text:
hmmm. I hadn't pondered it with all upper case. I think i like it, and i definitely like the blue, purple, violet Also, those are reminiscent of old-school html link colors. I think i'll take that and play with it some. Thanks @mix.
@Hélder Dias you just need the
.ssb/secret file. The
.ssb/gossip.json is a nice-to-have. As long as you have the secret and reconnect to the network all your old posts will be re-downloaded from the people or pubs who follow you.
Welcome @EvaLovelaceλ.
I just skimmed the sovrin web site. The core idea sounds good, and I see a lot of valid sounding use-cases. Are there any large companies actually starting to use the idea yet? If not, are you making good inroads towards that or is that not a goal?
side note: I had an earlier version that was much more pride-flag rainbowey and it just came across as "OMG I'M GAY! SEE MY GAY FRIENDLY THING!" and that was not at all what I was trying to convey for a random geeky utility.
I hadn't thought about the google aspect @MistyWrites. I was going with the multiple colors because of the fact that it's all about correctly converting colors from one form to another.
@Freddie Ridell yeah going with a palette based on a color wheel would probably improve the choices and might address Misty's concern. I think the IDE color scheme is a good idea in theory but i'm not as confident about it working in practice since they're rarely designed to have all those colors right next to each other like that.
Thanks for the input, both of you.
And I too have dealt with terminal escape codes and that stuff can be such fun. - @Joey Hess
I derive an inordinate amount of satisfaction from making little tweaks like that to apps i use regularly. I spent like half an hour trying to figure out how to make a terminal spinner to monitor some background process that was taking too long. I was never sure if the app was hung or just slow. Then i spent another half an hour making it better. I'm literally the only person who uses this tool at work, unless i go on vacation. But that hour was so satisfying.
I found Zach writing a python script which would allow him to pipe text from anywherre into any static html... because that's how he wants to roll with running his personal website - @mix
that sounds like me. I've written like 4 blog systems in probably as many languages, and now i am very content running markdown through Hugo and having a static blog that I never need to worry about spammers hacking into, and that returns pages faster than any code could.
I love the tension here where the things that's all about you is somehow perhaps the greatest gift.
I loved the kick in the ass i got when i thought i was "all that" ;) The universe is good about helping with excessive ego if you let it.
I need opinions. I have created a tool that transforms terminal output with all the colors to html. It's called oho. I figured it needed a logo, so I created this.
What do you think?
(honestly, not politely ;) )
? ? meh?
The Joys Of Implementing Arcane Specs
Or, fighting burnout, by implementing narrowly focused tools that essentially no-one cares about.
This is the journey of tackling a task that provided many unexpected turns, and pleasures. If you just care about the burnout relevant takeaway jump down to "The Takeaway".
The Background
I've been showing serious signs of burnout at work. I still love to program, but my personal projects were largely abandoned, waiting for me to come back and finish them. I just didn't have the energy to deal, and most days I suffer from serious decision fatigue.
From a developer perspective, most personal projects just have too many possibilities; too many choices to be made, and I simply haven't had the wherewithal to deal. The projects without "too much choice" have a completion date that's too far out... "ugh... it'll be so long until I'm done with this"
At the same time, accomplishing things feels good. Doing something productive feels good. Just staring at the tv like a zombie does not "feel good" even if it does help you relax.
The Task
At work I am, amongst other things, the Release Manager. Mostly this means I am a gatekeeper who helps to ensure only thing things that were intended to be into a release are in the release. I'm not actually the person who decides what is in a release. Instead, I help the people who've already made that decision to ensure they're getting what they asked for.
I've been iterating on command line tools to extract information about the release from Git, GitHub, and Jira for years now. They find out everything they can. They summarize it into a nice list that the Scrum Master requesting the release can go down to check that everything they wanted is there, that nothing else has sneaked in, and that nothing went missing.
I use color to highlight warning items like "THIS PULL REQUEST IS NOT MERGED" or "AWAITING QA". I also use it to divide the list into logical blocks so that everything doesn't blend together. BUT, Slack doesn't let you colorize things, and that's where I share the information. I was posting big long lists of text that didn't have any of that useful highlighting. So the question arose, "How can I share what I've created and make their lives better?"
The answer, as I saw it, was to take the terminal colors, convert them to HTML and convert that to PDF. Tools for this already existed[^pdf], so it should just be a matter of downloading and installing... I already had aha which was the best ANSI color to HTML converter out there. I ran my code through it and the output was... horrible. aha wasn't up to the task. I needed something better, but I was already using the best thing out there.
Initially I thought i'd just do some bug fixes to aha and submit a patch, but aha's source code is simply not up to my standards. It gets the job done but it's a single 790 line file with some sections nested 14 levels deep, and variable names like
pelem, and
meow. [^variables] Basically, it looked like a quick hack that kind-of got out of hand.
I attempted to refactor
aha into something that I could be happy with, but it quickly became evident that that my "refactoring" was turning into a total rewrite. Better to start from scratch.
The Learning
The Surprise
The biggest surprise about parsing terminal color escape codes is just how much of the information out there is completely wrong. For example, someone took a good amount of time to put together "The entire table of ANSI color codes" and share it on GitHub. The problem is that a) it's not anywhere close to the entire list. b) the vast majority of the lines of data are actually 2 escape codes mushed together. Wikipedia's comments about ISO 8613-6's escape code format are completely inadequate, misleading, and from some perspectives just wrong.
StackOverflow and blog posts are filled with answers that may be technically correct, but omit huge swaths of information. Similarly, on many forums there are questions about how to remove escape codes from terminal output. I have seen many answers, and literally every one fails to handle many common escape code formats.
Hope laid in the scoping. Despite the bad information, the problem domain was still fairly small.
I knew color escape codes started with a square bracket
[ and ended with an
m. Between those two were a bunch of integers separated by semicolons
; and none of these were particularly long. Those numbers corresponded to a very short list of possibilities:
- an instruction specifying formatting (bold , underline, etc)
- an instruction to remove formatting
- a foreground color
- a background color
Wikipedia made it clear that colors came in 3 formats
- 3/4 bit (a simple lookup table)
- 8 bit (another simple lookup table)
- 24 bit colors (red, green, and blue specified separately and needing no lookup)
"This is doable", I thought. "I just needed to:"
- separate truth from supposition
- split a string on semicolons
- write a bunch of boring lookup tables.
- match the numbers to the appropriate color
The new code
There was, as anticipated, a lot of grunt work. I spent many nights in my comfy living room chair, typing in lookup tables while my wife played video games or watched tv. One table is 263 lines like these, with some comments thrown in.
"0" => "#000000",
"149" => "#afd75f",
"150" => "#afd787",
"151" => "#afd7af"
"255" => "#eeeeee"
I had no choice about what 150 (for example) corresponded to. 150 is
#afd787 and that's all there is to it.
But you know what? It was kinda awesome; liberating even. I had to make some initial decisions about how to structure the data, and how I would leverage it, but after that... after that it was simple work that moved the project forward, with none of the things that frustrate me at work. No debates about maintainability. No one suggesting we shouldn't fix a bug because accepting the ticket into their project would be yet another negative tick mark against the work they'd done. No one suggesting we should wait to make the code better later, or skip the tests.
I was doing this "right". I was adding tests. I was making the code readable. I was supporting all the colors[^allcolors]. Period. End of discussion. There would be no compromise on quality. Every entry into one of those boring lookup tables was another color I supported, and supported correctly. Every entry in those monotonous tables was progress without decision fatigue.
Time passed.
I worked on this most nights, and because the problem was so small in scope, and because the sub-tasks were so focused, I made visible progress every night I worked. I wasn't just poking yet another bug in a seemingly endless stream on an app so large none but the most Aspergery of us can have any clue about the totality of it.
No, these tasks made the whole app better. These tasks solved important problems in the tool. These tasks moved the whole thing closer to "done".
Eventually. I had them all. 3/4 bit, 8, bit, 24 bit. All of them. Tested, and fast. In separating the supposition from truth, and figuring out exactly what the specification was, I saw some of our shared history. I saw the evolution of color support in computers; first basic, then high intensity colors, then 8 bit, then 24 bit. Each new advance in color support bolting on new escape codes. Initially, just adding a few codes to the lookup table. Then saying, "well, if you see a
5 then look up the next number in a different table to find the color." Then saying "well, if you see a
2, then you need to consider the next three numbers and they're your red, green and blue. " There's even a gotcha where specifying no number is the same as specifying a 0. It's all a classic example of technical debt, baked into everyone's terminal.
Then came the nice-to-haves. I'd made what is objectively the best ANSI to HTML converter out there. Now, I got to put on the little flourishes that help the users get what they want out of it.
I, like many developers, run a black terminal with light text, but the programs emitting the color codes don't know that, so a "correct" conversion is primarily black text on a white background. How can I make it easy to toggle? A "dark mode" as it were. What if someone actually cares that the background isn't "black" but maybe "dark grey"? How do I let them specify? What if when you convert that HTML to PDF the output is a bit fine, and hard to read. How do I enable my users to apply custom styling to the output?
Getting to do the best for my users is immensely satisfying because each day at work I see examples of where we've let our users down. Where we haven't done the "best" for our users, but where we're also not going to improve anything because polishing small things just isn't high enough priority. Here, I get to think about the user and say "How can I make their life better? How can I support their needs?"
It was released to the world, and as with all software, bugs were found. I fixed them. I added flourishes. I had a thought... This may be the best, but there's still more it doesn't support.
I'd seen mention of some "ISO 8613-6" format that used colons instead of semicolons for no apparent reason. My app would just throw those out. Here we had developers of yore, in the same position I was before writing this. They'd written useful tools, that used colors to help users, and I, like Slack, was just throwing their hard work out. That's not cool. That's not cool at all. ISO 8613-6 would be supported!
I came into this part of the project all ego and bluster. I knew what I was doing! I'd already solved 3/4 bit, 8 bit, 24 bit. I could handle some stupid colons.
"CMYK?! What the fuck? What jerk went and added CMYK color support [^cmyk] to terminal output?! Oh, oh as if that wasn't bad enough they added cmy! Who the fuck uses CMY? Tolerances?! Transparency?!?! WTF?!"
Soon though, I realized I'd stumbled upon an important part of early computer history. Someone had inevitably asked, why they couldn't use their computers to do page layout in the physical world?
Like most developers, they appear to have looked around them, seen what tools were available, and found ways to extend them to support the new needs of the day. Just like HTML evolved from table based layout, to CSS based layout that could better handle variable screen sizes, to responsive css that made it easy to support completely different screen sizes and orientations.
I'd stumbled across a time capsule of what seemed to be terminal based page layout, but I was still grumbly. My ego was still in play. But as I read, and reread, the relevant portion of the spec, [^iso] I had a realization. This "arcane" and "annoying" implementation that I had to support was going to be about a gajillon times cleaner than the code i'd already written.
They had taken the time to clean up the tech debt when they implemented the new features. They'd also made it trivial to add support for new ways of specifying color that they hadn't considered yet.
I blew through the new implementation in seemingly "no time at all".
The Future
I'm not done. I need to figure out, and support SGR (Select Graphics Rendition). I've got to make sure I've got ECMA-48 and ECMA-35 covered. I've just discovered some new forms of escape codes I need to add to my test suite to make sure I ignore correctly. I'm pretty sure I'll find some other ways of specifying colors along the way.
The Takeaway
It's important to find a way to accomplish the things in your personal life, that you can't accomplish in your professional life. For me this is making code that is built to the standards I believe are important. It means making the usability of my app as good as it can be for the users I have. It means seeing visible progress resulting from my efforts.
There's something liberating about having no users. As I write this the repo has been starred by one person on GitHub. I've spent no time spreading the word, so that's to be expected, but this will never be a wildly popular tool, and from this point forwards every new feature I support will probably be more arcane and obscure than the last. This is the definition of "niche" market. Because of that, I don't have to make this work for everyone. I have to make this work for myself, and Faustino Aguilar. I'm not making some code for a vague "people". It's ok if it takes a while. What I've made is good, and useful. But you know what? If somehow everything goes wrong and a I break it all, that's not terrible, because it's only Faustino and I that will ever notice.
There's something amazing about being able to honestly say, you have created the world's greatest version of something. To the best of my knowledge, I have created the world's greatest tool to convert colored terminal output to HTML.
There's something wonderful about being gently reminded that you're not "all that." There is so much history has to teach us: in computers, in politics, everywhere. The generations before us were not stupid. Yes, we have done some things better, but we have to remember to look back, or we're doomed to repeat the same mistakes, and not notice when we're being all egotistical about crappy things that the generations before us found better ways to accomplish.
If you're curious, my tool is called oho. If you're a command-line lover like me, you may just find it useful for sharing the output of your creations. If you avoid the command-line as much as possible, you probably don't need it.
[^pdf]: The HTML to PDF conversion proved trickier than expected. There are a number of tools out there, and as far as I can tell, they all suck. The only thing that did produce useful PDFs was completely unexpected, unpromoted, and largely unknown
[^variables]: Eventually I figured out that
pelem was "previous element". I'm not sure what the "mom" in
momelem is, and
meow is a complete mystery to me.
[^allcolors]: At this point I was still pretty ignorant about just how many ways there were of specifying colors in the terminal. My goal is still to try and support all of them. I'm just limiting that to the world of unix.
[^cmyk]: CMYK is Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black. They correspond to the 4 inks required to print realistic colors on paper. You can use more, for better representation in art books for example, but for many years now CMYK has done a very good job in most print situations.
[^iso]: Despite being an international standard ISO 8613-6 is not publicly available without paying some exorbitant fee. Fortunately a helpful comment on a random bug report mentioned that ISO 8613-6 is actually what they called the International Telecommunication Union's
T.416 specification after it became an ISO standard. The
T.146 spec is readily available for free. In reading it however I was reminded of the importance of not assuming knowledge on the part of your audience. I had no idea what their repeated references to "tolerance" were talking about until I read the
T.412 spec too.
@Tim Schumacher would it not be equally verifiable, and much easier for @mix if they were to just create signed tags and then verify the gpg key with GitHub?
You'd end up with something like the screenshot below on GitHub which would let you know the person owning the github identity that claimed to create the tag actually did. Even if someone hacked into mix's account they still couldn't create a signed tag with their key. Instructions on creating signed tags here
^^^ example of what a signed tag with a verified key looks like in GitHub from one of my projects.
p.s. mix: got it. thanks. will be in next summary. also thanks for the raw markdown editing. I'll give it a try tonight.
Thanks for all the great feedback folks. Sorry about the delayed response.
Even though Dat content "requires" you to have a server always online, what it brings as a benefit is that it separates availability from addressing.
With the web, a URL is both the availability and the address of the content. If the server for that URL dies, you cannot find the content elsewhere, the content's address is strictly attached to the availability of the content. - @andrestaltz
I had not pondered that aspect of it.
To me they are separated in http but in a slightly different perspective. addresses exist, and are valid, regardless of if the server's up. they just don't get you anything if it goes away. When the server is up it can interpret the address however it wants to serve up stuff from a db (or whatever) that has no resemblance to the folder structure shown in the url. They feel pretty decoupled to me. BUT i get that that's not exactly what you were saying.
So yeah, to me Dat is a big deal, because it decouples content availability from content authorship.
I feel like that's really important, but that i'm missing something. Lets say i put up a dat page. What causes someone else to have a copy of it? I'm not clear on how i "seed" it. I assume that Beaker (or whatever) handles that behind the scenes for me, and i don't need to worry about it, but how does anyone know it's there? What causes them to download it and have a copy for replication? Surely you wouldn't want a copy of everything up there. Assuming I'm using beaker, do i only have a copy of dat urls i've visited? If so i'm slightly mind-boggled that that results in enough people having a copy that i see it when i happen to be online.
I feel like with dat we have an address that... I dunno it feels like a weird state. It may or may not work depending on if the content has propegated out of the original host or not. So, it's almost as if you've got a shrodinger's server with dat.
Since Dat is a distributed (peer-to-peer) data sharing tool, a computer must be actively sharing a dat for it to be available. If you're sharing files over Dat, you might want to set up a dedicated server that re-hosts your dat. This means that it'll still be available even after you turn off your personal computer. - Dat Documentation
Things like this are the big roadblock for me. I get the theory of what you're saying Andre but it seems like the practical reality is that we're in essentially the same world as before. If I want you to see my stuff when it's convenient to you I have to set up a server.
Please, (not sarcastic) tell my why i'm wrong.
There's WIP to be able to publish your dat:// links directly to DNS txt records - @Powersource
Thanks for the link
I don't know who's responsible for this little bit of UI design but i have to say, I love it.
Those notifications have gone from a thorn in my side to a widget I enjoy encountering.
Part of me wants to shout from the roof tops about this place and the other half of me wants to keep it a secret - @MistyWrites
that's a pretty prevalent response i think. It's not ready for the mass ingress. We don't have the protections we need in place yet, but at the same time so many people getting so depressed by the BS news of our world that you can't escape on Twitter or FB. And yet here... here we have this wonderful little oasis, where we can still satisfy the desire to catch up with peers without being burnt out by it.
Get wired on caffine? O.O - @dangerousbeans
I am currently enjoying my new delight: decaf evening tea. Warm soothing fluid. It helps in its own little way. :) During the day i go for the caffeinated. On bad days, the caffeine helps me have enough "fucks" to continue the work-day.
Holy crap @dan hassan that's an amazing quote, and so very topical today. Why does it seem like no-one ever learns from history?
If you find a way @reconbot please let me know. I had to write a tool to split up the @butt_summarizer posts and deal with this problem each week.
Thanks to everyone who contributed to this I'm especially happy to see that some tools to deal with / protect against bad actors made it in.
Yup. config files are not created by default @MistyWrites. I was expecting that to be where Patchwork stored its prefs and was equally confused when I figured out it was something you manually create.
"show hidden folders" is what let you see the
.ssb directory (it shows anything that starts with a dot). When you create it I believe it will have to be valid JSON and stored in plain text format and i think named
config (no
.json extension). I'm not sure about that but i see code in patchbay referencing a file with that name. Sorry if this is too newby. I'm not sure where you are on the "geek scale". ;)
Are you trying to increase your follow distance / hops / whatever it's called?
I love this style of drawing @Kim Simmons , and this is a really nice example. :) I love how they tend to be filled with enough details to put together an entire little story about it.
Welcome to the 'butts.
Today, was a pretty day for me. When you combine days like this, with all the in the world right now it makes me especially thankful for this little oasis.
Yes, I want more people to experience the joys of SSB, but at the same time there's something really nice about this community and its slow organic growth.
Thank you all for being you, for caring about this place and the people in it.
standard disclaimer that "vim isn't right for everyone". That out of the way, vim can be a spectacular IDE once you start adding in useful plugins. The core thing is... extremely limited. If you like vim but wish it could do stuff you see in other IDEs @sentamalin I would be happy to help you find the functionality you hope for.
Welcome @Lisa Gill. It's great to see someone actually helping people figure out how to do self-management stuff.
welcome @Notwist
what kind of games do you tend to design?
@अभिनाश I believe the work has stalled out at the moment. I think @Matt McKegg did a brain dump of where they left off (not sure where the post is right now) and since then I haven't heard anyone mention any forward progress on that topic.
I did see a post of yours on ticktack @MistyWrites . I can't see it on Patchwork, but my understanding is that that is normal because it's a different message type that Patchwork doesn't support.
oops... cc @MistyWrites (for the notification)
Learning #esperanto has been on my "list" for three years now.
Yep, three years. I had the Duo Lingo course. I have workbooks, dictionaries and even a couple of children's books written in #esperanto. I love how I feel when I do speak it. I don't know why. I just feel fantastic when I do.
Se vi volas praktiki kun iu, mi estus felici helpi. Malgranda praktiko ĉiu tago helpas. ;)
I would love to have the time to dedicate to learning to speak it and to keep up on it. My work schedule, energy levels and more often interrupt my hobbies. For example, I still don't know how to use my keyboard to make the carrot sign over the letter "c".
I've put the instructions for enabling it on macOS here, but i'm sorry to report that it involves some annoying geekery. Not hard. Just annoying. I don't how to do it on Windows or Linux.
This is why we left the big city.
We're not completely rural, but we can see the stars at night. We have green trees, green mountains, green grass, a garden, and a small river. We can go outside, sit on the deck and just.... relax. We have the space to breathe.
I have a long way to go before I regain my equilibrium, but having a place like this helps a lot in the interim.
I would suggest that downsizing the images and only uploading the smaller resized version to the network is short-term thinking @Thunder
At every stage of modern digital photography the pixels captured by the camera have been more than people needed online, so we've always had this push to "resize and throw out the extra". Unfortunately displays and CPUs keep improving and now those ancient images, even the ones that weren't downsized look like crap on a modern "retina" scree.... all fuzzy and pixelated. Now we have the bandwidth to download those images we thought were "too huge" quickly and we have the cpu to load them quickly.
It's just a matter of time before the 5 meg images are equally low-rez and unpleasant to look at. By uploading the full version we're futureproofing our posts. This is especially valuable on SSB because I regularly see 2 year old threads being discovered and resurrected. I see no reason for this to stop. I'm always sad and frustrated when I load up pictures from my Apple QuickTake 100 because they despite how happy I was with them at the time, they look terrible in a modern display context, and I long to be able to see their contents better.
@keks's suggestion about multiple sizes is probably a good one, but it has the downside of putting even more data into the network.
yay! thank you @yi
welcome @joshua. Thanks for working to help protect and improve good journalism :)
Need help "getting" the "why" of dat:
I feel like i'm missing something about #dat I get that publishing without a server is awesome and most people have no interest in maintaining their own (even shared hosting), but for anyone to see it when I am personally offline i need a server / always on peer.
For anyone to find my stuff i need DNS, but the dat DNS story seems to be based on the
.well-known RFC which requires a web server to host some file. Then I have to keep the
/.well-known/dat file up to date with all the appropriate hashes (or maybe just 1? not sure).
For someone who already has a web server this seems like more work for no benefit + most shared servers don't want you running little servers on them so i'd either have to upgrade to a VPS or set up a second server to be my always on dat peer.
For someone who doesn't already have a web server they now need a web server in order for anyone to access their dat + a dat peer, so it's failed right off the bat in the "easy for non-geeks" realm.
I'm honestly failing to see why this is better, or what this buys me.
I want to join the dat train. I feel like there's something really good there. I love the idea of the easy cloning of dat app ...things. But the requirement for a server (or two) to make anything findable just makes me think this is never going to catch on or be worth the effort. And yes, I know about https://hashbase.io/ I don't count that as a valid solution because now i'm right back to depending on some centralized system managed by a company.
What am I missing? Why should I be all "hell yeah!" about dat?
also, thanks @andrestaltz. This is very cool.
Would be cool for @zelf if we can think of some interesting statistics to help with the external grant writing they're working on! - @corlock
i think the key thing that's missing from this is activity. Based on some earlier explorations like this that i've seen in the history I believe we have a lot of dead accounts.... people who came in, kicked the tires, and never posted again, or wandered off, or lost their
secret and had to create a new identity... I think it was ~4,000 "active" users if i recall correctly.
i see 7443 nodes using this tool. I couldn't get Gephi to make anything useful out of it. It imported fine after the specified edit to the first few lines, but it was just a big square impenetrable mass. Probably just my ignorance in using Gephi.
@hoodownr_swift I follow basically every pub that i could get an invite from. That way I cast as wide a net as possible for creating the summaries (someday this is going to force me to move my
~/.ssb dir onto an external drive), but even then there are many users I encounter who I can see, but who can't see me...which implies they follow a pub I don't.
Side note: if anyone out there is running a pub I'm not already connected to, please shoot me an invite code and I'll hook up to it to make sure I see your people when creating the summaries.
