I have a degoogled phone with only open source apps. This means I have to use the Google Maps website. (for the few times I use google maps instead of OsmAnd) The geolocation permission in Firefox Mobile allows me to find route from where I am right now to where I want to go.
Organic Maps is great. Although I often have to do the geocoding part externally because I don’t get the coordinates searching the OpenStreetMap data. Fortunately sharing or pasting most URLs with a lat,lon pair just works. And once you have the location saved in app, the routing is better or as bad (but in a different way) than Google(1).
Yes, I would love to go across 4 lanes of traffic at rush hour from a stop sign. Thanks so much.
I haven’t felt the need to use the web site for ages, openstreetmap.org has much better data most places I’ve been. In a previous thread where I mentioned OsmAnd, I was directed to try Organic Maps. It does seem like a nicer (and more properly open source) front end for mobile. I’ll properly swich once I’ve managed to import my favourites from OsmAnd (OsmAnd’s export formats and Organic Maps’ import formats do not overlap, so you need to export and then run a conversion tool).
I don’t care if people want to get together and navelgaze their naughty lists, and have nothing against balkanisation of “the fediverse”, but I sure do wish it was explicit. I don’t want to waste my time attempting to interact with somebody who will never see it because their admin has my originating host on a shadowban.
Some places list their moderation rules either in /about or in a code repo, but even the terms (limited/silenced blocked/banned/suspended) don’t seem to be standard.
It wasn’t deleted - there’s an ongoing problem over the last few days where the first tweet of a thread doesn’t load on the thread view page. The original text of the linked tweet is this:
I’ve seen a lot of people asking “why does everyone think Twitter is doomed?”
As an SRE and sysadmin with 10+ years of industry experience, I wanted to write up a few scenarios that are real threats to the integrity of the bird site over the coming weeks.
It wasn’t deleted - there’s an ongoing problem over the last few days where the first tweet of a thread doesn’t load on the thread view page.
It’s been a problem over the last few weeks at least. Just refresh the page a few times and you should eventually see the tweet. Rather than the whole site going down at once, I expect these kinds of weird problems will start to appear and degrade Twitter slowly over time. Major props to their former infrastructure engineers/SREs for making the site resilient to the layoffs/firings though!
FWIW, I just tried to get my Twitter archive downloaded and I never received an SMS from the SMS verifier. I switched to verify by email and it went instantly. I also still haven’t received the archive itself. God knows how long that queue is…
I used to help run a fairly decent sized Mesos cluster – I think at our pre-AWS peak we were around 90-130 physical nodes.
It was great! It was the definition of infrastructure that “just ticked along”. So it got neglected, and people forgot about how to properly manage it. It just kept on keeping on with minimal to almost no oversight for many months while we got distracted with “business priorities”, and we all kinda forgot it was a thing.
Then one day one of our aggregator switches flaked out and all of a sudden our nice cluster ended up partitioned … two, or three ways? It’s been years, so the details are fuzzy, but I do remember
some stuff that was running still ran – but if you had dependencies on the other end of the partition there was lots of systems failing health checks & trying to get replacements to spin up
Zookeeper couldn’t establish a quorum and refused to elect a new leader so Mesos master went unavailable, meaning you didn’t get to schedule new jobs
a whole bunch of business critical batch processes wouldn’t start
we all ran around like madmen trying to figure out who knew enough about this cluster to fix it
It was a very painful lesson. As someone on one of these twitter threads posted, “asking ‘why hasn’t Twitter gone down yet?’ is like shooting the pilot and then saying they weren’t needed because the plane hasn’t crashed yet”.
There’s no limit to the size of company that can run on kube if you can run things across multiple clusters. The problem comes if you routinely have clusters get big rather than staying small.
I was thinking about that too, but I’m guessing that CFA has a fraction of the traffic of Target (especially this time of year). Love those sandwiches though…
I work at a shop with about 1k containers being managed by mesos and it is a breath of fresh air after having been forced to use k8s. There is so much less cognitive overhead to diagnosing operational issues. That said, I think any mesos ecosystem will be only as good as the tooling written around it. Setting up load balancing, for instance . . . just as easy to get wrong as right.
I quite like It, including the extra features of the glitch-soc friendly fork of mastodon.
I’m eyeing that stack (and features) as the basis for a local community – the idea of longer messages and better image support hidden behind a CW may convince some folks that were previously averse to the small character limit, bad threading model for longer posts on Twitter.
Does anyone have opinions on other fediverse software stacks? I like the architecture and resource footprint of plemora, but have been turned off by some of the political baggage with it and its forks. :(
I really like glitch-soc. If you self-host, you should definitely fork whichever server implementation you use. Even basic stuff like changing character limits and re-theming is hard to really do without forking the code. I also think more people should know about Misskey. It introduces lots of the features you didn’t know you wanted and many you probably still don’t.
I’m on https://infosec.exchange and it’s been an enjoyable experience. I mostly chose it because a lot of the people I actually bother paying attention to on Twitter moved there and I have to say the admin is awesome. I’ve seen some good discussions bleeding over from ruby.social but haven’t had time to check it out yet.
FWIW decentralised networks like the fediverse have existed for a long time. GNU social, identica etc are just a few, they’ve been around for a long time.
Personally I like how mastodon approaches this: you get four key-value entries, so you can put whatever in there. I find that quite suitable.
Out of curiosity, how would this feature bother anyone? It has all the indicators that it would require minimal changes (multiple inputs for the “website” profile entry)
People on lobste.rs have shown interest in the fediverse for quite some time.
