I was just about to email a maintainer of a repo about some
programming stuff but then I realized that the guy was a denier of the
mass incarcerations in Xinjiang. đ€Šđ»ââïž
In the 90s, 00s I wouldnâtâve hesitated one second to work on code
with someone with political differences. I thought it was a good thing
that there were areas in life like code and boardgames where we could
cooperate without harming each other.
But it feels like politics have gotten so extreme. It used to be that
the enemy were the âno we wanna lower taxes for the richâ and now itâs
all âno weâre about to annihilate such-and-such minorityâ.
To be fair, itâs not just the world thatâs changed. Iâve changed too.
I was the one with extreme politicsâat the time I was ancom, vegan,
copyright abolitionistâso I was used to living & coexisting in a world
where almost no-one agreed. But now Iâve finally bubbled up and
echo-chambered-up enough that I can be in a place where eating plants
and copying tapes is not seen as weird. That makes âworking with the
enemyâ less of an everyday thing and more of a stretch.
I sometimes wish I could get back to the mindset of working with
everyone, by somehow making a large enough disclaimer that I disagreed
or whatever.
But, again, itâs not just me. Even back then there were lines I would
never cross, and these days FOSS is so big that people way beyond
those lines are running repos. Not happy about that.
A better database paradigm is the enemy of good, a perfect database
is the enemy of better; on-the-fly mainstreaming commons legacy is
future-proof operative.
While there is no shortage of database systems, there used to be none
that met my expectations. I can think of the following requirements:
Can write, and read the following structures:
relational, graphical
recursive, hierarchical
time, spatial, geometric
textual
Support efficient:
pagination
versioning
horizontal scaling
down scaling
Support ACID transactions across objects
Programmable with Turing-complete programming language
We will argue that one or more of those requirements are unnecessary,
and overkill. DWMT. NIH. YAGNI. DRY. We will argue that by relaxing a
few of the requirements, a particular software or a set of vendors can
bridge the chasm. We will argue endlessly, and we will be building
hedera ivy, yet-another-database, wheel re-invention, pollution, the
heresy of my diluted genius, that curse the software industry with
fragmentation diversity, and fatigue jails. We will mention UNIX,
respect, enterprise software architectures, open, free, available,
sources, transparent, experiences, know-hows, failures, patterns, bugs,
wars, fixes, success, huts, hugs, hubs, stories, productions, uses,
re-uses, decades^W centuries^W milleniums of goods, but proof-of-work of
maintreaming commons legacy.
Stand up, and still, I boost a grown up trend.
OKVS are used in Software as a Service (SaaS), privateer honeypots,
source available software programmed with long now C++, Java, C#,
JavaScript, Scala, Go, Zig, Rust, Python, Clojure, Common Lisp, and
Scheme.
You have already used an Ordered Key-Value Store.
You know about the components that make an OKVS. If you are a
software engineer, you will not learn algorithms, or new structures. You
will re-discover how to use, and re-use readily available knowledge to
better what you do in a way that is logical, that make sense in your
target environment, product, and whatever your varia vocable.
Ordered Key Value Stores are useful, usable, and used.
Is it an expert tool? Is it an acceptable tool? Are problems of
yesterday, today, and tomorrow fixed, or some require the precise craft
of engineering art?
If the Revised-1 Report on Kernel is the language of
programmable programming; then OKVS is the language of programmable
storage.
Caveat emptor: you think in terms of specific, more or less precise,
tailored, ad-hoc, prolly re-usable wording. You answer questions such
as: what problem do I want to solve? Along the transderivational
process, you log the most fitting, under, and over fitting
representations; you plan, exercise read, and write workloads, record
time, the flow of volatile, and permanent space usage, draft what
happens sub-second, shorter than the span of human awareness, and the
other side of the continuum: operations that have eventually a long
while.
Look to tell a good story.
To ease the reader perfect skills, re-new old ideas, the essence of
OKVS paradigm, the reference will also be illustrated with the help of
LaTeX to limit, and hopefully eliminate dubious derivations. First, the
goal is to cover as much substance as possible to give the freedom to
think. Then with convos put the user interface to the test with
well-known human interactions.
It helps to give yourself the opportunity to do it, in the most
fitting order try to: think, exercise, solve, code, rest, sleep, and
have fun.
Ordered Key-Value Store has a small user interface that give us
another good good reason to have a look at processing, memory,
permanence, and pointer swizzling.
A useable database must offer the following actions:
set will store a piece a data;
query will retrieve zero or more piece of data;
delete supposed to do what you think it will, but
you will not use it, and even when you do, it will just acknowledge you
made a wish;
The primary question that comes to mind is: what is a piece of
data?