{ "type": "share", "share": { "link": "%a6QsDKeGW/0vWyDfj050yAKEl3JopVwRatDnALqbbQ8=.sha256", "content": "blog", "url": "http://share2.ticktack.im:8807/%25a6QsDKeGW%2F0vWyDfj050yAKEl3JopVwRatDnALqbbQ8%3D.sha256" } }
{ "type": "share", "share": { "link": "%N320VxkixZBgnvowbcXg876UgHjU8gqFbrqr8GrHyrs=.sha256", "content": "blog", "url": "http://share2.ticktack.im:8807/%25N320VxkixZBgnvowbcXg876UgHjU8gqFbrqr8GrHyrs%3D.sha256" } }
{ "type": "share", "share": { "link": "%jDJBR5JmeProhli6nFicbfIdtsVOOZyk1jS4dXNQA7k=.sha256", "content": "blog", "url": "http://share2.ticktack.im:8807/%25jDJBR5JmeProhli6nFicbfIdtsVOOZyk1jS4dXNQA7k%3D.sha256" } }
{ "type": "share", "share": { "link": "%+86dl2ufpIGoXjEfyoi5r3pdrDcZEsnJh8D/ltv4Cpw=.sha256", "content": "blog", "url": "http://share2.ticktack.im:8807/%25%2B86dl2ufpIGoXjEfyoi5r3pdrDcZEsnJh8D%2Fltv4Cpw%3D.sha256" } }
{ "type": "share", "share": { "link": "%cx7+A458kD3D4dFBwmkteaZeR08CrsnubbJOAHg23Po=.sha256", "content": "blog", "url": "http://share2.ticktack.im:8807/%25cx7%2BA458kD3D4dFBwmkteaZeR08CrsnubbJOAHg23Po%3D.sha256" } }
{ "type": "share", "share": { "link": "%9HmJayeCub1Tn9apbOQogYXlplL6iQ8F+glGDtqosI4=.sha256", "content": "blog", "url": "http://share2.ticktack.im:8807/%259HmJayeCub1Tn9apbOQogYXlplL6iQ8F%2BglGDtqosI4%3D.sha256" } }
We live in the 12th floor so rigging a directional antenna is in the realm of possibility - @hoodownr
I doubt that would be necessary. An average handheld will work just fine without setting up any antennas, directional or otherwise. Here are the repeaters in Japan Anything you're <= 8 miles from (wild handwavey guess) you can probably reach with a handheld and no other equipment. Maybe a longer antenna on the handheld than what it comes with. From the 12th floor you can probably reach a few miles farther than that unless you're surrounded by mountains or tall hills. Add a directional antenna from the 12th floor and you've got no worries. Only question is can your handheld attach to it and can it put out enough power to make it worth bothering. There are geeky details about which antenna for which frequencies and stuff like that.
Does that sound right @emile? I'm still a bit of a newb on Ham stuff.
The Baofeng handhelds are really cheap (about $80 US), and work reasonably well. They're a pain in the ass to program channels into directly but there is open source software that isn't terrible. In general you don't need big antennas or powerful anything unless you are in the middle of nowhere and there are no repeaters anywhere nearby. I've definitely been places like this but... i'm not normal.
Like many computer things the prices go from cheap and gets the job done to small fortunes. Ours are ~$500 (US) For the purposes of being able to contact other people in an emergency i think the cheap ones will be perfectly sufficient, and frankly way more useful in an emergency. Just program in the local repeaters beforehand, give it a test, and keep it charged. You can of course, get bigger, and more powerful transmitters but i'm trying to think cheap and easy for someone who wants to be able to talk in an emergency.
My wife points out that the GoTenna has the valid use-case of trying to connect to a specific friend who also has one and does not have a ham radio license or interest in getting one... but again, they've got to be close, and more importantly, they've got to remember to turn the thing on. I think the latter is pretty unlikely in an emergency because it's going to sit in a drawer 99% of the time, and not really be considered "emergency equipment", and they won't ever think of it. This is even more true in Japan where they're not on sale yet so you won't have any strangers to use the "mesh" functionality of. Hams on the other hand commonly turn on their stuff and start talking the moment things go wrong. They also use it frequently just to chat with each other anyway.
I'm not sure what's required in Japan but getting your Ham license in the US is very easy and cheap.
Sending data over amateur radio is it's own thing. There are many ways to do it. My impression is that they're all slightly convoluted, and require additional hardware. I'm not sure if you really care, and I don't know a ton about it so... i'm just not going to go there at the moment.
correction / username link fix: @Jack is a student who joined us from Hertfordshire, UK.
That's pretty cool @jake
Welcome @Thunder. I hope you like it here as much as we do. Also, nice art. :)
Curious on what would happen when someone follows me now. Will they replicate this modified version or it would not pass validation as the content hash is different and not replicate this specific post? - @Alex Roy
neither. SSB is blockchain technology like EverLife-AI. Your feed is your personal blockchain. It is immutable like EverLife-AI. You can't screw with it. The question is does your SSB client point to the hash of the original version (in which case you're ok) or does it point to the edited version... in which case you've probably forked your feed which has the same terrible consequences as forking any other blockchain.
Search the archives for info on what exactly happens.
Don't forget that private messages won't cause propagation of blobs to anyone other than the recipient, and any path they take along the way to the recipient. - @kode54
I don't see how that can be true. The problem is this Bob->Mary->Alice. Bob sends Alice a private message. Alice isn't online. Mary IS though and the private message is in Bob's feed. Feed's don't skip messages. everything is on the record even private messages. So Mary gets bob's feed, including the encrypted private message to Alice. Alice then gets the message from Mary when Alice comes online, and reads the message, but Bob isn't online. Either Alice can never see the blob OR Alice MUST be getting the blob from Mary.
Remember SSB was written by a guy who lives on a boat. It seems highly improbably that Alice must be online at the same time as Bob for Alice to see Bob's images (or other blobs) in a system that's specifically designed to work offline.
What's the use case here @hoodownr_swift ? That is to say, what have you run into in your world that makes this useful to you?
First off, because i haven't commented on any of your other earthquake posts... I'm glad to hear you came through unscathed.
Might have to get a few of those gotenna thingies - @hoodownr
I have one of the non "mesh" ones. I wouldn't recommend it. They, like all radio stuff, are essentially line-of-sight. The gotennas useless in the city because the buildings block and bounce the signal all over the place unless of course you're up high in a skyscraper that's above most of the other buildings.They're useless when contacting anyone on the far side of a hill for the same reason. I tried to use mine to contact my wife less than 1 mile away in the city. Didn't work at all. If they're not approved in Japan then the mesh ones are going to be no better because there won't be anyone else with them to create a mesh to help you.
You're better off getting your ham radio license. You can get / use radios with much stronger transmitters, you can run your signal through local repeaters which will amplify it. You can send data over it, although the bandwidth is very low. My small handheld radio, in my house was able to reach a local repeater on a mountain over 7 miles away which then got me in contact with someone 30 miles away. I could probably reach farther but haven't really tried. These repeaters typically have a fair amount of battery power and/or generators for emergencies.
Also, speaking of emergencies like earthquakes that kill power. Ham radio operators are a critical piece of emergency communication infrastructure and every country needs more of us than we have.
If you'd like to help, I recommend starting an Invocation Thread - @mix
Alas, I have... negative desire to play in the JavaScript / nodeJS ecosystem. Elm may be the only exception to that. I'm waiting for the Rust version (or maybe the Swift) to get farther along... then I may start contributing SSB code. ;) This is one of the reasons I do the summaries. I want to contribute something, but I don't want to poke JavaScript.
can you explain what you mean by footnotes -- @mix
I'm not sure what the right way to answer that question is, because footnotes are just such a standard part of written English communication, and if you know what they are then it's surprising you would ask the question, but maybe you are really asking what syntax I am suggesting the use of to implement them...
Ok so. the first, and please know i'm not trying to be an ass, i'm just... flummoxed by the question.
Frequently you will have text with a superscript number that references a little note at the bottom of the page that is preceeded with that number. That note provides additional information regarding what you were reading when you encountered the number in the first place. Explanatory document you probably don't need.
Implementation-wise this is not in the core Markdown spec but many of the markdown flavors have agreed on the same format that was, I believe, set forth by MultiMarkdown. The documentation for footnote syntax in Multimarkdown is here Most systems would render the following
Here is some text containing a footnote.[^somesamplefootnote]
other text
[^somesamplefootnote]: Here is the text of the footnote itself.
Here is some text containing a footnote.1
other text
1. Here is the text of the footnote itself. ↩
The original rendered
1 would be a superscript that linked to the footnote at the bottom, and the footnote text at the bottom would be followed by an anchor link (denoted with
↩ or something similar ) to take you back up to the place that brought you here.
For a practical example of this in use see my blog post on getting started with Scuttlebutt. You can just scroll to the bottom to see the footnotes and click the
↩ at the end to see their point of origin.
I need some Ticktack help.
I went to post something in Ticktack that I've been working on, but the UI in v0.4.0 stumped me.
- the new WSYWIG widgets don't create visible markdown, so it wasn't clear if the markdown in my most would be considered formatting instructions or if i'd just have
## fooas a heading instead of an H2 block. It's also not clear what would happen if you combined the WSYWIG bolding (or whatever) with raw markdown formatting within a post, or even on the same line.
- the publish button... is that really a "preview" button, or will my stuff go off into the ether with no clue how it looks until it's too late? This is a much bigger deal on a long-form blog post than a quick update or question.
- it's not clear if footnotes are supported or not.
Can anyone help?
cc @mix & @SoapDog
So doing it eactly will take time. But doing it roughly you'd take the character count and if it's less than 6-7000 you should be ok. If you add 10 images you'd gonna be a lot less ok (because those are mentions that might be heavy in metadata)
I wish that were the case @mix. In an attempt to drop the number to something that is consistently postable for @butt_summarizer My splitter now splits every 3,500 characters, and it's still not low enough. Almost every week I have posts that I have to manually break up to work around the limit.
This is very cool @Prägnanz. Just skimmed it but can't wait to take the time to read it all, thank you.
This is the bit i have are hard time conveying to people @LanceW . Most of the folks I know live in a land of "constant" internet connectivity. It is so frequently available in the places they frequent that they just don't get how many places, even in our first world countries have terrible connectivity. Even in coffee shops. So, when i try and tell them how awesome it is to have a social network that always works even when i have no internet they say "that's nice" and quietly think "but it doesn't apply to me." Their minds seem to gloss over all the times they haven't had access but have wanted to use their laptops or phones.
welcome @An(arch)druid Wraidd
I'm not sure what more to say right now.
um.... tell us something about yourself? What makes you smile? What kinds of activities do you enjoy?
@An(arch)druid Wraidd
In patchwork you want:
More > Channels > Browse All
The lists that go by too quickly are the channels most recently added to and people recently posting, and those are being updated as you are downloading and ingesting new posts from others. But yes, it could be a lot better.
Something else to keep in mind is that "channels" are functionally just what you'd call "Tags" on twitter or other systems. Not "channels" like in slack.
sorry forgot to mention you in the prior post @Gwindor Lissesul
Some kind of a sync issue between clients with the same identity
multiple clients with the same identity shouldn't be an issue UNLESS you post from one client before it has synced up with the posts you made from the other one. If you do that then you fork your identity and it's kind-of permanently hosed.
Is there another post with the backstory here @sentamalin ? if not, can one be provided? I'm curious a) why you need dehydrated meals, b) why there's a delay until next month.
no @KidkArolis it means you don't follow anyone that follows them. Someone has to be within 2 hops of you for you to see what they've posted. I limitation of N hops has to exist because of the distributed nature of this system. Otherwise everyone would have a copy of the entire network, an practically speaking we just don't have hard drives big enough for that.
If you tend to se someone responding to someone else you can't see with some regularity, then follow the person who you could see, or maybe see what pubs the follow and follow them.
I dunno how possible / hard it is @mix but if you could somehow calculate the size of the post as you go, and display it, or a progress bar, or an approximation or... something along those lines, it would be great. I hate the guessing game of trying to decide how much to cut out of post (to paste into a reply) so that I am under the size limit.
"Is this enough?... No." put it back. select starting higher in the post. cut. "Is this enough?" repeat until it's small enough. ugh.
is there a bugtracker issue that I could subscribe to, to get a notification when that might be fixed? - @Philip Chimento
it's a very well known issue. It's not a bug so much as a limitation of the fundamental design. the
sameAs functionality is the solution to this limitation and its development is ... somewhat underway. Here's some of the last details on where the work left off. I forget if anyone else has taken up the challenge of bringing it to the next stage. I think someone has but i don't remember who.
correction "Teespring" not "Tspring"
Who are making these T-shirts and in what conditions?
@elavoie it's Tspring and they're pretty legit and make good quality stuff. :)
There are multiple colors, here's the purple...
I don't know for a fact because i haven't checked the code but as far as i know, no. You're bound to hit some eventual UI issues with the various clients but technically you should be able to do it.
Will mutable messages solve this if I ask kindly for someone to edit their identification of me? - @micro
I don't think mutable messages have anything to do with this. a) mutability will never be a true thing, more a "please show this new version instead even though you have the old version". b) even if they change their identification of you, the fact that they ever called you something else is already public knowledge that has been permanently replicated. Yes people probably won't see it anymore after it is changed (i think) it but the info is still out there, and if you're concerned about it becoming public because of some nefarious person... i'm sorry, but it's out there. this is a serious issue with how SSB works right now.
You should probably add your thoughts to why it's bad for others to be able to identify you with images or names you don't want to be public to this recent thread. We need more people to speak up about the dangers of this.
I feel compelled to point out that that's how The Martian was written too, and it turned out pretty well @Lars Wirzenius ;)
@hoodownr_swift , that's a time-honored debugging technique! ;)
yeah. we really need to improve the notification system @hoodownr_swift
what's the deal with @hoodownr vs @hoodownr_swift ?
instructions are in this post @Philip Chimento
i'm not sure what you mean by that, but i can see this posts of yours @Matt Nelsen so you must have been connected at some point. ;)
hey @harley
Want to share a little about yourself?
Welcome @Nico Pace It sounds like you're living a very intentional life by your values instead of the "standard" ones of society, which is absolutely awesome. I'm interested to see what stories you bring us.
I don't suppose it will be long before they start charging coders to upload and publish their work. - @Mark
I doubt it Mark. I think the current MS really understands open source, and the value GitHub offers the community, and that everyone would just move to GitLab and they'll completely devalue their investment.
In their defense the modern MS has been doing some really great stuff.
That being said they are still MS and as such will probably find some way to screw up their acquisition. They don't seem to be very good at not screwing up the good things they buy. I just doubt they'll screw it up in that particular way. ;)
Side note: GH does currently charge people to upload their stuff if it's to a private repo. I pay for this, and would pay for it even if I didn't have proprietary code I didn't want to share simply because I don't like releasing my open source stuff until it's completed enough for others to use, and because I have wanted the company to succeed because they've offered so much value to the OSS community, and made life so much better for us. I'm not sure how I'll feel about that now that they're under MS...
I find the implications of this very concerning. A lot of people could find themselves very screwed for doing things that are totally legal (in most countries)
@dangerousbeans. Ugh. thanks for sharing.
I need some money, and unfortunately considering my mental condition, getting a proper job is kind of out of the question - @kode54
Do you do online freelancing for money or something similar? if so what services do you offer? if not, how do you make ends meet?
So I feel like the way forward is for me to create multiple identities within ssb, one for each side. - @ktorn
It's an interesting idea but the problem with that, i think, is that you'd then have to go "oh on this issue identity A will take this side and identity B will take that side" or you have to have a different pair of identities for so many issues.... or maybe start making per topic identities or... ugh.
Welcome @Chris Thompson and ... damn. I didn't know tags couldn't start with numbers @kode54
I find that if i quit Patchwork, open Ticktack, quit Ticktack, and open Patchwork again, I have to sit through many minutes of patchwork reindexing my database. This has happened both times I've tried opening the new Ticktack. I don't remember it happening with older versions.
Is this expected @mix / @SoapDog ?
We also had a number of showers with very sketchy looking wiring to the electric water heater mounted on the shower head, which rarely worked. Frequently one, or both of us would decide showering wasn't worth the risk of electrocution that day.
But I think it's much worse that you got locked in your room. - @kode54
I just went back and reread the blog post where we got locked in. Apparently getting locked in the room was earlier in the trip, in Honduras, in a total tourist trap. That day was fraught with...well it was just fraught. That being said, I don't think we ever got too stressed about being locked in, because it didn't last very long.
In my case, do I need to have done that to get Ticktack working on my new device? @Teq
I believe you're good as-is @Teq. I think currently all SSB apps on the same machine use the same
~/.ssb folder / info. This means they should all work with your current identity, but also means you shouldn't run multiple ssb apps on the same device at the same time. I'm not 100% sure if running multiple simultaneously is a bad idea, but i'm strongly inclined to believe it would be.
As partner and father I see both as non applicable. - @doplde
There are a number of families on the road with children of all ages who are absolutely loving it. The only complication is that it requires home-schooling, but if it's something you and your partner actually think would be enjoyable rather than something fun to observe from the sidelines, maybe start talking with them and see how they make it work.
Estas multa da familioj kiu vivas la #vanlife kun infanoj kaj amas gin plene. La primara komplikaĵo estas la lernigi, sed se vi kaj vian asociano pensas ke gi estus donas ĝojo al vi, eble vi devus komenci paroli kun ilin ka lerni kiel ili fari ĝin.
Hey @benoon
want to tell us a little about yourself?
@mix as a simpler version of the algorithm you were pondering what about simply hiding any nic that has been given to someone by someone they blocked. that is to say if A gives B a nic, and B blocks A then that nic should be hidden from others.
Another simple option is to allow others to suggest a name / image for you and have it not become associated with your profile unless there is a corresponding approval message from you. This one basically solves the problem entirely. You do have the new problem of a bad actor spamming you with new things to approve or deny but that could easily be addressed by a setting in your app that said "don't allow other people to post nicknames or profile pics of me"
Re the ritual of naming, and making people read about being kind thoughtful about the consequences of publicly naming someone I really like that, but i (and i'm sorry this sounds mean) i think it's a little idealistic and naive. It will prevent some cases i'm sure and should be implimented, but just imagine if the folks from 4chan invaded. They not only wouldn't care, but would probably write a bot to algorithmically generate horrible names and spam everyone with them, and rotate through / generate many identities while it did it. Then it would find some site with the most disgusting porn fetish sites they could think of and start randomly assigning those images to people.
This isn't a question of if. It's a question of when. We've been exceptionally lucky so far. Social behavior hacks are good and I totally think we should do something like you suggested, but the downsides of allowing random people to name you are just too high. Marks against folks isn't enough. That can be gamed.
You've got to put yourself in the position of an amoral person who wants to do serious emotional damage to another person using the tools available on this platform. I think the mistake many here are making is to come at this from the position of an emotionally reasonable person dealing with other emotionally reasonable people who aren't actively trying to do harm.
For those not needing the multiple identities to be running at the same time, I've got a simple, way to swap between identities. I have a script for each identity. Each looks like this
rm ~/.ssb > /dev/null
ln -s ~/.ssb_masukomi ~/.ssb
the only difference between them is that each one has a different folder that it's symlinking. In my case
.ssb_masukomi and
I name each script to match the dir it's swapping in so the one above is named
ssb_masukomi so i just say
ssb_masukomi on the command line when i want to switch to this identity, and then boot up a client. Then Quit. run
ssb_summary and boot up to be in the other one.
When testing you'd wanting the other account to follow as few others as possible to keep its folder size down.
-- cc @mijkl @mix
and it's not right for me to tell other people to do the same, unless you yourself choose that picture. - @Cy
just to be explicit. it doesn't force anyone else to use that image. it jut makes it one of the available choices for them to use.
overall i agree with your sentiment Cy.
Personally I find it much easier to recognise people when it's their real face, so I've been tempted to upload pics.
But it feels weird to publicly 'out' someone's face if they haven't chosen to do so already, so I haven't yet. -- @Alanna
I'm not comfortable with the idea. It's especially concerning for trans folk, as many of them are pre-transition and not particularly happy with their physical image. Then there are folk who have very good personal safety reasons for not letting their real life image be associated with their profile (stalkers are real, and dangerous, and we have folks here who have them).
Also, think of how easily this can be abused. Think of all the nasty images and nicknames you could associate with someone you don't like. ugh.
Culture wise I think @martin ➬ put it well
I always try to use my best judgement in assessing whether the other person would be okay with my publishing stuff about them, and if in doubt, I'd go get consent first.
I think there's a relatively easy technical solution, which is that custom images and nicknames should only be visible to the person who created them. #somebodyshould absolutely implement this because it's just a matter of time before some a-hole comes and seriously bullies people with this mis-feature.
I was going to post a happy post about the lovely stickers I received from a very kind @dinosaur. I promptly put on my new (used) computer.
But, then the story got complicated... The new computer had to go away to be healed.
My company upgrades developer computers every 3 years (roughly) and then sells the used computers to us for cheap. We had a lottery to see who would be able to buy one because there were too many people. I was fortunate enough to have the second choice of computers, but because I wasn't in the office it was a few weeks before I got it.
When I did there was a post-it on it that said something to the effect of "Trackpad seems to work"
No-one said "hey masukomi, this computer you've chosen was given back because of a wonky trackpad." or "hey, there's another computer with the same specs you might want to choose instead" No, they just gave it to me with no warning and no real testing. Because if you actually try and use it you'll see that it randomly stops recording your touch, or moves on its own... So, my new (used) $600 laptop now needs $500 worth of repairs. It was a hard choice but despite being older than my current computer it has 250Gb more storage and is slightly faster.
I had to consider the original $600 as lost. A personal laptop with no trackpad just isn't very useful to me because I only use my work laptop at my desk. So, I had to ask myself. Is it worth $500 to have an upgrade from 250GB to 500GB + a faster CPU when i'm already hurting for enough storage ? Yup.
So now my computer is heading back to an Apple repair center somewhere. Maybe the person who opens the box will see that SSB sticker and think "huh, what's that?" and they'll discover this awesome thing we have.
Thank you for the stickers, and the note @dinosaur. I really appreciate both. I hope to have that set back soon.
Welcome @Oma Morkie
can you tell us a little bit about you?
The target audience is people who simply can't use Patreon, whether due to content policy, lack of payout options for where they live, or because they're politically persecuted by governments (who can just order Patreon / PayPal / Stripe to shut them down, or request their home address). For them it's not a matter of convenience, they simply don't have a choice.
so, it sounds like you've got a pretty legit use case, and an MVP @Sjors
I expect those people to be more motivated to go through a more manual process, and to put up with a limited feature set. From there I just have to make it incrementally easier and improve the features.
agreed but...
what i'm asking for is more this (in use case format)
As a potential user
I want to know if Matreon is worth spending time installing this thing or if i should look for other solutions
So that
- I don't end up with something that doesn't meet my aesthetic needs
- I don't end up with something that doesn't meet my functional needs
- I don't waste time installing something that doesn't meet my functional and aesthetic needs.
Imagine this was something that cost money, or maybe even just something that was on an app store. I need the screenshots and "why this is awesome" "what problems it will solve for you" "what it's going to be like" blurbs before i pull the trigger and give you money / time. I agree that your potential users will be willing to go through the setup complexities BUT only if you've convinced them the product is worth them spending that time.
Does this count as "classy" @sentamalin?
That was how you turned on the shower in a hotel in San Salvador, El Salvador. That hole was IN the shower. We decided not to shower that night. Pretty sure that was the hotel room we got locked in too, and had to convince a passing guest to free us.
Hey @MyAcademy
Sorry no-one said hi before now, but "hi". Welcome to Scuttlebutt.