It wouldn’t bother me none, especially if fields only present when populated. It’s your profile, if that’s how you want to be reached that’s appropriate info. I just don’t think one busy day represents a trend and the decision shouldn’t be made on that argument specifically.
On the flip side: If you only see twitter, facebook and github on peoples profiles, you’ll obviously not think about the possibility of the fediverse. But the usual candidates are getting free PR.
I’m going to stand up for Twitter threads here. I think they’re genuinely one of the most interesting things about Twitter as a writing medium, and it’s worth talking about what makes them so useful.
That thread is a particularly interesting example, I think. It’s about the move “Into the Spider-Verse”. It turns out many of the artists who worked on that movie use Twitter, and were sharing little snippets of behind-the-scenes reference material and storyboards and suchlike - so I ran a thread that tied those things together.
As the critical and fan reception to that movie increased (and the Oscar campaign got underway) more and more interesting material surfaced. I got to document that in a thread, for an investment of probably less than 10 minutes a day over several months.
I don’t know of any other publishing medium that would support that ROI in terms of effort to value of content produced.
I did the same thing for the Mitchells vs the Machines (many of the same artists) and the director of the movie interacted positively with the thread a few times, which made me very happy! https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1487673496977113088
Beyond multi-month collation threads though, I really like the writing style that threads encourage. They make people break their writing up into 280 character chunks, which I think makes most people better writers. They make it easy to embed images, and link to other tweets. I think the result is often a much more consumable piece than a regular blog post.
It’s a powerful engagement hack too: Tweet once and there’s a good chance many of your followers might miss it. Run a thread over the course of a day and each time you add to it there’s another chance for people to see it.
I HATE that Twitter make people log in to view them though. That’s the one thing that most discourages me from using them (I write a lot on my own blog too).
This is a very interesting example indeed. You’re basically using Twitter as a pinterest board :) The examples I pointed to, though, are using threads because users want to write big chunks of text but are limited by the 280 characters limit. My point was that if you’re going to write a long post, it’s probably better to write it somewhere where it’s allowed, and maybe link to it in a tweet so that people who don’t use RSS can still know you’ve posted it.
I don’t know of any other publishing medium that would support that ROI in terms of effort to value of content produced.
That’s because all of the content you linked is on Twitter. If you had to take screenshots or select the text you wanted to share from other platforms, then add a link to the original article for reference, etc. it would take you much longer than this. (I assume. I don’t have a Twitter account and am not familiar with the intricacies of this platform)
I HATE that Twitter make people log in to view them though. That’s the one thing that most discourages me from using them
I’m afraid it’s the trend these days. The worst being by far Instagram. Without an account, you cannot access anything. I’m honestly surprised YouTube is not requiring a Google Account to read the videos at this point, but maybe their business model of injecting ads inside videos proved good enough not to do that?
(I write a lot on my own blog too).
And we all are grateful for that! Your blog is fantastic!
I’m honestly surprised YouTube is not requiring a Google Account to read the videos at this point, but maybe their business model of injecting ads inside videos proved good enough not to do that?
Thought: If a user doesn’t interact, YouTube still has their primary content. Where as for Twitter the interactions are the content
You’re basically using Twitter as a pinterest board
I use a personal Discord server for that. I couldn’t possibly relate /s
They make people break their writing up into 280 character chunks, which I think makes most people better writers.
I feel that the older 140 character limit was better at teaching people to write concisely and clearly, but also so painfully austere that it was not a net win for communication.
I seem to remember seeing a graph they did when they were first rolling out 280 that showed that people would very regularly hit 140 or close to it, but hitting 280 was much rarer.
I HATE that Twitter make people log in to view them though. That’s the one thing that most discourages me from >using them (I write a lot on my own blog too).
This is one of the coolest projects I’ve come across in the last few years, and I’ll never not upvote it. Even if it was posted every day.
I’m working on this data-science library, and one of my ideas is to wrap exported datasets including their metadata (properties, lineage information, annotations) and a generic html file, and redbean into a zip file. The html page would serve as a sort of ‘data-passport’, showing a preview of the data itself, the metadata, etc. So, basically every dataset would come with a cross-platform way of executing it and showing itself off in a browser if users so choose to do. I haven’t really thought that through entirely, esp. security considerations (making random files executable might not be the best idea to recommend to users), and how that would work having a server process running on an OS where the commandline is not used by most users (Windows) for example.
But even if I decide to not go forward with the idea, just the potential that I could blows my mind…
That’s exactly the kind of use case I intended to enable with redbean. It’d be great if every website with Jupyter Notebooks had a button to “download my notebook into a redbean”. It’s why with Cosmopolitan Libc we’ve been focusing on porting other languages too besides Lua, e.g. Python, LISP, JavaScript, etc. Regarding security, redbean is one of the few application servers that’s viable in an air-gapped environment. What could be more secure than that?
It’s why with Cosmopolitan Libc we’ve been focusing on porting other languages too besides Lua, e.g. Python, LISP, JavaScript, etc.
Oh, I wasn’t aware of this. Please stop, my imagination is running wild. I’m getting to an age where this sort of excitement is keeping me sleepless for nights on end…
Regarding security, redbean is one of the few application servers that’s viable in an airgapped environment. What could be more secure than that?
I don’t disagree with that. I meant more the practice of encouraging my less-then-aware users to just set the executable flag on any random (data or not) file people send them.
