If you're writing a tutorial on managing Python dependencies for an application, be sure to add this line: "As soon as you pin one dependency, you must pin the entire dependency tree." So many people pin their direct dependencies, and then get confused why things are incompatible a few years later. #Python
I finished the scarf this weekend! I'm really pleased with how it turned out, to the point that I think I want to make another for myself (this one is a gift). #weaving
I find I can paste the code I'm documenting into a markdown file, write the docs for it with Copilot's assistant, and then delete the code again - and it's actually really fun
very cool! I volunteer to beta test the app 😊 one thing that would be amazing to have: remind me later about this email (snooze) and schedule for later. This would be great to offset things that should be answered but not yet, or send an email at a later time (for example birthday wishes, reminders to self).
Oh, look at the pretty UI mockups, showing exactly how we will use all that screen estate previously dedicated to the actual message to pointless meta-data, like the almighty corporate "Important!" flag, instead 🤮 But, hey, can I maybe convince you to give us back the *option* to use encryption and signing *separately*, I'd appreciate *that*. It's ok to hide it in some "Advanced" menu... You know https://gist.github.com/grugq/03167bed45e774551155#think-about-signing
Great 🙂 When it releases, it will be good if it doesn't only sit on Google play. Some of us refuse to use any platform with Google in the URL. I need Google not to be aware that I have a phone! So fDroid, Aptoide, etc?, are necessary as alternate download sites.
unfortunately not translatable into english: roden en valen zijn donderstralen (spreek uit ervaring😉) ( means something like redheads and strawberry blonds are very naughty)
Completed the design of the panel for Blinkenlights. This little Uxn emulator includes a knob to change the evaluation rate, a stepper and a toggle to run the program over.
03 DEC Created a little calendar application which has been a wonderful exercise in learning about the routines needed in finding the day in the week of a given date, finding the number of days a month, and finding the number of days in a year. https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/december_adventure.html
this is wonderful! I learnt than fooling around with date and time is suprisingly difficult when I had to design a simple function to get the next Nth {monday|..|sunday} in a month (or the following one) where N is [1..5]. Good brain teaser
04 DEC Transformed the little calendar program, into a kind of virtual whiteboard onto which I can scribble notes overlaying the calendar. It records each month's drawings as icn files, making it possible to edit them with Noodle. https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/december_adventure.html
05 DEC It's a busy day aboard Pino today, so I couldn't pick as large a task as with the previous days, so I've decided to make my pixelart life slightly more pleasant by adding a selection size label to remove some of the guess work in Nasu. https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/december_adventure.html
mis respetos. Eso de dar con lo que no se usa dentro de un código tan tremendo es de programadores "adultos" con mucho oficio y algo de intuición de detectives. 👍
In order: I'm alright, though a bit of a "case of the Mondays". I spent all weekend reffing roller derby and it was spectacular. I'm going to spend tonight DJing and probably streaming my session on Owncast, and that's awesome. Let's all spread a little happiness and share our creativity, love, and joy today...I know that sounds cheesy, but whatever.
totally respect that - especially since there are no indications at all if it will even exist in a week's time, or at what point they might start charging for it
Absolutely fascinating in terms of "new tools" though!
I'd include testing frameworks like pytest in that list too - a low stakes bug might be a great opportunity to finally figure out how to setup an automated test that reproduces the bug so you can test your fix
100 years of independence. 50 years of European membership.
Half a century ago, Ireland joined the EU.
Europe’s transatlantic gateway and link to the anglophone world, we have benefited immensely from the Irish spirit in our Union.
A people that struggled for the right to self-determination, who export openness and ingenuity wherever they venture, may we all learn from the resilience of the Irish.
Here’s to many more years of unity and building a stronger EU, together—le chéile.
I am a proud European and strong supporter of the EU and I feel particularly privileged to have built my life in Ireland, a small country with a big heart!
That's how respirators work to prevent you from getting infected with COVID-19, except in reverse (they attract the virus particles using static electricity)
also works as a tragically accurate depiction of my hair that I’ve straightened and brushed twice before it refused to cooperate as soon as I stepped out of the door😭
"Plus, whenever you reply to someone, that reply is then sent to every one of their followers so that it can appear in reply threads."
I did not know that! Who's responsible for sending those, is it the server of the person who posted the reply or the server that hosts the person you are replying to?
Does that mean if I reply to someone with a million followers my workers will be busy for the next few hours sending stuff to all their followers?
and on this bit: "Maybe HTTP as a base protocol with an optional TCP alternate for high-traffic servers to talk to each other over."
Do you think holding open WebSocket connections between high traffic servers might provide a good-enough performance boost that it would be worth using here?
Still HTTP but with persistent connections and much lower overhead (no headers for each separate message)
makes sense - does the protocol have a concept of batching like that at the moment? In terms of "don't deliver messages to another server more than once every X seconds and send everything that's queued up for that other server in one go"
It would be per-server, and I have no idea - others who've worked on Mastodon internals might know. I would hope it uses the shared inbox for this stuff.