I guess you could say I'm a keyboard geek too. I'm mostly just really concerned with good ergonomics for my hands. I haven't tried the Gateron keys, but my wife is a big Cherry Red fan and I'm a Cherry Brown fan. I recently got a Keyboard.io keyboard but I keep tweaking the layout. Haven't gotten it quite right yet. What's your favorite keyboard these days?
A friend of mine is a police officer @sentamalin. He always carries a small teddy bear in his bag, because it's not uncommon for police officers to come across small kids in traumatic situations. He gives them the bear and that, along with some kind words can help to calm them down. Despite doing this and having given out a number of them, eople don't expect officers to carry teddy bears.
One of my crew friends from another airline commented that they liked that I have stuff for kids, but suggested it may not be a good idea to bring them because it makes PAX think that there's an expectation that other flight attendants would have things like that for their kids--or for them--if asked for.
Just because one person does something unexpectedly nice doesn't mean everyone around them is expected to do unexpectedly nice things too. Beggars on the street don't expect that because on person they ask for money gives them a dollar that everyone they ask for money will give them a dollar.
Additionally, that thinking just leads to "don't do anything that's not absolutely required" . Your doing something kind for a child. No-one should take that away from you or the child because they don't feel like being similarly nice.
On the other hand... They are kinda right in that, ultimately, it's not really my job provide things like that...
it is everyone's job to help out the people around them who are uncomfortable if it's within their power, and safe for them to do so. The fact that our society has broken down to the point where we can walk by homeless people and pretend they're not there just shows how broken our society is, and how badly we're failing to take care of our fellow humans. I believe that it's even more our job to take care of the children because they can't do it by themselves.
even if you want to take the viewpoint that it's not you "job" to do that, so what? Very few people are literally hired to be nice to their fellow humans. This is a simple thing you can do that, i assume, makes you feel good and makes the people you help feel good.
I'm not sure what PAX is in this context, but i don't think it matters. Being nice to people is a good thing. If it helps them and doesn't hurt you, keep doing it. :)
I'm happy to announce the release of oho a command line utility to convert your colorful terminal output to HTML.
This is, admittedly, a very niche tool, but i honestly believe that it's the best one in its niche, supporting (as far as I know) every possible form of ANSI color codes including 3/4 bit (basic and high intensity), 8 bit, & 24 bit.
If you're someone who loves the command line, and regularly works with, or builds, command line tools with colorful output you should check it out, because it enables you to share that all that jucy output with people of less geeky persuasions. And, if you need to get really non-geeky, you can convert that HTML to PDF.
#crystallang #cli
I have problems with completing personal projects @Tim Schumacher , but for me it's nothing like this at all. It's more, when i start a projct it's filled with interesting problems to solve. The last 20 % though is just cleanup and documentation and preping distribution and... just boring gruntwork. There's no more "interesting" left in it so i just wander off to find some other interesting challenges.
in addition to what @doublec said @Tom Coates pubs are friends who always hang out at the same place, so you a) know where to find them when you want to gossip and b) know they'll be there all the time.
the following is intended as constructive criticism because I think it's a promising idea.
I was somewhat interested until the "donate bitcoin" bit. Practically speaking most patrons just don't have it and unless you're doing something where your patrons need the anonymity of bitcoin it's not worth the effort of self hosting. Now, if it hooked in with Stripe or something I think you'd have a LOT more people interested.
Other thoughts:
matroeon is a problematic name because it sounds like matron, and no-one wants to be thought of as a matron these days. You mention the matriarchy, but i don't expect most folks will make that connection on their own, and personally i don't see a connection between the matriarchy and being a patron of someone's work.
Your readme, and the medium post, are all about setting it up, but there's no clue about what you'd get it you did. I need to know it's something i want to bother setting up before i bother setting it up. If i'm going to host this instead of using Patreon i need to know what features it offers beyond just bitcoin integration. Does it have feature parity with Patreon? I also need to know if it looks good, like Patreon, or if its typical programmer UI, or maybe something in between. There are only a couple screenshots of it (and tons of setting it up) on the medium post and neither of them show me what it looks like for a supporter. Do they see a stream of posts? is there a mix of supporter and non-supporter content?
In short, please sell me on what you've before you tell me all the geeky details of setting it up.
thanks for sharing this @emile
we've got some frogs in the ... tiny river / stream? behind our house that sound like those. I love listening to them.
I'm not sure why, but i didn't read SSB all week. Then i sat down to write the @butt_summarizer 's post for this week and OMG you people wrote so much good stuff.
Instead of reading SSB I read Twitter and got depressed about the ICE bullshit that's going on in the US, and school shootings and... ugh.
I'm kind-of torn about that. I could have been reading all your lovely posts about positive things, but at the same time, I feel bad about hiding from the bullshit our country is doing. I want to know, but i don't want to know. I feel helpless to do anything about it beyond contact my politicians, but i live in VT so my representatives are pretty good (Bernie Sanders) and are constantly trying to push for doing the right things.
I'm totally envious of the guy behind Pinboard.in. He's got a pretty decent income from that, and the site doesn't need much upkeep, so he's using his time going around the country helping organize and fundraise for democrat candidates in upcoming elections, and he's doing a fantastic job. If you're not following him on twitter i'd recommend you start. No political bile. Mostly just good positive attempts to make things better and spread the word about good candidates.
Also, it's a pretty good web based bookmarking system that I happily recommend and pay for.
I'm guessing how this works is it essentially syncs myself up based on what my followers/pubs have on me at the moment, yeah?
correct. @sentamalin
We should probably talk @m455. i've been writing an ANSI->HTML converter (in Crystal) because aha has bugs / limitations. I've got default, high intensity, 256 and rgb color support now. only bug is related to some of the html generation BUT the relevant bit for you i have is the class with all the lookup tables. You're encoding things rather than decoding them but knowing how to do it one way just tells you the other way and there's.... SO much more to be added. I'm not sure if you want to stay with something simple like what you have, but if you're looking to fully support all the ANSI possibilities please message me.
I'll try and hack myself within a couple hops of you so you see this..
yeah, it's a big black box for me @sentamalin ... :/ what file format is it in?
The problem for me right now is that I don't really have any education, nor highschool, or college, so I'm kind of stuck out like that, but I still really want to move to a better place for the sake of better #lgbtq laws, and just, to be safe. - @microwave
I can't comment about New Zealand but I will say that in the US developers who can show a history of successful work don't really need the school. The lack of schooling might make it harder to get a work visa here, I don't know. My point though, is that I was like you. I have high school, but only one year of college (at a music school). I started my own business doing freelance work and eventually had a nice resume and work examples. Once i had that getting other people to hire me full time wasn't really a problem. Most of the time they don't even ask about the college. I think it's mostly just a question of how many years of experience are "enough" and what counts as "enough" for the employer may not count as "enough" to get a work visa in whatever country (NZ or other).
I would note though, that there are tons of front-end developers in the US. What we really need are the back-end developers. If front-end stuff is what makes you happy, then sure stick with it, but if you just enjoy being a developer then maybe consider improving your skills in whatever languages and areas there is a shortage of in the place you want to move.
Looking for travel insurance recommendations. - @jolyon
it also depends on what you're looking for. I'm never quite sure what people mean when they say "travel insurance". I think "Evacuation Insurance", but apparently i'm not like most people. I can recommend good evacuation insurance. ;) What services are you looking to get from the insurer?
There are a few good options for that - @traverseda
yes, but we don't have any of them yet.
Yeah but it takes forever to redownload feeds especially if you're using the JS implementation of ssb - @william
I think this is even more important than the words imply. I think you ( @traverseda ) are thinking of SSB in terms of centralized apps with always on connectivity.
Let's assume for example, that we have a magic want that solves the identity issue. Now what? It only really works if you think of SSB as having always on connectivity with limited on-device storage like Twitter or Facebook. Tons of us derive value from SSB when offline. Yes, many people have always on connectivity... in the first world, but in poorer countries this is a luxury. In much of the world cell coverage is crap (even much of the US), and when you have it data can be expensive.
Tons of people run out of space on their phone regularly without having a multi-gig (mine's 4.2Gb) download of their SSB feeds. yes, there are techniques for dealing with this but they mostly come down to "forget about being able to see pictures offline".
Node and electron isn't really the problem here. We've got multiple ports of ssb to other languages happening. Those will inevitably lead to other UIs. I'm sure some browser based ones that talk to mini local servers will emerge.
Haven't checked out the SpotX @emile yet, but it looks very similar to the Garmin Inreach Explorer+ which gets pretty decent reviews, if you're an REI member you can use your 20% off coupon on until the 28th and save $75. If you're not you still end up with a good discount after becoming a member.
Also, i don't know about your travel plans but it should be noted that southern Africa (and a little ways up its east coast) has no coverage.
Also, spot is a crappy company about their subscriptions. You have to explicitly call them up and say "hey, i want to stop my subscription" otherwise if you don't pay to renew your subscription, and then a year later you go to reactivate it and they're all "oh well you still haven't paid us for the last year, and you never cancelled, so that'll be 2 years worth of subscription fees to reactivate it" Garmin has WAY better plans and handling of them. They get that you may only need it to be on for a month here and there.
I have zero desire to do business again with a company with obviously shitty business practices like Spot.
how many pubs can I join at once? - @Cole
every one you can get an invite code for. ;) There's no upper limit that i'm aware of.
@traverseda & @Voppe & @Tre
I am completely on board with #ssb, but there is no reason why #patchwork should be exclusively on electron instead of being simply accessible via web browser.
If you're suggesting that you should have a little local server that manages all the SSB stuff and you can talk to with your browser of choice, that already exists. it's called Patchfoo It's not very pretty compared to other clients but that would be fairly simple to improve if you felt like it.
if you talking about handling it entirely in the browser, What client-side browser storage tech isn't destroyed by a user telling their browser to clear cached data? if you do that you loose your secret and can no longer post as you anymore. Pretty sure @SoapDog is kind-of cheating with his Firefox hack by talking to an external program with access to your disk.
Uranium is actually dangerous though. You're protecting yourself from people just talking about using uranium. - @Cy
The saying "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me" is a lie.
Words very much can be dangerous and hurt. I'm protecting myself from something that hurts emotionally, and screws over my ability to do my job. They may not hurt you but they hurt me. The implication that the talking about the subject isn't also dangerous is, and i apologize for the baggage with this word, privileged. You have the privilege of a healthier mental state than i have at the moment. Also, of someone with the strength to deal with more BS from others than I have at the moment.
Otherwise, just understand that they're trying so hard to do the right thing, and make everything work out okay, but they have the wrong underlying assumptions.
sure, even though i think that's a bit of a stretch when they're driving through a crowd of people because they're a different color or belief system, it doesn't mean that their actions aren't also harmful to me and others to see it.
I much prefer to be aware it happened and never see the video, or photos of the impact. In other words, i want it filtered by trusted sources.
To bring this back on topic.... the differing views that you and I have about this show the complexity of this problem. How there's no common stream of posts that will be acceptable to you, me, and @Alanna , and @inoas, nor will there be any common community that is perfect for each of us.
You couldn't deal with even one single radical Nazi post? - @Cy
Honestly, with my current state of mind, not well. I'm way over-stressed at the moment and seeing that stuff in its raw state just breaks me out of whatever calm i have managed to put together.
The problem isn't that they're posting stuff you don't agree with.
I actually love arguing (peacefully, thoughtfully) with people who have different viewpoints. I love figuring out why, and i love the act of trying to convince them or be convinced myself.
No, it's seeing one human be so violently, aggressively, disrespectful of another human's existence just because they're different. I was going to put examples. Was going to put examples but even thinking about them started to stress me out and it'd be unexpected in this thread and result in exactly the thing i'm trying to avoid in someone else.
The problem is they're posting so much that it disrupts your ability to converse. They're deliberately needling you, to keep you from being effective, and there's nothing you can do to stop that...in fact you probably want to know what the neo-Nazis are planning to do in your neighborhood, so all you need to ban is stuff that genuinely makes it harder to communicate
Nah. This isn't about making it difficult for me to communicate. I don't come anywhere near associating with them and i'm aggressive with the "ban hammer" so they don't post at me directly. I want to be aware of what's going on, but I need it filtered to safe levels.
Think of it like uranium. It's great to know it exists, but the more directly you are exposed to it the more likely it's going to screw you up. Best to take safety precautions, and put layers of protection between you and it.
I can still not understand the desire for the day to day time-waste happening on those mediums, sharing tweets/posts that are soon to be forgotten and never to be read again in a few weeks. - @inoas
i think it's a literal addiction. Like little tiny pleasure bits firing off dopamine and getting us addicted to constantly interacting with them. social media companies literally modify their systems to encourage addictive type behaviors. They A/B test features for which ones increase interactions and continued use of the platform.
So... I am wondering if decentralization is enough, or if a communications medium to successfully get us all rid of facebook/twitter must do much more than that, such as including something similar to a decentralized wikipedia including collaborative and single-identity related documents, forking and what not.
I don't think decentralization is enough. Think about all the neo-nazi's using diaspora creating their own filter bubbles of evil...
I don't really get what you're getting at with the Wikipedia reference. Maybe i'm just too tired ;)
CC to explain to me what I got wrong (or maybe not...):
I don't think you have anything wrong. I think we disagree somewhat about filter bubbles. I think they have benefits as well as downsides. I want the protection they provide most of the time. I don't want to deal with radical nazi's. I don't want to hear their crap except when i search it out for some reason, or except when it comes in through people who will filter it for me into a format that won't completely piss me off.
To me the thing that's needed is a lot of work (or luck) to build a community with strong values and resiliency. I suspect that most of us are just too burnt out from the FB & Twitter BS to deal with putting in that kind of social effort.
Also user driven platforms DIY/documentation platforms like stackoverflow or news aggregators like slashdot or medium.com could live very well on a decentralized platform
I dunno if it'd be better, worse, or the same. Thinking of SO, it works because of the centralized karma system. decentralize that and it's much harder to tie abilities to karma and without that system the moderation that keeps things useful / good starts to break down. Yes, there have been shown to be issues with gender bias against women on SO but overall the platform does its job pretty well.
You might be able to find a nice Mastodon instance that works for you. Mastodon is decentralised, but it's various instances have different rules and operate in different ways, and your timeline looks different depending on which one you join. - @Qi Gang
Those can be great for some people (hard to find, but great) but the problem is that they tend to be the filter bubbles that @inoas hates and hampers their number 4 point.
You could definitely design an SSB client to do what you want. It could have all the features to support the interaction you described. You'd either need to make it yourself if you have the time/skills, get people with the time/skill sufficiently excited about it, or find resources to pay people to make it for you. - @Alanna
Yes, and that is one of the wonderful things about distributed systems. At the same time, to me it feels like it would mostly just kick the problem down the road. Sooner or later the hard work of community building has to happen if you are going to let the community grow beyond a small core.
I think in your case @Alanna ( my apologies if i misrepresent ) you have some strong opinions about behaviors the tech should facilitate that others disagree with. The advantage the strategy of making an app with strongly opinionated community tools (like making pubs block anyone if x% of their followers block them, or maybe technically implemented "3 Strikes" rules, or whatever) is that the tools can help make it very clear what kind of behavior is tolerated and help to do a fair amount of that job of community values building.
{ "type": "about", "about": "@Nxe2+cp6qgqLrJnYf4SW8X68iu2G6Dz1YrPPT4+Oem4=.ed25519", "name": "Qi Gang" }
Have him on pumpkin, coconut oil, chicken, NO KIBBLE. Let's hope for the best. Never thought I'd be so anxious waiting for my dog to poop. - @nynhex
not sure what's good for a dog to make it go, but Pumpkin has the opposite effect. We give pumpkin and rice to firm things up. Coconut oil sounds useful for your purpose. Making them go isn't usually our problem, so i don't know much about what to give that google wouldn't get you with more info.
In the USA if you have roadside assistance with your Insurance provider, they raise rates based on how many times you use it (Apparently all of them do this now). Just learned that over the weekend. wee. - @zie
ugh... why don't you use AAA? they have a limit on miles / tows but the limit doesn't drop if you use them up and the the cost doesn't go up if you use it.
What was the problem you needed assistance with by the way?
Welcome @Pepo
Your work sounds very cool. I look forward to seeing how scuttlebutt, and the world, can benefit from it.
Thanks so much @Dan Hassan
I'd read things about tweaking it in
~/.ssb/config but i didn't have one so i figured it wasn't a thing anymore.
I think we have 2 education problems @martin ➬
- helping avoid new people's surprise and the inability to delete
- helping all people to understand that in distributed systems the best you can ever get is a polite request to change / delete something, and that there is no guarantee they will honor it.
I think 2 is going to be a major issue when delete is added. People will think "oh i'm safe no-one will see [insert something stupid they did]" meanwhile everyone has a copy of it and many / all will probably have easy access to all versions. That's going to be a hard think to educate folks to... maybe if the major clients go out of their way to make it obvious when a message has been edited (or deleted) and make it easy to see all versions folks will see that and be prepared for it before they eventually use the functionality themselves.
as with human communication, there's no takesie-backsies here. if i say or do something i regret, i can't remove it from the memories of the other humans who experienced it, i can only apologize (publish a new message). - @dinosaur
I think that's the key. I think emphasizing "hey, you're already familiar with this behavior. it's the way the real world works" is absolutely the best way to handle this. It reframes the "problem" perfectly and puts it in a "oh, i know how that works" perspective.
The protocol may grow the ability for messages to surmount previous messages (editing), but there is never a guarantee that the edit will have been reached as far as the original message. - @martin ➬
just to be extra clear... even if it did reach, there's no guaranteed that every client will honor the edit / delete request.
Works fine on mine using High Sierra 10.13.4 @mix
I guess I'm envisioning finding new content / islands through people linking to interesting posts or some functionality equivelent to retweeting. When you view these posts your client can then say 'give me that individual post that was linked / liked / retweeted by my friend please', but if you're not sufficiently networked with the person your client can't just say 'give me everything that randomer has ever said please.' - @happy0
but again, that doesn't work with how ssb works. either you already have it, or it's too far away from you to get (without making new connections, and then you'd have it). If you don't have it, you don't know where it came from, so you can't request it, or part of it, because there's no central authority who knows where everything is.
It'd be great to be able to denote "friends" who i'd gladly replicate the heck out of, and acquaintances who I'm curious about and would like to get to know, but am no ready to endorse with full on FOAF replicating.
I've no objections to this, but i suspect that most people don't think of things that way. that is to say, I suspect that most people are generally fine with the idea of replicating anyone they haven't blocked. I think the exception might be "X is a jerk, but i still want to see their stuff, but i'm not comfortable passing it on". I think @olizilla 's approach requires too much ... thought and action and if generally adopted would be harmful to the butts. Harmful because it's basically saying everyone starts out in a trial state and doesn't get replicated until you take action, but people aren't going to think about the replication part because they still see what they're getting, so they won't take action, so the stuff they're getting will rarely get passed on.
happy to help @Teq :)
but was wondering if you (or any of the fine folks in this thread) have some starter tips for an offgrib newcomer. @nynhex
insulation, ventilation, illumination, light barriers, open space. Focus on that and throwing out the extra crap and you should be fine. I'd add in Headroom because i think vertical space makes a huge difference. Also, omg the difference a fridge makes is huge, and yes you can run them off of solar without much trouble. ;)
I'm very much of the "if it's cold, put on a woolly jumper, if it's hot, take it off" school of thought (rather than create a micro-controller enabled air conditioning / heating system for small vans). - @ntoll
Propex heaters propane heaters are a wonderful, safe, and simple thing for #vanlife Really nice when it's approaching / below freezing outside. I don't have any personal experience with the Espar ones (for diesel) but they seem pretty much the same deal.
Once you fork your identity, is there a way to rebase the messages from the forked identity onto the main feed?
As far as i know no. I'm sure the copy-paste you did could be automated, but the key problem is the cryptographic proof that this message is what it claims to be and that it's part of the blockchain (identity) it claims to be. If you moved it to a different blockchain it's a different message (in effect) so... ultimately it seems like it must be some form of copy-paste to move messages between identity.
But it's nothing special, just a regular normal vehicle that doesn't stand out in the crowd at all, which is the entire point.
Oh i hear that. I don't care about the outside of the vehicle. The more boring and uninteresting the better! My wife and I frequently discuss the best stealth camouflage. Something that looks totally boring and not worth investigating more. Theres a bread truck that appears abandoned in our local supermarket. We think that'd be good as long as we removed the english (for foreign country travel) and didn't go to somewhere like Venezuela where bread is probably more valuable than cash right now. ;)
I'm interested in notable bits about arranging crap inside: storage, interesting bed solutions, space maximization, etc.
My next trip will be solo, and i just realized that that means I could hang a hammock instead of a bed which would free up a ton of floor space. Unclip an end in the morning. Clip it back up at night... and if after a month or so i decide that full time hammocking is not the thing I can always just build a bed frame. On the other hand, the bed that folded into a couch in our Vanagon was awful nice to be able to sit on and work at during the day... So many trade-offs.
it sucks that you have the stalker problem complicating everything. :/
The police were not overly helpful, and I got tired of constantly looking over my shoulder.
that is, sadly, not very surprising.
Today is a really weird day for me. The world seems very chaotic right now, and I feel unsettled and honestly a bit rattled for some reason. - @nynhex
sorry to hear that. it sucks that you have to take time off for medical reasons but maybe the time off will help with the mental things too?
Tonight I'm going to try to get some work done, on my nice new 34" dell curved monitor.
My wife was drooling over one of those. I think she should get it. It would totally help with her writing because she's always got pages of reference material / screens up to refer to while writing (both in her tech writing and her fiction). Also, she needs a "retina" resolution monitor anyway and I think those ones are (just without the marketing term). Right?
A question I'd like to ask everyone is: what makes you happy? - @Dimple
Traveling through all the in-between places. Seeing this amazing planet. Meeting all the people along the way. Encouraging others to take that first step and go on the journeys they've been dreaming about.
Also finding things that have been made by people who obviously cared deeply about making their thing "right". There's something very satisfying to me about encountering high quality items, software, etc. by people to who weren't satisfied with "good enough".
I'm interested in practicing polyrhythms @flpvsk , but right now i've got to rebuild my basic skills after not really practicing for far too long. I never really practiced them much when i was serious about music.
The demo looks great. I love the visual and audio combinations. The drum variant was cool, but I like the simple not version too. If you make it into a iPhone app I'll probably buy it. If you make it into a web app I'd throw a few bucks your way too.
Thanks for sharing this @frostedflakes
It was a very cool little insight into your world.
So, did you lose the old @Tom identity @Tom ?
@mix @SoapDog
I have to say I have been really impressing me with all the great updates you've been pushing to Ticktack lately. Every one makes me want to use it more. :)
HOLY SMOKES the picture of their wiring is enough to send me into spasms! WOW that's a giant, scary, insane mess - @zie
Agreed. My wife would loose it. She spent so much time getting the wiring perfect on our vanagon.
re lack of automation stuff:
I've been thinking a lot about geeky things for my next van build (probably going to build out an ambulance) and other than some above average (for a van) measures to deal with photo storage and backup I'm in the same boat as you. There's just not much point when you're living in 100sq feet of space.
We did monitor our solar and batteries but we didn't had the data feeding into anything. it was more just to look over and see how it was doing or warn us if things got low.
Plus I have a little 2500w generator that I can use in a pinch.
do you ever use it? We only had a 140w solar panel and one house battery and it was plenty, but we tend to be pretty constantly on the move so that plus the alternator kept things more than full. Only constant draw was the fridge and that was, to our surprise, never an issue.
