Second, as a disposable, dead layer, it also provides protection against UV light and such. We don’t think of living out of water under the direct radiation from the sun as being particularly difficult or the environment harsh, because we casually do it every day, but it was a very hard problem for life to solve.

Oh yeah, that’s a good point! I’d typically be more concerned with the drying out part for a lot of aquatic life, forgetting about the UV exposure issues.

Huh, thanks for the detailed reply! I suspected some of them must have something extra going on to help their time in the water, but wouldn’t have thought this!

Were you able to feel how dry the otter was through the sealed fur, or was it sealed enough that you couldn’t really tell?

What is the ontology of a concept or idea? If nothing doesn’t exist materially but strictly conceptually, does it not exist or is there a different term one should employ to refer to it? 🤔

Thanks for the pointers, I’ll have to give’em a look! Eusociality does sound right in line with what I was wondering about, but hadn’t heard of it before!

Any indications yet of how this may compare to similar group features or focuses via Friendica and Mobilizon respectively?

Thanks! I’ll have to give it a look! I currently have Termux, but was wondering about others, although maybe I should have asked for Termux packages instead. 😅

I tried Micro briefly but its interface doesn’t seem to have been as well adjusted for mobile.

I know, I know, but haven’t you wanted to jot down some pseudocode while out and about, formatted neatly, so you could pop it over to your main machine to turn into working code?

Is there a less arcane way to perform searches similarly to regex?

Thanks for elaborating! I’m pretty sure I’ve written some variations of the first form you mention in my learning projects, or broken them up in some other ways to ease myself into it, which is why I was asking as I did.

One is simply organizing your code by having a bunch of operations that could be performed on the same data be expressed as an object with different functions you could apply.

Not OP, but also interested in wrapping my head around OOP and I still struggle with this in a few different respects. If what I’m writing isn’t a full program, but more like a few functions to process data, is there still a use case for writing it in an OOP style? Say I’m doing what you describe, operating on the same data with different functions, if written properly couldn’t a program do this even without a class structure to it? 🤔

Perhaps it’s inelegant and terrible in the long term, but if it serves a brief purpose, is it more in the case of long term use that it reveals its greater utility?

What makes JavaScript so widely disliked? I know very little of it, and in skimming different stuff I think I’ve seen like a million different frameworks for it, so is that a part of it?

While I agree, what might everyday people use to set up forums as relatively easily and cheaply as their Discord servers, and not have them riddled with ads or other clunky elements?

I’m pretty sure those that may have even been considering forums went to Discord because the only other options were more involved in terms of set up/maintenance and cost, the latter to get something without ads.

As an analogy, you can try taking a selfie using an old laptop’s front-facing camera. You probably won’t like how you look either - you’d look either sickly pale or drunken red, eyebags appear out of nowhere, the distortion of the lens makes you look fat. All of these qualities aren’t because you are any of these things in real life. It’s simply that laptop cameras are bad. Same is true for microphones and speakers.

I think you make a good point with the hardware aspects of this, and on this last point I can’t help but be a little amused, as while it’s often very true, personally I sometimes prefer the lower res quality of a laptop camera as it can help obfuscate some of the finer details I don’t much care for. It’s basically a hardware lo-fi filter, and I appreciate it not catching every pore. 😂

I suspect this is basically it, however I’ve often thought similar could be said of one’s appearance; as it’s distorted by different lighting, whether your clothing’s gotten wrinkled up a certain way, the wind’s messed up your hair, or you accidentally smudged makeup or some dirt on you somewhere. Although that all is also typically easier to adjust (give or take the lighting and wind) than your voice, so that undoubtedly plays into it.

I think this is all pretty good advice, thanks!

However, this & the other replies, have made me realize I should have taken more time with the body text of this question. What I was a little more interested in was less the one-on-one interactions, and more something like…“How might one co-opt bad faith methods to spread helpful, good information?”

It’s so easy to to toss out bad, harmful information, but might there be some ways to more easily put out good, helpful information that sticks with people? Or at a minimum, more benign info that doesn’t gradually push people down darker paths? 🤔

I see where you’re coming from, I think. In my experiences with trying to follow tutorials though, I’ve found the difficulty to be between rough explanations and the examples given feeling a little too simple and isolated from how they might be applied in a working program.

Thanks for clarifying! So it does work roughly as I was thinking, that’s cool!

This gives a brief overview of Scuttlebutt with a link to a more technical breakdown.

That said, I remain confused by the other person’s description, as I’m not sure how it’s accumulating posts while “disconnected from the Internet”. I follow how it works when connected, but not so much how it would work as they’ve described it, at least in the disconnected circumstances, unless it’s sorta how I asked.

It was designed such that a Usenet server could spend most of its time disconnected from the Internet and accumulate local posts that would then be federated in a digest when the server dialed up and connected to other servers.

…Would this have been local posts of an individual, or sometimes a group in a LAN or something? The way you describe it here puts me in the mind of recent stuff like Scuttlebutt, albeit that’s more clearly individual-focused.

How would one use it if they’re struggling to understand it to start with? 🤨