"lyre, a new narrative scripting language designed specifically for building storylet narratives in the vein of games like Sunless Sea, Voyageur, Fallen London" https://azhdarchid.com/lyre_preview

@LexYeen I only bothered replying 'cause I knew it'd tell its operator ;)

@q Could you make an ATProto - ActivityPub bridge too?

@ifixcoinops "I've been thinking a lot about what happened to the Internet lately and what I miss so much about it from when I was young. The original promise was that it would open the entire world of human knowledge to everyone, but instead, the internet today is controlled by algorithms designed to offer suggestions based on things we already like.

We've lost sight of the Internet's potential because people have decided it's easier to eat the fast food of Google, Facebook and Instagram, rather than put effort into their own creations or go exploring to find something new. This plays straight into the hands of advertisers and companies who only want you to play in their walled garden while they harvest your data."
*sends walled garden algorithms out to harvest data and harass people*

Perfect little three-act play that

Le voici, après tout ce temps, c’est enfin l’épisode 200 ! Un épisode finalement complètement normal. On y parle de futurs projets, de mauvais films, d’excellents jeux vidéo : https://www.afterhate.fr/episode-200-again-uncanny-valley-permanente/ enjoy !

🍵 Une fiction interactive SF aussi chaleureuse qu'intriguante, qui promet rien de moins que créer (et vendre ?) des univers. En attendant, ce Prologue vous présente Lila et un curieux cultiste, devant une tasse fumante de Coyala.

[PROLOGUE] Universe for sale
👉 https://youtu.be/62QPF9WnWYw

hello, if you can see this.. could you boost this post to help me federate this server

thanks 😁

@GDCPresoReviews Has some imperial unit vibes, like bald eagles per football field type of stuff

@linuxgal ngl, these are just great. Finding the correct wire with the regular grey ones is pain for DIY. So all my projects are full of 🌈 in the end 😁

@abbas_dp in the general features it says "You can message anyone with an email address, even if they don’t have Delta Chat. They receive your message as a normal email, and their reply appears in your chat." But this isn't really true anymore. If I go to add a contact it opens a qr code reader. There's no place to add someones email. And it also requires encrypted connection so wouldn't the whole conversation not be possible now

J'ai trouvé mon passe temps d'insomnie (autre qu'être horny h24 en ce moment) : mater la vieille série the twilight zone : j'en avais vu qu'un ou deux plus jeune. Et c'est très cool, le NB est joli, et certaines histoires sont très bien écrites. Je sais que j'arrive littéralement +60 ans après le déluge, mais voilà, si vous aimez bien le mystère tout simple et le fantastique, go for it !

@parleur Les prompt artists qui se revendiquent artistes...

Je viens de voir qu'il y a des gens qui signent avec leur nom des images générées par IA.

Je. Je. 😑

Hello from FOSS for All!
The speaker lineup for FOSS for All Conference 2026 is confirmed, and tickets are now on sale.

This year’s theme is “Your Gateway to Open Source.”
Beginners and maintainers alike are welcome.

- Date: Sat, Nov 28, 2026
- Venue: Seoul Centerfield EAST 18F, AWS Korea
- Tickets: General KRW 20,000 / Supporter KRW 100,000 (supports the conference)
- Register: https://ticketa.co/e/ytbqha4p
- Sessions: https://2026.fossforall.org/sessions/

I paid people to try and follow my README

Developers suck at writing documentation. We like to say RTFM but often there ain't no FM to R. At best we have a half-arsed collection of notes, some obsolete tips, and a link to a desolate forum full of people asking the same questions again and again. That's no way to treat our users.

I naïvely believe there's a better way. As I've written before, you should sit down and actually test your readme. Spin up a fresh Virtual Machine, go through what you've written, and see if it makes sense.

But it is really hard to ignore your own biases. Of course you know that certain commands require sudo and obviously when you wrote -foo you meant --foo and everyone knows that you have to reboot afterwards.

How do you get rid of those biases? I paid people!

As part of my NLnet grant application for ActivityBot, I said I wanted to test the install experience with real users and I was prepared to pay them €25 for an hour of their time. I stuck out the call on Mastodon, gathered a few people, and had a video call with them.

The format was simple. I explained that I was looking for feedback on the first-run experience. I knew that it wasn't perfect and actively wanted constructive criticism. I asked the volunteer to share their screen and, crucially, to speak aloud. Tell me what they were doing. What they didn't understand, what confused them, what delighted them, what frustrated them, etc.

I took notes by hand (fuck feeding the machine) and spent several hours being told what incorrect assumptions I'd made.

Amongst the highlights I discovered were:

• The link to the demo tool was wrong.
• Some people read a README in the terminal.
• What does it actually mean to rename a file?
• How do you rename a hidden file?
• Should a demo tool be available on the web or just the user's local machine?
• Why does some text explicitly need to be quoted and some not?
• My jokes aren't funny and are actively confusing.
• Some of the technical terminology needed explaining.
• The ordering of the different sections was confusing.
• I hadn't actually explained what the software would do.
• A whole section which was technically interesting to me was utterly confusing to everyone else.
• Not all web servers use permissions in the same way.

And on it went!

After each session I updated the README based on what people found difficult, then I re-tested it with the next person.

In total, I paid out around €150 to have a bunch of people criticise me to my face. Hey, cheaper than therapy, right?

I know someone is going to say "why not just ask an LLM to simulate a range of users?" The answer is very simple - I want to speak to real people. People are brilliant! They can make you laugh, you can see their cat when it wanders on to the call, they bring a unique perspective to the problem, and they're really happy when you give them a €25 voucher. Some will gladly do it for free and make you happy!

When I was doing technical writing for GOV.UK, all my beautiful prose was given a second-eye by another human. They eviscerated all my flowery phrases and turned the document into something more readable. They were the ones who caught the mistakes that no spell chequer could. They were able to have a proper conversation with me. More importantly, I could hear the frustration in their voice - that's the thing which lets you know a mistake needs to be corrected.

I don't claim that ActivityBot's README is now perfect - far from it - but it is now demonstrably easier to follow. Developers need to talk to real people. You don't have to pay them if you can't afford it - but find a few people who will talk aloud while they try to follow your instructions. I guarantee you that your README will become much better for it.

#Arachtober 1: the lights on this pedestrian bridge create giant spider shadows! The casters are the appropriately named bridge spiders, _Larinioides sclopetarius_.

#DailySpiderPic #spiders #orbweavers #Araneae #Araneidae