Very cool. Thank you for sharing @CallumTheRobertson
ooh. Pretty. also, now i totally want to see the "van" that got you there. @zie
A: Currently Scuttlebutt is not at this time the place to have very private conversations. In the future with the options for implementing deleting previous messages etc it can become more private. - @zelf
Keep in mind that feeds are blockchain based (append only ledger) which means we'll never be able to implement true deletion. We can only implement a method to ask clients to hide old messages. They'll still have them, and they may choose to ignore the request.
thanks for that correction @moid. Dunno what i was thinking.
@Cléber Zavadniak
from this stack overflow question
Transform the simplest C code
#include <stdio.h>
int main()
return 0;
to its LLVM IR, using
clang -emit-llvm -S hello.c
The generated IR is:
define i32 @main() #0 {
%1 = alloca i32, align 4
store i32 0, i32* %1
ret i32 0
So yeah. it's pretty low level, plus there's the name originally stood for "Low Level Virtual Machine"
huh, I wonder why we didn't seem to see this earlier. welcome @resir014 Sorry about the delayed hello from us. Did you maybe have trouble connecting to pubs or did we just fall down on the job?
It's sort of hit/miss as to whether or not they are up sometimes but once you get an invite code and it's added to your index, the next time it pops online you're connected and all good. - @nynhex
If you're using an invite code (and the code is valid) then the pub should follow you back immediately (assuming it's online). if it doesn't keep trying to use the same invite code until it does (assuming it's still online). You can try a new invite code too, but usually just trying again with the same one seems to work. Note that patchwork has a transient little message about getting the follow-back or something like that.
cc @JeffPhi
a) wtf?! who tries to steal a home-brew mini sub?
b) was there insurance that would cover the damages? @juul
Even if i was inclined to steal a sub i definitely wouldn't steal a home-built one i wasn't intimately familiar with. Way too easy to die.
re climate change @emile
when we moved to our new house we had some contractors extend the custom fence the original owners had built. It promptly blew over in 30mph winds. "Oh, that kinda storm only happens once every ten years or so" they said. We've had 2 since. The second one blew it over again. The third one... i dunno. i think we got lucky because my wife and i weren't able to stand it up correctly so it had big gaps and was on a slant.
Obviously the contractors screwed up and didn't go deep enough with the posts, but the point was more that the "100-year storm" is quickly approaching annual in many places.
Thanks for the update @Dominic
nevermind. I get my mistake. @ev . sorry
If anyone wants to try mutable messages in mvd, I'm running a testnet off my website here: http://mutable.evbogue.com/ @ev
I just get a blank page when i go there in Chrome or Beaker. Was i supposed to do something else?
What? Really? Scuttlebutt feeds are block chains?
yup really. @Cy
Why? Shouldn't they just be numbered lists of digitally signed messages?
Why carry the hash to the previous message inside the current one?
blockchains solve a TON of problems with distributed systems. it's probably the simplest way to manage one and the hardest to screw up. The alternatives get pretty complex pretty fast. Programmers are excellent at screwing up complex things. You can't really afford that in distributed systems because you can't really fix your architectural screw ups once other people start using them.
The previous message could be on a different topic entirely!
I don't know that that really matters.
What matters is that you have a way of communicating to others that x is the most recent post you have from Bob and can they please send you everything more recent than x. Without a blockchain (or something similar) how does your friend know that he has everything between your x and the most recent thing they have? Maybe there was a post in there they didn't see because they weren't watching the thread? Would you only get posts on Bob's threads you are both reading? What if it's mary's thread and bob commented but neither of you are following it but 3 weeks later you do start reading it?
Blockchains are a very simple way to solve this.
Shouldn't they just be numbered lists of digitally signed messages?
that's essentially what a block chain is. it's a series of blocks pointing to the next and prior blocks. It's just a fancy linked list that's provable via cryptography. Anything more than that is just random crap that the creators of a particular blockchain chose to add. Etherium contracts? Proof of work? that stuff is NOT blockchain. It's stuff bolted on to blockchain.
Why carry the hash to the previous message inside the current one?
a) because that's how doubly linked lists work?
b) because using a hash proves that the prior message is really the prior message.
If i'm on message 3 and the prior message is 2 how do you know it's the real two? How do you know that the person who passed on the prior message didn't point you to a different 2? I could turn your mother into a nazi if i felt like it... "look it's all there in what she posted!" Hashes are a) fast to compute and b) pretty small. Why NOT carry it along?
@Patrik Wipp and @Simon
To be clear, you will never be able to truly edit a post or delete. You can merely request that other clients take your new information under consideration. Deletion will never be possible, only requesting that others hide your posts from themselves. Editing will be just requesting that others choose to apply some updates to your post, but they'll always be able to see all the past versions of it.
SSB isn't so much immutable by design @JeffPhi as it is a consequence of the choice to use blockchain technology. Every ssb identity is its own blockchain. Also, you really need something like a blockchain to make distributed systems work otherwise you can't know simple things like if you are missing an old post from someone you follow.
ssb is a lot like the postal system, where all the mail goes through a slot in the door. If you can find a house you can walk up to it and stick a message in there but you can't take it back out, and you can't make them delete it. You can't reach in and edit it once they have it either. You can only send them more messages asking them to please please not read the previous ones, or messages with instructions listing the corrections for previous letters. Yes they MAY do what you ask them, but they may not.
sorry I didn't read every post in this thread BUT I strongly recommend against the cloud synced .ssb folder option. The biggest problem is that when you boot up a computer from sleep or whatever you can't even OPEN an ssb client until that folder has finished syncing. If you mistakenly left one open then who knows what can happen. I started down that route myself. It's far too easy to screw up and fork your identity or screw up your data in other hard to predict ways.
The safest way i've found to share an identity on multiple computers is to copy just the
~/.ssb/secret and
~/.ssb/gossip.json files. Full details are here but the short version is the only thing you have to do is not post until you're newly booted / woken / switched to computer has finished syncing all your posts from the other computer. Once that is done you're good, and it's pretty easy to check what posts you have of your own from your other computer. just click on profile and see if the most recent stuff is there.
What if you could still fetch individual messages (via their ID), but just not request the full feed of someone you're not sufficiently close to on the follow graph? - @happy0
It's great in theory, but i think it ignores the fundamental reality of how decentralized ssb is. How would you get that message? if the poster isn't within 2 hops of me i hon't have their data. If they are within 2 hops i have their feed.
Keep in mind there's no central location like twitter to go and say "hey, do you have this post id?" You only have access to what you've seen.
Where would you go to look because no-one in this network has every other post? There are even islands of SSB communication that may be public within themselves but are not connected to the larger SSB community. There isn't even a chance of you seeing those posts, that their authors may be perfectly happy to share with you... if only you were connected.
That way, a Google-butt could still emerge by crawling messages that are heavily linked to, but preserving the privacy of some 'less heavily connected / public' parts of the social graph.
a google-butt could emerge now BUT now you're centralizing things and now you have all the problems that come with centralization, including but not limited to censorship, and editorial choices. Hell even google has started editorializing itself within the US. Old posts that are exactly what you want? Nah, you won't find those anywhere need the front page. New posts are better. We'll show those. No-one's clear where the cutoff is 5 years? Is there a sufficiently high page-rank to make them show up after 7? dunno.
We already have people who have scuttled most of the scuttleverse to be able to draw graphs of the whole network and figure out average account activity and age and all that.
I wonder if there'd be some equivalence between this and #circles? New friends wouldn't get lots of status updates and information and posts and stuff, because they're not in the inner circle yet, or something.
Circles only work if you can control the whole system. Otherwise if you put the data out there there's no stopping someone "in" your circle from replicating it onwards. You can ask them (more specifically their client) to please not share this but you can't actually make them do it.
Plus if you say "just got back from vacation" and it's broadcast to anyone and everyone, then anyone who knows your home address just got your exact location in space and time.
yup. but you don't even need to work that hard. People put locations in their tweets all the time, or something as simple as "loving it here in Hawaii". With most people you can have their home address within 20 minutes of human searching. Spend some time teaching a computer how to do the searches and it could be a few seconds. This is ignoring all the people who leave location stuff on in their twitter clients and post "enjoying a relaxing weekend at home" telling you exactly where they live and including a helpful reference photo.
... I guess the problem even then if you know the ID, then we still not be able to connect if no shared pub ? - @LanceW
Yeah, which is why I like the idea of including the pubs within reach, to increase the chances of finding a path… - @jolyon
Remember, pubs aren't required. Pubs are just identities that happen to be at a consistent location so that you can find them even if they're not on the same lan.
All you each need is to follow one person (doesn't even have to be the same person) within 2 hops and you'll receive the posts from each other. To @mix 's point the number of people on ssb and living in Aukland is pretty small so you probably already have those shared people.
Long term, yeah QR codes are probably a good idea, especially once we get mobile clients going.
Consider that git does not store diffs - those diffs you see are derived from comparing 2 complete files. I suspect there's a good reason.
I really don't think that's right @mix
Here are the docs on the pack format It does store a single full version, and then the other packs are deltas.
This sounds like a great app idea @Zach!. Please keep us updated when you release it.
Just started cooking up a kitty today....
Top half of this one is already done. It's a slow-cooker, so maybe we could have another one for you in 8hrs or so? Less if you only need the tippity top. ;)
Isn't this kind of opposite to what a social network should be? - @Cole
I'm with Cole on this one @mix. SSB kinda works like twitter now, and while i don't like the discussions happening on twitter I adore being able to find interesting people who know nothing about me and follow them.
That being said, I also acknowledge that a lot of folks want a more limited distribution.
only talk to strangers who have been followed by someone you know - @mix
this would kill the serendipitous discovery of interesting people talking about things you care about who are in no way connected to you, it would also make the network literally unusable for new people. right?
Maybe you could assign roles to the people you follow, and then sort posts and the like by role? Similar to how you can assign names to people. - @Cole
kind of like how discourse and Google+ did it? I don't know that we could control the outbound data like that but we could certainly control what you see on the receiving end that way. You'd also need an "everyone else" category for folks you haven't categorized yet, and new ones that appear in your extended network.
That would certainly help with the overload aspect that many people are commenting on, but I don't think it addresses Mix's concerns.
also yes on @Matt McKegg 's suggestion for pubs only gossiping with folks they follow or are within n hops of someone they follow.
Looks great @Tim '0xAFFE' Schumacher. Can't wait to play with it (assuming you'll release it someday).
What do you folks think about this? - @SoapDog
This isn't bad when it's an update, but what about when it's 50 as you maintain a page with useful reference info over the course of years? Or maybe you just kept fixing typos, and rewording things.
Every time you want to view the post you have to find, and then rebuild the history of patches. This doesn't sound very efficient... especially if we're talking about a post from years ago. Especially when you consider the identity might be of someone who isn't just using Ticktack but is posting a lot on the 'butts.
I'm concerned about performance mostly.
What's the argument against just replacing the whole thing? I'm not saying that's a better solution. I'm just wondering why not.
For comparison, git stores the entire new file when committing and later letting compression handle deduplication. - @Powersource
I don't think that's quite right. Yes a complete version of the file may be created in the objects directory but it's not actually stored in the git history or shared with others. It's transient data to improve local performance.
According to the link you posted...
Once loose objects are packed into .pack files, a data structure equivalent to a diff
I just did a little digging and verified that. The pack files are not compressed copies of each version of the file. There is A version plus a lot of deltas.
There is not a great method of retaining institutional memory for discussions that happen within the scuttlebutt ecosystem. I've seen many threads come and go asking similar questions, and someone luckily will read it, remember that there was a similar discussion several months ago, and link to the corresponding thread.
Yeah, I'm trying to address that in part with the @butt_summarizer work, but i think the next stage is to make it googleable because search here is... well it's got a ways to go before it's as useful as google for finding answers to questions. Right now it's better for serendipitous discovery. ;) Once we / I get it outside of the butts I think it'll help a lot. I just need to make the tooling for converting my internal links into externally viewable links and then shove it into a static blog or something... it's on my todo list it's just not high priority.
The "this week in X" projects are super useful, but while they are focused on jumping in to content discovery with a starting point of "time", I feel a more pressing needs to address content discover with a starting point of "project / use case". - @corlock
The weekly summaries don't address this well. I don't think we have a good solution for this yet. Tags just get you a reverse chronological listing of things that may be related which doesn't really help you get an answer to "what is this thing about, what's the current thinking, and/or how far along is it?"
As @mix suggested, i'd be happy to have help, but i don't think the @butt_summarizer is the right place for what you're describing.
I will say that what you're describing would be very valuable, but would also be a lot of work. I see most of the updates to the various projects go by, and comment on most of them but actually maintaining a collection of useful data on each would ... well it wouldn't be easy, also I think it's something that lends itself more to a static page that can be referenced and updated, which is to say... not on SSB.
What about a collection of web pages that described the various ongoing ssb work? As notable changes are made we could put the word out on @butt_summarizer.
I wouldn't recommend the attempt though. There are just too many ongoing threads / ideas / projects to try and summarize them in a meaningful way and maintain those summaries. If it was me i'd pick one or two that were meaningful to me, dive deep, and help them come to fruition.
It'd be nice if there was a way for people to, as a community, build a FAQ that was somehow reference-able from within the 'butts.
{ "type": "about", "about": "@LzTjF5eAVC6xprPMGeNzqEP/EEBIGpM6hDaaY10hrz8=.ed25519", "description": "an [adventurer](https://www.corporaterunaways.com/) with a penchant for illustration, programming, writing, Esperanto, and ukulele. I'm also the person behind the [@butt_summarizer](@iVPi/B73hJSpsUB8XbSnlxe3NembPXLjOfIexlYdgJA=.ed25519).\n\nPronouns are good, but I don't really care which ones you use. \n\n[http://masukomi.org](https://masukomi.org/) \n[@masukomi](https://twitter.com/masukomi) on twitter krom se vi parolas esperanton. En tiu okaze mi estas [@praktiku](https://twitter.com/praktiku)" }
How are you finding doing it @masukomi ? - @mix
not bad. Most weeks i just do it as I go. The downside is that with limited time to read & record I don't actually get to really read all the interesting things I record, because i have to spend time making the links, extracting snippets, etc.. This week I had to do it all in one rush today, because I've spent all my free time coding instead of surfing the 'butts or any other social network (porting aha to Crystal so that I can fix bugs and extend it).
Oh gosh I sound like a poor little child from that small snippet! - @LinuxLiaison
I just try and grab the most interesting bit of the hellos. Most of them are "I'm a geek who likes distributed tech" and there's only so much of that I'd be willing to read in new people. That bit was the most humanizing thing I found in my quick skimming of your hello(ish) posts... also i was working very quickly today. Something like that I'd click through to read more about the person. I hope others will too. "I a geek who likes distributed tech" won't get me to click through because that describes so many people here.
Yeah without the static IP the pub is no different from any other client, other the fact than it's always on and needs to be regularly rebooted.
Yes, it would do the mesh thing for local users but it wouldn't be useful for anyone outside of your LAN.
It would be a good idea for something like a hackerspace, or a house of people who like to use SSB. Anywhere where there is a decent number of people who care about SSB and are connected to the LAN with your Pi on it.
cc @Charles C Hutchins @Simon
welcome back.
There's another way to do this that involves far less syncing. I started out doing something similar to you but on Dropbox, and it was pointed out that that made some folks uncomfortable owing to the data of theirs that i'd replicated was now being hosted on a 3rd party that folks may or may not be comfortable having their data.
regardless of if you agree / care about the 3rd party stuff coping just the
~/.ssb/secret and
~/.ssb/gossip.json files to the 2nd computer and Patchwork (or whatever client) handle the syncing is a pretty easy way to go that i believe is a little less likely to result in problems if you boot it up before OneDrive (or whatever) has synced down all the files from your other computer.
Until we have
sameAs functionality @atau you can follow these instructions to use Scuttlebutt on multiple computers.
I'd love to figure out a way to leverage ssb to be portable between devices, as well as maintaining large, searchable, image databases. - @Dan
I don't think scuttlebutt is a good place for large searchable image databases. Not only do you not gain anything by having that be distributed, I don't have enough space on my computer for my image database nevermind yours too. The move to SSD drives has killed available space on most people's computers (laptops). Throwing a ton of images into any distributed system would just be causing hardship for all the people who participate i think. Leave the management of massive image DBs to Flickr and Google and places like that if you want it to be somewhere off of your computer.
I'm working on a lot of intranet systems where people have requested some kind of messaging "plugin"
Why not jabber? Or maybe Zulip chat for something slacklike but internal. If you want a distributed solution for some reason there's Friends chat which may be a bit alpha still.
So my understanding is that SSB doesn't use a blockchain but both do use public key crypto for identity. - @rabble
SSB does use blockchain tech, but not a single blockchain. Every identity has its own blockchain.
A feed is a signed append-only sequence of messages. Each identity has exactly one feed.
Note that append-only means you cannot delete an existing message, or change your history. This is enforced by a per-feed blockchain. This is to ensure the entire network converges on the same state.
From the documentation.
Welcome @Ingmar. Tell us a bit about yourself?
Is there a way where you can selectively choose to never download/replicate a specific hash ever again?... I know you can block users, but is there a way to block specific content? - @Yuval
I don't believe so. With blob's its may be doable, with posts it is probably is not. (speculating)
Also, here is a potential idea to implement potential world-wide deletion of blobs.
This has been discussed a number of times but the short version is that it is simply not possible in a distributed system. You can ask people to delete something, but you can't make them delete something. The best you can reasonably hope for is a "please hide this" command, which clients can optionally choose to implement. This is one of the advantages and downsides to distributed systems. It's an advantage because corrupt politicians can never delete any evil / stupid bs that they've posted in the past. It's a disadvantage because you can't delete benign stuff either.
Welcome @nw
Let me know how I can help!
There are so many ways... I think the biggest current need is probably support for private groups. There are lots of discussions here about how to possibly implement them, and I don't think anyone is currently hacking on it, but searching would let you know.
But, there are plenty of things on the wishlist, both big and small, and I'm sure there's something that you'd find appealing to work on.
@Dominic has been poking WASM lately but i don't know if there are any concrete thoughts of integrating it with SSB... yet.
I'm not often an early adopter, and growing more cynical every year. - @Tom Dewey
I used to be, but these days I'm more "ugh, let the young energetic people work out the kinks, and let me know when it's stable and good." That may just be the burnout talking though.
The only weed i am truly against is Mint. That stuff is far too good at replication.
Very nice @Miikka Thanks for sharing. I did some wet printing when i was young. I am perfectly happy to live in a digital photography world now. Those chemical smells always convinced me we were doing something horrible for the environment, even when i was small and Earth Day hadn't been invented yet. ;)
I do tech writing for a living - @Retric
So does my wife. Well, when she's not writing novels, but those don't really pay very well. ;)
Welcome @Tom Dewey
Am I right in assuming "the orange site" is Hacker News?
Care to tell us a bit about yourself?
I'll take liver casserole over XSLT any day of the week @Sleepy Sinews. If i never have to touch XSLT again it will be too soon. ;)
Keep in mind @andosteinmetz that the dir size grows fast when you first join the network because it's got a lot of history to catch up on. After that it is much slower. You could kill old blobs, but keep in mind that you'll be hampering your ability to view things offline. This is most notable when you start searching and pull up old threads.
~/.ssb/blobs folder is 1.78 Gb and i'm following a lot of pubs so i've got a lot of people's history in there.
Here's a csv verson of @Gerard Achternaam 's spreadsheet for those of you working offline (and in the future if the link has died).
very cool @Gerard Achternaam.
I've thought about sticky-posts within channels - @Teq
How would you un stick them? I guess if we had a "please forget me" type of message request you could undo the thing, but if a user left SSB (or lost their
~/.secret file) the message would be stuck forever. Also, bad actors could destroy a channel by spamming it with sticky messages they never took down imagine. Imagine if literal spammers got ahold of that power! shudder
Also, channels are really tags with a different name. There's no real "channel" functionality as far as I can tell. I believe it's just a search for threads with a given tag in them.
@noffle am i right in thinking that looking for the most recent
web-root post means you can only have one site per identity?
Welcome @Sleepy Sinews I can confidently say that i have not seen anyone posting here about Liver Casserole (until now) so you will hopefully be able to find SSB diggable too. :)
Welcome @yale. What do you enjoy doing when you're not coding?
Welcome @enerider
You'll find me in the land of the long, white cloud!
and now the distributed net ;)
Welcome @Miikka
Thanks for the #books recommendations.
Can we maybe see some of your photography work?
... Also, @Kyhwana I noticed you're only following one pub right now. Thats fine if you are primarily just interested in talking with the people who are already on that pub, but if you'd like to see posts from a wider collection of people I'd recommend you get invites from a few more. :)
Welcome @Kyhwana
What do you enjoy doing when you're not keeping our clouds puffy?
Welcome @Retric
Do many people watch HBO in Beijing, or are you an American living there?
Do you code for a living, or do tech writing, or both?
saw Copan Ruinas on your blog.. I've been there!
yay @Joey Hess
Was not a fan of the touristy town either, but on a random day hike out of town we found this really nice hotel.
One of the things i love about traveling between places is that you meet normal people not people trying to scam money out of "rich" tourists.
What about you @Alex Luhrman. What kind of traveling do you like to do?
a) I'm not sure i can come anywhere close to the quality of butt shaking provided by @Richard D. Bartlett and @dinosaur
b) I absolutely love that it's guys getting out there and shaking their butts for a change
c) I second your request for "moar butts"
d) nice dancing crab @Angelica
Welcome @Alex Luhrman
I am currently living and traveling in southern #mexico and would like to hear and share your experiences from around the world.
Why are you traveling? Just for the fun of it? For work? Other?
My wife and I have been through most of the Americas on motorcycle. We blogged the whole thing.
Here are a couple random pics from the trip. Poking through the southern Mexico pics. I dug out a couple random ones from Oaxaca
and this
and from about half way down Argentina's Routa 40 (before they finished paving it) we have this pic of my wife
@emile: @Luandro is in the southern half of Brazil so... yeah a bit further south ;)
Have simplified it so should be easier to mention, keep me in the loop @RZZL DZZL
Have posted a few images as well, just concerned about bombarding people with too much data as everything is hosted locally right? Any advice along theses lines?
I wouldn't worry about it too much. Just keep the file sizes reasonable and I don't think folks will complain. In general people seem to appreciate the pictures. I'd just be careful about copyright violation because technically, if you upload something you don't own, then someone receives your post they a) have an illegal file on their system and b) are distributing it to others.
Yes, everything is hosted locally. I'm not sure how many folks are aware but you can delete the contents of your blobs directory if you get concerned about the size and it'll just re-download old ones as needed. As many people don't know about it and / or aren't comfortable poking around with the command line to get into the hidden directories I would just assume that yes everything is going to be hosted locally.
@glyph I can totally empathize. It was frustrating to see new people jumping on and the first thing they post is complaints about the name "scuttlebutt".
How do we incentivize people to do the right thing? - @Cameron Leslie
I was thinking about this before. One way, that i've discussed previously, is adding templates to the user profile to encourage, but not require, certain information when people fill out their profile.
Before that though we can simple have some sort of "welcome" screen once people have created a profile, and before they have posted that encourages people to get a feel for the place before shooting their mouth off and complaining. Obviously, you'd want to write that in a kinder more empathetic way. ;)
Welcome @MatthewDavid
I hope you find this place as interesting and inspiring as I do. :)
In a day or two I will be deleting my facebook account. I'm giving it that long for the few people who do follow me there to get this message before it, presumably, self destructs along with my account.
The straw that broke this camel's back was this:
Facebook has moved more than 1.5 billion users out of reach of European privacy law, despite a promise from Mark Zuckerberg to apply the "spirit" of the legislation globally.