In the OKVS paradigm, âpiece of dataâ has two parts: the key, similar
to what LISP call car, and the value, similar to what LISP
call cdr. So set may be described with
set(car, cdr), in more parenthetical terms
(set object other)1. In an OKVS, key, and
value, respectively car, and cdr, or
object, and other, are sequences of ones and
zeros2. The user interface of the OKVS
paradigm use bit low level data representation.
Data that is binary sequences is a clue into why OKVS is fractal.
We know what is a piece of data: two bit sequences called
key, and value. The database is a list of
associations between a key, and a value. At
any given point in time, given a bit sequence, it can only be associated
once, and only once to another bit sequence.
Letâs consider a procedure that would be called get. One
must divine that get is a shortcut to
(get key) that returns, if any, the value that was
associated with key using (set key value).
Comes query.
To be an interesting user interface action, query must
subsume get3. The procedure get will
read, and return something, if any. The procedure query
will also read, and return nothing, return something , and opt-in to
return strictly more than one thing. If there is at least two results,
one should consider what comes first, what comes next, and if any what
comes last... That is why
there is an O in OKVS. We want to specify a sorting strategy. The
procedure query returns paired bit sequences in their
natural order4. To cover all use cases, the sorted
subspace returned by query is described using two bit
sequences called start, and end.
That is why OKVS is fractal.
Sunflowers turning into a white circle
over a dark background, and morph to sunflowers in what appears like a
(wanna be (infinite)) loop.
A problem can have several solutions. A solution can have different
implementations each of which with their own strengths and weakness in
terms of space, time and generality.
The goal of a code experience design is to optimize the cognitive
effort required to understand, learn and use. Otherwise said, code
usability aim to improve ease.
While looking for ease, one might trade it over expressive power.
Crafting an experience requires to understand the cognitive load
associated with the production. Cognitive load theory has been designed
to provide guidelines intended to assist in the presentation of
information in a manner that encourages learner activities that optimize
intellectual performance.
Here is some of those guidelines:
People learn more effectively when they can build on what they
already understand;
Take advantage of schemata;
Take advantage of visual thinking and other non-verbal thought;
The average person can retain only seven five chunks
of information in short-term memory;
Screenshot from inanimate alice, perpetual nomads. Available at itch.io.
Do not share,
what you do not want to be known
The three gates of speech
Before you speak, let your words pass through three gates.
At the first gate, ask yourself, is it true.
At the second gate ask, is it necessary.
At the third gate ask, is it kind.
Rogerian rhetoric
You should attempt to re-express your targetâs position so clearly,
vividly, and fairly that your target says, âThanks, I wish Iâd thought
of putting it that way.â
You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are
not matters of general or widespread agreement).
You should mention anything you have learned from your
target.
Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal
or criticism.
Dennettâs version of Rapoportâs Rules
Argument Ranking
âââââ - High-level generators - Disagreements that remain when
everyone understands exactly whatâs being argued, and agrees on what all
the evidence says, but have vague and hard-to-define reasons for
disagreeing.
âââââ - Operationalizing - Where both parties understand theyâre
in a cooperative effort to fix exactly what theyâre arguing
about.
âââââ - Survey of evidence - Not trying to devastate the other
person with a mountain of facts and start looking at the studies and
arguments on both sides and figuring out what kind of complex picture
they paint.
âââââ - Disputing definitions - Argument hinges on the meaning of
words, or whether something counts as a member of a category or
not.
âââââ - Single Studies - Better than scattered facts, proving
they at least looked into the issue formally.
âââââ - Demands for rigor - Attempts to demand that an opposing
argument be held to such strict standards that nothing could possibly
clear the bar.
âââââ - Single Facts- One fact, which admittedly does support
their argument, but presented as if it solves the debate in and of
itself.
âââââ - Gotchas - Short claims that purport to be devastating
proof that one side canât possibly be right.
âââââ - Social shaming- A demand for listeners to place someone
outside the boundary of whom deserve to be heard.
âHow to apologize: Quickly, specifically, sincerely.â, by Kevin
Kelly
Arguments category
Ad baculum : Argument relying on an appeal to fear or a threat.
Ad ignorantiam : Argument relying on peopleâs ignorance.
Ad populum : Argument relying on sentimental weakness.
Ad verecundiam : Argument relying on the the words of an âexpertâ,
or authority.
Ex silentio : Argument relying on ignorance.
Ex nihilo : An argument that bears no relation to the previous topic
of discussion.
Non sequitur : An inference that does not follow from established
premises or evidence.
Responses
Akrasia : State of acting against oneâs better judgment.
Connotation : Emotional association with a word.
Intransigence : Refusal to change oneâs views or to agree about
something.