What is open source but posting files online containing code and encouraging others to download and execute them? If you want a snapshot of things to come, we managed to get Python 3.6 down to a 5.5mb Actually Portable Executable. That’s including all its standard library dependencies which are baked into the ZIP structure of the binary. It took quite a hacking marathon. https://justine.lol/actually-portable-python.png It’s going to do so much to help facilitate a sharing of things like scientific knowledge that can be reproduced and interacted with for years to come, rather than merely read like a PDF file, or being something that breaks the next time Ubuntu upgrades, or requires that people in other parts of the world with less Internet privilege download gigabytes of bundled stuff? The technology that underpins redbean is going to help address all those things. You can read more about it here: https://justine.lol/ape.html If anyone reading wants to help make this vision of eliminating the barriers to knowledge, please consider sponsoring me on GitHub.
What is open source but posting files online containing code and encouraging others to download and execute them?
Yeah, I guess you are right.
What’s the plan with Python packages? I reckon including pure-Python ones should be feasible, but esp. for scientific data numpy and pandas would probably be much more difficult to support. Having sqlite available will make for a good workaround in a lot of cases, though. Building a more portable version of https://datasette.io/ might be an interesting project idea…
Have you ever looked into Apache Arrow? Intuitively, it seems like it could be a good fit with readbean if you wanted redbean to venture into the data science space a bit. It being portable, and memory efficient, mmappable and all that.
Either way, I’ll definitely keep an eye out for the Python support, even if everything I would like to do right now would already be possible with Lua.
If anyone reading wants to help make this vision of eliminating the barriers to knowledge, please consider sponsoring me on GitHub.
Done, good on you for mentioning it, I wouldn’t have thought to check… If I end up using it in our project, I’m pretty sure I can get them to sponsor as well.
Porting Python packages is something we’ve been doing by hand so far. It’s largely been a community driven effort due to how native dependencies have effectively locked-in so many packages to specific operating systems. Some examples of things we’re doing, is I started writing a Python bindings generator for chibicc which is an embeddable ~300kb C compiler. It’s all part of the Cosmopolitan Libc repo. My intent here is that, when you just want the native code to work, and you don’t care about having the last inch of performance you’d get with GCC and Clang, then all you need to do is plop the .c files into the .com file using a zip tool, and the Python implementation will just magically build them and link them in automatically across platforms. That would be the pain free path. But if you want the full perf for things like scientific computing, then you just need to integrate it with the Cosmopolitan Libc makefile build.
This same concept would naturally also apply to generating Lua bindings in Redbean for any C code where you need extra performance. chibicc is great. Since half as fast as GCC is still 10x faster than scripting languages. Plus its performance will improve too over time as we add things like simple optimization passes.
Thank you for your work! Honestly, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate people like you spending what looks like a lot of energy, thoughtfulness (and probably love) on really original ideas. Things like this make my days brighter. I thought redbean was an outstanding idea, but the more I learn about Cosmopolitan libc itself,.. When I first heard about it I could not imagine how much further you’d be able to bend this.
chibicc does sound great, I really have to find the time to look into all of this. I don’t want to harp on about Python specifically, but now I’m really intrigued: do you think this could become a viable alternative to things like PyInstaller, nuitka, PyOxidizer in the future? Esp. for cases where performance is not of upmost importance, and even if it’d mean we can’t use every Python library under the sun. Being able to distribute a single-file, cross-platform Python command-line app would be absolutely fantastic.
Upgrading/Testing Qubes 4.1 and trying to do some paid work, while trying not to worry about whether the US Navy has already rendered my and millions of others’ drinking water permanently toxic. And waiting for it to get light out so I can see what getting 9 inches of rain in just over 24 hours has done to the neighborhood. Oof.
The link to the one page summary on that page is dead. This doesn’t bode well, especially considering it’s hosted by Trac, which I haven’t seen in a decade or more.
It looks like there was a new release yesterday? I was initially confused why this link was posted with no comment or obvious reason. At the time, the new release announcement wasn’t showing on that page (for me). But now I see there’s been a new security audit and that it’s been a few releases past ditching python 2.7? I may give it a try again.
One of the things that trip me when I first tried emacs is what I wanted it to do too much without having any clue what was happening. I wanted it to replace by go IDE (GoLand), my JS and Rust tools (VS Code) and work perfectly with the language I was just learning (Elixir).
After a bunch of copy/paste and like 500 lines in init.el that I didn’t know what they where doing I obviously felt flat on my face.
Nowadays I’ve come back to it with more curiosity and less expectations. Got it working perfectly for beancount, got rid of the awkward (for me) hotkeys with evil, got the fonts and colors that I like, and now I’m free to explore and grow from here :-)
The rest of the tools are fine and I’m sure that emacs could replace them, but Idk how nor I need to know right now… I can just enjoy the experience!
If you are looking for something between Doom and vanilla, the author’s prelude starter kit is great. And if you use org-mode,
the sci-max kit has some really helpful utilities.
I personally can’t seem to feel at home adding on to any of the starter kits, but I’ve pulled in some things from both of these to my hot garbage of an ancient config mess. :)
I think doom is an incredible mix of out of box power, emacs customizability, and evil mode. Even as a power user, distributions ensure I don’t miss out on new features, as my dot files over time are likely to lag behind without a lot of attention.
Also recommending Doom Emacs. After 20 (25ish?) years of Emacs I switched to Doom Emacs so I could throw away a large part of my homegrown config and not having to maintain it anymore.
