re not who needs to be convinced… it’s everyone else.
Animal rights is sort of my favourite example of this. You will much more easily find people who think it worth their attention to protect other humans than people who want to protect animals. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that view point, either – even I’d agree that human suffering matters more than animal suffering.
GrapheneOS has some very strict requirements which basically means they will refuse to support anything except Pixel phones. Fairphone isn’t in the business of making their own (security) chips so I doubt the Graphene team will ever consider them.
CalyxOS, arguably the next best thing, did have support for earlier Fairphones but that project is sort of in limbo now.
What is that woman’s pose though? It looks like she was about to knee him in the groin but was interrupted by someone trying to take their picture.
LSAG is a good shout but I’m not sure it’s sufficient. It enables anonymous verification of something against a set of known public keys. But you still need to make sure that set of public keys is coming from real humans. It’s not proof that a user has a property (i.e. being human), it’s just proof they are a user.
But yes this is sort of a digression from the actual main problem. The real anti-bot solution is a mix of methods imo.
Maybe we can agree to disagree because I don’t think a specific demographic is enough to overcome the negative network effect at the start. The problem, imo, is that the attrition rate of dating apps is really high and dating apps are only good if a lot of people are located geographically nearby. You either need broad appeal to avoid running out of people early on or a demographic that is unusually geographically concentrated and usurps the attrition rate (ENM comes to mind for the latter).
Of course, you could always make something for dating without the geo proximity, but I think most people won’t want to use something like that at all.
The beauty of new FOSS projects is that they’re quite often hosted and developed for free, so I don’t think that’s much of a limiting factor as long as the community is there. That’s also why I think it’s important to make it big quickly, because that’s the way to get a big enough community before the creator loses interest.
That’s exactly what Retromeet was trying to do :)
Though I do agree that having a broader scope than just the hot-or-not swipe thing would really help to attract enough people to join. Retromeet doesn’t seem to do that, though I haven’t used it so I could be wrong.
Your usage and implementation of get_files_in_dir is quite awkward. It is returning None on errors and then you’re returning Ok(()) when it returns None, ignoring a bunch of errors. Why not just have get_files_in_dir return a Result<Vec<PathBuf>, io::Error>? You could drastically simplify the function by just ?ing the results.
Other apps do have some good anti-bot measures which could be adopted for a FOSS project. The problem with a lot of cryptographic solutions for this is that often cryptography is usually more about proving your identity more than proving something about your identity. Tor is also focused on privacy from middle-men, which doesn’t really make sense for a dating app.
I think the challenge boils down to how to prove you’re human without biometrics or other PII. And I think the sad reality is that you can’t prove it. Though you may be able to prove you have unique PII with some sort of zero-knowledge proof…
Unfortunately I think projects like this have extra challenges over even regular social media platforms. There’s also retromeet which seems even more dead (it may have not even made it to a stable release).
The idea is great but for a dating app to work, it needs to quickly get past two network effects: the global network effect (there must be enough people globally, or in a larger region, to get other people interested in trying out the platform) and the local network effect (there must be enough people to match with in most users’ local areas to keep enough people interested). With corporate backing that’s easy enough to do with a dedicated team to market and develop, but FOSS rarely has that sort of manpower. Slow growth is hard too, since users tend to leave dating apps quite often.
There’s also the funny problem if the dev gets a partner usually the partner doesn’t appreciate them staying on dating apps. Developing a dating app could be even worse for the relationship… actually now that I think of it, maybe I should make start a similar project since I don’t like dating…
The mainstream apps (at least the ones that have been around a while) have bot ratios which are much better. They also have active moderation teams which remove profiles that make it through the automated protections. I’d guess they have ratios closer to 20:1 than 1:20 (people:bots)
I can only guess but I think it’s a combination of a lack of effective anti-bot protections and it being a sort of dead platform (so the only users that remain are largely bots which never leave)
I’ve used it before. The bigger problem for me was the people to bot ratio was worse than 1:20
Sure, but the location is only shared from your phone to the server when you call the emergency line so it’s not really relevant. It’s not continuously streaming the location data at all times.
This would only work if there’s one cell tower within range of the phone, which is unlikely. It also wouldn’t help much because you already can’t triangulate with just one tower.
i you hate?