Inferential distance : Gap between the background knowledge and
epistemology of a person trying to explain an idea, and the background
knowledge and epistemology of the person trying to understand it.
Straw man : Creating a false or made up scenario and then attacking
it. Painting your opponent with false colors only deflects the purpose
of the argument.
Steel man : To steelman is to address the strongest possible variant
or the most charitable interpretation of an idea, rather than the most
available phrasings.
Red herring : A diversion from the active topic.
Rationalization : Starts from a conclusion, and then works backward
to arrive at arguments apparently favouring that conclusion.
Rationalization argues for a side already selected.
Dogpiling : A disagreement wherein one person says something wrong
or offensive, and a large number of people comment in response to tell
them how wrong they are, and continue to disparage the original
commenter beyond any reasonable time limit.
Grandstanding : An action that is intended to make people notice and
admire you, behaving in a way that makes people pay attention to you
instead of thinking about more important matters.
Whataboutism : An attempt to discredit an opponentâs position by
charging them with hypocrisy without directly refuting or disproving
their argument.
Dissensus : The deliberate avoidance of consensus.
Beliefs
Belief : The mental state in which an individual holds a proposition
to be true.
Priors : The beliefs an agent holds regarding a fact, hypothesis or
consequence, before being presented with evidence.
Alief : An independent source of emotional reaction which can
coexist with a contradictory belief. Example The fear felt when a
monster jumps out of the darkness in a scary movie is based on the alief
that the monster is about to attack you, even though you believe that it
cannot.
Proper belief : Requires observations, gets updated upon
encountering new evidence, and provides practical benefit in anticipated
experience.
Improper belief : Is a belief that isnât concerned with describing
the territory. Note that the fact that a belief just happens to be true
doesnât mean youâre right to have it. If you buy a lottery ticket,
certain that itâs a winning ticket (for no reason), and it happens to
be, believing that was still a mistake.
Belief in belief : Where it is difficult to believe a thing, it is
often much easier to believe that you ought to believe it. Were you to
really believe and not just believe in belief, the consequences of error
would be much more severe. When someone makes up excuses in advance, it
would seem to require that belief, and belief in belief, have become
unsynchronized.
A Priori : Knowledge which we can be sure of without any empirical
evidence(evidence from our senses). So, knowledge that you could realize
if you were just a mind floating in a void unconnected to a body.
Leading
âA leader is best when people barely know they exists, when their
work is done, their aim fulfilled, people will say: we did it
ourselves.â
â èć (Lao Tse), éćŸ·ç¶ (Dao De Jing)
Wikipediaâs etiquette
The first principle of Wikipedia etiquette has been said to be Assume
Good Faith, also they Be Bold, but not Reckless.
Wrong discourse
Answer: Jumping into a conversation with endless unapplicable,
unrealistic or unrelated answers to the question.
Question: Spouting accusations while cowardly hiding behind the
claim of just asking questions, and ignoring the answers. Asking loaded
questions.
Good discourse
Answer: A clear and honest response to the central point of a
question without an aggressive attempt to convince.
Question: question asked with the intention to be fair, open, and
honest, regardless of the outcome of the interaction.
Social rules are expected to be broken from time to time, in that
regard they are different from a code of conduct.
Response Ranking
ââââââ - Central point - Commit to refute explicitly the central
point.
ââââââ - Counterargument - Contradict with added reasoning or
evidence.
ââââââ - Contradiction - State the opposing case, what.
ââââââ - Responding to Tone - Responding to the authorâs tone,
how.
ââââââ - Ad Hominem - Attacking the author directly, who.
Interaction Ranking
Discussion
âââââ - Release - Initiating a discussion on the lessons learnt from
a project.
âââââ - Update - Presenting the recent development of a personal
experience, ongoing event or work in progress.
âââââ - Soapbox - Spontaneous and or enthusiastic posts about a
general topic of interest or finding.
Low-Effort
âââââ - Rant- Venting frustration publicly without explicitly
looking to have a conversation about the matter.
âââââ - Shitpost - Aggressively or ironically looking for the
biggest reaction with the least effort possible. Includes subtoots and
vague-posting.
Emotional Reaction
Seduction - You are led to feel that the fulfillment of your dreams
depends on your doing what the other is encouraging you to do.
Alignment - The interests of the system are presented as fulfilling
your emotional needs. You are led to feel that your survival, your
viability in society or your very identity depends on your doing what
the other is requiring of you.
Reduction - Complex subjects are reduced to a single, emotionally
charged issue.
Polarization - Issues are presented in such a way that you are
either right or wrong. You are told that any dialogue between different
perspectives is suspect, dangerous or simply not permissible.
Marginalization - You are made to feel that your own interests (or
interests that run counter to the interests of the other) are
inconsequential.
