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1:45 AM
@derobert interesting. I wonder if you might know an answer to this question I asked a while back?
 
 
5 hours later…
6:32 AM
@Gilles'SO-stopbeingevil' For what it's worth, I dislike gamification, but I agree with @Wildcard that it's a big part of why SE has been so successful. Or at least, successful to the extent that it has been successful. At least rep is central, I think.
And people seem to like all that badge nonsense too. They collect them.
@Wildcard Generally speaking, if Anthony doesn't already know the answer, he can figure it out. That's been my experience, anyway.
@Gilles'SO-stopbeingevil' Completely different dynamics. Wikipedia articles are the work of many hands. SE questions and answers are written by individuals.
That's just off the top of my head. I'm sure there are other differences.
@Wildcard Agree with all of the above. Mostly pretty obvious points, I think. Still, it's often (always?) helpful to point out the obvious.
Personally, my concern would be (a) manpower (b) conflicting views and design goals. But I suspect that building a polished user experience like SE needs a lot of work.
 
 
3 hours later…
9:26 AM
One of these days, I shall call you "Mr. President". @JeffSchaller @terdon
(or "Prime minister" in your case @Kusalananda)
>:-) 0:-)
 
@Fabby with some unsavoury claims to fame in between
Alternatively, a Red Hat software engineer became vice-president of the European Parliament:
Marcel Kolaja (born 29 June 1980 in Moravská Třebová) is a Czech software engineer, activist and a Czech Pirate Party politician who serves as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) and a Vice-President of the European Parliament since the 2019 election. He is a member of the Greens–European Free Alliance parliamentary group. His political agenda focuses on technological competitiveness of the EU on the world market, corporate lobbying in the EU and corporate tax avoidance, digital rights, censorship, environmental protection and consumer protection. As an activist he has also promoted free...
 
If I've learnt one management-related thing in my professional career, it is that if you're very good at one thing (maybe even the best), then this does not mean you're even suited for some other thing.
 
@Kusalananda which is a superset of the Peter principle
 
@StephenKitt Indeed.
 
@Kusalananda and I like your use of the word “suited”, because you might still be reasonably good at the other thing, but not enjoy it at all
 
9:32 AM
@Fabby You can start by calling me "sir"!
:P
 
Your Lordship
 
@StephenKitt Painful personal experience there.
 
@Kusalananda same for me!
@terdon how about something along the lines of “Lord Buckethead” or “Count Binface”?
Lord Buckethead, also known as Count Binface, is a British satirical political candidate. A candidate of that name has stood in three United Kingdom general elections against three different Conservative Party leaders and Prime Ministers. Representing the Gremloids, a frivolous political party, he ran against Margaret Thatcher for parliament in Finchley in 1987, against John Major in Huntingdon in 1992, and against Theresa May in Maidenhead in 2017 where he polled 0.4% of the vote. He announced his intention to stand in the 2019 European Parliament elections, but did not do so. Following a copyright...
Count /bin/face
 
Buckethead? Bin bucket? A reference to /dev/null, the eternal resting place for much data and many errors?
 
The Marquess of Null
The Most Honourable terdon, Marquess of Null, Puller of the terdon
Lest we forget
28
A: Are there any memes on Ask Ubuntu?

Nathan OsmanMeme: "pulling a terdon" Originator: terdon ♦ Examples: "let's not pull a terdon" "Let's not pull a Terdon here." "I promise to never pull a Terdon :p" Background: Our dear friend (and moderator) terdon inadvertently assisted a poor user in deleting his home directory. Terdon wa...

 
9:46 AM
Marquise de Null has a certain ring to it.
Ter Don von Null.
 
It could be misinterpreted as « Marquis des nuls » (however that might also be appropriate)
Herr Ter Don von Null ;-)
 
To be honest, "Terdon" sounds like some sort of title in itself. "I'm the terdon around here!"
 
It does!
“Let me check with my terdon” when you need to check whether you can give someone a deal (or pretend to).
 
Ok, I'm off for a meeting and then I need to continue working.
 
