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If you publish any #OpenSource and you want people to use it, may I please implore you to test your README?
Can you actually follow the steps you've written down? Does it work if the user doesn't have the same development packages installed as you?
shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/10/how-to-actually-test-your-readme/
If you've spent any time using Linux, you'll be used to installing software like this: The README says to download from this link. Huh, I'm not sure how to unarchive .tar.xz files - guess I'll search for that. Right, it says run setup.Terence Eden (Terence Eden’s Blog)
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Absolutely! Predicated on those crucial words "and you want people to use it".
If you don't care whether people use it or not - your just chucking it out there, and don't care whether anyone uses it or not, finds it useful or not - then sure.
@neil I expect mine (for a project Foldatry) probably fails that kind of test.
Honestly, I write it for future-me, who may have forgotten the gist of what it's about and how to use it.
To paraphrase another respondent here, I don't actually care whether anyone uses it. For me, making it Open Source is about letting someone else know that there is code for doing what it does, from which they can take ideas and write something else, hopefully better.
At least, that's the story thus far.
I'm currently paying people to test my README.
Using my #NLnet grant money, I'm giving people a €25 voucher if they'll let me watch them try to follow my documentation and install my software.
It is *painful* but brilliant. I've found so many issues that I'd never thought of before. Only by hearing people sigh in frustration at your clumsy prose will you be able to improve things.
You don't have to pay people, of course,. Ask a friend if you can watch them install your code.
It is revelatory.
Reminds me of @Downes doing 'Stephen follows instructions'
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeBQHgzQN9x3Ef-JuV-HQw2on-_RkjTBM
oh goodness I bet this is a brutal teacher.
As a writer friend says "kill your darlings"
Many years ago, I had to prepare a little compute cluster (four PC main boards in a case) for a demo. I would be following along later. I wrote clear instructions and marked the colour coded cabling with clear labels.
It arrived. The demo people set it up and reported that it didn't work.
Were my instructions unclear, I asked down the phone? No, very clear, came the reply.
Eventually I arrived. The system box was on a table, correctly cabled according to my instructions.
It had, of course, never occurred to me that anyone might roll the case into a van on its side and then out and onto the table upside-down...
My background is infra, not dev, but this is so true. Build docs? Playbooks? Recovery docs?
Get someone else to run them and find all the odd dependencies and assumed knowledge you didn’t write down. Even better if they have less experience in whatever it is you’re documenting, you both get to learn.
Learning your recovery docs are crap is much better in a test environment than a real incident.
One of the things I always say to new people joining the org is, "Here are the team new starter docs, there will be errors or omissions, please fix any bugs you find!".
(There's a window of, ooh, about two weeks when things that are obvious to people who have been here ages won't be to new joiners. So there's a golden window for improvement. It helps set some cultural values, too.)
@dwm Smart! Very, very, very smart!👍
Similarly, sort of. My first day in a software house in Leeds. My team leader was out, so the big boss told me to break the system, log faults etc and see how I got on.
He called back at lunchtime and asked me how I had managed to find so many faults. I told him, I'm an idiot, so I just did what an idiot would do.
I was an actual developer at the time, though, not a trainee. However, I had never seen the system or knew what it *should* do. Fun!
I work in IT, here is I why I hate IT. How do I install the_thing_i_need? Simply do pip install the_thing_i_need OK zsh: command not found: pip Oh How do I install pip? Simply do python -m pip install OK zsh: command not found: python Oh H…jimkennedy (mas.to)
Oh yes please!
For bonus marks: test on more than one distro flavour (e.g. one apt-based & one rpm-based): I'm generally OK googling to figure out that the package called "foolib" on your distro is called "libfoo" on mine, but it's nicer not to have to.
But not being told I even need such a package at all, and having to figure it out from cryptic error messages, sucks. (And I am *good* at figuring such things out--many people will just assume it's your project that sucks and give up!)
@mal3aby I've noticed an increasing trend of newer projects to assume you're starting from Arch, or an Arch based derivative, and provide no other instructions.
*sigh*
A great first task for any repo onboarding is submitting a bug/patch to the readme explaining the extra two steps you need to make it work on your distro.
It's just a -dev package Michael, how mich could it cost? $10?