My musings about an alternate protocol would more be about removing the JSON-LD stuff and allowing native compression/msgpack. It's the only way I see to build on top of ActivityPub without breaking compatibility.
something I've been pondering is if you could get a big speed up using a custom compression dictionary
If there's a bunch of common patterns in the JSON (I bet there is) maybe having everyone use the same (version-identified) well crafted zlib dictionary might be a big win
I've been mostly ignoring IPFS for years now as too blockchainy, but maybe sharing media files for ActivityPub in a way that doesn't bankrupt individual server operators is a good application for that?
I don't think it supports deletion at all though which feels like an inherent flaw to me - at least distributed caches have a chance for obeying deletion requests
good point, but isn’t deletion really a gentleman’s agreement in a distributed system anyway?
i was imagining some sort of (cryptographically signed) digest of messages (additions/deletions/edits) from various other instances, which your instance trusts because it asked the source for its public key earlier) (haven’t thought it through properly yet, tho)
I've seen some interesting regarding pub/sub across a DHT like structure in the libp2p docs. Maybe this sort of approach can scale better? These could even be specialised nodes.
Your reply is only sent *directly* to those mentioned, with your own followers implicitly mentioned (explicit in the actual activity); sending to the original posters followers is their instance's job.
Exactly so. And if you “get in” on that thread your server will try its hardest to ensure you are updated on any updates or replies on that thread too. Every interaction counts and generates traffic. Also, the “risk” is high that you will be introduced to new instances by proxy that you will start keeping track of.
This is why it can be “dangerous” to follow extremely popular accounts, at least if you are running a low-spec instance-of-one yourself.
this may explain why sometimes I peak at my Sidekiq queue dashboard and it inexplicably has thousands of outbound tasks running even though I didn't think I'd done anything recently (like post a new message) that would have triggered so much activity
aha! So any time someone replies to one of my messages my server has to kick in and deliver a whole bunch of fanout requests - which means someone else's action can cause my server to have to do a bunch of fanout work
That sounds like it might be exploitable for bad things :/
I mean, if someone has a million followers you can just reply to them with a URL and every single server and client of those followers will hit the URL in the next few mins. DDoS-on-demand.
Or just send junk replies and fill up their task queues and overload the server. I'm considering giving Takahē a mode where it does _not_ do this on purpose.
I'm really interested in that idea of a shared cache for those link previews - feels like a piece of infrastructure that would be relatively straight forward to design that could have a huge positive impact
As always the harder part would be governance, and figuring out how it's sustainably funded
there's already a shared store for media (which is easy because Mastodon supports S3). There just needs to be an agreed method for outsourcing link caching.
I think "all it needs" is a setting in Mastodon that directs those queries through a given proxy. Of course, getting that setting in is a different story.
and the problem with link previews is that every instance only requests the URL once, there are just a lot of instances now. So you need to convince most instances to use your proxy in order to reduce the impact.
Maybe the proxy could return a signed copy of the link preview and that could be included in the activitypub message and servers could trust that proxy's signature by default. That slightly simplifies the trust issue...by centralising it more.
or the server that the message was posted from could do the link preview thing and include that in the outbound message - and other servers could decide if they trust that server's previews or not
Would delay initial message sending though, blocked on however long it took to generate a preview (though you could enforce a 5s timeout) - that's a pretty big regression to how stuff works at the moment
>some end-user client apps do their own fetches too
Seems like that's a pretty serious end-user privacy exposure, and should be more widely known so they can be pressured to do the right thing for their users.
Yes I agree that would be problematic. Have we actually seen that kind of load rate on target servers in the real world yet?
Because the LinkCrawlWorker job is queued as low-priority on each server, and by default is scheduled to follow up later than the processing of each post. For example, even with empty queues for processing posts on my server at the moment, I have a couple minutes' worth of LinkCrawlWorker jobs scheduled out, for no more than a few per second.
However, you might still get a traffic hit as al of those followers' servers may need to fetch your profile info from your server if they don't have it already @activitypub
@Ciantic @andrew it sounds like that's how it works - the server hosting George Takei has to do all of that fanout work every time someone replies to him
that's exactly how it works (unless the target inboxes are all on the same instance, then it's an instance-dependent detail how they are delivered or how the work is batched)
Simon Kuznets, chief architect of macroeconomic accounting in the 1930s, warned that, “The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income.” Now 90 years later, it’s astonishing that GDP is still the leading indicator of social progress. 1/2 (Photo cr: NPR)
I like Christine's point about journalists saying "the Mastodon network" (rather than knowing about ActivityPub and all the other fediverse software): it's a lot like Ubuntu Linux back in the 2000s. People thought *all* Linux was Ubuntu, because that distro was the most popular. Christine's point is: this will change over time as people learn more. It's ok if people think it's all Mastodon right now.
Plus, she points out that ActivityPub was almost out of time -- the SocialWG charter was running out -- when Mastodon started using AP. That got the working group an extension, and Christine and others could finalize AP and get the Recommendation out the door.
This moment in history should be studied by science and technology studies scholars.
And both Morgan and Christine do good work pointing out some of the problems that the #fediverse has faced -- not just with the Twitter influx, but from day one: The dominance and therefor problem of instances (e.g., how do I choose one? and how well will that instance get along with others?). The problem of moderation tooling (blocklists and allowlists are not enough to do the job).