10:33 AM
Y'all having fun?
:P
 
 
2 hours later…
12:49 PM
Some answers don’t age entirely well:
10
A: How to "communicate" with a moderator about declined spam flags?

Stephen KittLike Jeff Schaller, I’m not a moderator... However to get in touch with a moderator, I think the best way is to @ one of them in the main chat room. terdon is usually quite responsive there, which means he gets to deal with this kind of stuff ;-). As far as spam goes, I think the practice here ...

 
Tim
I am wondering which functional languages to choose for learning concurrency: Clojure, Haskell, Concurrent ML, Scala, Erlang, Elixir, maybe also Go
Thanks in advance!
 
 
1 hour later…
1:59 PM
@Fabby I ... might eventually qualify as an Ex-UNIX Admin, but I really don't see politics in my future. Or crushing terrorist groups or war crimes. But thanks for vote, though! :)
I think instead of a title, pterdon might be more of a dinosaur
 
Wow, after the tvtropes thing, now saying terdon is a dinosaur, you’re trying to make friends and influence people ;-)
 
The Spanish don't call me Jeff "Dale" Carnegie for nothing
 
@JeffSchaller how’s that pronounced in Spanish?
 
@StephenKitt "Dale" of course
Pitbull might say it better than I do
@StephenKitt sorry for the trouble! Thanks for the edit; saved me from having to resign
@StephenKitt SSSSSSSssssssshhhhhhhhh!
They can't know about our conspiracy!
 
2:14 PM
@JeffSchaller oh yes sorry!
man I get confused by all the voices in my head
 
@StephenKitt tell me about it!
 
and all the socks on my desk
 
@StephenKitt and my kids with all their puppet games -- confuses me when I log on to work and see Puppet
 
@JeffSchaller more flags! more flags!
 
Kusalananda said he wanted more, since he got more votes than I did, he feels bad that he hasn't had a chance to handle as many flags as I have.
Now I'm really burning some bridges
man, hallucinating again? I could have sworn I made a flippant comment after the election about K earning more votes than me, and so meaning I could do half the work
 
@JeffSchaller you could suggest a “mod ROI metric” for codidact, so that users can see if the elected moderators are pulling their weight
 
Not sure the cowboy code is alive & well here, since terdon, Mrozek, and slm have run away with all the gold already.
(searching "codidact" as that's new to me)
 
@JeffSchaller top of the starred items
@JeffSchaller I would have thought the mods who left did it...
 
2:42 PM
@StephenKitt well, there's none left, so it's anyone's guess
@StephenKitt thank you for the nudge; my Google-fu was really failing me. Top result was something in German (?) and #4 (after two Facebook hits) was "Codidact is the #1 English website on the internet"
s/German/Dutch, apparently
 
3:10 PM
@JeffSchaller It's a bit difficult with you just doing them all so quickly ;-)
 
@Kusalananda vacation? Did I hear someone say I should take a vacation?
 
@JeffSchaller Also, I think it works the other way around. More votes == less work. I'm sure there's a Meta post about that somewhere... ;-)
@JeffSchaller :-)
 
@Kusalananda mmmmm, that does make sense. A great leader moves but a finger, and entire armies follow
@Kusalananda I'd look, but Stephen has apparently taken my Google-fu again.
 
@JeffSchaller That darn Stephen!
 
@Jeff I see from your edit rejection comments that you’ve started preparing your meta Q&A on the topic ;-)
 
3:13 PM
@StephenKitt I just couldn't live with myself approving that one
 
I’ve started working on an editing guide, but I keep slipping into style guide
 
I'm already "behind" on Meta posts -- fra-san's LQP wants an answer, too
at least I got that Stephen guy off my back, after 3 months of hounding
 
ah yes,
15
Q: How to tackle the gray area in reviewing low-quality answers?

fra-sanIt is not infrequent to see controversial reviews of specific kinds of answers in the Low Quality Posts review queue. Those answers are often short, made at most of a few commands or links with few to none words of explanation; they usually fail to provide a solution to the asker's problem (e.g. ...