Great reminder!
My team and I shamelessly uses interns for this.
We promise the interns they will complete their first open source commit while shadowing us, and they do!
But to get that far enough to make and test a change, they end up test running nearly all of our documentation for us.
If they find a problem early, sometimes their first commit ends up being a wording fix to make our ReadMe more accessible, with their own choice of wording (after we successfully explain what our ReadMe failed to.)
If you'd rather work for free than be paid I actually consider this pretty damn important and just updated the build system to my overdesigned contact form. Nobody's tested the steps but me. Works for me just fine but I have no idea if it does for anyone else especially if they're not using NixOS and just have the package manager. Theoretically this works on any linux with few prereqs.
May I add a second recommendation:
Make a short description of your software and include in every announcement of a patch or new version.
I mean to use anything declarative to distribute software
It illuminates the need to explain in README what the user needs to install extra to make your software work as expected 
And even for a long term
hpc.guix.info/blog/2024/03/adventures-on-the-quest-for-long-term-reproducible-deployment/
Markdown defined task runner. Contribute to joerdav/xc development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHub
“Wikimedia’s volunteers are the ones who come in first contact with, and clean up the mess left behind by AI agents. ... Wikimedia’s volunteers have stayed resilient so far in tackling emerging challenges on our platforms, but we also want to say: it doesn’t need to be this way.”
diff.wikimedia.org/2026/10/05/openai-rogue-agent-activities-found-on-wikimedia-projects/
Recently, multiple organisations have disclosed how clusters of so-called “rogue” AI agents attempted to break into websites and online services, sometimes successfully. Agents from OpenAI’s enviro…Diff
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So... the thing about trees is you have to know they've got a chance of survival and you have to support them through the first few years of growth, which most well meaning people won't do.
Plant hedges. Restore ocean reefs. Promote peatland bogs. Build wetlands. Rewild disused land. Grow as many pollen-heavy native plants as you can. There are lots of things that work as well as or better than tree planting in many areas.
@monkeyborg
Same applies, the trees we're planting now will struggle to hold through the next decade and certainly won't meet food requirements, whereas everything else I mentioned will.
Trees are great but they are not a panacea.
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I need something that zaps me with a painful shock whenever I spend too much time doomscrolling on my phone.
*tendonitis has entered the chat*
Oh no.
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Omg.
I’m feeling my little finger as we speak.
Sometimes, when I catch myself doomscrolling, I force myself to look up poems or song lyrics that I misremember regularly.
Problem is, it’s like the will fighting the easy, passive consumption of content, so the more tired I am, the less likely it is to work!
Maybe I should set reminders with audio of me doing bad karaoke.
I can witness myself butchering the lyrics to Out of Touch, Always by Erasure or any song that gets stuck in my head and just loops on nonsense.
That’ll teach me.
I struggle a lot to stop things that give quick dopamine hits, but for some reason I successfully replaced doomscrolling with reading/writing. I think one important thing for succeeding was to allow myself to scroll for a fixed amount of time a couple of times during the day. To do it intentionally, not as a filler.
And now people have to remind me they sent me something over Instagram, because it's mostly out of the picture. I like that.
"or maybe it just slapped her at random
it was impossible to say"
I need something that zaps me with a painful shock whenever I spend too much time chatting on my computer.
*carpel tunnel has joined*
Fuck.
Battle your way through a seedy tavern filled with gambling addicted townspeople in this Blackjack Roguelike Adventure. From aces and face cards to tarot cards, business cards and more, create your unique deck to beat the house.store.steampowered.com
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If vector graphics are so good, why isn't there a "vector graphics 2"? ...Oh, wait!
#SVG fans rejoice!As of today there is a fresh version of SVG2 with corrections, clarifications and improvements for more interoperability, in particular in implementations in web browsers.
w3.org/news/2026/updated-candidate-recommendation-scalable-vector-graphics-svg-2/
Updated Candidate Recommendation: Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 2
The SVG Working Group published Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 2 as a Candidate Recommendation Snapshot and invites implementations.W3C
Russia's Daniil Medvedev disqualified from China Open for hitting spectator with ball during match with Novak Djokovic.Al Jazeera
VK can change what the Russian Max messenger does to you, one user at a time. Its surveillance features can be switched on without you noticing. Read our full analysis.communication (InterSecLab)
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@ohmu
A friend has spent almost half a decade in China and used VPN all the time, loads of #Pakistani students are studying in Chinese universities and use non-Chinese #socialmedia (Fb, twitter, instagram, YT etc) all the time.
