“The medium is the message” ;)

I have to admit though that seeing a medium link is generally a negative signal for me. Still click on many of them.

i am still going through it, and will be done in a 2-3 days, will post here then.

ah ! thanks for the suggestion, will check that one out as well :)

l

The goal is build an RSS powered experience that people will actually want to use. The tech stack is based around the idea of having a large group of people being able to contribute. (We use Go & RocksDB for most of our tech, so it was a very conscious move to use Node & Mongo for Winds to foster a wider community adoption)

RFC822 is ASCII only to begin with one of the biggest limitations of email related “standards”.

Some 6.5 billion people around the globe use non-ascii charecters, and old standards only have layers of hacks upon them to support their usecases to some extent.

Why not create new standards from the ground up for the current usecases? I’m not interested in ActivityPub curently, but I have some experience with email and related technologies, and it badly needs a redesign. It won’t happen as none of the parties capable to organise it is interested in it.

My uninformed guess is that with the slow decline of email, there are more & better JSON parsers than there are MIME or email parsers. I would have made the same choice, but my reason would have revolved around JSON’s ability to store structured data, for future flexibility.

No reason, really. It’s a marketing effort, mostly.

SMTP is forever tainted by spam. ISPs like to block ports, spam filters like to eat mail from new unknown servers, etc.

Giving a pitch for Webmention instead of ActivityPub: Webmention requires the sender to publish an html page that actually links to the target URL. You can be stricter and require a valid microformats2 reply/like/repost/bookmark. That already stops old school pingback spam. For stronger protection, there are clever schemes based on “this non-spam domain you linked to has linked to me”.

Creating a PR involves more steps and context changes than git-format-patch git-send-mail.

I’m not sure I understand. What steps are removed that would otherwise be required?

I don’t think that’s a strong argument in favor of git being federated. I don’t think it matters either.

Git in of itself does not care about the transport. It does not care whether you use HTTP, git:// or email to bring your repo up to date. You can even use an USB stick.

I’d say git is communication format agnostic, federation is all about standardizing communication. Using email with git is merely another way to pipe git I/O, git itself does not care.

I belive that @tscs37 already showed that Git is distributed, since all nodes are equal (no distinction between clinets and servers), while a git networks can be structured in a federated fashion, ir even in a centralized one. What the transport medium has to do with this is still unclear in my view.

Fork counts and followers (stars?) I find much less interesting, they’re just ego stroking and should be discarded if technical constraints require

That’s exactly my point. GitHub offers a unit-standard, and easily recognisable and readable (simply because everyone is used to it). This has a value and ultimately a relevance, that can’t just be ignored, even if this reason is nonsense. It would just be another example of technical naïve.

I’ve shown my sympathy for ideas like these before, ad I most certainly don’t want to make the impression of a GitHub apologist. All I want to remind people is that the Social aspect beyond necessity (builds, issue trackers, …) are all things one has to seriously consider and tackle when one is interested in offering an alternative to GitHub, with any serious ambitions.

Also what mail transfer agent were you pointing git send-mail at?

Fastmail. Was too esoteric for the default settings of my router. And if it weren’t for support, I would have never guessed that that was the issue, since the whole interface is so alien to most people (just like the questions: did I send the right commits, is my message formatted correctly, etc.)

How about mirroring code on github to collect stars? Make it a read-only mirror by disabling issues and activating the pull request rejection bot. Git, Linux, and Postgres do this, and probably other projects do too.

I’m not saying it’s perfect (again, I’m no GitHub apologist) – my point is that it isn’t irrelevant!

Do SPF, DKIM and DMARC make this no longer true, or are there still ways to impersonate people?

Yes, if someone doesn’t use these things. And claiming “oh, but they just should” is again raising the entry barrier, which is just too high the way it already would be.

I finally made time to look at this, thanks! AFAICT there are two reasons he gave (I watched until about 40 minutes left in the video; the dumb player UI won’t show me how far in that is):

1. Each component has a separate address space
2. Future window managers with “trusted windows” could treat pinentry specially, “somehow”, because it’s forked from gpg-agent

Honestly I don’t see why either of those things couldn’t just be accomplished with the exact same architecture except using regular subprocesses instead of daemons. Can anyone give a reason that isn’t the case?

Reason 2 in particular seems like a lot of engineering to support a vaguely defined future scenario which may or may not show up, ever, and certainly does not exist now.

Have you ever tried to manually configure wireless on linux? It’s a nightmare. Always has been.