@JeffSchaller I haven’t accepted an answer there yet though ;-)
 
@StephenKitt well, if history is any indication, you'll be waiting twice as long for Kusalananda to respond ;)
 
@JeffSchaller you keep feeding him TV tropes!
 
3:17 PM
point!
 
@StephenKitt I might chime in on that one, at some point.
 
I'm in some sort of mood this week!
 
I’m going to become an OpenBSD developer so I can block tvtropes.org globally for all OpenBSD users
@Kusalananda I look forward to that :-)
 
@StephenKitt I'll continue pretending I enjoy that site until then.
 
@StephenKitt "So why did you become president of the Universe, Mr. Kitt?" --"Well, there was this Unix.Meta question I wanted an answer to, and people were getting distracted...
 
3:19 PM
@JeffSchaller ROFL
 
@Kusalananda typical!
 
 
2 hours later…
5:17 PM
@Wildcard Hmmm, I personally just listen to podcasts on my Android phone. Podist, my podcatcher, has an output mode where it makes a RSS feed with the mix of podcasts I want to listen to, in the order to listen to them in, with all the audio processing done. I put that on my server, where I can point any of several podcast players on Android. Used to use BeyondPod, but switched to Podcast Republic after BeyondPod's bitrot. I sometimes listen to music, I just use BubbleUPnP (or Google Play Music)
@FaheemMitha ... so in this case, I don't actually have an answer for that. Though I guess with enough work I could find one, writing it if necessary. But that's a lot of work!
So far I've avoided writing my own music player.
 
5:51 PM
@derobert Yes, I wrote that before looking at the question. That's really not a question so much as a request for software.
 
 
2 hours later…
7:39 PM
A rough spot of TeX debugging. Sometimes I wish I had an expert to hand things over to.
 
@FaheemMitha sorry to hear! I guess it's not appropriate for Tex.SE?
 
@JeffSchaller I haven't been able to isolate the problem so far. If I could isolate it, I could probably fix it. And without isolating it, TeX SE isn't really an option, anyway.
I've been at it for over 2 hours. Which is unusually long.
 
would the folks in Tex.SE chat be willing to provide tips on narrowing it down? Unless they already have a canonical Q/A on it?
a "shellcheck" for LaTeX??
 
8:02 PM
@JeffSchaller They're generally helpful, but as you may have noticed, they like something concrete to work with. If you can point to something specific and ask why this isn't working (or whatever), they can generally solve it.
Well, the site can. I don't usually post questions to chat unless they're fairly simple.
@JeffSchaller shellcheck?
 
8:15 PM
@FaheemMitha a website that tells you about problems with your shell script (shellcheck.net)
 
@JeffSchaller Oh. No, that sort of thing doesn't work well with TeX. And my code is very complicated, anyway. A mix of Lua and TeX.
 
@FaheemMitha gotcha; you've already lost me with "Lua" :)
 
@JeffSchaller LuaTeX uses Lua as a backend. So one can use Lua for the actual programming, which is considerably better than trying to do it using TeX.
TeX is designed to do typesetting, and it does that very well.
But trying to use it for general purpose programming is worse than trying to use Bash to write a web server.
 
 
1 hour later…
9:49 PM
@Gilles'SO-stopbeingevil' you might be interested in meta.stackexchange.com/q/338680/307622
@Tim Go is a very very nice language, very clean, with an ecosystem well suited to large scale development.
 
10:32 PM
I dislike questions that end up collecting cargo cult answers. "I also had this issue, so I did this...". Unfortunately I rarely know anything about the topics in those questions.
 
10:46 PM
@Wildcard indeed, thanks
I have similar concerns, and no good answer
 
11:12 PM
@Wildcard wow that's quite the analysis-- SO should hire them :)
 
11:47 PM
@Kusalananda I like answers better that have a deep and accurate understanding, but when I'm trying to debug a Windows printer driver I'm happy to get a working cargo cult answer. ;)
 

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