There is always a lot of potential in the long term. Keeping motivation up in the short term is the difficult part. Anyways, thanks for your word of encouragement. I appreciate it.
I was using Tamil as my UI language too. Then, I had some mysterious locale errors and stopped doing it. Must get back to it.
And, these days I do blog both in Tamil and English. https://ta.systemreboot.net I enjoy writing in Tamil, but I'm still not fast enough with the tamil99 keyboard. Also, my Tamil vocabulary isn't powerful enough to express some concepts, and I end up sounding weird. Still, I try.
A few years back, I started working on translating some command line applications to Tamil. But, I lost my motivation halfway through, and the project stalled. I need to see some community use my translations for me to summon up the motivation again.
I hate big, fat frameworks. They take all the creative fun out of programming and just make you conform to someone else's API. Not to mention the API is usually unidiomatic to its host language and basically a world of its own.
> The problem is that people who would really benefit from Tamil computing don't have computers of their own. Yes, this is often true. And, they probably don't have the time to learn programming either.
"If I translate computer documentation to Tamil, who will read it?" This question frustrates me a lot, and hence I end up not translating. Some time ago, in the Guix project, discussion about translating to and supporting discussion in other languages came up. People volunteered to support this or that European language. I could have volunteered to support Tamil. But, I didn't because I felt that no Tamil speaker cares. Why sink my life into something that no one likely cares about? Maybe, there are Tamil people who do care. But, I don't get to meet such people much. So, I imagine I'm all alone, and end up being very frustrated.
I have been on the Fediverse a good long while. Probably coming up on two years. I remember when Mastodon didn't have CW's. I remember when it didn't have private posts. I remember when Mastodon was made for tech bros, not for minorities. We were a peripherial demographic once upon a time, not the main demographic.
I am agender. I am trans. I am autistic. I'm other things, but those are the biggest three things that define who/what I am. I outlined some other things I am and am not above, so this gives context to my experience. (Before you open your mouth and say or think it, no, I did not come from Tumblr, and in fact, I don't even like Tumblr culture. I actually hate it because it's like the worst parts of the Fediverse concentrated into one place. And no, my gender is not autism.)
The Fediverse has not always been a safe place for me. I have been trolled, harassed, and I've even had outright lies told about me by someone from my past. Which for some reason people actually believe, even though the person in question is a well-known liar and dogpiler. Some of the slip-ups are my fault. I gave the wrong impression or tooted late-nite or under the influence of alcohol when I shouldn't have. Others were not warranted.
I was once told by Alda of witches.town (now gone) that I should jump into traffic. This was shortly before a friend of mine did just that. A friend of mine who left that instance because of that.
I have been dogpiled for not being the right kind of leftist. I've had people try to troll me. I've had times where I've had to step away, for something I thought wouldn't be a hot take. I do not feel safe expressing many sensible and well-intentioned views on the Fediverse, or discussing certain societal problems.
I feel like the fact I participate in the political process and that I'm left of the Berniecrats (and being someone who prefers to work at the ballot box and not with a Molotov cocktail) gets me largely ignored by the Masto political crowd. I'm just not the right kind of leftist. And it's not like the ancaps are gonna like me either. I don't know what it is about the Fediverse, but it attracts political radicals of the intolerant kind.
So yeah, I would not say Masto has been safe for me. I've seen it all. A major part of this is being an admin, and being on the front lines of this stuff, but I am sure ordinary users see it too.
So why do I stay?
Because it's still miles ahead of everything else.
I felt even less safe on Twitter. I definitely do not feel camaraderie or safety on somewhere like Tumblr. I barely venture outside a couple IRC channels. When you're someone like me, you will always be a square peg in a round hole, struggling through life, fucking things up cause you're human, and that includes the flaws.
I still have fun here. But I won't pretend it's been a smooth ride. And I won't abide people claiming it will always be a smooth ride for them either. I know people who've been run off here for transgressions way less bad than mine.
The Meltdown vulnerability occurred due to improper privilege isolation between operating system processes and other user processes. The improper isolation gave Intel CPUs a performance boost. The Intel CPU designers didn't realize the security issues at that time.