For me it does the same as the i3 window manager and the Fish shell: it has sensible defaults that I am mostly willing to accept to save time on config maintenance. (Ofcourse I still have my own customizations to these tools.)
His engagement with lobste.rs was much more polarising than burntsushi. The latter didn’t jump into comment sections to deliberately kick off a flame war that may not have otherwise occurred; the former did so deliberately and unashamedly. I heartily respect both their views but I can understand why they might be moderated differently.
Then clearly this community is not what the admin intended it to be before banning this domain because the stories from that domain were routinely getting above 30 points which is rare for most stories. It is time to shut this whole website down and just change it to be a private RSS feed of the admin.
It’s an attempt to avoid the Repugnant Conclusion; the mere addition of a steady attractor of upvotes can degrade the quality of life for everybody else.
Please go be loudly disappointed in the entire world (and promote sourcehut) somewhere else.
I really hope that this happened at the end of a process of attempting to politely engage, rather than as the immediate response. That reads like something from a burned-out moderator who needs to take a break.
I don’t like anyone getting banned for anything. I have a lot of respect for how much DeVault puts into his open source contributions and am envious he can live off of it. That being said, he banned me on Mastodon forever ago because I reposted an open letter a professor made during the eight of the 2020 US riots. We had a discussion over DMs and he blocked me in the end.
The more I lean about some of the stuff he’s said and done, I realize I can still respect his work while still agreeing with all the others who’ve come to the conclusion his actions are often inflammatory or childish. I’m not surprised he’s banned. He left the Fediverse a few months back too.
The reason for banning the user account was reported by the admin as apparently rude comments/encouraging arguments/arguing? The comments were usually upvoted though as far as I remember so I think the decision was mostly arbitrary.
The domain was blocked just because the admin banned the author from lobsters, not because there was something wrong with the content on that website. Drew wasn’t even the one posting his blog posts here.
Therefore at least one of those decisions is nonsensical.
You can try to create a website with semi-transparent moderation policies but that will never fix the standard power abuse by moderators like in this situation. The personal grievances usually win and no moderation log will fix this. The community enjoyed the content and @pushcx didn’t => the comments and the domain get nuked off the website.
I tried to get an answer at least to why the domain was banned but of course I never did (in the name of transparency).
The reason for banning the user account was reported by the admin as apparently rude comments/encouraging arguments/arguing? The comments were usually upvoted though as far as I remember so I think the decision was mostly arbitrary.
The domain was blocked just because the admin banned the author from lobsters, not because there was something wrong with the content on that website. Drew wasn’t even the one posting his blog posts here.
I disagree with your opinion that his behavior on the site was not rude, though I didn’t look closely at all of his posts so I can’t say for certain. What I do agree with is the domain ban. The ban itself seemed unclear and arbitrary. Moreover, as you mentioned, a domain ban affects much more than just a user, it affects all content on that domain.
This is an amazing example of technical investigation and writing. I think I found something noteworthy at each recursion of links I followed from the main story, e.g., the current mailing list software at lore.kernel.org.
Also, it’s going to have me wondering about several bizarre rsync stalls from back in the day. Maybe that one time wasn’t caused by spiders in the server case in our unfinished basement garage lab. :)
SecBrowser probably deserves a mention in this thread as well - Tor Browser patches without forcing Tor use. A possible step before having to compile and maintain your own damn Firefox fork.
Baseball fans will like this pitch tracking software company CTO’s talk, I think. The talk and this Q&A has reminded me of Casey at the Bat. Probably a lot of fun project names over there.
The hardware setup details were fun for the baseball talk too – super useful for the non-Nix knowledge even. And the Android AOSP build system in the next talk looks useful to me right away.
I was working with this last week as a POC for python scripts in an environment with limited disk space and that would benefit from faster startup times, but ran into some problems. This release seems to have fixed those problems and cleared up some confusing parts of the docs. That it works to package mercurial is pretty amazing too!
I didn’t know Postgres had a meme. And I’m now ashamed to know I’m in the sky zone!
No shame in being one of today’s lucky 10,000.
For what it’s worth, it only came across my desk for the first time Friday too.
I saw a post about it on Lemmy, but the image didn’t federate, so I moved on. Definitely glad to see it in this better form here!
I gave a talk 6 years ago at my local Python meetup on the same topic: https://github.com/voutilad/meetups/blob/master/hidden-py/hidden.md
Looks like not much has changed since Python 3.6!
Too bad the author didn’t look at all the turtledemo stuff because they missed out on a free analog clock: https://docs.python.org/3/library/turtle.html#module-turtledemo
TIL -
python3 -m telnetlibis another quick way to check ports ifncisn’t installed andbashis missing the net redirection support.Thank you!
What do location permissions do on Google Maps? I tried looking it up but only found answers regarding the mobile app, not the website.
I would guess that it gives the website the permission to use the Geolocation API.
I have a degoogled phone with only open source apps. This means I have to use the Google Maps website. (for the few times I use google maps instead of OsmAnd) The geolocation permission in Firefox Mobile allows me to find route from where I am right now to where I want to go.
For an alternative to the beast that is OsmAnd, you might want to loop into Organic Maps.
Organic Maps is great. Although I often have to do the geocoding part externally because I don’t get the coordinates searching the OpenStreetMap data. Fortunately sharing or pasting most URLs with a lat,lon pair just works. And once you have the location saved in app, the routing is better or as bad (but in a different way) than Google(1).