Framing - The terms of a debate are set so that issues that threaten
the system cannot be articulated or discussed. You are led to ignore
aspects of the issue that may be vitally important to your own interests
but are contrary to the interests of the other that is seeking to make
you act in their interests.
Quotes
âKings speak for the realm, governors for the state, popes for
the church. Indeed, the titled, as titled, cannot speak with annyone.â â
James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games
âInstead of trying to prove your opponent wrong, try to see in
what sense he might be right.â â Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and
Utopia
âYou should mention anything you have learned from your
target.â
âI donât argue: I just say what I know or what I believe, as the
case may be.â â John W. Cohan
Copy
The whole page is licensed under cc-by-nc-sa; it is adapted from
https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/discourse.html to make it easier for me to
change it. I also avoid the words âbadâ (replaced with âwrongâ) and
âfaithâ (replaced with âdiscourseâ), a few other changes.
On the server side, itâs pretty vanilla. Postfix, Dovecot, SpamAssassin, WKD.
On the client side, I use mbsync and notmuch and I have a ton of
automatic filters via nmsync.
Everything that those filters label with feed I read in a feedreader
instead of an email app thanks to nmatom. I can check in on those
newsletters once per day. No stress. And theyâre not getting tangled
up in my personal business, they donât trigger notifications, they
donât require responses, they show up when I have time to read âem
etc. Pretty great.
I also have the opposite, thanks to rss2email; I have one RSS feed
(janitorial type news from inside my building) that are so urgent that
I get them in my email client.
Speaking of email client, I also use Delta Chat. It and mbsync read from
the same imap store, they donât read from each other.
Delta Chat is great as a biff replacement (a classic mail
notification app from decades agoâthatâs right, biff only did
notifications) that can also bang out a quick reply.
But Delta Chat has some limitations, which is when I go to my other
mail app, which is the Emacs interface to notmuch. Here are some of
those limitations:
Starting a new thread: this is possible on Delta Chat but itâs a hassle. Even more so if I donât already have the mail address added
Writing long emails: short messages have their charm but sometimes a long one can be a good time for those deep topics and thatâs where Emacs shines
Applying incoming patches to my repos: way easier with notmuch
Sending encrypted email: Delta Chat can show me my GPG or WKD email just fine but the only keys it can encrypt to are Autocrypt keys (and it can send unencryptedly to non-PGP people). So for encrypted convos to non-autocrypters, I have to switch to notmuch, which is fine, I just need to remember which is which, and thatâs not great
When I need to top-post: pre-September geeks hate top-posting but some systems and bots require it, so when I deal with them I must go into notmuch
Delta Chat also canât block users that send to multiple senders. Which
is bonkers. It thinks itâs in âmailing list modeâ.
Which sucks since I have a monthly bill/invoice that I didnât even
have to see when I was on all notmuch. I had nmatom stash away the
bill, then alert me if the invoice wasnât autopaid within a few days.
But with Delta Chat, I canât hide it because it thinks itâs in mailing
list mode. It canât even mute the thread since every month has a new
ID in the subject.
Why do I even use Delta Chat?
Becaue the notification sitch on tablets suck. When I was at my desk
all day I had a great all-notmuch setup. Now that I spend most days in
bed, I wanna get pinged when I get email and thereâs not an easy way
to set up notifications. Itâs same on Android tablets and iPad
tabletsâI started this on Android and just kept going with the exact
same combo (Delta Chat + an SSH app) on iPad OS.
Also I was fast at email but that has been kicked up a liâl notch with
Delta Chat.
How do I inbox zero?
I donât use email to keep track of things I need to do. Instead, I
paste things into a separate todo app. The email is never the
reminder. Thatâs how I do it. There are other ways that might
make sense for those whose work is primarily email-driven, but for the
past few years Iâve only been using an external todo app to keep track
of anything I donât wanna get to right away. (But since my
filters sort newsletters from conversations for me, thereâs not a lot
of further processing Iâd need to do on my inbox.)
A few years ago I did have a couple of notmuch tags specific for this, and scripting & shortcuts to work with them and extract them to other systems. I had:
Waiting-for, for stuff where I was waiting for them (and might need to check in),
reply, where I was just procratinating on replying (and that sort of separation of processing from doing can sometimes be appropriate),
todo, where I needed to do something external before I can reply,
But these days I do none of that. I work from the todo app, not from
the mail app. Mail isnât anything special in that regard: I can add stuff to the todo inbox
from mail, from fedi, from rss, from web pages,
from a picture, from notes and mindmaps, from dreams or phonecalls.