In a tweak to its terms and conditions, Facebook is shifting the responsibility for all users outside the US, Canada and the EU from its international HQ in Ireland to its main offices in California. It means that those users will now be on a site governed by US law rather than Irish law. - The Guardian
Instead of just letting people say "no, i don't want you to share my private info with external companies and track me all over the web", they moved their legal HQ to somewhere it wasn't illegal yet.
Also despite it being completely illegal (in the US) and immoral (everywhere) they continue to let landlords place adds that exclude certain races.
And now, to top it all off, they're employing Dark UX patterns in their new privacy opt-in stuff to trick people into turning on things that have been disabled for years in certain countries: A flaw-by-flaw guide to Facebook's new GDPR privacy changes
This company is morally bankrupt. I will not participate in this BS any longer.
Interesting side effect of how the friend of friend stuff works here:
I just joined another pub and then got 3 notifications of people starting to follow me (Hello!) from up to 2 weeks ago. They could see me, but I couldn't see them. The messages with their following couldn't make it to me until now.
Hey @Alexander Færøy
Want to tell us a little about yourself?
First off, Welcome. We need more graphically minded folks around here.
2nd off (and please know i'm trying to help here...) I have absolutely no clue how to type the first character of your nic, so i can't actually mention you without manually creating a link by manually copying your nic, and then manually copying your id and pasting both into a manually constructed markdown link. You'll note that Richard didn't mention you. You really want folks to be able to mention you so that you get the notification in mentions, because without that it's really easy to not see that someone is talking to you. And if it's difficult to talk to or about you... well it kinda defeats the point of a social network. ;)
manually constructed--> ‡ ℜżżŁ ⦚ 𝔇żżŁ ‡
We never actually get the real frequency list until the day of. Not sure if there are other frequencies that they give out more freely, but Net Control's frequency is a fairly well guarded secret and it changes every year. Even with the ham shack being in a secured area, and with me having a security badge I doubt they'd give me the frequency if I didn't also have an officer with me, since I'm working directly with the police not with the Hams.
Even if you have the frequency you won't learn much because they've transitioned to doing everything with a set of secret codes. "Net Control to __ . Has event 27 begun?" "No, we're still waiting". Every year they change some aspect of what they're doing to make it harder for bad people to do bad things.
And yes, the organization is amazing. I can't imagine how much work must go into it each year. Can you link me to the radio procedures doc you found @emile ?
a) interesting b) Why would someone choose to use IRN over D-Star?
Admittedly, D-Star software appears to have been written by a clueless programmer and requires a bunch of magic incantations that don't make a lot of sense... I can only assume that this system is better in that regard.
I feel like no single backhoe should be able to take out power to the entire island in a single mishap. Zero redundancy for electric routes out of the plant, and no other plant or supplemental power source feeding into the grid just seems brain damaged for that many people and square miles of coverage.
side note: You should be able to make an image a link to something else via the normal rules of markdown with
[![image alt](image blob)](link to something else) but it doesn't seem to work in patchwork. Clicking just loads the image in an external browser instead of going to the url you specified.
Radio Volunteering at the Boston Marathon
For the past four years now I've volunteered at the Boston Marathon via a CERT group attached to one of the many Massachusetts police forces that volunteers to help with the Boston Marathon.
Our crew meets up at 5:00, gets our vehicles and gear and starts driving to Hopkinton, where we discover where we'll be deployed. Most of our officers work intersections to keep people from trying to drive through the marathon. Some of them patrol the starting areas. Some yell at runners to not pee on the school even though there are literally hundreds of porta-potties only a few hundred yards away. Some of them patrol a section of the route looking suspicious people and bags.
This year I sat in a van, listening to three radios, while our officers got very wet and cold.
I listen to three radios because of a little-known fact. Police departments can't really talk to each other. There are some interdepartmental frequencies, but at the marathon they all get used up.
The Boston Marathon is a huge deal, and a very real potential target for terrorists. The Boston Marathon Bombing was nothing compared to what it could have been. There are tons of people bunched together at the starting line, in corals before it, and in staging areas before that. We have local Police departments volunteering from all over Massachusetts, State Police, Special Forces, bomb sniffing dogs, Ambulances with EMTs and Paramedics, Fire Departments, Bomb Squad(s), Secret Service, FBI, and probably some other federal agencies I'm not aware of. The point being, lots of different teams that need to communicate.
The radios used by Police, Fire, Ambulance, etc use frequencies which are crapy for hilly terrain. The hilly terrain isn't a problem in their home towns, because they'll have a repeater high up that the handheld and car radios can see from most anywhere in town, and that relays their signal to other officers.
When police travel to other towns their radios can't use the local repeater and have trouble talking to other officers from the same department unless they're close, and unobstructed by terrain. That's where the Ham radio operators come in. We can use frequencies that are better suited to the terrain, and many of us have portable antennas we can set up, and the people who have those look for any opportunity to take them out and use them.
Our town's portable antenna is enough to reach most of our officers. There's usually one or two who are out of range though. It depends on where they ask us to place the antenna and where our officers are stationed.
The Hams have a series of Net Control stations along the route with large antennas and very experienced controllers. These coordinate everything. There are almost 300 AARL members who show up and get stationed at medical tents, at the various police headquarters along the route, at checkpoints along the race, with officers at intersections in places police radios can't reach, and ... just everywhere.
They are, in my opinion, the glue that keeps all the pieces of the marathon working together.
Listening to Net Control has been a great lesson in communication and remote team coordination. It's also great practice for a disaster scenario. When Puerto Rico got hit by Hurricane Maria and lost all the normal means of communication, it was the Hams who stepped in and helped coordinate and organize everything.
I'm not too interested in chatting with random strangers on my radio, but getting my Amateur Radio license has given me a real way to help out my community and prepare for the worst. With climate change bringing increasingly dramatic weather each year, I think having a communication tool that works even in the worst situations is a pretty good thing. I think having the experience to use it in those situations is even better.
#hamradio #police #running
This looks great @noffle. I can't wait to have the time to read this whole thread and then start playing with it. :)
You mentioned search and rescue and town events, what other sorts of situations do EMS volunteers train for? - @Matt Lorentz
Well, our unit is primarily police officers so anything you'd normally expect to have a police officer involved in. We also help pumping out people's homes when there's flooding, man the warming shelters when the power goes out for days in the dead of winter, bring folks generators if they're on life support and there's no power. Basically just helping keep the community safe and alive when needed. Most of us are certified first responders so that helps with the keeping folks alive part too. We've also got a bunch of folks with ham licenses to help with communications when the power goes out and takes out the cell towers (eventually their generators die), or phone lines go down in wind storms. Whatever.
We also practice using ICS-100 a little for our town stuff so that we're prepared for larger events. We could do better at practicing that though.
Linden was a full 17 minutes off her personal best at Boston, which shows you how bad the weather was. Of course you would know if you were out in it.
actually, I spent most of it hiding in the van. ;) only had to go out to set up and take down the antennas. :D
The yellow blobs in the background are busses dropping off runners to go to the start line. There were very few this year. I never heard a final count but... it felt like a ghost town compared to normal.
I act as the radio dispatcher for one of the many many volunteer police departments that help keep folks safe. I'm not a police officer but I'm a CERT member and have my Ham radio license, which is important there because the Ham network is a) the only network with all the information and b) the only one that can cross departments (because none of the police radios talk to each other). So I raise our antenna (mounted on a lighting unit) and listen to the Hams and the Hopkinton PD (because we tend to be stationed by the start line) and pass on info to our officers. Usually there's another ham with us and a police officer to keep watch. Some of the other Hams in our CERT group help with the marathon's ham network directly.
The ham net for the Boston marathon is amazingly well run, and has been a great learning experience to listen to them.
Does the Burlington marathon need Ham volunteers @Rick ?
It seems to me that there are people here who would wish degrees of closed society for themselves, and people who prefer a more open position. - @IBob
implementing a client that supports both ends of this spectrum is quite difficult - @Dominic
Why aren't private groups a solution to this @Dominic? I feel like there's an aspect to this that you and @IBob are thinking about that I'm missing...
Which part of these docs to you guys believe to be essential to learn about ssb? - @Luandro
The getting started guide
We also need a good overview. the video is nice but really we need someone to write a nice, relatively short, overview that answers the question of "What is this thing, and why should I care?"
This is awesome!
Thank you @mix and @Zach! for working on this. The visual styling has been one of the reasons Patchbay isn't my primary client.
Isn't another possibility separate SSB networks? That's not rather than private groups, that's separate networks + private groups. - @bobhaugen
Yes, but i don't think that's as realistic of an option for non-geeks to set up and keep separate, and more importantly I don't think people want totally separate networks (in general). You want a safe space in the larger world, where you can look through the windows and see all the other things happening. Not a tiny isolated world with darkness beyond the glass.
also, the clients just are not even remotely equipped to deal with switching between the private network and the larger public one(s).
So, it's not decentralized @Matt Lorentz but it may give you ideas: ReadyResponder is the project i help out with occasionally for our local Emergency Management Services.and most all of its things could be decentralized:
- sends out notifications of events to the appropriate people (sms or email)
- processes responses back about availability (via sms)
- provides a way to see who will participating in an even
- makes sure you have people with the skills you need (doesn't help to have people show up to help work the radio of none of them are licensed)
- registers when people show up to an event (via sms)
- registers when they leave (via sms)
- manages inventory
Patchwork already supports the basic events + who claims they'll come it could be extended to do the rest of the stuff. There could also be a plug-in on a server that listened to Twillio events for bringing info from sms into the network or from the network to sms.
The time tracking is important for EMS teams because they can be repaid for the time worked by the federal govt. (in the US) and use that money to buy/maintain/upgrade the equipment they need.
We use this system when there's a disaster, when practicing for disasters, when we get called out to help in a search and rescue, and when performing normal EMS activities (manning town events, etc).
It's current weakness is the cell network. Given those have battery backup / generators but strong winds can be an issue. You could could mesh network out of or into no cell areas and then connect back to the internet and Twilio for SMS usage if there was some way of guaranteeing that bad actors couldn't use it to send SMSs on your account. ... Just thinking off the top of my head. It feels like Patchwork has already proven most of this is possible. I'm not sure what's actually worth doing in a decentralized way.
nicely done @Kieran
Why are you all focusing so much on the person who got nicknamed and their needs, and not at all on the case where a person is toxic/abusive and others want to warn people about them?
I understand your warning usage @Alanna , at the same time the system you're using for warning can and will be used for toxic abuse of totally innocent people, like @samschooler 's sister, and it's worse than anything on other social networks because it sticks to your page and there's nothing you can do about it.
@Stefan there's another option:
Only you see the nicknames you create.
If I decide to call you @stef then i write @stef but everyone else sees whatever their nickname is for you, or whatever the default is for you if they don't have one.
In addition to protecting people from harassment via this mechanism it reduces confusion. There are a number of threads where I've seen someone use their nickname in a post but everywhere else in the thread that that person says anything it's with a different name (the default one in this case). it's very confusing. I'm all "who are they talking about?"
yes @Kieran, that is one option that i think many would find useful, another that would be really useful is access to the markdown that created the post you are quoting. You can't quote a section with a link and maintain the link when you're copy-pasting, even with WYSIWIG controls.
Personally I'd prefer it not WYSIWYG so much as tools to simplify the modification of the markdown while keeping it in markdown format. There are many open source libraries that do this.
However, isn't most on Scuttlebutt public and un-deletable?
yes @Karsten. It is currently, essentially all public, and it will always be un-deletable (due to the nature of blockchains). The exception to the public thing is private messages which can have multiple recipients (mini, encrypted, group chats).
Maybe I have to dig deeper into the protocol but as far as I understand it's not trivial to see who's reading my posts and to limit their access. These feature are very important for such a sensitive topic.
Yeah, we'll never be able to see who is reading. I don't think that who is / was reading is nearly as important as who can read your posts. For sensitive topics like this we absolutely need private groups, which is why i say they "need the near future of Scuttlebutt". Private groups are coming. It's just a matter of time.
There will always be the risk of letting in people to your group that you thought were ok, only to find they meant you harm, but that's a human problem, and realistically it doesn't matter what tech you use there's no taking back information once they have it. Witness all the deleted tweets by politicians that people have screenshots of, or the copied text of. With SSB we at least have the blocking mechanism to prevent them from ever getting more and to help insulate your friends from them.
The Verge just posted an article about sex workers moving to Mastodon as a result of the new brain-damaged Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA). For those who don't know it's "brain-damaged" because it does nothing to stop sex trafficking, it censors victims of sex trafficking so they can't get help, and it forces companies to censor sex discussions on their platform. The EFF has a page about what it would do from before it got voted on.
Anyway... The Verge's article got me thinking. Pushing sex workers underground just endangers them more. Moving to Mastodon doesn't really solve their problems because even though it isn't centralized it's still based on a federated server system and those servers are easily targeted and taken down. In this case there's a new instance called "Switter" (Sex Worker Friendly Social). It's pretty safe to say that, if they're successful, they'll be targeted and taken down.
They need Scuttlebutt.
Victims of sexual abuse need Scuttlebutt.
Inviting the first group here would probably be disastrous for us because of everyone who'd follow them. Inviting the second group here would be disastrous for them because we don't have private groups yet. The first group could really use private groups too.
Really, both groups need the near future of Scuttlebutt.
The longer I'm here the more value, and promise in opening SSB up to the larger world. Many folks are concerned that the tone of things will change when / if it becomes popular on a large scale, and I think they're right. I also think that with everyone finally realizing that they're regularly having their privacy violated and their thoughts manipulated on the popular networks (other than Mastodon which is... debatably popular right now) ... we need something like SSB that can't be controlled, and can't be taken down.
We're not quite ready, but the time is close (I hope), and the need is great.
Caulk Talk - @IBob
No. please no. Just imagine talking out loud to your female coworkers about asking a question on "caulk talk" and you'll see why.
I'm envious @Luandro. It looks like a lot of hard work, but also like your building something beautiful.
is there something we can help you with @clacke ? i see 4 of these "testing 1 2" posts.
at first glance (before it'd all scrolled into view) i thought i was looking at a sideways picture of a large rock island in the sea. @glyph
Not to beat a dead horse, but I think per-client bayesian filtering is a much better solution to this problem.
Problems with tagging:
- doesn't work without a consistent lexicon
- You can't have a consistent lexicon without centralization
- has language issues
- the word "sexual" probably has no meaning to a speaker of Marwari.
- not all concepts are directly translatable, and context plays a huge part in meaning
- you're forcing everything through the linguistic filter of whatever language you choose for your tags, as well as the social filter of the group/thing doing the tagging (if thing then the social filter of its creators)
- people won't tag their own stuff
- people who do tag their own stuff will have different social and language filters so may not consider what they've written to be applicable to tag x, but others do, (or vice-versa).
- the list would become insanely long because the things I think are worth filtering isn't the same as the list of things you think is worth filtering, and if this was a thing that was decentralized then you'd have tags from every social and language group each having their own ideas of hundreds of things that they think are filterable.
Their work could be aided by, or largely outsourced to, AIs, as AI is getting quite good at categorising content
Again, this is based on the assumption of a homogenous social group with shared values. We are not that now, and the larger ssb becomes the more true this will be.
From a practical perspective, try to imagine you worked at Twitter and were trying to apply the idea there, even with all the advantages of centralization it's still just not doable.
Myself I feel like I'm drawing boundaries for the sort of community dynamic I want to live in and largely taking a bunch of abuse for it. - @mix
I think a lot of us here are perfectly fine with the world you've been trying to build and the way you've been working with the community. The voices aren't as loud because we tend to not shout "YES I AGREE, YOU GOOD PERSON! CONTINUE WITH YOUR CURRENT BEHAVIOR!" nearly as much as we shout the opposite.
There's an emotional labour cost to this whole thing.
Sadly, even if we were shouting more support I suspect the cost would be there. Maybe diminished some, but ... dealing with that stuff is emotionally expensive.
As best I can tell we've got 2 people who feel maligned and marginalised, who feel like I have abuse power to do them wrong.
I haven't been participating for that long, but from what i've seen you've been trying to treat folks with respect and that I've basically always been in agreement with your take on things.
The ask is if you're watching this happen, your help would be much appreciated.
noted. Sadly, I think there are probably a lot of others here like me who see the drama and just want to get the eff out of there.
oh, an interesting thread... doo de doo...
Welp. That went to crap pretty quickly... gotta go!
For the same reason you're stressing about it others are probably actively avoiding it to protect themselves.
Or, as @Alanna said
And, tragically, the also familiar trope where most people in the community just watch it happen, as bystanders, preferring to "not get involved in drama" or chalking it up to an "interpersonal conflict", because it means they don't have to do anything, and they don't have to look at themselves as a part of a community that allows its best to be abused and scapegoated. It's not a fucking interpersonal conflict - it's a failure of culture, boundaries, and collective integrity.
My advice? Block liberally. Yeah, it's harder when you're perceived as a person in charge / in power, but you don't have to listen to everyone. If the people who are injecting drama into your life have a valid point and aren't just toxic actors then their message will get through to you by other means, and hopefully it'll get filtered of the toxic bits along the way.
My recommendation: I would suggest going towards the funding decision being distributed among all people that are trusted to take an informed decision around funding so that the funding doesn't fall on one person. - @Fabián Heredia Montiel
good advice that, but i agree with your response about the complications of designing a fair voting system.
There is no one system which would be inclusive for everyone or that everyone would be happy with. - @Dan Hassan
and that
Could it be that it's not people that are the matter, it's the patterns of movement that are going on here. - @mix
Yes, but it could also be the people. That's my vote.
My take is very Similar to @cryptix's. To what I just quoted from Mix I think cryptix said it well:
For the most part though I could still see some truth in them but there also was destructive spin that totally pulled threads sideways.
If you all - yes that includes you, yes you! - stand there and allow Mix to burn out because of this bullshit, you will all be far, far poorer for it. SPEAK UP about how Mix has built you up, served this community, and is appreciated, or the only voices ringing out will not be the ones deserving of our attention. - @Alanna
Yes, 1000x yes.
I'll try and do better about speaking up against the when I see it, whilst trying to not derail the thread.
@nanomonkey I theorize @007pig is just a very stylish pig who, like their namesake, doesn't understand the mechanics of martini preparation but does like gin. ;)
Welcome @007pig
@nanomonkey I believe @Daan is talking about the fact that #patchwork considers the space character to be the indicator of the end of the hashtag. It doesn't separate out trailing punctuation. so
(#)patchwork. at the end of a sentence would be correct grammar but it would create an undesired hashtag. The regexp for a hashtag should probably be something like
/(?!\w+)#[\w-_]+/ with the negative lookahead for non-word characters at the end. I think that'll work in most languages too.
Welcome @paeneultima
Something to note re longform posts is that if you're going to do it within Patchwork there is a max limit on posts that isn't terribly long. You'll probably want to Post, and then reply to your own post(s) with the subsequent posts. That's what I have to do every week with @butt_summarizer
However there is TickTack which is another client that runs on the scuttlebutt network and allows for long-form posts. Unfortunately those posts have a different message type and I don't believe they will show up for folks just using Patchwork/Patchbay. Only other TickTack users see them. So, for now your best bet is to do the replying to your own stuff, which kinda sucks but...
What does the community prefer? sameAs or better moderation features? - @Matt McKegg
We need tools for dealing with toxic actors, yes but
sameAs is just a crazy-important piece of infrastructure that: enables mobile devices, enables easier handling of multiple computers without potential forking, .... We just really need it.
We're never going to get rid of toxic behavior. But, blocking is effective on the individual level and it helps the community. Even if you disagree with this as a strategy (many conversations about this and not trying to start a new one) it is a relatively effective one. We can, and should, work on improving our toolset there, but I feel that
sameAs is just too important to the basic usability of the platform.
@Travis This seems a lot like the way money works already.
everyone "mints" information.
ok, everyone doesn't mint it, but there's really no restriction on who can mint it, you just have to believe in the minter and their creation. Bitcoin proves this.
Identity is central to meaning.
Yes, no-one would care about the dollar if it wasn't the US dollar backed by the US government. There's no gold backing it, or anything else. Not only that, I'm pretty sure there's more US money in circulation than there are paper bills, so some of it is purely ideas backed by the identity of our government.
Similarly, it seem inevitable (to me) that bitcoin is going to fall out of favor, and like any traditional currency it'll be useless, not because anything has changed about it or how it works, but because no-one values the identity of it / behind it anymore.
information is not fungible. If I ask you how to use Patchwork, and you tell me how to tie my shoelaces faster, I will ask someone else until I get the answer I'm looking for.
If you ask someone to convert your Pesos into Dollars and they say they have Yen, you just keep asking until you find someone who has the "information" you want.
Debts are never canceled.
That one i don't get. The example doesn't work for me. " A helping hand does not balance out any number of sandwiches. All value is positive. " .... there's still the debt of paying back the person who helped you out. I help you out, and then you fall on hard times or even die, you're not going to be able to repay your debt. I must be able to accept that fact, and thus cancel it out.
The world is permanently a better place with every transaction.
No, because me choosing to use my limited resources to help someone who doesn't need it, instead of someone who does, makes the world a worse place by not helping the weak and by increasing the divide between the haves and the have-nots.
My disagreements aside, i'm pretty sure there's already a cryptocurrency out there that does most of what you're saying. Each person has their own coin, value of each coin is highly tied to the identity. For example if bob doesn't have services you value, or services that anyone else values, then bobcoin isn't very valuable to you and you might want 100x more bobcoin than alicecoin in exchange for your goods or services. Alicecoin may not have much value to you directly, but if you can trade it for coin that does have direct value for you then her coin has transitive value.
Unfortunately i didn't bookmark it and it's nigh-impossible to usefully search for a cryptocurrency these days. :/
@rtoh & @Wayne I extracted the pieces from Cream to have control-c/v/x work in vim like they do in other os apps.
@Wayne why not use Gvim? You get all the benefits of vim + all the benefits of windowed OS integration.
noooooo. bring us with you. That's what laptops and distributed offline networks are for! ;)
have fun @Tim '0xAFFE' Schumacher
oooh. tell us a cool tale / fact from invertebrate biology or game design :D
also, welcome @Anisoptera
I'm a little saddened at the loss of hobo signs. As far as I can tell they pretty much died out when I was a wee one, or maybe before then. Then again, maybe they're alive and well and I'm just worse at seeing them than I would have expected...
Just rambling here, i hope i am making sense - @Andrei Cociuba
Yes, that totally makes sense, and yes the analogy is a good one. Mountaintop to Mountaintop, vs local repeater to local repeater is like pub server to pub server vs connections across a LAN. In some cases 2 hops gets you a few meters. In some it gets you a few countries.
Right now we have the issue that most everyone is connecting to each other via a few big pub servers. I don't see this changing any time soon, but pub servers will (if things continue according to plan) start changing to be lots of little servers with handfuls of people instead of big monoliths that everyone subscribes to. So, it will move towards the local repeater state of things.
With the current state of the world, yes if the network grows the effectively centralized pub servers are going to be shoving around a huge amount of data. Not only are they not up to the task yet, the bandwidth and storage costs could become onerous. We'll have the same problem of #APRS, and like everything else, we should take a moment to learn from history.
Thanks for bringing up this bit of relevant history that not many folks are familiar with.
Very nice. thank you @SoapDog. The pictures totally make me want to visit. At the same time I usually go out of my way to avoid cities when traveling, especially one as busy as Rio... but then I end up going to them anyway to get my motorcycle (or whatever) serviced by people with a clue. ;)
Welcome @WriterLionel
I hope you find SSB as enjoyable as we do.
can you tell us a little about you? Where do you come from? what do you enjoy?
My advice for beginners is to search for things you enjoy, then start following the people who post about them. SSB is better when you follow a bunch of interesting people.