I haven’t felt the need to use the web site for ages, openstreetmap.org has much better data most places I’ve been. In a previous thread where I mentioned OsmAnd, I was directed to try Organic Maps. It does seem like a nicer (and more properly open source) front end for mobile. I’ll properly swich once I’ve managed to import my favourites from OsmAnd (OsmAnd’s export formats and Organic Maps’ import formats do not overlap, so you need to export and then run a conversion tool).
OSM is definitely the way to go for off road stuff, google still has better results when searching for a place to eat or shop
I don’t care if people want to get together and navelgaze their naughty lists, and have nothing against balkanisation of “the fediverse”, but I sure do wish it was explicit. I don’t want to waste my time attempting to interact with somebody who will never see it because their admin has my originating host on a shadowban.
Some places list their moderation rules either in
/aboutor in a code repo, but even the terms (limited/silenced blocked/banned/suspended) don’t seem to be standard.Why Twitter didn’t go down … yet
I was hoping for some insights into the failure modes and timelines to expect from losing so many staff.
This thread https://twitter.com/atax1a/status/1594880931042824192 has some interesting peeks into some of the infrastructure underneath Mesos / Aurora.
I also liked this thread a lot: https://twitter.com/mosquitocapital/status/1593541177965678592
And yesterday it was possible to post entire movies (in few-minute snippets) in Twitter, because the copyright enforcement systems were broken.
That tweet got deleted. At this point it’s probably better to archive them and post links of that.
It wasn’t deleted - there’s an ongoing problem over the last few days where the first tweet of a thread doesn’t load on the thread view page. The original text of the linked tweet is this:
It’s been a problem over the last few weeks at least. Just refresh the page a few times and you should eventually see the tweet. Rather than the whole site going down at once, I expect these kinds of weird problems will start to appear and degrade Twitter slowly over time. Major props to their former infrastructure engineers/SREs for making the site resilient to the layoffs/firings though!
Not only to the infra/SREs but also to the backend engineers. Much of the built-in fault-tolerance of the stack was created by them.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1593541177965678592.html
I have this URL archived too, but it seems to still be working.
hm, most likely someone would have a mastodon bridge following these accounts RT-ing :-)
FWIW, I just tried to get my Twitter archive downloaded and I never received an SMS from the SMS verifier. I switched to verify by email and it went instantly. I also still haven’t received the archive itself. God knows how long that queue is…
I think it took about 2 or 3 days for my archive to arrive last week.
oh, so they still run mesos? thought everyone had by now switched to k8s…
I used to help run a fairly decent sized Mesos cluster – I think at our pre-AWS peak we were around 90-130 physical nodes.
It was great! It was the definition of infrastructure that “just ticked along”. So it got neglected, and people forgot about how to properly manage it. It just kept on keeping on with minimal to almost no oversight for many months while we got distracted with “business priorities”, and we all kinda forgot it was a thing.
Then one day one of our aggregator switches flaked out and all of a sudden our nice cluster ended up partitioned … two, or three ways? It’s been years, so the details are fuzzy, but I do remember
It was a very painful lesson. As someone on one of these twitter threads posted, “asking ‘why hasn’t Twitter gone down yet?’ is like shooting the pilot and then saying they weren’t needed because the plane hasn’t crashed yet”.
Twitter is well beyond the scale where k8s is a plausible option.
I wonder what is the largest company that primarily runs on k8s. The biggest I can think of is Target.
There’s no limit to the size of company that can run on kube if you can run things across multiple clusters. The problem comes if you routinely have clusters get big rather than staying small.
Alibaba, probably.
Oh, I didn’t realize that was their main platform.
Chick-fil-a, perhaps..
I was thinking about that too, but I’m guessing that CFA has a fraction of the traffic of Target (especially this time of year). Love those sandwiches though…
Had they done so, I bet they’d already be down :D
I work at a shop with about 1k containers being managed by mesos and it is a breath of fresh air after having been forced to use k8s. There is so much less cognitive overhead to diagnosing operational issues. That said, I think any mesos ecosystem will be only as good as the tooling written around it. Setting up load balancing, for instance . . . just as easy to get wrong as right.
Lots of infosec people recently came to https://infosec.exchange and https://defcon.social
I’ve heard good things about https://hackers.town
I quite like It, including the extra features of the glitch-soc friendly fork of mastodon.
I’m eyeing that stack (and features) as the basis for a local community – the idea of longer messages and better image support hidden behind a CW may convince some folks that were previously averse to the small character limit, bad threading model for longer posts on Twitter.
Does anyone have opinions on other fediverse software stacks? I like the architecture and resource footprint of plemora, but have been turned off by some of the political baggage with it and its forks. :(
I really like glitch-soc. If you self-host, you should definitely fork whichever server implementation you use. Even basic stuff like changing character limits and re-theming is hard to really do without forking the code. I also think more people should know about Misskey. It introduces lots of the features you didn’t know you wanted and many you probably still don’t.
I share your thoughts about pleroma.
I’m on https://infosec.exchange and it’s been an enjoyable experience. I mostly chose it because a lot of the people I actually bother paying attention to on Twitter moved there and I have to say the admin is awesome. I’ve seen some good discussions bleeding over from ruby.social but haven’t had time to check it out yet.
I’m not saying the interest is gonna last only one news cycle but let’s wait at least one news cycle.
FWIW decentralised networks like the fediverse have existed for a long time. GNU social, identica etc are just a few, they’ve been around for a long time.
