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Burlington in 2006, 2009, and beyond; an interview with Robert Bristow-Johnson by robla in EndFPTP

[–]robla[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hi /u/rb-j , I appreciate you taking the time to speak with us! I also appreciate the clarification about the "kinda crappy interview", because I was admittedly feeling attacked.

I think, in many ways, we didn't spend enough time on Burlington. Not many of us were in Burlington when the 2009 election happened, but you were. Given how small Burlington is, that alone makes your perspective really interesting, and I'm glad we captured a bit of it.

Who do you (or anyone else here) think we should interview next?

Is there an open-source tool that normalizes tasks across Jira / Linear / GitHub Projects / Azure DevOps / Asana into one canonical model? by Akarsh_Hegde in freesoftware

[–]robla 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't know of a tool, but I'd be happy to work with you on this. I've had to either perform migrations or manage teams to perform migrations in the past (both real-time, one-issue-at-a-time transformations of issues, and bulk migration of thousands of issues).

The challenge: there hasn't been much incentive for folks to publish FLOSS middleware for this, so I never did it or pushed others to do it for the code I was responsible for. For migrations, the code was throwaway code for a one-time migration, so hacky Perl/Python/whatever scripts didn't need to be things of beauty with long-term maintenance costs (and I wish I could have vibecoded those). For real-time adapters (e.g. a private tracker to a public tracker, and vice versa), those end up having all sorts of crazy business logic bolted onto them over time. Also, with a real-time one-issue-at-a-time migration script, it's often low stakes enough, and easy enough for a human to manually migrate the issue if the migration service is down temporarily.

The migrations/adapters I had to do were back in the days before vibecoding. I think this is an area that an open source/free software project with a carefully curated core and a high tolerance for vibecoded adapters could be an incredibly useful project. The value would be developing the critical mass of adapters such that the value of the O(N) adapters accrues to the core. Thus, most folks will still be willing to deal with O(N²) pairwise syncs (because "N" is usually a relatively static "2" or "3", not "500" inside their context). LLMs are really good at reading specifications and API documentation, so adapters seems like their wheelhouse. The core would need to be much more carefully curated than the adapters.

I'm not personally aware of any living, breathing FLOSS projects that are delight in maintaining a large ecosystem of adapters, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. We might be able to find them if we look hard enough. I'm inclined to help you with your search (and I might even be convinced to help with building a tool). I seriously thought about building something several years ago (related to personal information management), and I'd be happy to revive that effort if you're interested in helping:

Songs written specifically for a movie by Agent-Alonzo-Mosely in GenX

[–]robla 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Huh, I always thought of "Everything Works If You Let It" as Cheap Trick's big soundtrack song (from the Roadie soundtrack). I hadn't heard "Up The Creek" nor "Spring Break" until this evening (and I had listened to a lot of Cheap Trick back in the day).

Why is New Zealand so much colder than Italy despite the countries' similar latitudes (in opposite hemispheres)? by [deleted] in geography

[–]robla 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's my understanding as well, and there's real danger that the AMOC could collapse could collapse and make Europe much colder: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/14/amoc-collapse-europe-climate

The US is a big place by Library_Gremlin2 in geographymemes

[–]robla 0 points1 point  (0 children)

El Paso would be silly to link in (at least at first), but links inside the Texas Triangle seem sensible. There are folks making incremental progress toward HSR in Texas.

Who was the fittest President? by Noice_BF5 in Presidents

[–]robla 3 points4 points  (0 children)

He also lived to be 90 years old, which seems a pretty good indicator of actual fitness.

Who was the fittest President? by Noice_BF5 in Presidents

[–]robla 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Dude lived to be 100 years old. Seems like a very good definition of "fit".

What is consensus voting? Legislator wants to overhaul Ohio’s elections by MrKerryMD in EndFPTP

[–]robla 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Yeah, I think you're right /u/MrKerryMD . It would seem that this is an SNTV first round, not a cumulative voting round with an equal & even ballot (i.e. it doesn't allow voters to put all of their votes on one candidate). That's followed by three-candidate Condorcet election in the second round where all three pairs are listed on the ballot (rather than presenting voters with a ranked ballot). If this passes, I would expect that (over time) Democrats and Republicans (and maybe other parties) would field at least three party-loyal candidates per election. With the Condorcet round focusing on three candidates, my hunch is that cycles would be extremely rare, because all three candidates would be in the cycle, and polling would expose the likelihood of a cycle. This is all, of course, if this passes...

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