No. The Linux’s I use come with an out-of-the-box experience that makes wireless as easy as clicking a box, clicking a name, typing in the password, it works, and it reconnects when nearby. They have been like that since I bought an Ubuntu-specific Dell a long time ago. They knew it was a critical feature that needed to work easily with no effort with some doing that upon installation so parts of the install could be downloaded over WiFi. Then, they did whatever they had to do in their constraints (time/talent/available code) to get it done.

And then I was able to use it with only breaks being wireless driver issues that had answers on Q&A sites. Although that was annoying, I didn’t have to think about something critical I shouldn’t have to think about. Great product development in action for an audience that has other things to do than screw around with half-built wireless services. That’s a complement about what I used rather than a jab at OpenBSD’s which I didn’t use. I’m merely saying quite a few of us appreciate stuff that saves us time once or many times. If common and critical, adoption can go up if it’s a solved problem with minimal intervention out of the box.

That said, props to your project member who solved the problem with a minimally-complex solution in terms of code and dependencies. I’m sure that was hard work. I also appreciate you illustrating that for us with your comparisons. The difference is almost comical in the work people put in with very different talents, goals and constraints. And m4 isn’t gone yet. (sighs)

This is really great. I wish all other projects can do that, preferring elegancy to throwing code on the wall, but sometimes life really takes its toll and we cave and just make Frankenstein to get shit done.

I really appreciate all the works by OpenBSD folks. Do you have any idea how other *BSD’s deal with the wireless?

It’s almost like if you prioritize the stuff that truly matters, and be willing to accept a little bit of UX inconvenience, you might happen upon a formula that produces reliable software? Who would have thought?

I think this is just a matter of what you think matters. There’s no sadness here. The ability to trade off security for features and vice versa is good. It lets us accept the level of risk we like.

On the other hand, it’s really sad, for instance, that OpenBSD has had so many public security flaws compared to my kernel ;P

I’m getting a bit tired of every complaint and remark being reduced to entitlement. Yes, I know that there is a lot of unjustified entitlement in the world, and it is rampant in the open source world, but I don’t feel entitled to anything in free or open source software space. As someone trying to write software in my spare time, I understand how hard it is to find spare time for any non-trivial task when it’s not your job.

Though I am not a heavy user, I think OpenBSD is an impressive piece of software, with a lot of thought and effort put into the design and robustness of the implementation.

I just think it’s somewhat disheartening that something this common (switching wireless networks) was not possible without manual action (rewriting a configuration file, or swapping configuration files, and restarting the network interface) every time you needed to switch or moved from home to the office.

Whether you feel like this is me lamenting the fact that there are so few contributors to important open source projects, me lamenting the fact that it is so hard to make time to work on said project, or me being an entitled prick asking for features on software I don’t pay for (in money or in time/effort) is entirely your business.

First, both free speech and hacker culture say that person can gripe about what they want. They’re sharing ideas online that someone might agree with or act on. We have a diverse audience, too.

Second, the project itself has developers that write cocky stuff about their system, mock the other systems, talk that one time about how they expect more people to be paying them with donations, more recently talk about doing things like a hypervisor for adoption, and so on. Any group doing any of that deserves no exception to criticism or mockery by users or potential users. It’s why I slammed them hard in critiques, only toning it down for the nice ones I met. People liking critiques of other projects or wanting adoption/donations should definitely see others’ critiques of their projects, esp if its adoption/donation blockers. I mean, Mac’s had a seemless experience called Rendevous or something in 2002. If I’m reading the thread right, that was 16 years before OpenBSD something similar they wanted to make official. That OpenBSD members are always bragging when they’re ahead of other OS’s on something is why I’m mentioning it. Equal treatment isn’t always nice.

“But, I do care that people aren’t berating developers with: “That’s great, but ____” comments. Let’s support each other, instead of feigning gratitude. It wasn’t clear if that’s what you were doing, hence, my request for clarification.”

I did want to point out that we’ve had a lots of OpenBSD-related submissions and comments with snarky remarks about what other developers or projects were doing. I at least don’t recall you trying to shut them down with counterpoints assessing their civility or positivity toward other projects (say NetBSD or Linux). Seems a little inconsistent. My memory is broken, though. So, are you going to be countering every negative remark OpenBSD developers or supporters make about projects with different goals telling them to be positive and supportive only? A general rule of yours? Or are you giving them a pass for some reason but applying the rule to critics of OpenBSD choices?

i think he’s sad that there haven’t been enough volunteers to make it happen sooner

If the technology and processes you prefer have intrinsic merit, then why regretfully and silently abandon them?

Because when I didn’t, people were complaining about my quoting style, not understanding which part of the message was mine and which wasn’t and complaining that me stripping off all the useless bottom quote caused them to lose context.