Personally I like how mastodon approaches this: you get four key-value entries, so you can put whatever in there. I find that quite suitable.
And this approach handles a variety of services types. In addition to fediverse and code forges, it could also cover sites like keyoxide.
Out of curiosity, how would this feature bother anyone? It has all the indicators that it would require minimal changes (multiple inputs for the “website” profile entry)
People on lobste.rs have shown interest in the fediverse for quite some time.
It wouldn’t bother me none, especially if fields only present when populated. It’s your profile, if that’s how you want to be reached that’s appropriate info. I just don’t think one busy day represents a trend and the decision shouldn’t be made on that argument specifically.
On the flip side: If you only see twitter, facebook and github on peoples profiles, you’ll obviously not think about the possibility of the fediverse. But the usual candidates are getting free PR.
There is a detailed (and ongoing) Codeberg response as well.
I’m going to stand up for Twitter threads here. I think they’re genuinely one of the most interesting things about Twitter as a writing medium, and it’s worth talking about what makes them so useful.
I write a lot of Twitter threads. I kept adding to my longest one for just over a year! https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1077737871602110466
That thread is a particularly interesting example, I think. It’s about the move “Into the Spider-Verse”. It turns out many of the artists who worked on that movie use Twitter, and were sharing little snippets of behind-the-scenes reference material and storyboards and suchlike - so I ran a thread that tied those things together.
As the critical and fan reception to that movie increased (and the Oscar campaign got underway) more and more interesting material surfaced. I got to document that in a thread, for an investment of probably less than 10 minutes a day over several months.
I don’t know of any other publishing medium that would support that ROI in terms of effort to value of content produced.
I did the same thing for the Mitchells vs the Machines (many of the same artists) and the director of the movie interacted positively with the thread a few times, which made me very happy! https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1487673496977113088
Beyond multi-month collation threads though, I really like the writing style that threads encourage. They make people break their writing up into 280 character chunks, which I think makes most people better writers. They make it easy to embed images, and link to other tweets. I think the result is often a much more consumable piece than a regular blog post.
It’s a powerful engagement hack too: Tweet once and there’s a good chance many of your followers might miss it. Run a thread over the course of a day and each time you add to it there’s another chance for people to see it.
I HATE that Twitter make people log in to view them though. That’s the one thing that most discourages me from using them (I write a lot on my own blog too).
Thanks for this feedback!
This is a very interesting example indeed. You’re basically using Twitter as a pinterest board :) The examples I pointed to, though, are using threads because users want to write big chunks of text but are limited by the 280 characters limit. My point was that if you’re going to write a long post, it’s probably better to write it somewhere where it’s allowed, and maybe link to it in a tweet so that people who don’t use RSS can still know you’ve posted it.
That’s because all of the content you linked is on Twitter. If you had to take screenshots or select the text you wanted to share from other platforms, then add a link to the original article for reference, etc. it would take you much longer than this. (I assume. I don’t have a Twitter account and am not familiar with the intricacies of this platform)
I’m afraid it’s the trend these days. The worst being by far Instagram. Without an account, you cannot access anything. I’m honestly surprised YouTube is not requiring a Google Account to read the videos at this point, but maybe their business model of injecting ads inside videos proved good enough not to do that?
And we all are grateful for that! Your blog is fantastic!
Thought: If a user doesn’t interact, YouTube still has their primary content. Where as for Twitter the interactions are the content
I use a personal Discord server for that. I couldn’t possibly relate /s
I feel that the older 140 character limit was better at teaching people to write concisely and clearly, but also so painfully austere that it was not a net win for communication.
I seem to remember seeing a graph they did when they were first rolling out 280 that showed that people would very regularly hit 140 or close to it, but hitting 280 was much rarer.
I remember staying within the 140 for a long time after they rolled out the 280. No idea why other than perhaps just “I will not use 280!”
There’s always Thread Reader though, right? https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1077737871602110466.html
Which helpfully is
!threadon DuckDuckGo too.Happy birthday! This is my first read of the day most days – and I love it. Thanks to everyone involved.
Another one: https://dbeaver.io (Java-based, cross-platform)
Any idea how this compares to https://dbvis.com/ ? (Which is also Java and cross-platform)
This is one of the coolest projects I’ve come across in the last few years, and I’ll never not upvote it. Even if it was posted every day.
I’m working on this data-science library, and one of my ideas is to wrap exported datasets including their metadata (properties, lineage information, annotations) and a generic html file, and redbean into a zip file. The html page would serve as a sort of ‘data-passport’, showing a preview of the data itself, the metadata, etc. So, basically every dataset would come with a cross-platform way of executing it and showing itself off in a browser if users so choose to do. I haven’t really thought that through entirely, esp. security considerations (making random files executable might not be the best idea to recommend to users), and how that would work having a server process running on an OS where the commandline is not used by most users (Windows) for example.
But even if I decide to not go forward with the idea, just the potential that I could blows my mind…
That’s exactly the kind of use case I intended to enable with redbean. It’d be great if every website with Jupyter Notebooks had a button to “download my notebook into a redbean”. It’s why with Cosmopolitan Libc we’ve been focusing on porting other languages too besides Lua, e.g. Python, LISP, JavaScript, etc. Regarding security, redbean is one of the few application servers that’s viable in an air-gapped environment. What could be more secure than that?
