I still don't have time for deep commentary (just got back from Origins; post about games to come), but there have been some developments since the Stack Overflow moderation strike began on June 5:

Data dumps

From very early on, Stack Overflow Inc. has published a quarterly data dump of all of the content (with attributions etc) from all network sites. This was the explicit insurance in case Stack Overflow turned evil in the future, like Experts Exchange, the company that led to SO being created, did. That stuff all uses the Creative Commons license and is meant to remain available.

Someone noticed that the June dump had not been posted on schedule, and asked a question about it. One of the people who was part of the 10% layoff in April replied, saying that the dumps had been disabled at the end of March with an annotation that they were only to be restored at the direction of the "Senior Leadership Team" (this usually means C-level executives). That drew some attention.

The company spent several days ignoring, then brushing off, then making excuses for this unannounced change. Nothing they said was credible. The strikers added "restore the data dumps" to their list of demands. After almost a week, the June dump was posted. No public promises have been made about the future yet as far as I know (though, see "was away for several days" above).

Spam overflow

With about 1500 curators (including about a quarter of moderators network-wide) on strike, and more importantly with the volunteer-run anti-spam automation turned off, the junk's been piling up. Reportedly, employees are now spending time handling spam, cutting into their day jobs.

While we're told that discussions are happening between representatives from the moderators and the company, they don't seem to have made much progress. A moderator told me that the company committed to keeping the data dumps coming, but it sounded like it was specific employees making the commitment, so the promise might not outlast their employment.

Rules for thee but not for me

In addition to violating the moderator agreement in a few ways (leading to the strike), the gen-AI-hype-chasing company recently announced that they are going to launch a site for "prompt design" (I am not making this up), but they're not going to use their existing process for creating communities because it doesn't work well, so instead they're looking for people to be part of a behind-closed-doors steering committee or some such, with the goal of launching the site by July 26.

The CEO is giving a talk about gen-AI hype at some conference on July 27.

Meanwhile, people who are trying to launch communities using the current process would like a word.

Meanwhile, over at Codidact...

Stack Overflow Inc. has given us a gift. We have lots of new participants and new activity, and some active efforts to build new communities here. Nice! We've gotten some questions about differences and was starting to think that we need an "immigration guide" and then someone reminded me of this early post asking about differences -- with a new answer from one of our new users. Nice.

It sounds like we might also attract some contributors on GitHub, which would be great. We have many things we want to do and not very many people.

I have an open-source project I am very enthusiastic about (Codidact). Mostly my role does not involve the code directly: I'm the community lead (i.e. primary talker-with-people-who-use-it and triager of feature requests), and I do some design of features, workflows, wireframes, internal documentation, and stuff like that. And I beat up on the test server a lot when there's work in progress to poke at. We have infrastructure to support all that.

But sometimes I'd like to get a little closer to the code, mostly for my own education and partly so I can maybe help do smaller things because our team is pretty small still. And there was that one time that I really wanted to fix a front-end bug that I admitted was limited in scope; it was bothering me, but not something to drag a developer off of something else for. And it was in the Javascript code, which I can bumble my way through, so ok, I figured, I can do this. (And there was that weird thing about dates in Javascript, but I digress.) But I didn't have a dev environment to test it with, and ended up putting it in a userscript to test and then asking somebody else to plug it in for real, which meant I needed help from one of the developers after all, and I shouldn't be that lame.

My Mac with its older operating system is not compatible with some library or other that we use (details forgotten; I just remember the long setup sequence that ultimately failed). And people said "why not update your OS?" and I said "ha ha no" -- not going to break what's working on a machine I depend on. Clearly, what I need is an inexpensive dev environment somewhere, maybe something I could connect to remotely or maybe outdated-but-more-current-than-mine hardware that would be good enough for this purpose.

I went to the elves for counsel, and one suggestion was a cheap AWS instance (considered it), and then our team lead said "a Raspberry Pi would be fine". And lo, Raspberry Pis are cheap, but they're also aimed at the do-it-yourselfers, and to say that I am not a hardware tinkerer would be an understatement. I am not at al enamored of the "ooh, let's take a bunch of parts and build a fabulous machine!" project; I just want a working machine. I will spend money to keep more of my hair attached to my head. I said this to our lead, who said "here's a place that'll sell you all the stuff including a pre-loaded operating system, but you have to put it into the case yourself", and I said "deal".

