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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • The biggest reason for me is that it’s less data to send over a network. Especially when I’m working with lists of objects, including null fields can add a noticeable chunk to the payload.

    There are some cases where it might be worth it to differentiate “No value” and “No attribute”, but in most cases they can be treated the same, since the data should really be validated against a schema anyway.





  • Honestly I wish there were less communities. I’ve said this before, but people treat Lemmy like late-stage Reddit, expecting niche communities for everything, and we end up with hundreds of communities with no (or one, if we’re lucky) active members.

    This problem is then amplified by the fact that these niche communities are split even further across several instances, so our userbase ends up completely dissipated.

    I would love to see users focus on a smaller number of more general-purpose communities. Of course, these should still be shared across instances, but I think we would benefit a lot from having, say, a “video games” community instead of 500 specific game communities.

    As a side note as well, I don’t think we shouldn’t be “allowed” to create more niche communities (though if an instance admin wanted to regulate, that’s their call). I think this should be more of a user culture shift, if anything.




  • I’ve done this a few times through my life, especially lately as I’ve finally been getting my own life stabilized. Here’s some more “notable” examples.

    A family member, where I’ve been trying to mentor them and help them in every way I possibly can - sometimes at great personal cost - but as the saying goes, I’ve led them to water but I can’t make them drink. Still won’t give up, though.

    Another family member I’ve done the same for has actually been trying to take me up on it. Still early stages, but they’ve started on applying for college in a field they’re interested in. I’m helping them study since it happens to be adjacent to my own field, and I’ll help cover the bulk of the cost if they don’t qualify for gov’t funding. I’m really hoping things work out for them.

    The only time I’ve really actually seen obvious results is in my students where I volunteer teaching English. One student in particular really struggled to read even a single word, but in less than a year, they can now read most sentences on their own - which is honestly just insane to me.
    Obviously it’s like 99.999% their effort rather than mine, but I like to think I’m helping lol.

    …writing this all out makes me feel like I’m bragging or something. Really I’ve just been in a rough spot for most of my life, and now that I’m getting my life together I’m just trying to give back a bit where I can. I just want everyone to be happy, lol.


  • Some folks on Lemmy recently recommended StreetComplete, and I’ve been really enjoying it so far.

    It’s a “Pokémon Go” style thing, but you go around answering simple questions about your surroundings which are then used to update/improve the data on OpenStreetMap.

    One concern I considered after using the app was that because your contributions are uploaded to OpenStreetMap, in theory I imagine someone could use that data to track where you are / where you’ve been / where you tend to be. So just be aware of that.