Note: this isn't a critique of his choice, just a mention of something others might find useful.
Source: I had a T480, P51, X1 Carbon and now P1 Gen 6, they're pretty good. Also have a MacBook M1 Air for note taking and stuff.
Surely, there are other places on the internet where NGO's are politely criticized for getting kids the wrong free laptops - those likely contain valuable advice on what brand of computer you can buy
12" is on the smaller side, but it's also a 2in1 that can be used in a desk setup as an extra monitor. I'd ship them a cheap lightning portable monitor, simple keyboard+mouse pack, and for $100 more they have a durable portable laptop and a simple two monitor desk setup for dev.
https://knowledgebase.frame.work/what-countries-and-regions-...
Sounds untrustworthy. Bangladesh's standard of living is roughly on par with India's, so cheap Chinese laptops should be fairly common there, and repairs for such laptops should be pretty available.
So, instead of one MacBook, you could buy about 10 laptops for 10 Bangladeshi kids, and developing on them would be about as comfortable as on a MacBook.
I agree the critic sounds misplaced though, he wanted a Macbook. However not because all the other models are complicated to fix in his land.
If a lifetime’s effort has only gotten him to the point of affording a phone, what suggests he’d expect to afford a repair anyway? Or that the skeezy aftermarket parts involved wouldn’t compound his problems?
I do use discord myself. But as a company I wouln't put all my communication data in the hands of a company that could just do the same as Slack did, in some foreseeable future.
In my eyes they're practically the poster child for an organization who could (and arguably should) be running their own solution on their own servers.
Perhaps self-hosted Revolt Chat [1] which I've been keeping an eye on but I don't have any first hand experience with it. There are many more solutions in this space though.
Neither Revolt nor others are unfortunately at the right level of maturity to be adopted seriously. The team is doing a great job, but it’s still extremely basic.
Discord with all its warts is still the best way to have group calls in a casual setting.
This shows that many people still have no idea what's going on. That you shouldn't use Slack OR Discord.
It's really incredible, although expected.
Inb4 "IRC sucks"... Jabber/XMPP exists since late 00's (at least ready enough compared to the first versions) and there are pretty fine clients for every OS.
I agree that walled gardens are a trap. But you're not going to convince people to move to free solutions without being able to recognize clearly why they walled gardens are so attractive in the first place.
Right, I misunderstood your last line. I initially took you to mean, "We've had IRC since forever and Jabber since the early 00's..." Reading it again, I now understand you to mean, "Before you say 'IRC sucks', which I agree with, better protocols like Jabber have been around since the early 00's."
IRC, because of its simplicity, can be layered, so adding encryption is trivial if we want to hide from the server (FISH). By default IRC servers show hostname of the user, but that depends on the network; for example LinkNet hides it.
"Lots of clients" -- that's actually a problem. "Oh, you want to have a quick chat with experts in our community? First, here's a list of 50 IRC clients, half of which haven't been updated since 2003, all of which have different advantages and disadvantages. Go through and choose one and go through all the configuration. Oh, and you wanted to be able to read something someone wrote while your laptop lid was shut? Like, maybe you're not in the same timezone as many of the contributors? You're going to need to find an always-on server and set up this IRC bouncer. Also, because of spam, we only allow registered users to post, so you're going to need to type these runes in the command-line and make yourself a certificate."
Matrix certainly had its warts when we switched, but it was still an immediate quality-of-life improvement, particularly for newcomers.
I mean, HAM radio is basically a chat room with an entrance exam; there's certainly something nice about having communities full of people with that sort of filter up front. And, for a charity designed to teach kids to code, maybe helping them munge around with IRC clients is a bonus. But for a normal community, IRC isn't the right tool for the job.
What's your definition of "engagement" here? Because it makes me think of social networking tactics to keep you ... well ... engaged ... the longest time possible.
So unfortunately Matrix is a dead end. The matrix foundation gave up control 2 years ago. Matrix is now controlled by Element.io corporation and they only care about their government hosting contracts. It's really only viable if you have a significant constant money stream to pay for the ever increasing server resources like governments/corps.
IRC persists. It is the text chat layer of the internet which is the platform. Trying to build the entire internet into your text chat platform, and storing everything, is the kind of insanity only for-profit operations do... and eventually die from. Whereas IRC being a dumb pipe with lists of IPs associated with sockets will live forever. And cheaply.
https://matrix.org/ecosystem/servers/
> and there's literally no way to trim data from the db in synapse or everything breaks.
https://element-hq.github.io/synapse/latest/admin_api/purge_...
https://element-hq.github.io/synapse/latest/message_retentio...