I go into my mail apps to read & write mail. That works for me right now. đ€·đ»ââïž
Maintaining and expanding Guix's collection of packages can be
complicated. As a distribution with around 22,000 packages, spanning
across around 7 architectures and with support for cross-compilation,
it's quite common for problems to occur when making changes.
Quality Assurance (QA) is a general term to describe the approach
taken to try and ensure something meets expectations. When applied to
software, the term testing is normally used. While Guix is software,
and has tests, much more than those tests are needed to maintain Guix
as a distribution.
So what might quality relate to in the context of Guix as a
distribution? This will differ from person to person, but these are
some common concerns:
Packages successfully building (both now, and without any
time bombs for the future)
The packaged software functioning correctly
Packages building on or for a specific architecture
Packages building reproducibly
Availability of translations for the package definitions
Tooling to help with Quality Assurance
There's a range of tools to help maintain Guix. The package
linters
are a set of simple tools, they cover basic things from the naming of
packages to more complicated checkers that look for security issues
for example.
The guix weather
tool looks at substitute availability information and can indicate how
many substitutes are available for the current Guix and system. The
guix challenge
tool is similar, but it highlights package reproducibility issues,
which is when the substitutes and local store items (if available)
differ.
For translations, Guix uses
Weblate
which can provide information on how many translations are available.
The QA front-page
Then there's the relatively new Quality Assurance (QA)
front-page, the aim of which is to bring
together some of the existing Quality Assurance related information,
as well as new being a good place to do additional QA tasks.
The QA front-page
started
as a service to coordinate automated testing for patches. When a patch
or patch series is submitted to guix-patches@gnu.org, it is
automatically applied to create a branch; then once the information is
available from the Data Service about
this branch, the QA front-page web interface lets you view which
packages were modified and submits builds for these changes to the
Build Coordinator
behind bordeaux.guix.gnu.org
to provide build information about the modified packages.
A very similar process applies for branches other than the master
branch, the QA front-page queries
issues.guix.gnu.org to find out which
branch is going to be merged next, then follows the same process for
patches.
For both patches and branches the QA front-page displays information
about the effects of the changes. When this information is available,
it can assist with reviewing the changes and help get patches merged
quicker. This is a work in progress though, and there's much more that
the QA front-page should be able to do as providing clearer
descriptions of the changes or any other problems that should be
addressed.
How to get involved?
There's plenty of ways to get involved or contribute to the QA
front-page.
If you submit patches to Guix, the QA front-page will attempt to apply
the patches and show what's changed. You can click through from
issues.guix.gnu.org to qa.guix.gnu.org via
the QA badge by the status of the issue.
From the QA front-page, you can also view the list of branches which
includes the requests for merging if they exist. Similar to the patch
series, for the branch the QA front-page can display information about
the package changes and substitute availability.
There's also plenty of ways to contribute to the QA front-page and
connected tools. You can find some ideas and information on how to
run the service in the README and if
you have any questions or patches, please email guix-devel@gnu.org.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Simon Tournier and Ludovic CourtĂšs for providing feedback on
an earlier draft of this post.
About GNU Guix
GNU Guix is a transactional package manager
and an advanced distribution of the GNU system that respects user
freedom.
Guix can be used on top of any system running the Hurd or the Linux
kernel, or it can be used as a standalone operating system
distribution for i686, x86_64, ARMv7, AArch64 and POWER9 machines.
In addition to standard package management features, Guix supports
transactional upgrades and roll-backs, unprivileged package
management, per-user profiles, and garbage collection. When used as a
standalone GNU/Linux distribution, Guix offers a declarative,
stateless approach to operating system configuration management. Guix
is highly customizable and hackable through
Guile programming interfaces and
extensions to the Scheme language.
Youâll get a text file; itâs up to you to then place that textfile on
Gemini or Gopher.
Iâm not telling you to go use linkhutâthe Smol Earth Compendiumâs own
format is much simpler, just use it straight up; this script is only
good for people already using linkhut.
Itâll only grab ones with the âoutdoorsâ tag (and remove that tag),
and only bookmarks to pages on Gemini or Gopher, and not if they
contain a tag that starts with the string âexpires-2â. I want to
submit more permanent entries.
Youâre gonna need an API key for linkhut. Once you have one, create a
file in your home directory named .linkhut2outdoorsrc that contains
something like this:
key=abcdefgh123yaddayaddayadda
You can also optionally put an url to a linkhut instance (defaults
to https://api.ln.ht) and an out for a file name (defaults to
/tmp/outdoors.txt).
Then just run the script as a user that has access to reading that
file.
When I am sending patches I always try to use whatever brace style
upstream is using, and my own projects rarely use brace languages.
So I rarely get to use my own prefered brace style, and maybe thatâs a
blessing for the world since itâs so unusual and non-standard.
