I recently read "The Sense Of Style", which explained the actual principle behind making an understandable run-on. The trick was to allow the brain to mentally store away the earlier parts of the sentence, and take it out of the parsing context into the logical connections context. Not going to try and remake the point from scratch, if you're curious go read the book!
(as a sidenote, trying to make a point about grammar made me very self-conscious about mine, this is why I had to read a good book!)
Thanks for the recommendation! I'll definitely be following this rabbit hole a little bit, I did some previous research but didn't find this whole section of the internet.
I've thought a good bit about the "too large" side (author here under a different name). The magic rule for me has been to consider whether each member actually has a function within the community, in the sense that they contribute something unique to the group which is not contributed by anyone else, and for which the community would be hurt if they aren't there. The idea was originally put into my head by C.S. Lewis, in his work on Membership: "If you subtract any one member, you have not simply reduced the family in number; you have inflicted an injury on its structure. Its unity is a unity of unlikes, almost of incommensurables." E.g. if you were to remove a random poster from HN, it wouldn't affect anything much at all, because they end up a number. However, if you were to remove dang, their presence would be missed because they contribute to the uniqueness of HN's community in some way. IMO, if the group doesn't pass this test, you haven't actually found the real community yet.
Of course, all of this is quickly-written thoughts for a HN post. Maybe at some point I'll edit them down and post them properly, but I need to discuss it with more people so I'm sure my thoughts actually strike reality.
I don't know that I miss it, it's still around if you look for it. Even here, I find several posts a month doing something this insane and fun, let alone finding out about my friends' personal projects.
I found this earlier this year when researching for a school presentation - it was a joy to read, but sadly did not help me much with my research! I was trying to find some code supposedly hosted on Ucbvax from a research paper. I appreciated the humor in its passing though, and if I ever take an important server down I would love to do a ceremony like this.
Just glancing through your dotfiles, I was wondering why you use VcXsrv. WSLg has always been fine for me, and I've never heard of anyone trying to use a different X server.
(as a sidenote, trying to make a point about grammar made me very self-conscious about mine, this is why I had to read a good book!)