@Andrei Cociuba SSB clients use Markdown (with a couple minor tweaks). I'd link you to the official docs but they're terrible. The GitHub Flavored Markdown guide is pretty close to what we use and very readable.
@cel Should we take this post to imply that you'll be picking up from there, or that you're doing a brain-dump for others to know what needs to be done before the dive in, or maybe both?
one of the things traditional social media does wrong is that every content created is obsolete as soon as you hit publish...
It would be king to be able to flag certain things as "valueable" and also make them available say via http/rss or http/blog-software etc.
i agree about the obsolete / things not being relevant very long temporally but why bother trying to figure it out? Why not just make it all available? If the pub server's going to have it all in the blockchains anyway we may as well share it.
As for relevance, Google already deprecates old stuff anyway (boo!). Let them spend the resources trying to figure it out.
what about pub servers with web viewers converting user feeds into RSS? @SoapDog
That seems like an easy interim hack. Just converting the markdown to XML instead of HTML instead of requested. BUT... you wouldn't want someone to subscribe to a thread in an rss reader. It'd just stop getting updates and start wasting server cycles on pointless pretty quickly. I think you'd want it to only work when requesting someone's profile AND i would suggest that maybe it should only show you the posts they make that are not replies (also ignoring likes and subscribes and stuff like that). You could also add the rss link tag in the HTML requests for the profile too. The web link for each post in the RSS feed could be to the standard HTML viewer and that would bring up the whole thread (as it already does) if someone was interested in seeing any potential responses.
I just remembered that Feed Readers also cache everything locally, so sbot could be having a very bad day and your experience wouldn't be diminished. You'd still get to see all the posts. You'd ALSO get to use it on your work computer without installing an SSB client with your private key. There are so many good benefits to this hack someone totally should.
What's really cool though is that if you do that, then... [insert great idea which turns out to just a reimplementation of server side caching.]
Maybe just install a squid cache and serve HTTP requests via that?. It just needs to be smart enough to a) never bother requesting fresher versions of blobs b) not waiting very long for sbot to respond c) serving cached version when sbot is dead.
Wait... Why don't pub servers just do that anyway? With or without the RSS hack. If the pub servers were served by apache / nginx / whatever with a cache then sbot could continue to be its flakey self and http(s) requests would remain unaffected.
@Gilles Activity Streams seem (I didn't know about it before) like it'd just be a similar thing to what @SoapDog was suggesting only you convert it to JSON instead of HTML / XML. No? What uses these though? Why should someone bother? (real questions not rhetorical)
@alanz ActivityPub sounds like a bigger undertaking because "It provides a client/server API for creating, updating and deleting content" (in addition to reading). We certainly could do it, but would it be worth the effort? My thinking is that this would, in effect, turn each pub into something that functioned like a mastodon server and thus we'd get all the Mastodon mobile clients suddenly able to use us. That could be cool, but I don't think this would be viable until the
sameAs functionality has been completed. Now, as i think that
sameAs is an inevitability ( @andrestaltz 's mobile client won't be terribly useful without it), one could argue that it'd be worth the effort to start in on this work now. <wild mostly ignorant speculation> it might even be an easier way to get us a mobile client than writing our own. + we'd get a whole bunch of them</wild mostly ignorant speculation>
From the stuff so far i think somebody totally ought to do the RSS idea as suggested by @SoapDog (with the caveats i added) because it'd be such a minor hack with such a huge potential upside.
Two ideas:
Idea #1 RSS Readers
Everyone on #scuttlebutt has a blockchain that is, essentially an RSS feed that we subscribe to in a weird way....
What if pubs would convert people's "feeds" into RSS feeds.
- now folks outside of scuttlebutt can follow you using existing tools
- the number of available readers explodes
- better memory, cpu, and battery performance client options
The obvious argument is that you can't respond to what you read. But so what? For ages now people have subscribed to blogs with RSS readers that didn't let them leave comments even though the web site did. There's still a lot of value in being able to read stuff.
Idea #2 Converting posts to static blog content
(not sure if i've mentioned this one before or not)
What if you wired a pub server into a static blog engine. Now hosting the read-only viewers becomes FAR less resource intensive and the sbot can die / be rebooted / whatever without affecting people's ability to read things on the web?
This plays into the RSS idea too because it's a very similar extraction & conversion.
@Zack is that ...chocolate icing?
I did that, but then used the secret on two different computers, which messed something up, that my messages did not come through. -- @Tim '0xAFFE' Schumacher
that will, in theory, work as long as you don't post on computer 1 and then computer 2 before computer 2 has had a chance to sync up with the feed from 1. I've put more details on how to run it on two computers in this blog post but there's reall not much to it beyond copy the secret and "don't post until they've synced".
still working @jpope, and the tribe has grown while you were away. Welcome back.
I think this is a great idea.
I also think the idea of membership fees is great too. If nothing else it could be used just to guarantee there will always be at least 1 pub server up and running.
Members usually get something for their contributions, so obviously we're going to need annual T-Shirts for anyone who supports with more than x $/€/¥/£/₣ per year ;) Gotta be something high to justify the printing and shipping and actually have money coming in, and oh look, we've just funded the next 20 years of pub servers.
Re what payment platform to use. Keep in mind that the money's probably going to be funneled through to whatever country the org is in and you need to make sure the payment processing place doesn't screw you on currency conversions. I'd try to find someplace where there could be only one conversion: from the currency of the person who is paying to the currency the organization needs. Not donator to platform AND platform to organization.
I wouldn't have even scanned this idea, had you not posted it, but dismissed it immediately, because it comes from Zed Shaw.
That said, I completely disagree with the assumption that everyone on the internet is a "f* asshole", it's patently and demonstrably false. - @moid
Yeah, that's the problem with Zed. He's so ... ascerbic that people just blow off the things he puts out there. The fact that he titled it "saving the internet through hate" also helps put people off of the idea before they even start.
However, I think the idea is still with merit if you can set aside the speaker for a few minutes.
Sounds complicated - @Go-T103
How so? Seems pretty straightforward to me.
- Invite system to help guarantee identity
- public keys to prove identity is same over time
- karma system that only records downvotes
- penalties when karma drops below threshold. In the case of his chat client it was just proof-of-work before sending a message. More work for people with worse karma.
I could see the argument that his particular implementation is "complicated" but i think the fundamental idea is pretty straightforward
A piece of context that I think is missing is that my comments were provided after @Jules emailed me to follow up on a HN post I made concerning the issues I had with claims of security in ssb concerning it being built on npm/nodejs. -- @Blame
I think there's very good reason to be concerned about the quality and security of node modules in general. I see a lot of people who are very new to programming making "useful" modules that get sucked into incredibly large dependency trees that people are either unare of or oblivious to the dangers of.
So, from that perspective, yeah I agree and I can only hope that the crypto packages that SSB uses were written by people who knew what they were doing.
@Andrei Cociuba It grows fast initially. It's downloading the history of everyone within a couple hops, but the blobs (usually images) are all optional and can be downloaded asyncronously, and they are where the real size comes from.
So, for a mobile client you could just come up with a strategy for only pre-fetching the blobs you're likely to need in the near future, and deleting the ones you haven't viewed in a while, or aren't likely to view anytime soon. You can always download them again later when you're next online.
I'm not suggesting that coming up with the algorithm for that would be simple, but the fundamental concept is pretty straightforward. Yes, this means you'd sometimes be missing some images when out of cell or wifi range, but everything else would work.
To be honest, D-Star is something i havent tried yet. I know people who are into it, and i thing the local repeater supports it, but from a distance, it just looks too much like talking on the phone. I am more.... tinkering inclined. Not that i dismiss it, i dont really have time to wrap my brain alfway around itself, let alone d-star... -- @Andrei Cociuba
I think that D-Star actually delivers on the dream of Ham Radio. You pick a repeater, and maybe there's someone there, maybe not, but if they are, they could be anywhere in the world, and you'll be able to hear them perfectly. I was connected with a guy from Whales from the US. Unless you're really into the hardware, and you get very lucky with the weather, that's simply not going to happen with traditional ham radio. I just have the USB D-STAR Gateway. My radio talks to it. It talks to the repeater over the internet.
I don't use it to talk to anyone locally, and my only interest in a local repeater would be to get me to the central repeaters that everyone connects to. Otherwise, it's not much different than just talking over normal radio to local people... UNLESS you're interested in using it to transfer data in an emergency situation. There's some very cool stuff going on in that area, like sending photos down from search planes to the ground crews because cell towers can't keep up with the plane... or there are no cell towers in the area. :)
There's a QRP BitX waiting to be assembled on my shelf for half a year, but work started to get massively crazy, and other personal aspects of my life also leave me little time.
Yeah, I can empathize with that. I wish you the best in finding the time to do the little fun things that aren't "important".
I got my license a year or so ago, and don't have a rig of my own yet.
I was finally able to look it up. Callsign matched name, but the site seems confused. It thinks you got it in "Decembrie 1989".
I'd like to get back into mountain biking and music. I'm also into photography but not sure when I'll next have a chance to get back into that as it does require a lot of time to do it properly. Yourself? - @Visobida
When I have brainpower I have a number of programming related projects (a visual diffing tool, a interruption tracker, teaching people why vim is awesome and how to get more out of it). They're all in various states of not-done-ness.
But my true passion is Overlanding and sharing just how amazing of a world we live in. My wife and I traveled the Americas by motorcycle, and have spent a lot of time exploring the US. I'm actively working towards visiting the rest of the Americas again (not sure what vehicle yet). Just need to finish paying off the current batch of bills and then save a little, but it'll probably be a pretty low-budget trip.
Is there any pruning mechanism for the data feed, or are our .ssb directories doomed grow ever larger? - @Brian Ó 🐟
you can wipe out the blobs at any time. Clients will re-download them as needed. They're not actually part of the post but things referenced by the posts. There's been some discussion about maybe someday writing something to wipe out old unused blobs in desktop clients, but it doesn't seem to have actually been a problem for anyone yet so i don't think anyone's actually doing more than just pondering aloud.
The feeds of each user are each individual blockchains though, so you're going to always have the entirety of everything that individual has said. Fortunately text is very compressible and it takes quite a lot of it to fill up hard drives these days. ;)
Also forget about "Drawing on the right side of the brain" been there when i was younger. It is teaching conformity and mediocrity - @krisa
Yeah I agree with @IBob on this:
It is a set of exercises specifically designed to help with the transition to drawing what is actually in front of us, rather than drawing what parts of our head loudly think they 'see'.
Don't think of that book as "what you should draw" or "how to make traditional drawings" but more as a tool to help you to learn the fundamentals of how drawing works and how to approach the basic principles of it so that you can have the tools to build your own style.
I've seen a lot of "i'm an artist" people doing all sorts of abstract "non-traditional" crap simply because they never learned the fundamentals. I've also seen a lot of people who do understand those fundamentals go off and create amazing things, sometimes abstract, impressionist, realist... I will give you that the book isn't "exciting".
Learning your modes as bass guitarist isn't "exciting". Practicing popping and slapping drills isn't "exciting". Learning where all the harmonics are on the neck, and how to get the quiet ones to ring out is not "exciting", but all of those will dramatically enhance your ability to express the music inside of you if you're a bassist. ( Yes, i used to be a bassist )
P.S. to give a little more background to the book recommendation, my mother was invited to go live with and study under Picasso, based on a post-card she sent him that, like his work, was not even remotely realistic, but based in a firm grasp of the fundamentals. She, of course, took him up on the offer. She produced amazing works, some of which are in museums, in a variety of styles.... but it was all because of years of work doing incredibly boring things, like sitting in museums day after day, trying to replicate the work of the old masters so as to understand how they "captured light" in oil, or any of the other myriad things they have to teach us.
Visual arts can be wild chaotic fun. They can be standing behind a jet engine and throwing paint at a canvas. BUT if you want to truly capture the beauty in your head, or effect emotional responses in other people.... that requires more than a good story. It requires a lot of practice, of "boring" fundamentals.
cc @Marce Coll
Somehow I fucked up my old Identity - @Tim '0xAFFE' Schumacher
re that, i recommend that you now back up the
~/.ssb/secret file and
~/.ssb/gossip.json files of your current identity. I keep mine in an encrypted cloud backed store along with my passwords, since they're kindof the same thing... at least the "secret" file is.
thanks to you @Tim '0xAFFE' Schumacher i have just gone down the rabbit-hole of making a sourdough starter, and confirmed that our bread maker will happily handle converting the starter into a loaf. :)
some thoughts @mix
- absolutely loving the root post only view with 250 chars.
- I like starting on a default channel idea, but it'd be better if i could pick that default
Unrelated to this update (i think) but feedback on it in general
- I have absolutely no clue how to load the settings screen you posted a screenshot of.
- there were a couple times where i was seeing a fair amount of a post (more than 250 chars i think, so i'm not sure what view i was in) but the rest was cut off and it wasn't visually obvious it'd been truncated. I was able to figure it out, but .... more obvious indication of post truncation please.
- notifications are so much nicer than Patchwork
Thanks for sharing the experiment.
Ash was anesthetized again, and got her stitches redone. They used different sutures this time and her belly is much happier about it. Unfortunately this morning she got poked in the eye while trying to avoid taking a pill. I think her cornea got scratched.
This afternoon she cuddled up with her dog for some comfort.
#cats #dogs
Welcome @plomlompom
Thanks for such a detailed "hello" post
Some questions/projects to which I currently seek input (and ssb channels I can subscribe)
It should be noted that channels function more like "tags" than "channels" My advice is to search for the topics that interest you and then follow the people who post interesting things about them. Focus more on the people than the channels and SSB will provide a better experience.
That being said #hamradio and #amateurradio are worth subscribing to. Not sure for the other topics.
Welcome @Nobe
what's your favorite keyboard and car?
I've always found myself afraid of learning about things that may challenge what I think I'm capable of, so this and some of my newer hobbies are attempts at overcoming my fears.
Congrats on actively working to overcome those. Hopefully you'll find as many interesting people here as I have.
Welcome @Casey Marshall
What kind of traveling do you enjoy? Have you spent much time in Big Bend? I keep seeing beautiful pictures from it and really want to spend some some time there.
You probably could attach a video @Enron Hubbard & @Brian Ó 🐟 but i'd recommend against it.
Remember, everyone gets a copy of everything that their client consumes, and videos take up a lot of disk space, combine that with the fact that computers seem to be getting less storage space thanks to the abandoning of spinning platters and I think it is best to be considerate of your fellow scuttler's hard drives and not make them download massive files.
Better to just link to a video. If there's a way to make the video playable within Patchwork i haven't found it. I suspect the best strategy there is for one of us geeks to get off their butts and write something that recognizes youtube and vimeo urls and embeds their players.
In the meantime, I shall link you to this humorous german video entitled "Rhabarberbarbara" https://youtu.be/gG62zay3kck
Welcome @Enron Hubbard
thanks for the entertaining hello post. However, I'm sorry to inform you that you may be mistaken about that Coffee thing. Tea is where the true deliciousness lies. ;)
Sadly, I can't convince my wife of this universal truth, but i must keep working to spread the word of Tea. And, to be clear, I'm talking Black Tea... not that herbal stuff... no, we shall not speak of that. ;)
this is brilliant. The dog, and its pose goes so well with the car.
Welcome @thrrgilag
That's a lot of work for a development "hobby". ;)
What do you do during your non-hobby time?
Welcome @Marce Coll
I'm also struggling to learn how to draw.
I have 2 pieces of (unsolicited) advice, from someone who practically grew up in art classes (my mom was an artist).
- draw every day
- (most important) stop thinking. My mother spent considerable effort working with every student helping them to stop drawing what they thought they were seeing, or what they thought should be there and instead to just draw what they were seeing without letting their brain get in the way.
She recommended "Drawing on the right side of the brain" by Betty Edwards as a good starting book.
Good luck. :)
Welcome @Rodolphe
I am looking for alternatives, and #ssb looks like a promising one. Is anyone of you experiencing a similar situation? How have you managed to bring non-tech relatives to using #ssb?
yes, and I haven't. I've gotten one geeky friend on, but i haven't seen them post anything so i don't think it stuck. I keep linking them to posts on one of the public viewers that i think they'll find interesting.
I don't think it's really an SSB issue so much as an issue of "network effect". Everyone they want to talk to is on Twitter or Facebook and if they came here they would not be able to talk to their current friends and have to find new ones...
Also, i think that people (at least in the US) are finding Twitter and Facebook to be so toxic that the idea of joining another social network is not attractive because they probably fear that it's going to be another source of toxic behavior.
Welcome @Susan Lucina Blair I love the idea of punk rock knitting. Conjures up images of a bunch of purple mohawks, studded leather, head banging, while everyone sits in comfortable chairs knitting and purling... :D
Vermont, USA
Hey @Brian Ó 🐟. I totally missed this. I'm in Bennington (southwest corner of our fine state). My wife and I moved here ... like 6 months ago? Something like that. We were in Cambridge MA for over a decade before that. We're SO much happier here. We'd like to be a bit more rural, but we're really loving our new house, the internet is fast enough to let us work, everything's convenient, and 5 minutes in any direction is absolutely beautiful.
I'm not sure if the fact that I'm the only one who comes up for Vermont is indicative of your tiny scuttleverse, or the tiny scuttleverse, or just people not mentioning their home countries that often, nevermind more detailed things like state. ;) Probably all of the above.
Welcome @Andrei Cociuba
What country do you hail from? I tried looking up your ham Call Sign in a couple places and didn't see it? Also, do you happen to use DStar at all?
Taking a moment to look at the positive
There's been a lot of discussion about dealing with toxic actors, and some people commenting about feeling attacked or unsafe, and that sucks, and we need to improve.
On the positive side, there's some pretty amazing discussion happening about how to handle it, and some of us have radically different opinions about what constitutes a "good" action to take with regards to these bad actors and people aren't getting all riled up at each other.
This is one of the things I love about this community: the fact that most of us recognize the need to protect self and others, and most of us are willing to have real debate with people whose opinions are not at all the same as ours.
That's a pretty unique and wonderful thing to find on the internet these days.
I don't think this is a problem that requires a technological solution. Actually, let me rephrase, I don't think a technological solution will solve this. -- @soapdog
I just posted about Zed Shaw's Utu I think there are some tech ideas that can help address this.
We're now in a world so polarized and so without empathy that it becomes quite hard to disagree with people without entering a shit storm.
I think that's, sadly, quite true online, and offline it seems to be moving closer to true each day.
Blocking, or erecting walls between us don't solve this either but I do understand why people often need to do that to keep healthy. What solves stuff is education.
Yes, but that's beyond the scope of any social network, and I find that online people simply don't want to hear your "education" because "You're wrong!" (cue violent conflict).
I don't think this would fully shield against unwanted drama either as your friends might have a different configuration where they would engage with trolls and you would become ensnared in drama from that. - @substack
Sometimes your friends engage in things that make you uncomfortable or unhappy. Typically you need to decide if you have to unfollow that person online. There's no getting away from that really, but you can minimize it with intelligent filtering that learns what you like to see and don't like to see. When your friend starts going off about some topic you want nothing to do with (or starts arguing with trolls) the filter could simply push it farther away (lower down the stack, hidden behind some extra step, whatever).
What I want, and have wanted for a while, is a control for my own online filters. Not quite sure how to put it to words, so let me try with pictures: -- @ktorn
I would suggest that that's a valid idea but incredibly difficult to quantify (and thus implement). However, a simple bayesian filter of things you find "worth reading" / "interesting" would pretty much get you the same results.
The thing is, I don't think people actually want posts from people who are "different than me" or "similar to me" they want posts that are "interesting" to them regardless of source. If you are a person who likes hearing from differing viewpoints then the things that are "interesting" to you are likely to include posts from people who are dissimilar. If you want posts from people like you then you'd just be training it as an echo chamber and reinforcing posts from people similar to you. (cc @bobhaugen)
I posted details about Zed Shaw's Utu: Saving The Internet With Hate. I think there are some concepts that could be adapted / adopted for use on SSB.
cc @Emile
& @musicmatze
I'm posting this because i believe it's an interesting concept worth at least considering that is relevant to the recent discussions about how to deal with toxic actors. There is a copy of this on my blog that also includes the geeky implementation details.
A lot of people will react negatively to some of the following ideas, because we're raised with the belief that people are inherently good and kind, and in real life this is actually true, but it's not true online. People, even good people, are inherently more toxic and reactive online than in real life, and there's a valid argument to be made to start out from a standpoint of protecting the good actors instead of assuming everyone's a good actor.
While reading this keep in mind that the core idea is a centralized chat server, and some of the ideas would change if applied to a P2P network.
Zed Shaw's Utu: Saving the Internet with Hate.
A high level summary (and paraphrasing) of Zed's talk at DEFCON 15 (in 2014) because I couldn't find a good text version.
Utu is the Maori word for a system of revenge used by Maori society to provide social controls and retribution. Utu is also a protocol that uses cryptographic models of social interaction to allow peers to vote on their dislike of other peer's behavior. The goal of Utu is to experiment with the effects of bringing identity, reputation, and retribution to human communications on the Internet. A secondary goal is wiping out IRC because apparently nobody really likes IRC.
The Utu project is now dead, but its source code can be found on Github.
Part 1: The Idea
Philosophical Foundations
- Strong Identity
- Reputation
- Retribution
If you have and combine those, you can start to implement some controls available in human communications.
Strong Identity
In order to have strong identity everyone has a cryptographic key, but because keys are so easy to create you have to be invited, and you have to have a handshake as part of the invitation because you need to care about who the invitee is. This doesn't work if any jerk can invite any other jerk without consequence.
- Zed certify that he wants to invite Joe.
- Joe certifies that yes, that invite is from Zed.
- Joe takes action to assert that they actually want the invite
- Zed says yup, I really did want Joe to join us.
Rather than associating likes with an identity or posts you associate "hate" with an identity, and over time that hate builds up from many people.
"Wouldn't it be great to punish the dickheads?"
[Transcriber's note: I believe i remember Zed saying something about reputation (and retribution) also tying to the person who invited the bad actor. So, if you invite someone who turns out to be a jerk, a percentage of the consequences would tie back to who invited them. This may be a false memory on my part, but either way it could work.]
(Keep in mind that Utu was intended as a chat network)
As a person builds up hate they have to do some cryptographic proof of work before they can do anything. The more hate they have the more work their computer has to do before they can say anything.
This accretion of hate gives you a weighted social network that you can crunch numbers on. You can figure out who "hates" who, who talks to who, where they come from, and we can start looking at the social problem.
You can say "Hey, if we change the hate model to be this way, or we change the hate model to be that way, how does the social network change? Do the jerks go further away?"
Another alternative to hate is distance, because people aren't prevented from talking to you it just takes them longer.
Zed believes that you need to design your software with the assumption
..that everyone on the internet is a fucking ass hole and they need to be taken down...If it goes on the internet it's social software. It shouldn't be designed assuming everyone likes you... Eventually some person is going to hack it. Eventually someone is going to try and abuse it.
I'm not going to be able to stop everyone...but if the server and the protocol, like from the base of the protocol on up is designed to make it so it's harder... it's not making it impossible, just harder... then what I'm banking on is the predator concept. A predator, when picking two different types of prey, will pick the weakest one.
The entire post, with details on implementation can be found here on my blog if you really care.
In the transition phase the user could be asked: "Hey, 60% of your friends block this person - do you want them, too?"
That would (kinda) shortcircuit the problem a bit. @musicmatze
Yeah, and that could be done at the client level.
I really like that idea but i would expand on it a little.
Once someone crosses that threshold
1) you get a notification banner than only goes away once acknowledge by clicking "Block" or "Do Nothing" (persists after quit and restart too unless acknowledge).