Put on safety goggles for this one because itâs gonna look weird. Itâs
just what makes sense to me.
Hereâs how it works:
All indentation widths are two spaces
Elidable parens (including braces) are elided
All braces are hanging
All indentation widths are two spaces
I like my code compact, is the running thread through all of these.
This isnât to try to obfuscate, I still want to write the code as
clearly as I can, I just wanna fit it all on my super tiny screen.
Elidable parens (including braces) are elided
That last one includes single statement clauses in ifs and elses. Some
languages make braces mandatory for such clauses but in other
languages, they indicate a progn. Progn and side-effects are fine but
I want to be deliberate about them.
This goes for operations, too. I hate infix but I do my best to try to
elide the elidables. Iâm sure there are many places where Iâve missed
that. Thatâs just how difficult infix is.
All braces are hanging
This means that opening curly braces hang on the preceding line, and
closing curly braces hang on the last line of their block.
Like this:
foo {
bar;
if (baz) {
quux;
quuux;}
else
frotz;}
This is unlike the so-called lisp style because they often put the
opening parens on the line below. Here is Wikipediaâs example of that style:
while (x == y)
{ something();
something_else(); }
For me, that would look like this:
while (x == y) {
something();
something_else();}
The progn brace belongs to the while, not to the first statement.
Reading & writing
For writing and editing it, editor support that can match parens is pretty clutch.
The whitespace pulls a lot of weight when reading this since curly braces are all over the place.
But since I do have that editor support for writing it, and the
indentation helps me read it, itâs great. If I didnât have those two
things, itâd suck, but I do so itâs great.
I could read that example above if it read:
foo
bar
if baz
quux
quuux
else
frotz
So my brace style is just adding the grawlixes back into the
pseudocode as unintrusively as possible.
Usenet was sorta like Reddit or other threaded forum sites but decentralized.
The word for âsubâ, âforumâ, âcommunityâ on Usenet was called a ânewsgroupâ or just a âgroupâ.
Each server decided which group it should carry. News servers were mostly ran by ISPs. Back then, ISPs would have email service, you might get a home page on the web, and youâd get Usenet access via one server.
You could only post to groups that your own server carried.
Letâs say thereâs a group about knitting (free.uk.knitting perhaps) and itâs carried by 40 servers. That means each of those servers would have to copy over every single post every single day. Donât worry, they didnât have to poll, it was UUCP which is push based just like Fedi is today, but still! Holy redundancy, Batman!
That collapsed once people were posting binaries, both because they couldnât handle transfering gigs of binaries across thousands of hosts (already back in 1983 (yes, thatâs 83, not 93) there were over 500 servers) and because they didnât want legal responsibility for those binaries.
Usenet was the anti-BitTorrent. BitTorrent is efficiently letting people share small parts and pieces of binaries and piece them together. Itâs the opposite of redundancy. Usenet was redundancy city. And flaky as all heck redundancy with a lot of posts missing and threads being read out of order and laggily and buggily and it just didnât work very well. (And the comparison to Reddit unfortunately also extends to the toxicity on a social level.)
A lot of Fediâs struggles both early on and today come from this idea that every server should carry every post, which just doesnât work. Thatâs also why hashtags on Fedi arenât a good idea.
It doesnât work technically and itâs inhuman socially. Ebba Grön has a song about it, âMental Istidâ which means âMental Ice Ageâ. Itâs all about one long algorithmic timeline where you canât cry, you canât sob, nothing matters, everything is homogenous, our lives are rapidly flittering past on status updates. That is what Twitter is. That is where the âUsenet-globâ model of Mastodon was heading.
The Fediverse should not try to be like Usenet. It should be like email. FEP-1b12 is more akin to mailing lists (and there can be separate lists on the same topic) whereas hashtags try to be Usenet groups or IRC channels and depend on an UUCP redundancy that just isnât scalable or healthy.
Uh, thinking about it some more three seconds later
A mailing list thatâs mirrored across a couple of servers to
distribute load doesnât sound like a wholly bad thing. Iâm not trying
to completly write off all of UUCP and NNTP, there were historical
reasons why it made sense given the bandwith limitations of the time.
But my main point is that âeveryone needs to carry everythingâ is
inherently a broken model. âThe whole known networkâ tab on Mastodon
is not your friend.
If you got an account on Mastodon, Homecamp, Akkoma, Misskey, Pixelfed
or similar during the big Twitter migration and you wanna reply to a
post on Lemmy or kbin, read on!