My box of Pi stuff came, but did not include any assembly documentation and there were a few things I was mystified about. (I had a package of heat sinks but no clue what to do with them, for instance. They were three different sizes, so I thought it was a general package from which I was supposed to choose one. Got that sorted.) With some further help from the elves I was able to sort out what goes where, and this afternoon I assembled it all, pulled out a spare monitor that I knew spoke HDMI because it still had an HDMI cable dangling from it... and found that the other end of that cable was not HDMI but some older fatter connector type with pins (yeah I've lost track of video-connector history), and I do not in fact have a spare monitor with an HDMI port.

But wait, I said. Surely in the vast world of gadgets and connectors and adapters, there is a thingie that lets you plug in two HDMI cables, maybe because you need a longer cable (extension-cord style). And lo, this is a thing, and when my $5 part arrives I will be able to set all this up and see if it works.

It's always something, isn't it?

(I believe that, longer-term, I will be able to set this up so that I can connect to it remotely, from a few feet away, and it won't need its own monitor, keyboard, and mouse, at least most of the time. But for now, it can have a corner of the desk to get up and running until I learn how to do that.)

I see one more benefit to doing all this, one that's not about Codidact. Someday I will need to replace my primary machine, as all hardware goes the way of dinosaurs eventually, and I'm not sure I want to keep buying into the Mac ecosystem. I moved from Windows to Mac some time back (the Windows option at the time was Vista), and maybe I will move from Mac to Linux next time. I'm comfortable on the Linux command line, but am unfamiliar with the Linux GUI setup. This seems a way for me to explore that world some.

Shameless self-promotion:

As we know,[1] the evening meal for Purim starts with Wacky Mac, a dish that features four pasta shapes: wheels, shells, spirals, and tubes. What is less widely known is how we are to eat this ritual item. Like the Pesach seder a month later, the meal has specific requirements and specific meanings! And like at the Pesach seder, your child should ask you to explain why this night is different from all other nights and what the laws and customs are and what they mean. It is only because of the other celebratory aspects of this holiday that in most families the child is too inebriated to ask (and the parents too inebriated to answer). So prepare yourself now, so you can both fulfill the commandment and explain it to your child.

First, we must examine the symbolism. [...]

See the full article at Judaism Codidact.

Pass the wine! :-)

P.S. For the programmers, we have this question on type systems and the use of void -- more answers welcome!

Somebody on Twitter asked:

What did you learn in 2020 (besides how to make bread)?

I responded there:

• To grow food in pots.
• To cut men's hair.
• To cook more new things.
• That my cat loves me being home all the time.
• More about community-building.
• How to set up a nonprofit foundation.
• To cut people w/no morals or human decency out of my life.
• And yes, sourdough.

I was up against a character limit there, but I'm not here.

Back at the beginning of the pandemic, when staying at home was just starting to happen, I remember somebody asking: what will you do with this gift of time? I've had that in mind for most of the year. I miss seeing my coworkers, but I gained close to an hour back each work day in not commuting, and I gained a lot of flexibility. My team tries to work mostly normal hours for the sake of collaboration, but everybody recognizes that people have other demands on their attention too. The parents trying to work while their kids are at home attending school via Zoom gave me the opportunity to attend that mid-day (virtual) class or non-work meeting, and the flexibility to tend to things around the house while working. As one small example, sourdough -- it's a two-day process that doesn't require a lot of attention at any one time, but requires availability that wouldn't have been possible were I going to the office every day. Before this year, bread came from a store/bakery or out of a bread machine, only.

Both of us working from home is sometimes frustrating when one or the other of us has meetings, but we're also spending more time together throughout the day and that's very nice. We eat lunch together, every day, in addition to dinner. Sure, this means I'm not making things that I like but he doesn't (that I would have normally made for lunches at the office), but on the other hand, because I'm not limited to things that pack well, we're eating better, I think. Not always healthy, but less crap, more stuff made from scratch. I even grew some of it, which was new to me.

I only cut his hair the once. He held off for a long time back in the spring, thinking it would be possible to see a barber soon, but soon kept moving. He did a lot of it himself; I did the parts he couldn't see or reach. Men's hair technology sure is different from women's.

