NPR News Now publishes great little 5 minute podcast digests every hour or 2 summarizing the big news items of the day / hour.

Their politics podcast and Trump’s Trials podcast are also good.

All three of these are very U.S. centric, obviously.

I had a bunch of friends up and was gifted Cosmic Encounter.

I had seen it played on YouTube, but this was the first time I got to play it myself. We had a great time! The game can feel a little bit overwhelming at first with all it’s stages and card-decks, but once you get past it it’s a really good time.

If you’ve never played it, the super short version is that you are trying to get colonies on other players planets by drawing cards against each other. But what makes it fun is that every player also gets to draw an (initially secret) civilization/character card, which typically has abilities that completely turn the game on its head. We had lots of hilarious moments stemming from the character reveals. I would definitely recommend checking it out!

I also got to play Radlands with my S/O. Not at all the kind of game either of us have really played before, but we had a blast. It’s a card-dueling game, and all the cards feel very powerful with some cool synergies. It’s pretty simple to teach, especially if you use table-top sim or spring for the edition that comes with play-mats.

But on the other hand, if loans were subject to bankruptcy, most poor people would never be approved to get them.

I made one such tool!

https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim

I know there’s also a python script out there and a new Android app that has active syncing. I don’t have links handy to those on mobile.

Under this broad of a ruleset, all software would have to be open source.

Excellent work by the way, much better solution than my own :)

Didn’t get a chance to look at how your app works under the hood, but for LASIM I look up the community by name to get the ID and then call thr subscribe API. The former did seem to trigger the Lemmy instance to “learn” about the community, but it takes awhile, and there is no way to know when it has learned it other than to retry looking it up a few times.

You should see if you can use GitHub Actions to automate builds - they should be unlimited / free for public repos.

The PR for the necessary back-end changes is out for review on GitHub: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3869

This is now released :)

For anyone finding this in the future:

The latest version of LASIM (0.2.1) has a Settings tab that allows you to choose what you want to upload.

If you are using the JSON file posted above, you’d want to choose just “Upload Community Subscriptions” on this tab so that your profile settings, etc. are not changed.

There is also a community for finding / announcing new communities:

https://lemmy.world/c/newcommunities

I’ll throw my tool out there as well: https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim

Unfortunately, you need access to the old server to download the list of communities and blocks - but that’s true of all tools that do this.

I would kindly redirect any kind comments you have, or suggests for items to add, to @Madbrad200@lemmy.world, the original creator of the list.

I am but a humble cross-poster.

Everyone is saying it’s missing from the API, but I don’t think that can be the case since the regular Lemmy UI uses the API - so far as I know it isn’t doing anything custom compared to apps / other frontends.

You can see all the API endpoints here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/main/src/api_routes_http.rs

That said, obviously developers have to add those features to their front-ends, and could be waiting for whatever Lemmy API library they use to support certain calls.

Sneak peek :)

I hadn’t even considered this use case for LASIM, but that’s really neat.

I’ve been thinking about a settings page where you can toggle what to sync, among a few other future features. I’ll definitely add an option in the future to NOT sync the profile settings.

LASIM author here - you are correct. I explicitly made it “additive” to avoid accidents where you could end up erasing a bunch of subscriptions. Right now LASIM only calls the subscribe API interface so it’s actually impossible for it to unsubscribe you from anything.

I am considering adding a “destructive” sync in the future which, if toggled on, would unsubscribe you from anything not in the JSON file. But it’s not implemented yet!

Good news! It is going to be an option. Feature was merged into the back-end already - just need someone to update the UI.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3318

My understanding is that all free .ml instances got removed as well - could be a sizeable chunk.