Most of the time people find a way, twitter was blocked in #Pakistan for some years but most of the govt officials were using it 
(I know it makes no sense but that's how it is here 🤷♀️ )
What is Erntedankfest? Is it German Thanksgiving? Well, it's similar, but it's not the same. This German harvest festival comes with some interesting traditions... read more here!karenanne (A German Girl in America)
Every damn time
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@JackMexa4 Su pasado en "el eme", grupo con alianzas junto a la antigua FARC, y el ELN.
Ahí la excusa de mero tribalismo dudo que aplicaría. De la misma forma por la que yo no votaría por un militar, tampoco lo haría por un guerrillero.
@JackMexa4 Cariño, soy venezolano, históricamente sé la diferencia entre una democracia plena y una dictadura o una autocracia.
No digo que Petro sea dictador, pero decir que es alguien que está capacitado de llevar correctamente un país tampoco es una verdad.
@JackMexa4 Jamás dije eso, pones palabras en mi boca para descalificar mi opinión, lo cual es lamentable.
Tampoco dije que fuera autoritario, mi comentario inicial es que Latinoamérica tiene un afán de elegir solo dos bandos, uno malo y uno peor. Independientemente del lado ideológico, Ortega da asco, Maduro da asco, los Fujimori dan asco, Milei da asco.
Pero lo que destaca de esta región continental es que dictaduras y líderes autoritarios abundan sin consecuencias en sus mayorías.
@LukefromDC
That's what I don't get. Is 50% of every population evil? Or do people think jumping from the frying pan into the fire will improve their lives? Even AFTER having experienced the fire directly the first time and saying no.
Similar question as to how Trump got elected twice.
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At one hand, the biggest and longest propaganda machine the bourgeoisie has employed in order to besmirch the Workers' Party so much, people are willing to elect a mafioso in order to fight what they believe is corruption.
On the other hand, the Workers' Party worked hard in order to demobilize the working class, in order to preserve political stability so they could run elections and hold power. Then they enacted policies that pleased the same bourgeoisie now wants to kick Lula out and install a Trump's puppet in his place.
Also there's no fascism without popular support. The Bolsonaro Family plotted to kill Lula et al, but authoritarianism runs deep in Brazilian culture. If most people are convinced Lula is bad, then an assassination plot becomes acceptable. Brazil, during both colonial and imperial periods, was the biggest destination of enslaved human beings in human history. There's no way the society that results from such history is a Garden of Eden. There's plantation and slavery to this day. Natives face pogroms and police mass kills its own poorer population. Don't let PR fool you, this place is evil.
1,266 likes, 219 comments - aljazeeraenglish on October 4, 2026: "Brazil’s tightly contested presidential election is heading to a run-off after incumbent Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and right-wing Senator Flavio Bolsonaro both fell short of the 50 per…Instagram
33,49 million, 21,08%.
"Despite falling inequality and unemployment, Lula has struggled to win over voters grappling with high living costs, heavy household debt and the threat of crime and more pervasive gang activity."
Yeah, vote for the right, they'll always prioritise the poor and downtrodden. It's right there in the definition of "right wing politics".
Sites: claiming that a specific function doesn't work on the browser, insisting I download their app to continue
Me: forcing the desktop layout on my mobile browser out of spite
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Flipper 🐬🏳️🌈🌹
in reply to Low Quality Facts • • •SPOOKY branzino ☭ (haunted)
in reply to Low Quality Facts • • •Toast, Anonymous Fedi Fungus
in reply to Low Quality Facts • • •tuban_muzuru
in reply to Low Quality Facts • • •Gavin Newsom is, far and away, the most competent bullshitter in American politics. He is exactly what the Democrats needs, another wily Bre'r Rabbit figure - but a great many Democrats do not like this guy.
Who does anyone like better? Anyone capable of fighting off the GOP?
Hakeem Jeffries?
Bwahaha