If you donât have any Fedi account at all yet, youâre living the
blessed life. Good on you!â„ Bookmark this page and return here once
youâve been on Fedi a few weeks and have gotten comfy and wanna branch
out to the threadiverse. Or, if itâs the threadiverse itself thatâs
appealing rather than the seedy world of microblogging, just make an
account on Lemmy or kbin instead and in that case you donât need this
tutorial. You might need a reverse tutorial if you wanna interact with
people from Mastodon or Pixelfed or whatever, but I donât know how to
make one since I donât know how Lemmy looks from the inside!
First of all: it doesnât always work
Sometimes servers are unavailable, queues are filled, posts deep in
threads donât propagate properly. Itâs a flaky, unreliable mess
thatâll bring tears to us who remember the relative reliability of
mailing lists.
Option one: subscribing to groups
Groups are called âcommunitiesâ on Lemmy and âmagazinesâ on kbin.
Subscribing to the groups as if they were users is the basic level of
compatibility. In that sense, it works kinda like gup.pe did. Each group is associated with a username on a server, like for example if you have a server named bar and a group thatâs https://bar/c/nitpicking the groupâs âuser nameâ is either !nitpicking@bar or @nitpicking@bar (depending on whether your own instanceâs server software supports the ! thing or if it only supports @).
You can search for that user in the search field on your own instance
in order to follow it (âsubscribe to itâ).
You can mention the user in order to post to the group, whether or not
youâre subscribed. I havenât figured out yet how to do it in a way
that doesnât look goofy.
Option two: Replying to a specific post without being subscribed
I donât like to subscribe to things. I donât wanna bring in a bunch of
floods and must-check-must-check communities to my life. I try to keep
my âdaily torrentâ pretty limited, and then if I do wanna spend some
time browsing a little bit further, thatâs perfectly fine, and
thatâs when I sometimes stumble over a comment or post I wanna reply
to.
Letâs say Alice@foo has started a thread in the community
nitpicking@bar and Bob@baz has replied somewhere in that thread and
you wanna reply to Bob@bazâs comment. Since posts are federated, they
are copied and show up in multiple servers; a post here might show up
on foo, bar, and baz, for example. So the challenge for you is to find
the right version. If you wanna reply to a comment by bob@baz, that
means that the URL to the post you wanna find is the one on the baz
server. It doesnât matter that the thread is on a group on bar or was
started by a user on foo.
Youâre looking for an URL such as https://baz/comment/12345 if baz is
a Lemmy server, and an URL thatâs a liâl longer and more complicated
if baz is kbin. Look for a âfedilinkâ or for the liâl rainbow-colored Fedi
logo until youâve made your way to the original post.
Then you can paste the URL of where youâre at into the search field of
your instance. Itâll spin and search for a while, and sometimes you
have to reload and try twice, and other times it wonât work at all.
And from here you can reply, boost, or like the post, although your
boosts or likes wonât show up on Lemmy at all, go figure; and Lemmy
upvotes of your reply wonât show up on your instance at all; kbin
upvotes will, though.
Now to the most frustrating part: sometimes your reply wonât even show
up! Youâve spent all this time typing it and even then sometimes it
just goes missing in the wind. And you wonât know for sure for
sometimes it shows up right away, sometimes it takes a few seconds,
sometimes a few hours, and sometimes it just never shows up.
The threadiverse is a flaky and dangerous ocean.
When to include the username?
On Mastodon itâs good practice to not delete the username of the
person youâre replying to. It helps make sure they get notified and
that they can even see the post.
On Lemmy, thatâs not the norm. Most replies on there from Lemmy users
to each other do not include the username, and Iâve taken to deleting
the usernames when replying to them on there. Works great, looks great
on their end, awesome all around.
However, thereâs a caveat here: If the person youâre replying to is on
another instance, then if you delete the Lemmy username, the threadâs
Lemmy instance wonât see it, it wonât be aware of it. Sometimes it
shows up later, sometimes not. So in that situation it might be a good
idea to keep the usernames in there.
What about gup.pe?
I dunno! I donât know how to find and browse and see individual
posts, let alone reply to them; lemmy and kbin I can jam in any
RSS reader but I havenât figured out how to do that for gup.pe
yet. Of course, the âfollow the a.gup.pe user in order to
subscribe to the groupâ method, as intended by gup.pe, works, but
that runs into the whole âhave to accept the entire firehoseâ
problem as outlined above.