2) If you are friends with them, then there is a small icon next to their nick in your friends list that says "over x% of your friends block this person" when you hover over it (or maybe if you click it)
3) a small banner with that icon and that message (visible in the banner not just when hovered) appears on the person's profile when you view it.
4) people who are "blocked by x% of the people in your network" would also get this small icon next to their nic on every post you see from them (slightly different hover message). Think of it as a mini-trigger warning before you read anything they say. This would be susceptible to Sybil attack though, but as it's not going to auto-block anyone it may be an acceptable risk.
(not sure if the thresholds of % friends who blocked should be the same as the % of people in your networked who blocked, but i'm inclined to say yes)
All of those would happen on the client side only. So NO centralization problem and no Sybil attack. All of these would be something you could toggle in the preferences and set the percentage on (some high default like 60%). This could be implemented in #patchwork (or whatever) without touching the servers.
Have you looked at the trust metric from advogato @Emile
I'm not familiar with the details of it, but it reminded me of Zed Shaw's Utu Discussed in this talk here ("Utu: saving the internet with hate") which got a bunch of drama because of the title, and partially because of it being from Zed Shaw, but it was specifically designed to deal with this problem. I'm re-listening to it now. Will write up a summary in a separate post because i'm not finding a good one in text form anywhere.
Re @dinosaur's proposal @moid. Yup, that exactly why i'm thinking my idea's worth keeping, but now i'm liking @musicmatze 's idea even better.
Each year one of our friends the members of our weekly dinner group to go to an event and a dinner as his Christmas present to us. He provides a bunch of choices and we vote on what we want.
This year the group voted to go see "The Humans" a Tony award winning Broadway play and have a nice dinner at a fancy French restaurant.
The dinner was good. The play was like sitting in on an uncomfortable conversation with someone else's relatives. The end was dramatic in a way that didn't feel, to me, like it fit with the tone, or content of the rest of the play. It was more like "oh yes, i'm a drama student!" Like those indie films where they just scream "I'm an indie art student! Look how unique and artistic i am!" But, that was just the end and one other tiny scene. Both drama bits were well done, but the rest of it was "um... i wouldn't be comfortable if this was my family, never-mind someone else's."
The play took place simultaneously on two floors of a house (split so the audience could see both) and sometimes this was used this well. At one point there was an uncomfortable phone conversation with an ex upstairs while downstairs a couple was kissing on a couch, but then there were periods where like, the dad went upstairs and stood in a dark corner just staring at the opposing corner for like 10 minutes for no reason.
The writing alternated between decent and poor.
I do not get why people like this. A man a few rows back was brought to tears afterwards, just bawling into his girlfriend's shoulder after it ended, presumably by something in the play, and it won a Tony, so it obviously touched some people. My wife said it brought up a lot of things to think about. I was just like "yeah, but i'd already thought about them all..." Maybe i'm just weird, but I did not get it.
Great gift, but meh play.
Welcome @malteof
Still missing out on a big part of the conversation I think, need to follow more people...
Yup. SSB is much more enjoyable when you follow a bunch of interesting people. I recommend searching for topics you find interesting and following anyone who says interesting things about it.
What interests you when you're not thinking about computer stuff?
In one of the recent threads about toxic actors i'd said
Imagine a pub that says "hey, if X% of my subscribers have blocked this identity, then i will to"
and @ansuz pointed out that
That would be vulnerable to a Sybil attack.
They're right, but the more i think about it, and the future of SSB, the more i think this is an idea worth keeping.
Here's my thinking: yes currently it shouldn't be used with the major public pub servers because of the Sybil problem, but everyone seems to agree that we need to move to a world with lots of topic / region / whatever specific small pub servers. If a pub server is invite only (in some controlled manner) or has moderated invites then the Sybil attack isn't a problem, and I believe makes the idea of automated threshold based blocking even more valuable (if the group wants it). There already are pub servers like this and i'd bet that many of their maintainers would be willing to turn on such an option.
Thanks @Teq. That was a very nice summarization of things.
@bobhaugen @Emile is correct, but on the mac there's an even easier way. Just hold down the
e key and you'll get a press-and-hold menu, then type the number you want. In patchwork that works just fine and you can then get @Édouard's nick just fine even in a thread without them.
Your c won't have the
4 option of ĉ. That's because mine's been hacked to support Esperanto characters. On Windows you have to do a combo like what Emile mentioned. The many windows ways are listed in this question on one of the stack exchanges. Sadly, i don't think they have anything as intuitive as press-and-hold.
Welcome @Édouard
I like this line from your site:
I'd like to spend my life guiding complex product systems towards egalitarian ends. Heritage
Unrelated: I think you may want to make a nickname for yourself without the accent over the E. I think many of the US folks won't be familiar with how to make an É (we're very monolingual) and thus will have trouble mentioning you in posts.
We screwed up.
Ash was feeling better and we let her run around a bit today. This evening we checked her stitches, and now she's got a big open wound now :( Fortunately it's not bleeding or oozing or anything like that, and she's already on antibiotics. We cleaned her protective garment and put in some gauze. We'll call the vet first thing in the morning to get her stitched back up. Poor kitty. We feel terrible, like we have let her down.
If we were still in Boston we'd have a 24hr vet we could easily take her to. Out here... well, it can wait until the morning. She'll stay quiet through the night and not move much or bother it while she stays by our feet where we can listen to her. Right now she's curled up under a blanket cave by my leg.
cc #cats
@Tim Schumacher
re bread.... do you use a bread machine or do it by hand? Got a favorite recipe you'd recommend? We make it at least once a week, and love waking up to the beautiful scents of the loaf our bread maker has just produced in time for breakfast.
Welcome @Tim Schumacher
Re. your new pub: A) thanks for setting one up B) I'd suggest searching for how people have been handling the problems with them suddenly eating all the CPU or memory (regular reboots, things to watch memory usage etc). Sorry to inform you that they're not the most stable beasts at the moment.
Re. just enjoying the place: I'd suggest searching for topics you're interested in and then following the people who post interesting things about them. SSB is more enjoyable as you start to follow more interesting people.
Well the thing is if you only want to hear your opinion, there should be rooms for that, private groups, or whatever.
totally agree @inoas
However if you walk on the street you should be ready to realize that other people have vastly different opinions.
I think this is where you and i are talking about different things that seem the same. I absolutely agree with you about the need to be tolerant of differing opinions, but I (and i think most of the folks here) aren't talking about blocking folks for differing opinions. I think this discussion is primarily about how we handle abusive and toxic people, not how we handle reasonable people with differing opinions.
And yes, i agree about taking care to maintain the ability to have differing opinions here. I dunno about confrontation. Confrontation can be good. It can help us to grow when confronted with uncomfortable ideas, but confrontation can have good and bad forms, and I agree that disrespectful confrontation should be avoided.
I stumbled across the traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns subreddit. Unsurprisingly it's a collection of trans memes. Sadly, a metric boatload of them are about depression, isolation, stress, etc....
Just a sad reminder.
The gay_irl and wlw_irl are memes about being gay or lesbian but they're also mostly OMG BOYS YAY! OMG GIRLS YAY!!
Embracing and celebrating vs "God this is hard." interspersed with moments of hope by the folks just starting their journey.
I wish there was something positive, uplifting, and true I could say to the trans folks out there. All I can offer though, is an understanding ear, and a shoulder to cry on and stand by.
#transgender #trans
Ash has been recovering from surgery (we spayed her) and has been demanding lots of snuggles while she heals. She's gotten too large to climb into my wife's fleece shirt so we got one of those baby-wraps for Ash to climb into while my wife works. This was one of those times.
The camouflage thing Ash is wearing is a Suitical recovery garment which I would highly recommend if your furry friend has surgery. Much better than a cone.
Welcome @xxxiiinnn
Care to expand upon what this intersection of art and distributed systems is / means to you?
Welcome @Phoebe Hynes I think you'll find many like minds around here. I suggest searching for things you find interesting and following the people who are talking about them. Scuttlebutt is better when you follow more interesting people. :)
Willkommen bei Scuttlebutt @dirkomatik
Ich habe hier nicht viel Deutsch gesehen. Diese Wörter werden sogar von Google Übersetzer angegeben.
Ich hoffe, Sie finden hier andere Deutschsprachige, mit denen Sie sprechen können.
Sorry to hear that @jer. Looking at it from another perspective I'd say that you probably had it rougher emotionally than Bob (laying off people who counted on you, loosing something you worked so hard for, etc) but at the same time you kind-of do have something to show for it. You took a chance and tried to build something. It failed, and was hard, but you built a company! You got VCs to believe in you (for a while at least)! You caused people to have an income (for a while at least).
It's the difference between the people who dream of writing a novel someday, and the person who actually did. It doesn't matter if no-one read or liked your book. You already accomplished something by writing it (metaphorically). ;)
Please don't think I'm trying to say you didn't have a right to be depressed. I think most people would be in your shoes. I'm trying to say that you DO have something to show for it. You didn't just improve your skillset(s). You got off your ass and followed your dream and convinced others to come along.
You're obviously a driven person, and I assume you work those 50 hrs a week because of some other entrepreneurial project, but maybe you can find some visible thing from that failed company to put in your line of sight and remind you that your daughter is growing up fast, and you can either trend towards Bobdom, or trend towards missing as few of her growing moments as possible. :)
Welcome @Visobida
Other than the distributed web, what kind of stuff interests you?
I've now followed 2 people
I recommend searching the channels for topics you are interested in and then following people who say interesting things. Your experience in the scuttleverse is much improved as you follow more people. much like twitter. Also, don't forget to check out "Extended network" under the "More" pull-down in Patchwork.
At this point, a coordinated response from pub owners (to block bad actors) could buffer against widespread replication of malicious content / characters - @glyph
you know, we could automate that. Imagine a pub that says "hey, if X% of my subscribers have blocked this identity, then i will to" Each pub owner gets to choose what % x is. We can have that be an optional behavior that's turned off by default for maximum permissiveness
Public pubs may have to go. -- @noffle
I don't know. I think if the pubs start listening to the will of the the community they serve they may be able to live even with a large influx of people into the scuttleverse.
There is a difference between accepting (things you consider) bad stuff people do and outright exiling people in the same way that there is a difference between restraining orders and jail-time versus death penalty. -- @inoas
I disagree. I think what @Alanna is proposing is more akin to "hey, i don't approve of X. You can go read / see X if you want but you won't be getting it from me." You're simply not choosing to participate in the distribution of material you don't approve of. Just like I won't recommend that people read racist blog posts and I won't repost racist things on social media, but am happy that others have the freedom to write them.
The effects of blocking, either individually, or by group consensus, is very much the same as a community creating laws. In general societies agree that assault is not allowed. In the US we have agreed that verbal abuse is a form of assault and is illegal. I see the community creating a law that you can't verbally assault someone as roughly equivalent to members of the scuttleverse getting together and saying "this community has decreed that if you abuse enough of us, we will shut our doors to you." We're not even saying "you will be kicked from the network" We're just saying "You'll have to go play in your room, but you can have as many friends in your room as you want."
If you starting to think about those you do not like as "enemies" instead of finding ways to coexist despite differences, you have already lost
Yeah. I agree. At the same time, you don't tell an abused wife that she needs to find ways to continue to "coexist" with her husband who likes to beat her every night. No, you tell her to get out, get safe, and get a restraining order against him.
Could it be that agreeing to have (yield and request) certain liberties comes with prices to bear things (to tolerate things) you don't like to a certain level?
I think that in general people are not going to block others just because they hold differing views or say things they "don't like". They're going to block other people who they find offensive and/or abusive. There are a number of folks here with whom I disagree, but they put those views out there in a respectful way and listen to others, so I don't block them. I don't believe this is an issue of learning to co-exist with people of differing opinions and perspectives. I believe that this is an issue of protecting your mental health and well being, and deciding to try and protect the people around you.
You may not agree with what I personally find to be a good action for protecting people, but I alone won't have any notable effect by blocking someone. If the community blocks someone then there's an effect, but it's from the voice of the community, and it would have to be a strong majority of us to actually cut someone off in any meaningful way (or all the pub servers).
The Guy Who Loved His Work
(or Why A Healthy Work-Life Balance Is Important)
During the dot com boom I worked at a company with a developer who loved his work. The problems were challenging, and we really valued the things he produced. Everyone who worked late late got dinner, and sometimes he'd work so late that he ended up sleeping by his desk. Bob (not his real name) wasn't pushed to do this. He just really liked his job.
After about five years the dot com crash hit. A third of the company was laid off. Then another third of the company was laid off. Then everyone left was laid off and all the assets were sold to IBM.
Bob was left with a five year gap in his life. He had nothing to show for that time. No real relationships. No software he could point to. It had disappeared into the bowels of IBM. I assume he became a better programmer during this time, but everything else suffered.
Bob could have been spending those hours writing cool software for himself. He could have been helping open source projects that were important to him. He could have spent time with the people he cared about. He could have found new people to care about. He could have been falling in love.
Day after day, most of us help someone else's company to thrive, and many of us forget that it's not our company. It's not our "baby". We don't get rich if it succeeds, and we suffer when the people in charge make bad decisions. Your company may get sold, or implode. The people in charge may decide to abandon the thing you've devoted your time to. Even in a healthy company, your work rarely makes the world a better place. It rarely makes the people in it healthier, or happier.
Our time on this planet is too limited, and most of our waking hours go to someone else. They aren't devoted to improving our lives or our happiness.
Don't let yourself wake up one day and discover you're another Bob. Put in the hours you agreed to when you signed up, and then go do something for you.
#programming #work #mental-health
a) cool @Josiah
b) why tags and channels?
Why not rework channels as tags since that seems to be what channels really are in practice?
Welcome @microwave
I'm formally a Frontend Engineer working remotely.
What are you doing now?
Also, if you don't mind my asking, did you transition while working remotely? And did the remote part help make it easier or just make you feel more isolated?
I recognize that this is pure ignorance talking, but hopefully one of you #myco geeks can enlighten me. That company's site talks about how resource intensive real leather is, and yes, there's some chemical evil that goes on with tanning leather that we can improve on, but I can't help but think that people aren't killing cows and pigs for their leather. I'm thinking we eat so many that there's just leather to spare and if we don't use it we're just being wasteful.
Honest question: what's wrong with that thinking ^^^?
Well your liqueurs certainly look nice. How did you end up doing that @flash ?
Also, welcome, and thanks for the dad joke.
I think we're mostly crossing our fingers that they don't in the short term. Long term i think that at least part of the solution will come from technological improvements that give us private groups and topic based pub servers.
Then they can come and be all gross in their own corner of the world and the rest of us can simply block their pub server(s).
Realistically there's no stopping a determined malicious person from just signing up to public pub servers too, but I think that the fact that blocking someone also blocks your replication of them is a wonderful feature though. If the community decides that someone is undesirable then it'll be a lot harder for their messages to get out.
poor kids. they don't look particularly happy :(
How long they been in "the clink" @Emile ?
@Luandro are you actually in the park or just very close to it?
Hopefully I will make it to Brazil on my next big trip. It feels wrong to have driven across South America without visiting it.
Right now I would call scuttlebutt secure not because it is particularly difficult to defeat the security but because it is not worth much. -- @Jules 's friend
Just to be clear, there are 2 forms of security at play here and i don't think that statement applies to both. Public messages are transmitted with encryption but stored in plaintext on your hard drive. Private messages are encrypted, sent with more encryption (I think) and then stored encrypted on your hard drive, and it is using modern encryption algorithms to do that so... Also, everything is signed so you know that it came either from the person who it claims to be from, or someone who controls their computers.
I feel that your friends statement doesn't really reflect the reality of the situation, and if they think it's just "security through obscurity" I would suggest they don't actually understand how encryption is used in SSB (even if they are very knowledgable about encryption in general).
sorry @indigo the problems you noted with signing up have started this down the path of techy stuff you specifically said you're not interested in. But, don't worry. not all conversations lead to tech talk. Just search for mycelium if you want an example ;) i have no idea why people have shown such interest in it, but they certainly seem to enjoy talking about it.
Like, don't count the invite accept successful until you know for sure the pub has followed. -- @Dominic
I think that would be a good stopgap measure if nothing else. Maybe (during stopgap) combine it with an error message that says something like "Sometimes the pub servers have trouble following you back, but we're working on it. Please try again" -- but only if it did whatever currently counts as success but has not registered as following you back.
This is assuming the generated invite codes would be re-usable. If not we'd probably have to mention that you'd need to get a new one or... something.
me too @sdellis . mostly I remember how you didn't feel you needed to learn a bajillion js tools and frameworks to feel like you were building something good.
that sounds like such a downer. There's still a lot of good we can do with simple. I just think many of the current generation have lost sight of just how much you can do with so much less.
reading what you said there @Archagon, and i have to say i think some of that energized community is alive and well here on Scuttlebutt. I hope you find that here too.
I guess @minikomi would be my smaller quieter sibling. ;)
Hey @captjack. Welcome. Sorry no-one said hi before now.
What kind of stuff are you working on in your entrepreneurial endeavors?
you're not the only one @indigo. The pub servers have been pretty flaky lately with regards to that. Some days they work well, some days... not so much.
The core maintainers are aware (there have been discussions about it lately), but none-the-less it sucks, and is something we need to get past. -- cc @mix just for awareness of recurrence
Is that what you're asking?
Kind-of @Rivet. I was more concerned about being able to actually feel the edge of the brass. consequences being discomfort after leaning a fleshy bit against it for a while, and things getting stuck along it: dirt, grit, papers as you try to slide them around. I would assume you could make the resin very flush with it to address that, but it also sounds difficult to get right. I dunno. I've never worked with resin.
I covered a related aspect of this in the (#)butt-sumaries a month ago
one user ended up using the ability to assign someone a name you recognize them by, as a means for warning themselves, and others about someone with potential trigger warnings, but not going so far as to block them.
the thread that it came from was interesting but it also exposed the potential for bullying and abuse so it's definitely something we need to address before any bad actors decide to abuse it.
what did you do to displease it so and create that look @Frank Pfeift ?! ;)
That looks amazing @Rivet . Really great job.
It looks like you've got a ... metal? edge along the front edge too. What are you doing to smooth the transition between surface material and edge material?
How would people here feel about having a pub asking for a donation before giving an invite?
I think it's a great idea @elavoie, especially with the aspect of it being a tool for funding ssb development, BUT i don't think you should do it until the reliability issue has been addressed. That's also something that wasn't listed in ongoing tasks. Sbot isn't just a resource hog. From what i've been reading, and from the reliability issues i'm seeing when attempting to connect to most of the pubs... the bot just goes down, or gets hung or any of a number of things that have been documented elsewhere.
The thinking is this: Even if it is just a donation, there is still the mental association that "hey, i have you money for this thing, it should work." And our pubs just don't have the reliability for that.
I also like @noffle 's suggestion about adding transparency about users and such.
If the number of users in the Pub would go over 4000, the users would be invited to join another one, with a different Pub maintainer.
I'm not so sure about this. The problem is that it assumes that all pubs are following the same people. If i switch pubs then it changes what stuff is in my feed. I don't have a good way of knowing what I'll stop seeing if i switch pubs. If all the pubs are following the same people (everyone) then they're probably going to have similar loads and they're definitely going to require massive hard drives as content expands.
That may seem daunting but the whole process can be bootstrapped with the personal bank account of a single maintainer and progressively migrated as the number of contributing users grows.
If successful, that's going to be a problem come tax time. It'll all count as personal income (at least in most countries). What would make more sense is if a) ssb had a non-profit behind it (it may already) and if the payments all went to that non-profit and then the non-profit sent the 10% (or whatever) back out to the pub owner.
if the goal is truly to support ssb (not personal profit) then this is much better becausue a) it guarantees ssb gets the money and b) doesn't require effort on the part of the maintainer, and we don't have to worry about someone setting up a pub and wandering off and never giving the money to ssb. Even if they're not being malicious and spending the money they may just forget about it for a while and that money doesn't do anyone any good.
I'm not just talking hypothetically about wandering off and forgetting about the money. This exact thing happened with a Linux credit card a while ago. The people who set up the card forgot about it, and one day found they'd earned over a million dollars from the tiny percentage they got from each transaction. That money was intended to go to Linux software development but instead was just sitting in a bank account. I believe they did the right thing when they realized what had happened, but still...
so you can't subscribe to a thread.
correct @Seb , but if the thread involves people you follow it will pop up to the top of your feed every time someone posts to it.
This is actually kinda cool because i've seen posts from months, or years ago, that i was totally unaware of but then someone i follow posted on them and "oh cool, what's that thread" :)
I was going to say pull-down too @gmarcos87 but @SoapDog beat me to it.
BUT until such time as pubs announce their urls (if they have one) in some way I think just having a text box is probably the best solution. Once they do that though you can start to do interesting things like have it automatically only choose ones that have been seen recently when you make the link.
It could also randomize which one it used to help keep load down (which seems to be a concern with the servers these days)
Imagine a #ssb pub that reacts to all UDP #sbot broadcasts / announces by fetching all feeds, messages and blobs of that peer / the peer has to offer.
so... a pirate ssb box + auto-follow anyone who joins the network?
Welcome @sdellis
I think your intro would be totally true for me too. I recently crossed the mark of doing web dev professionally for 20 years and for that whole year kept thinking "Holy crap. I've been doing this for 20 years!" Which was quickly followed by the thought that i'd been doing this almost as long as many of my coworkers have been alive.... and then I felt old.
Are you in that "Oh my, it's almost been 20 years!" state?
welcome back @Max!
this seems interesting but doesn't sound like a valid alternative tech to ssb because it tries to make sure everyone has all the network, and if we ever start scaling up in users that would be a nightmare because no-one would have enough disk space.
Yes, we went down this rabbit hole about a month ago . the Thread kind-of got sidetracked with a discussion about channels vs tags (scroll down until you see @andrestaltz 's post) I think the consensus was basically yeah they're really tags, but there were some additional thoughts, and we need someone to actually do the work to move forwards on this.
is there a way to show parallel processes that you think is amazing?
"amazing" no. But i think "swim lanes" are the best visual tool i've seen for managing multiple parallel work paths for recipes: what's going on on the stove vs what you're prepping at the moment.
I'd note that I have a very active hatred towards traditional recipe writing and write very detailed step-by-step recipes for anything that I think is worth cooking again, because I think no-one should get screwed up by recipes the way i do. E.g. "now add the chopped onion." ... "Wait? When the hell was I supposed to chop the onion?! You didn't say anything about chopping the onion and now i have 30 seconds to chop it before i have to do the next step!!!" A typical four paragraph recipe ends up being 4-5 pages when I'm done with it and makes very few assumptions about the reader's knowledge of cooking. I haven't done the visual components yet but I'm planning on using swim lanes.
So, I'm definitely interested in your work here.
on a related note: I usually write my recipes with optional branching instructions, so "...if you can handle multi-tasking (or have a helper) you can do X now. Otherwise...." BUT when doing it myself i'll typically just prep everything (chopping all the things and dividing them and the spices up into mise en place bowls (one for each "add x, y, and z" action)) and THEN start the actual cooking.
Reminder: @butt_summarizer is now going to be posting the #butt-summaries (which sadly i failed to tag this week's thread with initially). So, if you're not following that identity, and like the summaries, please start following it. :)
As always, suggestions for improvements are appreciated and can be PM'd to either account, but i'll see them on the @masukomi account faster.
Sorry @Rick someone else work ended up taking it before I saw your response. Also, yes i disappeared for a few days which didn't help but I still think he raised his hand sooner.
I will say that regardless of who you have hosting your email server having a humorous domain for it is very enjoyable when you have to give it out over the phone.
