#softwarewish — Public Fediverse posts

Here's a thought: why doesn't Masto's moderation/reporting feature use some standard ticket-management tool like @forgejo ?

It's frustratingly limited as it is, and I'm sure maintaining its codebase adds to the overhead of maintaining Masto's codebase. Why not just integrate with a general tool that's already well-maintained?

#softwareWish

I need a non-web-based email diagnostic program to tell me why the settings which work on my laptop and @Harena's phone aren't working on my phone (same app). >.<

(I could also wish that diagnostics were more standard in email apps -- but even those that are pretty good otherwise seem to eschew anything beyond vaguely-informative error messages.)

#softwareWish

Mastowish: If you hit "reply" after having started a post, one of the options in the pop-up should be to copy what you've already written into the reply-post (in addition to (a) losing your work or (b) continuing with the post as-is).

I mean, this is the scenario liek 99% of the time when I get that message: I either realized I had started without hitting "reply" first, or I wanted to change which post I'm replying to (often because another reply got added to the chain).

#softwareWish #Mastodon

I want tmux, but for GUI.

(This is different from ssh -X or VNC. With the former, you can't attach to an already-loaded window; with the latter, you have to be sure there's a server running on the remote, and it requires a separate login. I want something that I can just invoke via ssh, using ssh's security.)

#softwareWish

Why isn't there a Linux filesystem that lets you connect to an IMAP account and move messages around like files? #softwareWish

I do wish there was a way to greenlist certain accounts on an otherwise redlisted (fedilimited) instance. #softwareWish #mastoWish

Wow, we could really use federated moderation today -- spam account popping up on multiple random instances.

Oh well, at least it's still only... [counts...] four clicks to block each one.

...not counting the clicks from the user reporting them.

#softwareWish #fediWish

The Masto account-suspension appeals process really should have some support for dialogue between admins and banned account -- even if 99% of the time it's absolutely clear* that there doesn't need to be any. #softwareWish

(*the rejection said we don't allow advertising spam accounts, which your account clearly is because it's all about your web site and nothing about you as a person and you didn't even attempt to address this in your appeal; therefore, go away)

A valid and ethical use for LLMs:

• On "community support" fora for popular FOSS software projects...
• ...have the LLM go through the posts and look for questions that the community seems to be having difficulty answering...
• ...and forward just those few issues to selected devs (summarizing the issue if it's brought up in more than one thread).
• If it thinks it has a solution, it could also propose that to the dev as a possible response, saving writing time. - Dev-approved responses could be added to the training data for the LLM's next iteration.
• Alternative: If the LLM detects an unresolved issue coming up more than X times, or remaining unsolved for more than Y days, it could attempt its own answer -- with thumbs-up/down feedback from the users, to let the devs know if the LLM isn't doing a good job.

Meta-thought: instead of replacing workers, provide assistance to people doing work for free so they can get more done.

#softwareWish

For Linux, I'd like a GUI app which runs at startup and which lets you specify other apps to load automatically, but will apply certain conditions like:

• per-app checkbox: always ask me before running (it would show a dialog with all the apps it wants to run -- you could invoke them individually, clear them all to run, clear just certain apps)
• only run if CPU or RAM usage is below a certain level, and if [specified app] has already been loaded
• [only run]/[don't run] for certain network connections (e.g. I don't want Syncthing or Nextcloud running when I'm using a metered hotspot)

I'm always forgetting to run certain things, but I also don't want to just always run them automatically.

#softwareWish

It seems that there are no web-based equivalents to MS Access / LibreOffice Base. Not even Microsoft 365 has an equivalent.

This seems a rather curious omission.

I mean, yes, doing an online DB is going to be a little more complicated than a text document or spreadsheet, but... still. It seems like something that would be so useful that a substantial number of people would be willing to pay money for it, and possibly more money than for just the regular stuff.

Note that to get MS Access 97, you generally had to get the more-expensive Pro edition of MS Office 97... and the app by itself cost almost as much, iirc.

(I am planning to write something equivalent, eventually, but who knows how long it will be before I can get to it.)

#softwareWish

Someone really needs to design a markup for describing command syntaxes, so that the markup text can just be plonked into a GUI which will then let you compose syntactically-correct commands by entering in values, choosing options, etc.

