_NetNomad

forums face a lot of the same issues federated platforms do, chiefly- why the hell would the proverbial i join it when reddit and discord already exist? i already have an account there, there’s already a community there… i think for some people that’s just never gonna change. there’s no closing pandora’s box. i run an online community with a small but fairly active discord and we have a forum as well in anticipation of discord going full enshittification, but it’s just impossible to get younger people onto it. the fedi at least has the advantage of looking like the monolithic platforms people are leaving, but forums are such a foreign concept

getting a community going is a bit of a catch 22. the best way to get users is to already have users and appear active. if i recall correctly, early on reddit had a ton of staff sock puppet accounts to do just that. i’m certainly not advocating for it but it goes to show how tricky the problem is. the only real answer on an individual level is to pick a platform and stick with it through the thin years and try to recruit a few friends- after that MAYBE hopefully it eventually gets some momentum

i’m gonna level with you, i completely forgot IBM cloud was a thing and just thought this was MS pointing fingers at system Z or system . thanks for catching that!

so Delta’s non-Windows machines were the ones that suffered the most from a Windows software malfunction? that makes sense

many retro systems have implementations of a language called BASIC, which is about as easy as it sounds. it has some quirks that aren’t transferable to newer languages and you won’t be able to make anything nearly as sophisticated as retail games for the same hardware but if you find modern engines intimidating, it can be a good place to start

that said, +1 for godot if you want to learn a more modern tool. it’s way simpler than it may seem at first and there is a huge wealth of beginner-friendly tutorials available online

different strokes for different blokes i guess but i prefer to not have to charge things and not worry about pairing and that’s that

i avoid anything wireless like the plague short of wifi. pairing is always a miserable process, and by the time everything is connected, the batteries are dead. it drives me absolutely bonkers. thankfully many motorolla phones still have 3.5mm jacks . i think my current model is the motorolla 5g stylus

rexx is my favorite programming language. it’s an interpreted language similar to python but it has actual visible block delimiters instead of going by indentation. the error handling system is also very convienent. the reason it probably faded into obscurity is it’s wild cowboy take on typing- EVERYTHING is a string until you try to use a math function on it. i get that it’s unrealistic for writing anything performance-sensitive but for writing shell scripts and utilities it is unmatched in it’s simplicity. it definitely comes closer than anything else i’ve ever seen to the COBOL ideal of resembling natural speech. the rexx interpreter was a default feature on the amiga and i think also os/2 but these days it’s really only ever used on mainframes and the few open source implementations for desktops and servers are a bit clumsy which is a real shame