At the beginning of the year the evil deeds from people who should know better at Stack Exchange were still doing a lot of damage. It wasn't just what they did to me; they did some other nasty, bone-headed things early in 2020 and then throughout the year. A couple of the employees they drove out shared some things publicly after. (Pro tip: don't fire someone who knows about your dirty laundry without securing an NDA.) The folks there are majorly screwed up, and a couple of people I once thought decent folks in bad situations have shown themselves to be lacking in ethics and human decency. I'm well to be rid of their lies and malice.

Frustrating as it was to lose some good communities there, I've spent this year working to build the next generation at Codidact, and I'm very happy with where we are. We're building an open-source platform for Q&A and so much more, learning from those who have come before and building things that serve communities better. While our all-volunteer team is small and that limits us sometimes, we're flexible and responsive and working with our communities, and that shows. We have about a dozen communities up and running on our network now (including Judaism, yay! with some folks from Mi Yodeya), with more to come. Some of them are doing some novel things that weren't possible Somewhere Else. I'm the Community Lead, and while I had a fair bit of experience as a moderator on communities with varying characteristics, this role has allowed me to stretch and learn even more. It turns out this role makes me the most logical person to do "product management" and bug/feature prioritization and a fair bit of QA, too. Cool!

I'm now a board member; The Codidact Foundation was incorporated in November as a non-profit (I just got the confirmation letter from Companies House this week) and we'll now seek charity status. As soon as we can get a bank in pandemic times to let us open an account we'll be able to take donations and presumably get ourselves some better servers. This is all very exciting for me, and it's neat to be working with a worldwide team with quite a mix of backgrounds. Our major contributors include students and software developers and an ambulance dispatcher and a soldier and an accountant, among others.

Don't get me wrong; 2020 has been terrible in many ways. People close to me have died and I couldn't even be with or hug people, just be on Zoom. Friends and one family member are dealing with health challenges. The pandemic has greatly impeded my congregation (and so many others!). Nearly a year of not being able to socialize, go to restaurants, take in entertainment, hold conventions, attend Shabbat services, or do "normal life things" is wearing. Knowing that it's going to be at least many more months is sobering. (I'm going to call it now: I think Pennsic will be either cancelled again or severely hobbled and small.)

I'm glad to have the kind of job I can do from home; many people don't. And something I left off of that list on Twitter: I've learned how to work from home pretty effectively. I'd like some more human contact in three dimensions, but when (let's say "when", not "if") the pandemic is finally under some degree of control, I'll be able to get that from places other than work. I've learned more solidly that I could handle working for a company that's all-remote -- I suspected as much when I applied for such a position a few years back, but now I've seen it. And my employer has learned that remote works too; finally most of our engineering positions are now listed as "anywhere" instead of just the two cities in which we have engineering teams.

On the larger scale, 2020 has been a year of plague and violence and tyranny and unrest and hate and division. In the much smaller scale here at Chez Cellio, there has been good along with the bad, and I'm thankful for them.

I haven't been posting regularly. Oops.

I've been baking bread about once a week. This past week I finally scored some rye flour (that was not exorbitantly priced), so I made a rye sourdough for the first time. I think I prefer less molasses than this recipe called for, so I'll adjust that next time or try a different recipe. The bread is tasty, aside from the molasses overwhelming the caraway. Most "rye bread" recipes I've seen use rye for only one third of the flour, which sent me searching for "all rye" rye bread, which apparently works and tastes good but might not rise as much? I'll probably try it at some point, especially since I had to buy four (small) bags of rye flour to get it.

Dani and I play board games every Shabbat now, and occasionally we have two other friends (who are also careful, and I guess this is a "pod"?) over to play. We play Pandemic in every session because, well, pandemic. Yesterday we pulled out Kings and Things, a game we all had vague memories of, and by the end had concluded that while it's appealing it's also kind of tedious and maybe sort of a shorter Titan, a game I like in principle but dislike actually playing. Ok, now we've refreshed our memories...

A friend has a game called McMulti, which is an economic game (oil/gas theme)... in German. There are lots of places where text matters, so when we've played we've used cheat sheets since none of us read German. We recently became aware of an English-language derivative, called Crude, and got it recently. They've changed some of the mechanics and made one really annoying change to how the board is laid out, but other changes are positive and the game's a little faster. I like it, but am tempted to figure out how to print my own board. The game is really strongly designed for four players, but there are rules for a two-player version, which Dani and I have played once, which seen to work ok.