It's actually kind of weird that this doesn't already exist. (I know about Backus-Naur, but I don't think that's quite the same thing, is it? That's for defining language syntax, and I'm not sure if it includes the information necessary to create a command-builder GUI.)

#softwareWish

There really ought to be a way to subscribe to a post, i.e. receive a notif whenever there's a reply.

This could also cue whatever mechanisms are needed in order to expedite those replies arriving on the local server, helping to reduce the reply-visibility gap.

...all of which would help with the reply-harassment problem that has been much discussed of late.

#Mastodon #softwareWish

Here's another #fedi idea:

When an instance limits (but does not block) another instance, individual users should be able to remove that limit for themselves, for the whole remote instance (not just for individual users, which is all they can do now).

E.g. if instance A is blocking instance B because B tolerates certain types of annoying behavior that A considers unacceptable, user X on instance A should be able to choose to tolerate that behavior for themself only (e.g. users in B would be able to comment on X's posts, and X could see B users' comments on other threads, but this would not be true for other users on A by default).

I think this would go a long way towards alleviating "HOA" accusations (legit or not) against instances that do fedi-silencing.

#softwareWish

Is there such a thing as a virtual CLI terminal app which will also render HTML it receives from the remote?

...or any kind of rich text, really, would be useful. ...especially if links are supported.

#softwareWish

[edit] Apparently there is now an ANSI standard for hyperlinks in virtual terminals; Konsole supports it and MATE Terminal will soon. This only addresses one corner of my ask, but is still useful.

I would like open-source self-hosted software that can monitor a set of in-home webcams, notice when certain events take place (e.g. specific people wake up, specific people come into certain rooms) and trigger alert notifications based on those events.

I'm pretty sure we have the tech for this now; I'm just not familiar enough with the software in question to know how to go about building it.

#softwareWish

Is there a Linux desktop out there which lets you have separate workspaces for each monitor?

Under #MATE, when you switch spaces, it switches it for both monitors, and it would be really nice if there was a way to control them separately.

#softwareWish

Is there any desktop manager which gives you separate workspaces for each monitor? Or maybe there's a setting in #MATE somewhere which makes that possible? #softwareWish

I wish #Kate supported global bookmarks.

Like... you can bookmark lines in any given file, but you have to be looking at the file in order to see the bookmarks you have set there.

I often need to bookmark a change I have made, then go into another file to look at a problem caused by that change -- and then I may want to revisit the change in order to fix or diagnose the problem... but I have to remember which file it was in, which is often not easy.

#softwareWish

Thinking about it... in #PHP, why are interfaces and traits even different things?

Everything you can do with an interface:

1. declare functions
2. extend another interface
3. "implement" it in a class
4. use it as a parameter type

Item 1 (functions)

This is functionally the same as defining an abstract public function in a trait.

Item 2 (extend)

This is functionally the same as a trait use-ing another trait.

Item 3 (implementation)

This is functionally the same as use-ing a trait that consists entirely of abstract public functions.

Item 4 (parameter type)

This is the one thing a trait cannot do -- but I don't understand why it was done that way.

Note: this seems related to my trait implements wishlist item from earlier. At first I thought that they might be in conflict, but on looking at the syntax in more depth, I don't see how. A trait that uses/extends another trait is also declaring abstract functions in that trait as an implementation requirement.

Putting both of these suggestions together would both simplify the language and make it more powerful, I'd think.

#softwareWish

It would be really nice if I could check to see who's active on @nextcloud over the past hour or so, so that I could tell if this was a bad time to take it down for an upgrade.

#softwareWish

I really wish there was a "move tab to beginning/end of list" in the right-click menu. #softwareWish #Firefox

#PHP #softwareWish:

You can get a list of an object's methods with get_class_methods(), but it would be really really nice to get additional info along with each listing -- mainly the filename and line where the method is defined.

#softwareWish I wish #PHP had an equivalent to dumping the memory address of an object -- some kind of unique identifier. It does have the === operator which lets you determine if two variables point to the same data-space, but sometimes that's not practical to use when debugging.

This doesn't quite qualify as a software gripe... maybe #softwareWish: it would be nice if #PHP would let you declare that a function isn't supposed to return anything at all (e.g. NULL as a return type).

Benefits:

• minimizes confusion with older functions where I just haven't gotten around to giving them a return type
• catches mistaken attempts to return a value, when you forget that the output is supposed to be conveyed via some other means.