spinflip @spinflip@qoto.org

@Xibanya @grainloom eh, I think there's something to be said for everyone learning the basics of coding badly. Computers are basically magic to a significant chunk of the populace right now: vitally useful, but utterly inscrutable to everyone outside a small cadre of experts. Not everyone needs to learn how to make webapps from scrate, but a basic level of 'this is what a computer is and here's how it works' seems generally useful. Trying to teach every school kid to become a professional programmer seems dumb, but teaching people to break problems down into minimal logical steps via small targeted programming challenges seems like a generally useful skill worth cultivating.

@freemo Ah, I didn't know arteteco was a mod. Still, there's a lot of work to be done. I've also got a suspicion that the light-touch rules of this instance are going to crash into reality at some point with bad-faith users skirting the rules while making qoto a less pleasant place to be for everyone... We'll see how that works out.

On a separate note: can we try to get out of the habit of jumping into conversation threads with a question or thought that clearly only involves *some* of the participants, but leaving everyone tagged?

@freemo what are your plans for administering/moderating the increased number of users here? More people will mean more advertisers, more spambots, more trolls, more nazis looking to propagandise… if moderation is entirely down to you and @absolutus, it's going to be a struggle to stay on top.

@porsupah well, there's no inherent reason that M has to succeed, and it's certainly still possible that activity will taper off over the next few months. But right now, this feels fast closer to a living social network than it has in the past.

Meta-post: I think this is the third time I've made an account and tried to commit to mastodon. The others times lasted for about as long as it took for the novelty of tooting about mastodon to wear off: once we all got that point, it turned out that nobody really had much in common and engagement slowly dropped to zero.

This time around, I'm actually genuinely enjoying being here. There's a lot more activity, and a far smaller proportion of it seems to be of the boring "mastodon is good and better than twitter" ilk. Maybe the critical mass to keep people around has finally arrived?

@drewfer Huh, I think that might be working... Fingers crossed, and I'll find out in a few GB. Thank you!

@cosine I'd love to use something different, but as far as I can tell the organisation producing this data only makes it available over HTTP(S).

@liamvhogan I stopped going when I was 12 or 13, but before that it was years of ropes/knots, bushwalking, camping, kayaking and canoeing, learning to make cool shit... the monarchist/religious stuff was pretty strong, but underneath that it was mainly a great organisation that got lots of kids learning and doing cool things

@mamur have a look at the instances at the bottom of https://joinmastodon.org/
I'm not sure whether those are active or total users, but it should give you an idea of the relative sizes of the major instances: there are a thousand of us qoto-ers, a few hundred thousand on mastodon.social, and plenty of tiny instances with only a handful of people.

@arteteco @freemo @Surasanji I don't see how it's in any way productive to disagree with others who don't share your priors. Good-faith disagreements in which both parties generally agree on the fundamentals, differ in their interpretation of the consequences, and are willing to learn from their disagreements? Great, I love it. But if someone disagrees with me and fundamentally disagrees on the realities of the world in which we live, there's nothing there to be gained for either of us. That's where we get into culture wars, where the only possible outcomes of any argument are victory or defeat.

Here's a cleaned version of what I currently have: https://pastebin.com/Tpgqrvdi

I'm working on a project that involves retrieving large (~2-8 GB) .zip files through HTTP and storing them for later processing. I've written a script that uses an API to lookup and generate URLs for a series of needed files, and then attempts to stream each file to storage using requests.get().iter_content.

The problem is, my connection isn't perfectly stable (and I'm running this on a laptop which sometimes goes to sleep). When the connection is interrupted, the transfer dies and I need to restart it.

What would be the best way to add a resume capacity to my file transfer? So that if the script stalls or the connection drops, it would be possible to resume the download from where it failed?

@Send_Lwyds I'm so glad to see you here! Your name/pic combo has been the best thing to see on twitter for like the last year

@Expat1975 @InvaderXan it feels like plenty of narratives would still work. A desire for harmony and unity doesn't mean that everyone will be harmonious and unified all the time. Neighbours will still argue, individuals will still want to upend the status quo, environmental issues will still be there. Just all against a background of societal optimism.

@cwebber but hey! There are a whole bunch of smart people who dismissed bitcoin back in 2010 for all the reasons that are now obvious, who've learned that there really *are* people with more money than sense–millions of them. I'm sure that generational revelation can only lead to good things in the future.