Hi! Ty! And Hack club is totally free to teens and we provide travel stipends, hardware, electronics and more. (We don’t charge 7 percent to clubs to sell things :)) hack club run a fiscal sponsorship and adult-orgs using it pay us 7percent- which we use to make more things free to teens. - hack club cofounder here
I don't know if it's still the case, but a young developer in Bangladesh has been making pretty cool neovim plugins on a mobile phone. Hack club is (or was?) collecting donations to get him a macbook laptop to hopefully reduce the pain points: https://hcb.hackclub.com/oxy2dev-laptop/transactions
Please don’t downvote this advice into oblivion. As a person who owns MacBooks all his life, I do want something more open now, and honestly, I have no idea what else I can buy. Any polite input into this conversation is actually valuable.
Would make sense if this thread was about laptop purchasing choices.
Surely, there are other places on the internet where NGO's are politely criticized for getting kids the wrong free laptops - those likely contain valuable advice on what brand of computer you can buy
Not available in Bangladesh. There’s every reason to believe that this person weighed the pros and cons of everything available locally before deciding on the Apple product.
Framework 12 is well aligned with this use case. Hackable, durable/utilitarian design, lower priced, aimed for youth and education markets (has a bit of the EeePC spirit). Well, those were the initial design goals of the concept, but then they sort of made a more general purpose laptop that everyone at the company fell in love with, which led to it actually going to production.
12" is on the smaller side, but it's also a 2in1 that can be used in a desk setup as an extra monitor. I'd ship them a cheap lightning portable monitor, simple keyboard+mouse pack, and for $100 more they have a durable portable laptop and a simple two monitor desk setup for dev.
Sounds untrustworthy. Bangladesh's standard of living is roughly on par with India's, so cheap Chinese laptops should be fairly common there, and repairs for such laptops should be pretty available.
So, instead of one MacBook, you could buy about 10 laptops for 10 Bangladeshi kids, and developing on them would be about as comfortable as on a MacBook.
Why don't you start a non-profit that gives laptop to kids so you can decide over the kind of machine to procure. These constant opinions on other peoples decisions where you have no insight to the whys is very ego-centric in a i-know-best kind of way.
About… the teenage boy’s… “bs” about his preferences? About his supporters recognizing his free labor, wanting to reward it, asking him to make a choice for himself and him making it?
This case was different from hackclub’s usual donations. Someone spotted OXY2DEV, a prolific Neovim plugin dev, coding on his phone and shared it with the community. People rallied to raise money specifically for him, and hackclub stepped in to facilitate. The drive ended with a small surplus, and since the funds were raised only for him, they let him decide how to use it. Smart choice because in South Asia chasing service centers is such a hassle and Apple’s service process is a dream in comparison.
I can't talk for the entire region, but what I saw across my travels is quite the opposite. You enter a repair shop the owner typically knows how to solder and will fix about any laptop and mobile phone. Back home in Europe is where repairs are overpriced or deemed "impossible". I can't recall more than once in south east asia the words "you better off buying a new one", oh so common in the "west".
I agree the critic sounds misplaced though, he wanted a Macbook. However not because all the other models are complicated to fix in his land.
Isn't this basically the same as Slack, just good for _now_?
I do use discord myself. But as a company I wouln't put all my communication data in the hands of a company that could just do the same as Slack did, in some foreseeable future.
I am somewhat guessing here: They used to sell this app (for, idk, $300 I think?) until recently. The FAQ might not have been updated in full to reflect the fact that it's now open source.
I would recommend that people stop taking this kind of bait, especially as an organization. Discord is free for now but that's bound to change and you can't have any expectation of privacy there.
In my eyes they're practically the poster child for an organization who could (and arguably should) be running their own solution on their own servers.
Perhaps self-hosted Revolt Chat [1] which I've been keeping an eye on but I don't have any first hand experience with it. There are many more solutions in this space though.
I explored revolt with a group of friends earlier this year, along several other solutions such as Matrix Element, Telegram and the new TeamSpeak.
Neither Revolt nor others are unfortunately at the right level of maturity to be adopted seriously. The team is doing a great job, but it’s still extremely basic.
Discord with all its warts is still the best way to have group calls in a casual setting.
We've deployed mattermost at my company because it meets most requirements that slack did minus the SSO. Surprisingly used by some big government agencies (NASA/USAF)
This. It is mind boggling to see an organization that teaches tech related stuff be so clueless about the dangers of proprietary software, cloud services and walled gardens.
Yep. We millenials spent decades talking about free and libre protocols (and software) and kids today love another walled garden against another one... good luck with that.
Inb4 "IRC sucks"... Jabber/XMPP exists since late 00's (at least ready enough compared to the first versions) and there are pretty fine clients for every OS.
Listen, I'm an old fart who may have been messing around on IRC when you were just a twinkle in your parents' eyes. IRC does suck along a lot of important metrics. The GPL open-source community-developed project I worked on for 19 years moved from IRC to Matrix several years ago, and the payoff in terms of engagement was obvious immediately.
I agree that walled gardens are a trap. But you're not going to convince people to move to free solutions without being able to recognize clearly why they walled gardens are so attractive in the first place.
What's your definition of "engagement" here? Because it makes me think of social networking tactics to keep you ... well ... engaged ... the longest time possible.
Right, I misunderstood your last line. I initially took you to mean, "We've had IRC since forever and Jabber since the early 00's..." Reading it again, I now understand you to mean, "Before you say 'IRC sucks', which I agree with, better protocols like Jabber have been around since the early 00's."
No, I like IRC, but IM has different uses. IRC is for technical/non-private/random connections to roam around, like going a public place IRL. IM it's for personal stuff, as talking between relatives, close friends, word colleagues and so on.
Moved on to matrix? Many did... and they're all realizing matrix doesn't actually work long term. There's only the synapse server and there's literally no way to trim data from the db in synapse or everything breaks. That means the db just grows and grows until it's too expensive, or too slow (re:IO), to work. That's why the matrix.org homeserver has a 55TB db. That's why many long running IRC servers gave up on running matrix bridges because it simply became too computationally/resource costly to run the simple text based server even if they loved the features.
So unfortunately Matrix is a dead end. The matrix foundation gave up control 2 years ago. Matrix is now controlled by Element.io corporation and they only care about their government hosting contracts. It's really only viable if you have a significant constant money stream to pay for the ever increasing server resources like governments/corps.
IRC persists. It is the text chat layer of the internet which is the platform. Trying to build the entire internet into your text chat platform, and storing everything, is the kind of insanity only for-profit operations do... and eventually die from. Whereas IRC being a dumb pipe with lists of IPs associated with sockets will live forever. And cheaply.
Synapse server is the only server that does the things matrix says it can do. All those others don't. Notice only two of those say 'stable' and only one, synapse, implements the full set of features. Also can't switch between them.
And your links to synapse features ("Please note that, as this feature isn't part of the Matrix specification yet, the use of m.room.retention events for per-room retention policies is to be considered as experimental.") may describe certain synapse functionality but in practice is doesn't work and the db keeps growing as does IO load. The compression thing is an attempt at mitigation because the protocol just doesn't handle it.
Even now it costs extra to have file uploads over 50MB, high quality audio, and large video calls. Features that an organisation like this could legitimately need.
we use discord, it's great, we wrote our own bots for the things we need. In terms of making money, it's just discord has a different model for making money, it doesn't want the servers to cost money, it wants as many servers as possible so many people want to use discord. It sells directly to users.
reply