Codidact, the project that consumes most of my spare time, is in the process of incorporating as a non-profit. We've got our lawyer on our Discord server and having conversations about incorporation documents via Google Docs comments. It looks like we will be able to clear an important hurdle soon. Neat!

On the project front, I'm not writing code -- I keep feeling like I should learn Ruby and the dev environment so I can help, then concluding that I probably won't be helping because I'd be taking time and attention from the developers who are actually being productive. But I've taken over bug-wrangling -- some analysis and testing, clarifying vague reports, and, especially, triaging. I was surprised to find that GitHub counts filing issues as contributions. I think that's new?

We just had our first birthday, counting from when the project founder set up a Discord server to talk about maybe building an alternative to Somewhere Else. We've still got a lot of work ahead of us, both technical and community development, but I'm pleased with where we are.

I've been reading a lot of fiction, a mix of short stories, novellas, and novels, many through the BookFunnel network (and also StoryBundle). I'm "meeting" a lot of authors I didn't previously know. I should really write a separate post about that.

I am delighted by how well things are going on the Judaism community on Codidact. We have a lot of active people and interesting questions. I have my people back. And in time we'll broaden our activities; there are discussions of an on-site blog (for torah commentary) and a dictionary or wiki of Jewish and halachic terms and concepts. We've also integrated with Sefaria, the big online collection of sources, which is cool and produces bidirectional links.

Paging Dr. Whom and other linguists: Languages & Linguistics is a new site and currently has questions about Hebrew, Arabic, a comparison between Arabic and Chinese, English, and (language-agnostic) linguistic concepts.

People have been asking us for a programming site for a while. Friday we launched Software Development, which has a slow start so far presumably because of the weekend. We wouldn't normally launch on a Friday, but this was the best timing for the SRE-type who would be keeping an eye on things for the first few days. Its scope is broad; we're planning for spin-offs from the start but we're starting with one big tent rather than creating specialized communities that struggle more to achieve critical mass.

Now we have to get the word out. I have a draft of the next newsletter for our mailing list, so that should go out soon.

(Our other communities: Writing, Outdoors, Photography & Video, Scientific Speculation, Cooking, Electrical Engineering, and the "town hall", Meta.)

We sent out a newsletter to our announcements mailing list a few days ago, and now that we've got the features to support it I created a blog on our site too. You can read the latest message there. I'm especially excited by four new communities (now six total, plus Meta), the "article" post type (not everything is Q&A) which is being used on the cooking site for recipes (which I did not anticipate, and it works), MathJax so we can support science/math sites, and smaller additions like suggested edits and better tools for building on-site help.

The four new communities are: Cooking, Electrical Engineering, Scientific Speculation (an offshoot of Worldbuilding on SE), and Photo & Video.

Since we sent the newsletter out we added Wilson scoring for answers, meaning we take controversy into account when deciding what order to show answers in. On SE a post with 10 upvotes and 5 downvotes (+10/-5) is treated the same as one with 5 upvotes and no downvotes (+5/-0), but if you're trying to figure out which one to use to fix your out-of-memory problem or the short circuit in your appliance or your bread that's still gooey on the inside when it's burnt on the outside, we don't think those two answers are equivalent. We're also showing the raw votes everywhere (still working on the presentation there; I spent an evening last week with our design lead collaborating in Figma).

We're still based in the UK (that's where the servers are, and the person who oversees them). We need to learn more about UK libel laws, which sounds like a problem for platforms hosting user-contributed content.

Do any of my readers have experience (or specific knowledge of) setting up a non-profit corporation in the US? I have questions.

Is incorporation a matter of paperwork that I can do, or do I need to hire a professional? If the latter, what kind of professional am I looking for? Are there referral services, and do they include people who'll consult for a discounted rate or pro bono for a non-profit?

What decisions need to be made before starting the process? A statement of purpose (articles of incorporation)? Bylaws? A slate of officers and/or a board? What are good resources for creating those founding documents, to make sure we dot all the "i"s and cross all the "t"s?

We intend to solicit donations, so we'll want to apply for tax-exempt status (501(c)3, I assume). I think that's a separate step?

What thoughts do we need to be thinking early on about exposure to liability?

I am, if you haven't guessed, talking about Codidact.