Oh, I wasn’t aware of this. Please stop, my imagination is running wild. I’m getting to an age where this sort of excitement is keeping me sleepless for nights on end…
I don’t disagree with that. I meant more the practice of encouraging my less-then-aware users to just set the executable flag on any random (data or not) file people send them.
What is open source but posting files online containing code and encouraging others to download and execute them? If you want a snapshot of things to come, we managed to get Python 3.6 down to a 5.5mb Actually Portable Executable. That’s including all its standard library dependencies which are baked into the ZIP structure of the binary. It took quite a hacking marathon. https://justine.lol/actually-portable-python.png It’s going to do so much to help facilitate a sharing of things like scientific knowledge that can be reproduced and interacted with for years to come, rather than merely read like a PDF file, or being something that breaks the next time Ubuntu upgrades, or requires that people in other parts of the world with less Internet privilege download gigabytes of bundled stuff? The technology that underpins redbean is going to help address all those things. You can read more about it here: https://justine.lol/ape.html If anyone reading wants to help make this vision of eliminating the barriers to knowledge, please consider sponsoring me on GitHub.
Yeah, I guess you are right.
What’s the plan with Python packages? I reckon including pure-Python ones should be feasible, but esp. for scientific data numpy and pandas would probably be much more difficult to support. Having sqlite available will make for a good workaround in a lot of cases, though. Building a more portable version of https://datasette.io/ might be an interesting project idea…
Have you ever looked into Apache Arrow? Intuitively, it seems like it could be a good fit with readbean if you wanted redbean to venture into the data science space a bit. It being portable, and memory efficient, mmappable and all that.
Either way, I’ll definitely keep an eye out for the Python support, even if everything I would like to do right now would already be possible with Lua.
Done, good on you for mentioning it, I wouldn’t have thought to check… If I end up using it in our project, I’m pretty sure I can get them to sponsor as well.
Thank you for your support!
Porting Python packages is something we’ve been doing by hand so far. It’s largely been a community driven effort due to how native dependencies have effectively locked-in so many packages to specific operating systems. Some examples of things we’re doing, is I started writing a Python bindings generator for chibicc which is an embeddable ~300kb C compiler. It’s all part of the Cosmopolitan Libc repo. My intent here is that, when you just want the native code to work, and you don’t care about having the last inch of performance you’d get with GCC and Clang, then all you need to do is plop the .c files into the .com file using a zip tool, and the Python implementation will just magically build them and link them in automatically across platforms. That would be the pain free path. But if you want the full perf for things like scientific computing, then you just need to integrate it with the Cosmopolitan Libc makefile build.
This same concept would naturally also apply to generating Lua bindings in Redbean for any C code where you need extra performance. chibicc is great. Since half as fast as GCC is still 10x faster than scripting languages. Plus its performance will improve too over time as we add things like simple optimization passes.
Thank you for your work! Honestly, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate people like you spending what looks like a lot of energy, thoughtfulness (and probably love) on really original ideas. Things like this make my days brighter. I thought redbean was an outstanding idea, but the more I learn about Cosmopolitan libc itself,.. When I first heard about it I could not imagine how much further you’d be able to bend this.
chibicc does sound great, I really have to find the time to look into all of this. I don’t want to harp on about Python specifically, but now I’m really intrigued: do you think this could become a viable alternative to things like PyInstaller, nuitka, PyOxidizer in the future? Esp. for cases where performance is not of upmost importance, and even if it’d mean we can’t use every Python library under the sun. Being able to distribute a single-file, cross-platform Python command-line app would be absolutely fantastic.
So excited about the possibilities with Python support! Amazing!
Upgrading/Testing Qubes 4.1 and trying to do some paid work, while trying not to worry about whether the US Navy has already rendered my and millions of others’ drinking water permanently toxic. And waiting for it to get light out so I can see what getting 9 inches of rain in just over 24 hours has done to the neighborhood. Oof.
The link to the one page summary on that page is dead. This doesn’t bode well, especially considering it’s hosted by Trac, which I haven’t seen in a decade or more.
It looks like there was a new release yesterday? I was initially confused why this link was posted with no comment or obvious reason. At the time, the new release announcement wasn’t showing on that page (for me). But now I see there’s been a new security audit and that it’s been a few releases past ditching python 2.7? I may give it a try again.
One of the things that trip me when I first tried emacs is what I wanted it to do too much without having any clue what was happening. I wanted it to replace by go IDE (GoLand), my JS and Rust tools (VS Code) and work perfectly with the language I was just learning (Elixir).
After a bunch of copy/paste and like 500 lines in
init.elthat I didn’t know what they where doing I obviously felt flat on my face.Nowadays I’ve come back to it with more curiosity and less expectations. Got it working perfectly for beancount, got rid of the awkward (for me) hotkeys with evil, got the fonts and colors that I like, and now I’m free to explore and grow from here :-)
The rest of the tools are fine and I’m sure that emacs could replace them, but Idk how nor I need to know right now… I can just enjoy the experience!
Glad to hear it’s now working for you.
For those wanting to start, I suggest either:
The only config I’d recommend from the beginning is
(fido-mode), https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Icomplete.html .If you are looking for something between Doom and vanilla, the author’s prelude starter kit is great. And if you use org-mode, the sci-max kit has some really helpful utilities.
I personally can’t seem to feel at home adding on to any of the starter kits, but I’ve pulled in some things from both of these to my hot garbage of an ancient config mess. :)
I think doom is an incredible mix of out of box power, emacs customizability, and evil mode. Even as a power user, distributions ensure I don’t miss out on new features, as my dot files over time are likely to lag behind without a lot of attention.