And your links to synapse features ("Please note that, as this feature isn't part of the Matrix specification yet, the use of m.room.retention events for per-room retention policies is to be considered as experimental.") may describe certain synapse functionality but in practice is doesn't work and the db keeps growing as does IO load. The compression thing is an attempt at mitigation because the protocol just doesn't handle it.
Just takes them to hire the right marketing genius and suddenly you'll be subscribing to send more than 5 messages a week.
Even under accessibility you can only change things like contrast
A quick Google search says that for iOS 15+:
>To change per-app settings for any application, including Discord, on an iPhone or iPad, go to the Settings app > Accessibility > Per-App Settings. Tap Add App, select Discord from the list, and then customize settings like Display & Text Size to alter the app's appearance or behavior without affecting other applications.
Unfortunately it’s still somewhat screwed up with the sidebar font being too big compared to the message text
that's a perfect teaching occasion, then!
Kids: don't use proprietary services just because they are trendy. Prefer always open standards!
Although I am not in the nonprofit tbh but maybe one day I would love to apply :>
They sound cool. Sad that bad things happen to the good people.
Slack really is slacking if they are literally asking 195k$ to a literal non profit whose helping kids/teens.
So if you use an open standard, but not self hosted, and your provider tells you "pay 250k or lose all your data in 2 days", I'd say are not necessarily in a better position than they are now.
It's not impossible to migrate off of slack, but migrations take time.
I know this, because I've done it.
Similarly a migration from self-hosted to SaaS gitlab (though, not back).
Perfect is the enemy of good, but man, it can be pretty close to perfect if you choose your vendors properly.
[1]: https://codeberg.org/ZelphirKaltstahl/server-management/src/...
Teaching coding to kids is a _bad_ thing for existing developers and software engineers.
At worst it makes developer jobs obsolete because a future manager doesn't need a developer to write him shitty python scripts or excel macros, at second worst it creates one new competitor for the shrinking amount of software engineer positions.
I believe there is no profession more masochistic than software engineers, with them wanting to teach all kids to code and burning out writing open source libraries that big business uses for free.
You don't want an entire generation of people who can barely operate the devices that enable and control a huge portion of their lives.
Kids will benefit immensely from being able to logically reason, and will be less afraid to repair or work around shoddy software, even if they never write another line of code in their lives.
Professional programmers dont fear kids taught to code any more than novellists fear kids taught literacy or accountants fear kids with numeracy. If anything, they know personally how important it is to learn these things.
(the comment you made surprised me)
You could use the same argument to stop teaching many other useful skills to kids. It's a bad argument.
It's a way to create many forms of art, solve everyday problems and automate a plethora of machines in our homes.
You sound like an accountant whining about kids learning about calculators and statistics.
I would love it if future folks can write their own random scripts without needing a developer to do it for them.
I would love to see more people writing software. There will always be advanced work that needs doing. There will always be larger challenges.
I want the world of the future, where every 10-year-old knows calculus and python and is incredibly capable, and then I want to see the future we get when they grow up.
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/812...
Noshareholder would be more honest.
This is said knowing nothing about the company in question, just from my own experience working for a non-profit. Employees still need to be paid.
That is literally what the OP is arguing that people who found non-profit organization shouldn't be paid even a modest salary for their work.
This raises some interesting questions. Would you expect to see people in charge of this org, performing the day-to-day jobs, to work without receiving any pay? When you say the people are profiting, do you mean the organization is receiving more money each year than they are spending? That is certainly the goal of all orgs, businesses, churches, soup kitchens, and government NGO's.
It's an interesting question. I suppose they could take on jobs elsewhere in the private sector, and then perform these jobs for Hack Club at zero cost to the company. I would say it comes down to time spent. How big is Hack Club? If it can be managed for 10 minutes worth of work a day, then perhaps that should be donated time. If it requires more than 8+ hours a day. And if the work is specialized then it def needs the right person there, WITH the expertise to run this company --- then they should receive pay for his/her work.
1) They should know that this is unaffordable for a nonprofit like this. By doing this, they will almost certainly lose them and their thousands of aspiring teenage developers as users. The chance of actually booking that 200K are next to 0.
2) Microsoft learned a long time ago the value of getting young developers using your software to learn. Once those teens start working, maybe starting their own companies or choosing which tools to use at their future empoyers, if they know Slack they are very likely to pick Slack. This is a very short sighted shakedown attempt that wont work in the short term but will drive people away in the medium term.
https://hackclub.com/
(They do help clubs sell things, taking "7% of income", so they do have a revenue stream, but the money that Slack wants would pay a veritable army of student interns.)