It happens, though. It's understandable. We're so used to one central thing to sign up for -- a decentralized approach is quite novel for most people. Also, it's easier to explain 1 new thing than 20 new things on a deadline!
An enchanted diamond pickaxe l upgraded with Netherite. Enchanted with Fortune 3, unbreaking 3 & efficiency 3.
Ancient debris is SO hard to find! It's most common in the nether at Y level 15 (turn on coordinates in settings) & needs to be mined with a diamond pickaxe (I think). I was lucky and found a Bastion which got me 3 pieces.
Four pieces of netherite scrap (put ancient debris in a furnace) & 4 gold bars to make a netherite ingot. You can then use a smithing table to upgrade your pickaxe.
You can max out your pickaxe enchantments by enchanting multiple diamond pickaxes, then combining diamond pickaxes with a blacksmith anvil. Make sure you change which slot each pickaxe is in as one direction will be more expensive than the other.
Diamonds are now more common the deeper you go in the real world not just at Y level 12, especially if you explore a large cave deep down. I now have 3 stacks of 64 diamonds without really trying 🤪
My publisher Tor Books and Goodreads are having a drawing for a giveaway of advance hardcopies of my next novel, "Red Team Blues," a Silicon Valley forensic accounting thriller about a cryptocurrency heist. If you're in the US or Canada, enter here to win a copy:
My ebooks and audiobooks (from Tor Books, Head of Zeus, McSweeneys, Beacon and others) are for sale all over the net, but I sell 'em too, and when you buy 'em from me, I earn twice as much and you get books with no DRM and no license "agreements."
If you're a Medium subscriber, you can read these essays - as well as previews of upcoming magazine columns and early exclusives on doctorow.medium.com.
My latest Medium column is "Yes, It’s Censorship: Stop picking that nit, it’ll never heal."
If you prefer a newsletter, subscribe to the plura-list, which is also ad- and tracker-free, and is utterly unadorned save a single daily emoji. Today's is "👩⚖️". Suggestions solicited for future emojis!
Agreed re: the corruption of Stallman’s idea of “Free Software” as “Open Source.” I’ve participated in actual Free projects (Emacs, Perl), and watched Open projects become whatever read-only code Google, in particular, throws over the wall every month.
See also the capture of the W3C and various IETF WGs, which are basically rubber stamps to “standardize” whatever Google wants for the web’s future.
Probably many already suggested it: Making toots 2..n of a long thread unlisted - instead of or in addition to CWing it - would make my and other people‘s timeline a lot more concise. And I could read the thread when I choose to without having to scroll over all the messages again for a second time. This is a feature where the #fediverse is clearly superior to Twitter.
Since this interview with @pfefferle and @timnolte was all about #WordPress and the #Fediverse, I've decided to upload the whole thing to Peertube. It's an insightful information filled with tips and tricks for connecting WP to Mastodon and the IndieWeb. https://p.lu/w/3kssrJ6Lw1rLGm3tuju4SU
Fun fact: The number of "Mastodon"-related plugins in the WordPress repository appears to have doubled in the two weeks since we recorded this episode!
Periodic reminder that, in English, Boris Pasternak means 'Boris Parsnip', Haruki Murakami means 'Haruki Uptown', Tolstoy means 'thick/fat', and Albert Camus translates as 'Bertie Flat-Nose'.
Explains the famous quote: The only way to deal with a world of un-flat noses is for yours to become so absolutely flat that its very existence is an act of rebellion.
I think there's something to that though. Funeral parlours handle all of the after death stuff. There (IMO) need to be services setup to handle this kind of thing.
Good questions, I really need to think about it as well. It can always happen in an unexpected moment.. After my dad passed, I took over his email and accounts using various password reset mechanism and checked which accounts to keep, delete etc.
I've done my best to ensure non of the household 'services' rely on me, and the last bastion is moving from keepassxc locally to 1password cloud. Any blogs/sites that are non-critical will just fade when I'm gone, and anything important (email/domains) will be documented. Beyond that, I just have to hope I haven't missed anything 🤞🏻Homelab is fun, but out of the critical path.
I think you're half way to inventing the job of *Executor of the digital last will and testament* which I actually think would be a useful thing for when our generation gets old
I have been thinking of this, if I drop dead suddenly how long will home automations and routers keep working? Not to mention domains, passwords and whatnot. There are a lot of stuff that keeps needing small tuning every now and then.
Yes, there are bits & bobs of a system around the place e.g. if you have an Apple account you want to set a legacy contact (under Password & Security in your system settings) but there's much more needed. 1Password certainly need something similar.
But even with all my passwords and access to my email I think my family would find themselves a bit lost, bills going unpaid etc. Especially as my email would all fall over if the domain expired.
So far I've come up with a password saved in my will, along with the url of a publicly accessible keepassx file, that refers to my documentation and main key pass url (or other secret storage) and password. This way my main db is mostly save, and I can change details without changing the will.
Probably some tech savvy friends need to have access using samirs sharing secret, as the will takes quite some time.