Also recommending Doom Emacs. After 20 (25ish?) years of Emacs I switched to Doom Emacs so I could throw away a large part of my homegrown config and not having to maintain it anymore.
For me it does the same as the i3 window manager and the Fish shell: it has sensible defaults that I am mostly willing to accept to save time on config maintenance. (Ofcourse I still have my own customizations to these tools.)
Same, as a long-time Emacs greybeard. I switched to Doom and got rid of a lot of garbage that I had accumulated over the years.
I gues it’s better to leave on your own terms than to get your domain blocked or get kicked out.
The wording on the banner is far from being a friendly advice - I’d call it antagonistic and confrontational, hostile even.
BTW, the code itself has been added last year in this commit.
Ironically, lobste.rs was created by /u/jcs as response to HN heavy-handed moderation.
His engagement with lobste.rs was much more polarising than burntsushi. The latter didn’t jump into comment sections to deliberately kick off a flame war that may not have otherwise occurred; the former did so deliberately and unashamedly. I heartily respect both their views but I can understand why they might be moderated differently.
Thank you for saying this in a far more polite way than I was about to.
And why would that result in banning the domain? Drew wasn’t even the one posting his blog posts here and they were always upvoted.
Because many of his posts were explicit flamebait; look at the last two posts on that domain for instance.
Then clearly this community is not what the admin intended it to be before banning this domain because the stories from that domain were routinely getting above 30 points which is rare for most stories. It is time to shut this whole website down and just change it to be a private RSS feed of the admin.
It’s an attempt to avoid the Repugnant Conclusion; the mere addition of a steady attractor of upvotes can degrade the quality of life for everybody else.
Did you mean to include the one about a finger server and io_uring as one of the two? I found it interesting and informative.
I meant what was submitted to Lobsters, which were the final straws,
Thanks for the clarification. Not sure why I didn’t read it that way.
This was just an example - there’s more in the moderation log if you care to look.
Wow, this ban message from your second link:
I really hope that this happened at the end of a process of attempting to politely engage, rather than as the immediate response. That reads like something from a burned-out moderator who needs to take a break.
This was a sustained pattern of behavior over months.
Pro tip: moderators are always burnt-out.
oh wow, Drew got banned ..
I don’t like anyone getting banned for anything. I have a lot of respect for how much DeVault puts into his open source contributions and am envious he can live off of it. That being said, he banned me on Mastodon forever ago because I reposted an open letter a professor made during the eight of the 2020 US riots. We had a discussion over DMs and he blocked me in the end.
The more I lean about some of the stuff he’s said and done, I realize I can still respect his work while still agreeing with all the others who’ve come to the conclusion his actions are often inflammatory or childish. I’m not surprised he’s banned. He left the Fediverse a few months back too.
Yup. I was actually pretty interested in Sourcehut, but in the end I didn’t really want to use a service run by someone that hot-headed.
What was the nature of the letter?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nCtWHLfbqk
There are two issues here:
The reason for banning the user account was reported by the admin as apparently rude comments/encouraging arguments/arguing? The comments were usually upvoted though as far as I remember so I think the decision was mostly arbitrary.
The domain was blocked just because the admin banned the author from lobsters, not because there was something wrong with the content on that website. Drew wasn’t even the one posting his blog posts here.
Therefore at least one of those decisions is nonsensical.
You can try to create a website with semi-transparent moderation policies but that will never fix the standard power abuse by moderators like in this situation. The personal grievances usually win and no moderation log will fix this. The community enjoyed the content and @pushcx didn’t => the comments and the domain get nuked off the website.
I tried to get an answer at least to why the domain was banned but of course I never did (in the name of transparency).
I disagree with your opinion that his behavior on the site was not rude, though I didn’t look closely at all of his posts so I can’t say for certain. What I do agree with is the domain ban. The ban itself seemed unclear and arbitrary. Moreover, as you mentioned, a domain ban affects much more than just a user, it affects all content on that domain.
Negative comments are deleted when users are banned or leave; you won’t find any of his egregious comments here.
For my sins I’m tracking every submission to lobste.rs.
Here’s a gist with an extract of submissions matching ‘drewdevault’ in the URL. I consider a comments/score ration above 1.25 “controversial”.
Hopefully this can give a sampling of how Devault’s content was received by the community here.
This is an amazing example of technical investigation and writing. I think I found something noteworthy at each recursion of links I followed from the main story, e.g., the current mailing list software at lore.kernel.org.
Also, it’s going to have me wondering about several bizarre rsync stalls from back in the day. Maybe that one time wasn’t caused by spiders in the server case in our unfinished basement garage lab. :)
SecBrowser probably deserves a mention in this thread as well - Tor Browser patches without forcing Tor use. A possible step before having to compile and maintain your own damn Firefox fork.
Baseball fans will like this pitch tracking software company CTO’s talk, I think. The talk and this Q&A has reminded me of Casey at the Bat. Probably a lot of fun project names over there.
The hardware setup details were fun for the baseball talk too – super useful for the non-Nix knowledge even. And the Android AOSP build system in the next talk looks useful to me right away.
I was working with this last week as a POC for python scripts in an environment with limited disk space and that would benefit from faster startup times, but ran into some problems. This release seems to have fixed those problems and cleared up some confusing parts of the docs. That it works to package mercurial is pretty amazing too!