I’m in the same boat as you, with decades of projects I want to be able to open.

However, OP mentioned Reaper, which has a native Linux version! So as long as they’re not using a load of VSTs, and the ones they do play nicely with Linux, it could work out for them

The only way is to give it a go and find out though

Well that’s why I prefaced what I said with the point about not having enough detail for specifics. I went off a rough idea of what any typical smart home gadget I’ve come across would require.

Many consumers care about ongoing maintenance of the stuff they buy, especially smart home stuff. I know I personally wouldn’t touch a new product if I got any impression it would stop working or be abandoned in the future.

Apps sometimes break in some way with new OS versions and need changes to continue working correctly. New devices come out and the app might operate on assumptions that are no longer true, requiring improvements.

Security researchers might find a bug in your app/API/gadget and now suddenly you’re hosting a botnet whilst potentially being on the hook legally and financially. That’s gonna need engineer time to diagnose and fix, ideally proactively.

And yes you’re right, one engineer could do it all, I addressed that in my original comment. If one engineer can do it all well they are going to be expensive, the implication being you could get it done badly for cheap. If OP’s idea is just a scam product then sure, but I’m assuming they actually want whatever their idea is to be successful and not give off a half-arsed vibe to potential customers.

Given we don’t know what your idea is it’s kinda hard to speak in specifics, but just on the software side you’re probably looking at three engineers minimum—app engineer (probably x2, one iOS one android), api/infra engineer & an embedded software guy for the device itself. At least the first two will need to be permanent as those things will need to be maintained over time. Any engineer that says they can do all three roles to a high standard is either lying or going to be very expensive.

Then you may start to need someone handling project management around those guys to make sure things stay on track and that’s before we get into the hardware side of things.

Depending where you are, an engineering team like that could easily get quite expensive quickly and some of these will be ongoing costs. So I guess I’m saying make sure you know what all of your costs are going to be and that your finances cover it comfortably before you commit to anything

You can’t guarantee you are able to delete anything you post publicly to the internet anyway.

Once it’s public, web crawlers can take a copy of it, entirely independent of any kind of federation.

There were several sites dedicated to letting people “undelete” Reddit comments, for example.

Antidisestablishmentarianism

opposition to the disestablishment of the Church of England

Also bonus Welsh town name:

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch

Literally translated, the long form of the name means: “[The] church of [St.] Mary (Llanfair) [of the] pool (pwll) of the white hazels (gwyn gyll) near to [lit. “over against”] (go ger) the fierce whirlpool (y chwyrn drobwll) [and] the church of [St.] Tysilio (Llantysilio) of the red cave (gogo[f] goch)”

You’ve definitely found them and you’ve already picked a few of my favourite tracks—I’m happy to have introduced you

Everything Everything

They’ve written some of my favourite albums over the past decade or so

Is it just me that sees double strikethroughs on the dollar symbol hilariously childish?

You chose this, just like I did and will continue to do so

The dogs did not

ps aux to list your processes

kill 1234 to ask PID 1234 to stop nicely

kill -9 1234 to kill it

You might need a sudo in there if the process is running as another user

Whilst I’m pretty excited about this in general, it’s got me even more excited that a positive reception of this might spur EA on to actually do some more good, and release the sources for games from other defunct studios they’re doing nothing with like Bullfrog

I’d love for the community to give games like theme hospital, dungeon keeper and populous a lick of paint

Maybe some of the old weirder maxis games too, like SimAnt & SimCopter

It’s one of the first lines of text in the original Zelda game

what is this? I googled and found nothing

Ah I got my history slightly wrong, she bathed in donkey milk and just liked asps (a kind of snake)

Maybe coconut water or aloe vera gel, I imagine it’d feel weird but probably not regrettable.

I guess we’ve got to beat Cleopatra as our baseline with her bath of asp milk.

Marmite would probably veer into the regrettable category, and I’m saying that as a marmite enjoyer

What is extremely political to one person is just someone simply existing to another.

The term “no politics” in internet communities often actually means “only things that align with my politics”. I’ve seen it over and over again for as long as I can remember

Honestly if you’re not putting the internet and the general proliferation of personal computers and then smartphones in the “truly innovative” category, then I’m not sure anything will make the cut—I’d make the argument that both are more innovative than flight which is something we can observe in nature.

Not wasting time

The meaning of life is to enjoy it.

You do you fam, and keep doing it

ActivityPub seems like the wrong tool for this job

You’re more looking for a decentralised distributed file system/object store as the base for this.

And it’s going to require a lot of participants in the network to get to the storage capacity and redundancy necessary for it to function well

Messages are nearly always better IMO because they don’t demand my immediate and undivided attention, the exception being an emergency or similar, which would warrant that.

A phone call means I have to stop whatever I’m currently doing, at a potentially inconvenient time, to deal with it whilst also having no idea how long the call will be. Messages can be dealt with whenever you’re actually free to deal with them.

Plus when you’re dealing with companies or the government, phone calls don’t give you a record of what was discussed, messages/emails do

I was about to take umbrage with that on behalf of millennials, but tbh we are a mess—not entirely through our own doing, of course—but definitely a mess.