*banned 4 MarkDown love* @design_RG@qoto.org

@freemo @Full_marx

Followed to that user's home page and found a revealing post (or two), after two weeks of full caps nonsense.

Provocateur, yes. 12 years ole, possibly.

@dharam Hello Dharam, and welcome to Qoto!

In my homecountry of Brazil, currently half the population is very upset with a supreme court decision there; the other half is rejoicing for the same thing.

I think we might see the US supreme court in a similar situation in the coming year, potus will try to take any legal challenges all the way there, and use the 2 judges he personally nominated to get his way.

@pschwede Nic, thanks for the post.

@Full_marx might be interested !

@akshaytarfe @shibaprasad @freemo Welcome to Qoto and the Fediverse!

I think some user tutorials would be a good idea, have been making some posts with the things I have been learning, but eventually I am thinking of creating a Forum post with steps clearly explained, screen captures, and all in one page, to be referred to.

We have the Discussion forum here, so hosting it would be no problem.

Congratulations on picking Qoto, it's one of the best servers around in my opinion!

@moonshine@freespeechextremist.com @Full_marx Yes, that would be fine and understandable.

I used a plugin in FF that allowed me to change some of their feedline settings, to show chronological posts for example.

But the worst is really how they select WHO will see your post, never mind you have 200 friends, unless you get lots of Likes, and even better, replies (harder to get, with the mobile users crowd; freaking screen keyboards are so unproductive), uless you get some of those, only a few users see your post.

@Full_marx Here's a snapshot of Pinafore saying TOO BIG man! :smiley:

Red numbers, grayed out Toot button, no siree bob.

@iammrc Welcome to Qoto, MRC. 😃

@Full_marx @moonshine@freespeechextremist.com At some point, the fediverse might grow and something have to be done about the huge amount of posts flowing thru.

That must be the case with FB and Twitter, with millions of users.

But even if there's a need for some selecting, I would prefer a neutral algo handling that, unlike what we see in those large places.

@Full_marx Pinafore is quite nice, and amazingly fast, handles the Federated feed with aplomb. Great work.

My only negative note is the hard coded 500 chars post size limit, which they enforce in the post entry box, greying out the Toot button if we go over that.

Maybe we could suggest to them to add a 'check max lentgh' from the user's home instance when they authorize your account with qoto or other instance.

Or have a hard coded list on their side with sizes they know are accepted, by instance. At least for the ones offering larger limits.

@Full_marx @freemo
Now, if one of our posts is long, does it get accepted and shown properly in the other instances?

Or it gets truncated? It would be interesting to know.

@Full_marx @freemo Oh, man, yes, looks like his account is gone; shows without a link underline in one of my posts above. 😔

The larger post size is indeed a BIG difference. Even the regular 500 chars in many instances is already twice what twitter allows.

Bringing a post from here to there is a pain in the but as a result. 😃

BTW, I have been visiting other instances, for curiosity, and noticed a few mentioning 50 K chars as their limit.

Also noticed, just now with my computing history megapost, that Pinafore is hard coded to allow only 500 chars.

It gave me a Red text, -3600 chars count when I finished typing it there. Had to swith to the qoto web instance and post if from there instead.

@freemo Thank you, I will have to observe and compare, when it happens. Does it happen only on mastodon via web interface, on browser, or does it also show in a client like Pinafore, which I have been using.

Would it be my own browser being overloaded with tabs (have many open most of the time, but it seems to be running smoothly even so).

If I find an incident and can intuit a cause, will report.

@freemo @raining_night @Gomario I think the size of MS is too large, way to big for the current way things are done in the fediverse. They are over 400 thousand users!

Maybe they allowed it to see how to handle such a size and crowd, which could happen in the future if the fediverse becomes more popular.