Racket and DrRacket include Finnish internationalization
Check Syntax binding arrows are drawn for names bound with define-local-member-name
Many other improvements and bug fixes are included, including to the scribble and plot packages
Thank you
Thank you to the people who contributed to this release:
Adrien Ludwig, Alex HarsĂĄnyi, Alex Knauth, Alexis King, Ben Greenman, Cameron Moy, D. Ben Knoble, Greg Hendershott, Gustavo Massaccesi, Jay McCarthy, Joel Dueck, John Clements, Jordan Johnson, Kamil Laskowski, Laurent Orseau, Liam Avella-Pisera, Matthew Flatt, Matthias Felleisen, Mike Sperber, Oscar Waddell, Pavel Panchekha, Philip McGrath, reflektoin, Robby Findler, Ryan Culpepper, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt, Shu-Hung You, Stefan Schwarzer, Stephen De Gabrielle, and Yongming Shen
I havenât been programming for a while but I spent a few minutes
putting together a liâl rss-mash utility that takes RSS URLs on the
command line and prints a combined XML file of all those items to the
standard output.
I already had sxml-url, which has been pretty useful both at the
command line, where it prints an SXML representation of any web page,
and in other zshbrev apps, like rss-mash which is the new part.
Itâs also hopefully a pretty clear demo of how zshbrev turns command
line arguments into function arguments, and function output into
stdout in a pretty dwimmy way (it should work regardless of whether
your function prints something or returns a value, like a tree or
string).
This currently only works with RSS, not Atom. Itâs just a liâl hack
quickly thrown together.
Installation and usage
First:
apt install chicken
chicken-install brev zshbrev < Paste the code from earlier in this post (the two `define` calls) into `~/.zshbrev/functions`, then:
zshbrev
~/.zshbrev/bin/rss-mash https://the-first/url.xml https://a-second/url.xml
You can add ~/.zshbrev/bin/ to your path if you wanna.
Today's computers are amazing, but sometimes I miss what it was like
to write code when I started. I don't miss trying to cram my program into 4K of RAM, or having to
save every change twice because cassette tape was unreliable, or
having to link my programs by hand because there wasn't enough memory
for both source and object code. What I do miss is having total
control over the machine, from top to bottom. I miss not having to
worry about an operating system, and having almost no layers between
my code and the hardware. After all, hell is other people's code.
(Except when it's not, of course.)
With that in mind, when I spotted the M5Paper hand-held computer from M5Stack, I decided to try a project on it. The battery-powered M5Paper has a
540 Ă 960 black-and-white e-ink display, 8MB of RAM, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth,
and many other features. That's not much power compared to a modern
laptop or server, but it's vastly more powerful than my TRS-80. There are built-in low-level APIs for graphics, networking, etc., so
programming on it is not quite bare-metal. But it's close.
I liked the logo that a Design Crowd artist had made for BALISP, so I decided to hire them for the weather dashboard, too. I sent
them a description of what I wanted on the screen, and asked for an
SVG mockup that I could then use as a template. Within three days,
with just a little bit of feedback, they found me an artist (thanks, Natalia!) who sent me a great design and a set of weather icons.
My plan had been to have Scheme code on the M5Paper fetch data
directly from openweathermap.org. But that was going to turn a small side project into a bigger
project, so I searched for something easier. I found M5Paper Remote Dashboard (thanks, Martin!), a project on Github that fetches and displays a new JPEG from the
web every fifteen minutes. All I had to do was compile it with my
Wi-Fi credentials and URL. On my web server, I wrote Scheme code that
fetches the weather data, generates an SVG image, converts it to JPEG,
and serves it on demand. Between fetches, the M5Paper goes into deep
sleep, but the e-Ink display stays "on," so the battery
lasts well over a week.
I found a design for a stand for the M5Paper (thanks, Neal!), printed it on a 3D printer at Hacker Dojo, and was done.
This project was fun, but I haven't quite gotten back to the feeling
of working close to the bare metal. What I still want to do is to get
a Scheme REPL running on the M5Paper, with all the graphics,
networking, and other hardware accessible. That would truly be back to
the future.
letloop is a Chez Scheme command line tool with some goodies: the
test runner with code coverage makes sure you touch the ground running,
and it also possible to produce elf binaries for your deployment
convenience.
The algorithm to reduce entropy is missing. Be assured that I am
doing everything I can to fix the current state of the art^W loop.
Meanwhile, download letloop for your favorite GNU/Linux, or (Just
Linux), then you can use the following templates as inspiration to
invoke your favorite, all around best scheming device:
letloop exec program.scm executes
program.scm;
letloop compile program.scm will produce an elf
binary called a.out for program.scm;
letloop check library.scm execute the test runner
for library.scm. The test runner expects tests to be thunks
named with a prefix ~check-
e.g. ~check-ess-000-earth-is-not-flat exported by
library.scm. The test runner expects a return value that
satisfies the following predicate
(lambda (x) (eq? x #true), otherwise anything besides
#true is considered a test failure, or error, use
--fail-fast to exit as soon as bad things happens. A HTML
code coverage report with number of run times is produced. It helps
identify hot, cold, and dead code.