This was a fight it didn’t feel worth fighting.

I can still use my old usenet quoting habits when talking to other old people on mailing lists (which is another technology on the way out it seems), but I wouldn’t say that the other platforms and quoting styles the majority of internet users use these days are wrong.

After all, if the maiority uses them, it might as well be the thing that finally helped the “other” people to get online to do their work, so it might very well be time for our “antiquated” ways to die off.

But HTML emails are good for one thing: providing hyperlinks without exposing URLs to people.

That doesn’t come without a huge cost. People don’t realize that they need to know the underlying URL and don’t care to pay attention to it. That leads to people going places they didn’t expect or getting phished and the like.

Those same people probably wouldn’t notice the difference between login.youremail.com and login.yourema.il.com either, though. So I’m not saying the URL is the solution but at least, putting it in front of you, gives you a chance.

As much as good web developers aim for elegant URLs, the fact remains that URLs are for machines, not people.

I’m not sure about this… at least the whole point of DNS is to allow humans to understand URLs. Unreadable URLs seem to be a relatively recent development in the war against users.

Personally, I hate HTML in email - I don’t think it belongs there. Mainly, for the very reasons you had just mentioned.

Let’s take phishing, for example - and spear phishing in particular. At an institution where I work, people - especially those at the top - are being targeted. And it’s no longer click here-type of emails - institutional HTML layouts are being used to a great effect to collect people’s personal data (passwords, mainly). With the whole abstraction people cannot distinguish whether an email, or even a particular link, is genuine.

When it comes it the structure itself, all of that can be achieved with plain text email - the conventions used predate Markdown, BTW, and are just as readable as they were several decades ago.

To the unserious comment, I don’t think I was being a jerk. I called him a jerk, which I guess you could argue is a jerk move under any circumstances, but if I’m being a jerk then so is Gary.

To the serious comment, I just want to note that “brain damaged” is a meme among old school hackers which isn’t as strong of a word as you think.

To the aside, I don’t use hipster as an insult or to imply wrongness, but I do use it to invalidate his point. Gary is a Ruby developer. Linus is a kernel developer. The worlds are far removed from each other.

(I am not defending Linus’ behaviour here, please don’t put those words in my mouth.)

I strongly take issue with American ideas of “professionalism”, and an even more so with the idea that we get to decide whether this project is “a professional setting” or not. What exactly makes this a “professional setting”? What is a “professional setting”? Why do we hold some interactions to higher standards than others?

I suspect “money changing hands” is the thing that makes this “a professional setting”, and that grinds my gears even further. Why are we supposed to hold ourselves to different standards just because some people are getting paid for doing it?

The Linux kernel is not a professional setting. Besides, I argue that the 1% is useful, even in a professional setting - sometimes strong words are called for. I’ll be That Guy and say that people should grow a thicker skin, especially people who weren’t even the subject of the email and have never been involved in kernel development.

Thanks, especially that second point makes sense. What I usually do is make a bookmark on my bookmarks bar for that and delete it again after a week or month. But I do that so rarely that it’s a good enough hack.

Also I wonder if now (hey, it’s 2018) the amount of people actively using NNTP isn’t such a low number that this is kinda moot. Also I always get the vibe of ML-hate not from people old enough to be staunch NNTP fans, but from younger people. So are the “MLs are ok, but NNTP is better” folks really even less than the “I only use NNTP”, both hardly noticeable against something else? ;)

It’s a combination of laziness on my part and the fact that I don’t make many large contributions to other people’s projects. I have accounts on those services, and I know the generally accepted workflow for opening pull requests and getting changes submitted. The time from me saying, “Hey, this is a small bug I can fix,” to writing the code and opening a pull request can be as little as 5 minutes.

But with somebody’s self-hosted Git repos, I don’t automatically know what the process is. Sometimes they’ll say, and sometimes they won’t, but it’s almost always more work than the third party hosts and it’s potentially different for everybody’s self-hosted code.

It is pretty easy to add a macro for systems that don’t support noreturn.
Here is an example from one of my projects.
#ifndef NORETURN_H
#define NORETURN_H
#ifdef __cplusplus
#define NORETURN [[noreturn]]
#else
#define NORETURN noreturn
#include <stdnoreturn.h>
#endif
#endif

Neither of those are necessary. The * const is trivially inferable and no optimizing C compiler worth anything will generate a variable length array from a const int. BUFSZ may be completely eliminated by the link time optimizer as well, since this module will have an initial executable storage class.

cc: @friendlysock

Good point! I’m a little lazy on const stuff sometimes. :(