But I imagine it must be very confusing for new users, with so many fish in the pond and the mods trying to keep order like the UK parliament Speaker with the 600 MPs around him. 😃

Better to have smaller sized instances, with themes and attracting like minded, similar interested users. Easier to set the tone and maintain a civil atmosphere in that case too.

@togs That was an excellent post, well done.

Assembly programming is hardware specific, and therefore much more detailed, and time consuming, specially if you have to support different system configurations.

I remember enjoying the elegance and speed of some programs I used very frequently in earlier, command line intensive days. Some were at least partially written in Assembler, at least the most critical parts, and it showed a competent and knowledgeable developer behind it. Kudos to them.

@Full_marx

I have been out of doing programming for a long time, my first language was Fortran, in first year Engineering, and I really enjoyed the new experience of having access to a computer and learning about it. These were the days of Mainframes, my first system was a Burroughs 5500 I believe. One of those that seemed a Cathedral of Computing, with a huge room, tons of air conditioning, and a priesthood to keep things running.

We noobies approached with reverent respect, handed in our jobs for processing, and waited to see the result.

Analog days in that sense - my assignment was written in pencil and paper, I had to understand and believe each step was correct and would result on what I needed at the end.

I would write the code line by line on paper, parse and interpret it in my mind, and if it looked correct, then go on and prepare to take it in for processing.

We students did not have access to a terminal, but brought jobs in as decks of 80 column wide cards. I usually would prepare my own, finding an IBM punch machine in a quieter department (Physics usually).

Handed in the deck, and waited for the processing. You could tell things were looking good even there, by the way the card reader took your stack.

If it read smoothly, no pauses, it looked nice and might not have any errors. If it paused half way, you could expect an error message - in the output, a fan paper printout. Each printout contained at the bottom the cost in US dollars of that processing task, not that we paid for it.

What a difference time has wrought. :)

Forward about 30 years and I was standing and teaching a grade 11 programming class, we used QuickBasic which I thought was wonderful for learning logic, structure, flow, etc.

My students would always be baffled when I gave them a small task, and asked them to sit and write a few lines of code to make it happen. They found that very difficult! :smiley:

Usual type it in, and hit Run on the Qbasic compiler was what they wanted to do, but understanding the logic is much more important.

The concepts you learn, hopefully well, will go forward with you and to new languages which you will probably work with in the future.

I don't know how much you already learned or understand, but I would recommend a higher level language to learn the logic, structures, etc.

At one point in time, I used TurboPascal (early 90s), which was developed specifically for teaching and learning programming.

QBasic, Pascal, are too far back now, but maybe JavaScript, possibly?

sorry for the long post, but it's fun to reminesce. :smiley:

I remember how we used to always compare our programmes to our peers i nteh Math faculty 1st year course. We used Fortran, they used Algol, we all had the same assignments, our profs being from the Math department.

Sometimes one, or the other language "won", with a skinnier deck of cards showing less steps, tighter code. On the next assignment it might change, as each language had its strong points.

Fortran is Formula Translation, and was created specially for Science and Engineering. ALGOL was an acronym too, I am not sure of the wording.

At that time (mid 70s), COBOL was the most widepread language in business, having been created for that kind of task.

Funny fact related to what Doug mentioned -- when Unix was first created, it was from scratch, on paper, and the first program they wrote, the foundation for the whole system building -- was an Assembler, which was punched on paper tape, and read to input into the DEC PDP mini computer that they had got access to.

I love History in general, and Computing History is fascinating.

Screen capture from Test Post --- to check for web browser performance and compliance. No damage results from opening the page, just a lot of Image requested from remote server in a very short time.

https://hellsite.site/@goat/103130901914476599

Got to say, their Cat emoji collection is *Oustanding.*

Warning - - this has been posted as a TEST for web browsers, can they handle the huge number of image file requests to load the page well?

Firefox and Waterfox reported to work perfectly. Others might not work so well. No Damage to your device expected.

https://hellsite.site/@goat/103130901914476599

So you like emoji, uh?