I’d hate to live in a world where just because something isn’t immediately useful it shouldn’t be researched.

Being able to demonstrate the ability to suppress a sonic boom would be huge.

Then you find out nobody needs you and you get depressed.

Yeah I was going to say the reason there hasn’t been significant progress on a HIV virus isn’t because it isn’t possible but because for the longest time the bodies that could provide funding for the research thought HIV killing ‘the gays’ was a desirable outcome…

So when I started in the current startup I am in, we did the anarchy approach of just give a feature to work on and a tool to track tickets for 3 years. Eventually as team leader we migrated to scrum development. And as the team has expanded I’ve actually gotten stricter about it.

The rituals of scrum seem pointless when you start out and with a team of less than 4 people but at 4+ people it’s important just to keep track of what on earth is happening in the team. Like end of sprint allows us to work out if things are vaguely on track. If they are not we can identify where the weaknesses are. Someone took on a task estimated at 8 story points and it took 2 weeks to do, need to find out what the issue is (usually because either because there is a knowledge gap in that aspect of the system or because the task just simply hasn’t been defined clearly enough and needs the product owner to give more details).

I never thought I’d be that guy who defends the scrum process but 5 years of being a team lead changes you.

Though because this system was one that evolved naturally as we grew and realised what we were doing as a company wasn’t working we largely avoided the corporate bullshittery version of scrum. We don’t have a scrum master, I’m the guy who is like “oi I need you in this meeting” to the product owners.

Yeah these days literally every website uses JavaScript in some format as modern reactive design is easier to do if you can execute client side code. Blocking JavaScript is a sledgehammer solution to the problem.

I completely forgot I had added that extension (back when Google actually looked ugly on Firefox on Android without it) just disabled and oh my god not only does it not freeze it actually feels usable again (I hate the weird AI suggested tabs at the top in the chromium UI).

Yeah I think I find this problem a lot with most projects with a FOSS community. Lamenting about the lack of large scale take up of a project whilst also getting ideologically gatekeepy about the user experience.

Apps like Sync are a gateway for converting Reddit users over to Lemmy and we should celebrate them.

Yeah also trying to stay FOSS on Android/iOS seems like a lost cause given the OS themselves.