P.S. It probably wouldn't have made a difference since the coworker has real-time communication with me during the day and I only have SSB running some of the day... but for the future: since the SSB clients don't do notifications @ mentions help folks to notices posts because it bumps the number on the Mentions button in Patchwork. :)
what about parallel processes @nanomonkey ? Frequently there's "Place x on the burner and bring to a boil. While that's heating up, chop the celery.
So, we got rid of our Vanagon primarily because it was pathologically incapable of not having something break on it every 2 weeks, but also because we were living in Boston and wrenching on it in the street was just not workable. We're perfectly happy to do our own work but we're slow when we're working on a vehicle we're new to, and don't want to screw up.
We farmed it out to a not-local mechanic because we didn't consider working on our street realistic. Not-local because it was a diesel which is great for fuel mileage, but even rarer than most Vanagons, and it had a Frankenstein engine and transmission, and no-one wanted to touch it.
Before we sold it we acquired the last OEM windshield washer pump in the US, and I believe the last available window crank runs (until more show up in junk yards) that aren't from China. We also acquired many from china because most were crap and didn't work so you had to get a bunch and hope one worked.
Which is a long winded way of saying "I feel your pain." and noting that sometimes farming it out isn't a lot better. It cost us a fortune and left us carless for many repeated stretches of time.
This is also why I'm not allowed to buy the Toyota FJ40's I so desperately want to drive around the world in.
This is lita, rising up from the back of her favorite sitting spot (my wife's chair).
Hey @Ítalo Nascimento Welcome. I work with a guy from São Paulo.... I think. Now i'm questioning that statement as most of the people I work with that aren't in the USA are in Uruguay... Anyway Good to have you. Sorry about the delayed hello, and what kind of Ukulele is that and are you any good at it? Mine's from Mainland Ukulele and I'm not very good at it... yet.
is one of those people you @Emile or is that just a picture from that kitchen?
Yup. I don't believe any of the clients implement notifications yet, but yes it's come up, and yes @juul , @Seb that's why folks tend to mention each other in replies so that when they boot up patchwork (or whatever) they see a number in mentions and know there's something specific involving them.
welcome @wowcrab
What interesting, or boring, things should we know about you?
I like the look. It's... a little bit content and a little bit, "hmm... No this just won't do. What shall i do next..."
#cats #cat-pics
Now the problem is that i know my way around linux and i can administer servers. The question is how we could make this more approachable and mainstream.
Well there's the piratebox + scuttlebutt which basically has all the necessary parts and then some. I think if you throw out the wireless access point stuff and just have a disk image that'll load up scuttlebutt on a Raspberry-pi you're basically good to go. You'd also need some scripts to kill and restart the process regularly because sbot sometimes looses its brain and takes all the cpu or just stops doing anything...
I think that'd be enough to get it "mainstream" Buy a pi. stick this image on the SD card, stick it on your network. The end. It's a bit geeky still but you are talking about running a server so...
Is this just bad idea? I am i crazy wanting this?
No. I'd like it too. I'd also like to see a nice responsive web UI that i could just point my phone or laptop at.
Basically I want @Fenwick's single-user, self-hosted web client to be done, or at least to have enough features to switch to.
At one point i started to think if using android and actually using the phones would not be better for regular people.
I've pondered using old phones for this, but I think no for normal people. You'd have to root whatever device and set up services that the default OS on the phone is specifically designed to prevent.
I mean why we can't have UX of mobile phone for little home server?
Have you seen the UX for the Pi-Hole ? it's pretty nice. I think the phone thing is a red herring. It's just that people designing phone UIs tend to care more and / or have more of a clue about UX than linux server geeks. Historically geeks who work on server stuff are crap at UI and UX.
Welcome @Manny
In general I think you'll find responses less... "real-time" around here. I'm glad you got it working.
@happy0 thanks for that PR. It's obviously doing its job. :)
Is anyone interested in owning the
fancypants.email domain name? I'm not using it and will transfer it to anyone who wants it.
Referring to pubs as servers strikes me as not quite correct, as it implies a client/server architecture. - @moid
true, but from a functional perspective, they're servers. Just like git and Github. We could just decided that "bob's computer" is the one we're all going to push and pull from, but from a practical perspective everything becomes easier if everyone agrees on a central computer to sync via and that box needs to be always on, which functionally, makes it a server. It's even easier if we use an actual server to host one of those git clients.
And, the pubs are not just practically and functionally servers, they're literally servers too. They're servers that just happen to be running a P2P client.
We, like everyone using git with GitHub, have something that is effectively a client-server architecture.
I think we need to embrace the fact that this P2P network is successful because of a network where servers act as reliable central hubs for distributing our communications. Distributing invites out of band doesn't change this.
This is cool @Fenwick . It's something i'd consider using once you've got more features going, because it gives me in-page search and makes it easier to use multiple computers (or my phone).
My concerns are the same ones I have with regards to the pubs staying up. That is to say, they don't, and need to be regularly restarted, and I'd be concerned this would have similar issues.
If you could make a one-click installer for it (once it has all the basic features) I'd seriously consider throwing it up on digital ocean.
Question: does it store everything in the ~/.ssb dir? It'd be extra cool if it did because then you could use it as a local client too (as folks do with Patchfoo).
the feeds are not intertwined.
to expand on that, every user has their own personal blockchain.
You can't take away your data from a pub. Can you?
nope. But that's more because it's a decentralized system and once you give something out you have no mechanism to force the remote entity to get rid of it. Thus the lack of "delete".
do pubs also have an append-only log of what they've done (asked for, told about, saw, etc) or do they store individual trees and add to those?
I don't think so @kyrtdfh, but i'm guessing. My understanding is that for each person you follows the client (or pub server) knows what the most recent post is (easy with individual blockchains) and when it connects to someone who knows about that person it asks them "do you have anything more recent than X for this person?" and downloads the new additions if it does.
I'm undecided about the idea of needing to replace the standard ones with our own @Angelica, but i have definitely been wanting emojis that we don't have. I think this is partially due to our work Slack having a ton of custom one's we've added that are just so useful.
The practical side of me would like to see you, or anyone, spending the time to figure out what emoji SSB needs / wants that we don't already have, tackle those, and then maybe tackling the reimplementation.
from me. "eat poop you cat" has brought me a lot of laughter. @dinosaur
Slightly concerned about the drawing aspect of it though. Drawing with mice .... kinda sucks. Then again, maybe that would just help with the downward spiral into silliness that makes this game so great.
This presumes that recruiting new users is a priority. - @Richard D. Bartlett
@haileycoop had similar thoughts.
I disagree.
I believe that if we are going to allow new people to come in we should not make them experience frustration. We should give them the easiest possible onboarding experience. We want the people who do choose to come here to say "oh, that was easy, and look at all these nice people having interesting conversations" not "O M G This thing doesn't even work"
Think of it like your house. You stick up a no tresspassing sign and not let anyone in who doesn't already have access. Or you can choose to let visitors come over. If you DO choose to let visitors come to your house you don't leave the pit trap in the driveway. You fill it in so that they don't die on the way to your door, or show up severely wounded and kinda-pissed off that anyone suggested they come over.
Now, just because you have removed the pit trap doesn't mean you also have to start encouraging everyone in town to come over. You can have both. You can have a nice onboarding experience and not promote that anyone use it.
The reality is that people can join the network and we do have public pages and posts showing people how to do it. None of them say "beware of pit trap". ;)
i've come to realize that ssb's high barrier to entry has been a feature not a bug - @dinosaur
There's a difference between a high barrier of entry and broken buggy software. ( Sorry that's not intended as a put-down to the great work that's come so far, just factual ) I use a lot of software that has a high barrier of entry. My day job's product has an extremely high barrier of entry (months of work and sometimes tens of thousands of dollars) but the tools I use, and the tools I make, all try and make the work required to get past that just the work that's required to get past it, not additional work to compensate for software bugs.
To @Teq's point. Yeah. Some days are better than others with regards to pubs. I think i just hit a particularly bad point where they were all being flaky in one way or another.
I did even consider hosting an ssb pub server just so that next time around it isn't such a hassle.
Is there an easy tutorial for that? -- @inoas
I tried to get easy-ssb running. it was.... not pretty and after asking around i found out that it's not really being actively maintained.
ssb-pub has a one click installer which worked perfectly for me but it's a command line only server app. I believe @dinosaur has some stuff that he runs on his that kills the process when it inevitably eats up the ram or takes up the cpu. I don't know if that's part of the on-click installer or not.
BUT considering dinosaur said they're still having issues keeping it up, i wouldn't personally go there. Also, i really want to help the public with a nice easy UI not set up an invite only thing or the extra geeky "here's a random string of characters on a page" like some have on the pubs listing page.
The other important thing is to educate very early that things are append only and that you should be careful with whatever profile picture you upload as it cannot be deleted afterwards.
That one is easy.... well... easier. I think that's just a matter of coming up with the right wording and adding it to the Getting Started guide. And yes, to future "how-to" stuff too, like the screencast I was making.
How about starting a pub directory/monitoring service which tracks uptime/health stats for each pub?
Yeah. That'd be a great idea. It'd solve a huge problem right now, and in the future when the pubs are stable i believe it'd still be useful because people wander off, get disinterested, and stop paying for servers they're not using. So, servers will die even if the software is rock solid.
I've been thinking about that idea a lot lately. I think i could quickly hack something together with a cron job and a bash script that regenerates a web page every ten minutes. As soon as I think that i think "there must be a solution to this already", but i don't think there is. At least, I don't think there's one that'll just make a page of "things that are up right now", that we'd want to point people to.
side note: I've abandoned doing the screencast now just because I don't think it's a good idea to make a video to show people the "happy happy" land when they're just going to loose metaphorical their feet to land mines along the way.
I wish i had the mental bandwidth to help with the code, but i'm not even keeping up with my own code projects
I just saw this @Luandro, and it's amazing. I'd love to visit your place someday.
Also, I've wondered for years what luffa were before they became bathroom sponges. I always assumed they came from the ocean.
The water does look... frustrating. Have you decided on a plan for keeping it out yet?
it looks pretty. Are the raised corners for speakers?
Imagining myself using it I think that the curve is going to be too deep. Mine has a slight curved inset in it, and while I do appreciate it, it has cut down on available space for my keyboard in front of my monitor (partially due to a huge monitor stand) but even if i switched monitor stand I wouldn't want to be any closer to the monitor. Making a deeper curve would force me to be closer because my hands would be that much farther forward.
The manufacturer of mine doesn't offer a curved inset anymore but i can take a picture tomorrow if you'd like.
The problem with resizing images would be that it takes up more space than just referring to the existing hash, no? - @nanomonkey
yes @mix mentioned to me that linking to the original would result in no additional download, but my goal wasn't space savings. My goal was formatting. It's one thing to write a post about your shiny guitar and have the picture about it be a huge visual block in the post. It's completely different when the shiny guitar is just a mention in a post about many other things.
It's like going topic, topic, topic SHINY GUITAR!!!!!!, topic, topic.
Check out the difference (visually) between Richard's shiny guitar post and what you see above. Patchwork is stretching out landscape photos to fit the width but it appears to only scale portrait photos downward. So, my strategy worked for some of the pics but not others. Landscape photos are just going to be big. I'm not sure that scaling photos UP is a good strategy for Patchwork because it's just going to result in making the photos look worse, but it is what it is.
So, I dunno where that leaves things. Do i keep doing it for portrait photos? Probably. Definitely not for landscape.
On a related note i tried to make the small photos links to the big photos but i couldn't figure out what the right thing to link to was. "Copy Link Ref" on a photo doesn't seem to produce a valid link ref... or what it produces does't work when i shove it in the search field, so I dunno.
What is it that makes it feel that way? Is it the bare-all tone of so many messages; the breadth of insanely niche topics of discussion; the careful courtesy? There's a kind of naivety -- in the best possible way -- to this that is really striking. - @Sam Gwilym
For me "the careful courtesy" is a huge part of it. The courtesy, and general acceptance of the people one the network who are different from you.
And yes, I love the diversity. I love encountering @glyph's fungus posts which make no sense to me but are fascinating none-the-less.
Can you see anything technology related that would create/enforce filter-bubble effects on scuttlebutt? - @inoas
yes "create", but not "enforce". As @mijkl said we're free to implement our own viewing algorithms, and the different clients definitely do that.
BUT @mnzaki and I were discussing the possibility of using bayesian filtering to highlight "interesting" things and bubble them to the top. I believe that doing this could result in a a filter bubble but it's highly dependent upon how the user chooses to interact with it. That is to say, you could get a filter bubble if you a) only trained it to like a narrow category of things and b) only looked at the things that were highlighted by the algorithm, thus causing a self-reinforcing loop.
I don't believe it'd be a real problem in practice. I would like to think that people are not that focused in what they find interesting, but i don't know for sure. I've rewritten this paragraph like 4 times now, each time getting a little less confident. I know for a fact that this approach can provide huge benefits to dealing with data overload, and not wasting time reading things that just aren't interesting to you. At the same time, I'm starting to think that we should keep this concern in mind if we go forward with it.
Love the pics, love the iterative improvement every week, thanks for your contribution @masukomi! - @Richard D. Bartlett
a ) thanks
b ) I should point out that the iterative improvements are the direct result of people making suggestions. Images seem obvious, but they just hadn't occurred to me until @mix (i think) suggested it. I kinda feel bad about that, because there were some very cool images from new people in past weeks.
If any of you has an idea for things that might improve these summaries please message me.
Right now, getting started with SSB is an exercise in frustration
I set up a new profile today for the (#)butt-summaries. People shouldn't have to listen to my personal crap cat-photos, rants, etc just to get the summaries.
I figured while I was at it I'd make a "getting started" screencast for new folks.
The process was painful in the extreme. Frankly I'm amazed anyone signs up or sticks around long enough to say hi in (#)new-people.
All but four of the easy-ssb pubs failed to respond on the web (503s mostly). ALL of them failed to respond when I used "Join Pub". With some the dialog disappeared after a long wait but nothing happened. Some "could not connect to sbot".
ALL of the ones with an invite code listed on the pubs listing page responded with "could not connect to sbot".
Heropunch (on the 2nd or third attempt) was the ONLY one that not only accepted my invite but ALSO followed me back. Two others accepted my invite (patchwork started following them at least) but didn't follow me back which would leave a new person shouting into a black hole and wondering why no-one responds to them. After many attempts with many of the pubs i finally got a 2nd one to follow me back. Mostly just "could not connect to sbot" errors.
Once I did start getting gossip I encountered the following problems:
- It seemed to download in fits and starts. It looked like it was done, but
wasn't actually. Active channels would stop churning. Downloading progress bar would go away. Indexing progress bar would go away.... and then a minute later it would all start up again.
- I went to (#)cats because it seemed a good safe place to show how to look at a
channel and finding people to follow, but I got "Fetching images..." which a) took forever. Then it gave me a broken image icon. I restarted patchwork, and went back to (#)cats saw the fetching images again and then got images after a couple seconds.
- seeing messages about a post being out of range or the person possibly blocking me even though I know they were 2 hops away and no-one had blocked the new account yet.
Right now I think making the pub servers work reliabily should be top priority. If there's anyone interested in making that happen I think it'd be a great expenditure of the grant money.
Distributed social networks have a bad enough rep for geeky things that get abandoned and aren't worth bothering with. Having one that you can't even get on because half of the servers are down and the other half give you errors is not a good first impression.
Personally, on the server side, I'd love to see a really bare-bones lightweight implementation in in Rust (or something similar) with a boatload of unit tests to guarantee that that core works perfectly. No plugins. No fancy stuff. Just something that stays up, reliably follows you when you give it an invite, and shares gossip.
On the client side... we've got to do something about the progress bars failing to address the reality of the initial sync and whatever's going on with the images.
A getting starting guide shouldn't have to include disclaimers about the servers going down a lot and how you need to occasionally restart the client to see pictures... Hell patchwork doesn't even consistently load text. Frequently a link sits there with an infinite "Loading..." no matter how many times i go back and click on it, but if search for the hash it loads it instantly.
I'm concerned that since everyone here already has a working install, and has already signed up with pub servers we're assuming that it'd work for new folks too. There were a couple posts recently in #new-people talking about these things. One listing all the servers that were dead and one talking about how none of the pubs had followed them and they couldn't figure out why no-one was responding to their posts.
#scuttlebutt #patchwork
Hmm I tried resizing the images to make them smaller (not take up huge visual blocks of the thread) but apparently Patchwork just stretches some of them out and makes them look worse. ugh.
My apologies to @nicoHz and @Stuart John Fox for low-rezifying your pics. Next time i'll just link to the original image.
Community Geeky Intersection
@myf had some questions about switching between patchfoo and patchwork.
@ev linked to the videos from their talk about "Designing decent(ralized) social networks with secure-scuttlebutt"
@mix and @matt introduced the idea of "scuttle-shell" ("name to be bikesheded later"). The idea being to create a back-end that runs on your system and all clients connect to. This, of course, opens up a lot of possibilities, like running multiple clients at the same time, and bug fixes benefiting all clients at once.
New People
@chadoh joined us from Pensylvania, USA. They teach web dev and have created "An intentional living app that shows you a zoomed-out view of your whole life at once, to help you chart storylines and create meaning."
@nicoHz is a bird lover and programming social worker
(other pretty bird pics in the thread)
@dajbelshaw is a "Open Educational Thinkerer" who said a brief hello.
@Omega9 is "Some kind of a musician."
@Stuart John Fox told us about a job they love and some of their travel plans.
@ilã is "a visual artist and (very) infrequent programmer". SSB reminded them of using MOOs in the 90's.
@Verbman hails from New Zealand, is fascinated by institutions or "distributed thinking structures" as he call them and gave us a nice long hello.
@cam says,
I've been an advocate for decentralization and blockchain technologies. I consider myself a decentralist, in that I see the political world in terms of centralized power and decentralized power.
along with other non-geeky points of interest in their hello.
@Dr.T.Error hails from Germany and isn't "...so much into social networks but this whole scuttlebutt-thing hit a sweet spot." They gave us a short but informationally dense hello post.
If you're a new person who said hello in (#)new-people but don't see yourself here, it's just human oversight on the author's part.
post 2 of 2
This week in Scuttlebutt
(butt-summaries #7: Feb 19-25 2018 part 1)
NOTICE: after this week, posts to #butt-summaries will be coming from @butt_summarizer That way you don't have to listen to @masukomi going on about random things that have nothing to do with the summaries. Please follow @butt_summarizer to make sure you can see them going forward.
Followup / Missed Items
Apparently I missed a bunch of new folks last week. I can only blame all the hard alcohol I didn't drink. ;)
@nicoHz joined us
… because I think it's a questionable idea to connect people through a huge centralized social network, especially in context of free powers of capital - and I've heard some good from #scuttlebutt - decentralized network and friendly people ...
@taku0 is an emacs & swift geek who joined us.
@Sam Deane is "... an indie Mac/iOS developer living in the Outer Hebrides." and is currently looking for "interesting projects".
@richard is "...an anarchist sailor like a few other people here, and [they] worked on IPFS for a while..." They're currently based in Montréal.
Totally Random
(#)cats saw Querty taking care of their human
(#)dogs saw a corgy smiling in the snow
(#)birds found a long-tailed tit, and a blue heron and another tit
Birds wins this week.
@Richard D. Bartlett put forth his contender for "Shiniest Guitar on Scuttlebutt"
@SoapDog enjoyed scuttling and sharing pictures in the 'verse while his city flooded and left them without power.
@pod is thinking about starting a niche media outlet for French speakers in Luisiana, USA.
@Cusco is getting about as far off-grid as you can, and shared some pictures and Portuguese captions. It's pretty amazing to think that someone can live that far in the woods, with no net connection, and still participate in our online community. Yay SSB.
@cblgh is wondering what we can do to make decentralized stuff "cool".
post 1 of 2
My only pressing question at the moment is: how does one create a channel? Did some searching for this and was not able to find it.
the thing to keep in mind is that they're called "channels" but in practice they really just work like "tags".
unrelated: just discovered that "ã" is not a character that is typable through normal means on a US distribution of macOS. This shouldn't be a functional problem for you though because the auto-completion in clients like Patchwork should bring you up with just typing "il". Then again if we get a lot of people whose usernames start with "il" it may be a big list to arrow through... Just a thought. Not sure what the "right" solution is, or if there even is one. I don't think any computer system gets this right. Esperanto's a "supported language" in macOS and yet I still can't type any of our hat characters (ĉ, ĵ, ŝ, etc.) without hacking my system files.
Welcome @Stuart John Fox
Congratulations on finding a job that's meaningful to you.
I'm interested in hearing more about your travel plans. My wife and I have done the Americas (all of them) on motorcycle, and I'm thinking of doing them again in 2019. We love talking with like-minded folks and may have something worth sharing if this is your first big international trip.
Welcome @Omega9 .
It'd be nice if you added some of the "about" info from your web site to your profile here as well as links to your site and discography so that folks who encounter you in future posts can learn more about you, and then find and enjoy your music.
Hey @dajbelshaw Welcome.
There's a whole bunch of interesting stuff about you on your site's "about" page. It'd be nice if you threw that in your profile here as well as a link to the site so that people can learn more about you.
The answer is simply to embrace the fact that in certain situations it can happen, and that it's not the end of the world, adapt culturally. - @Dominic
Yeah, I guess it would be a much easier approach to simply accept that collisions like this are going to happen and instead of trying to prevent them or correct them in an automated fashion you simply empower the humans with tools to correct them. E.g. an "oops. didn't see you're doing it. I'll stop." button. ;)
And, there would probably be enough meta discussion around the todo list that, most of the time it wouldn't just be people doing tasks on a list in a void bereft of any coordination.
With that approach I'm convinced of the viability / achievability of such a thing.
I can only imagine how nice it would be to look back on a project and say, "Hey, we totally overlooked how much work X, Y and Z would take...let's not do that again." or "Damn, so-and-so is really doing a lot of invisible labor supporting your asses." - @nanomonkey
yeah. that would be good, but to get something that reveals that easily ( no brute force digging through old states of todo lists ) I think you're basically going to be reinventing project management tools. Not saying that's bad or good, just that to get to that point is a lot of work and many iterations past a collaborative todo list.
I found that video that @mix linked to be really interesting. In addition to talking about savings groups it goes into concepts of identity and trust, which are obviously core to a savings pool, as well as the value that some of these savings groups provide their members. The speaker works on an app called ChamaPesa
Join with us to build the ultimate app for social savings groups. ChamaPesa can take your chama to a whole new level by putting the record keeping and the money itself on the members' phones. ChamaPesa uses a blockchain to make your savings group transparent, accountable and reliable.
you mean, the "connected" pubs on the left? It's not a listing of ones you've joined. Those are just one's within 2 hops of you that you are currently connecting to. Yes, that listing confuses many people.
If you really knew me you'd know... -- @Drew
I think the best would be something between that and what I suggested. That line is good, but it's so open ended that a lot of people will have a hard time knowing what to put there. On the other end of the spectrum we've got Mad Libs which are very easy to complete.
We should avoid the "blank page" problem. Too many possibilities or options make it hard to narrow your focus.
Maybe, to @Elouen's point an alert box pops up if the profile form has just opened for a brand new identity and says something like "We've provided some suggestions to help you fill out your profile, but you can put whatever you want there."
If you _really_ knew me you'd know that I love it when....
When I'm not working I enjoy...
I'm constantly thinking about...
And, just so you know, the best pronouns for me are...
The pronouns thing always feels awkward for me. I don't believe that the idea of specifying pronounce has permeated society enough, but unfortunately the English language really wants you to use them. It's difficult to talk about someone without them, and people get weirded out when you use "they" if they're used to hearing "he" or "she" all the time.
I'm encountering this literally daily with writing the (#)butt-summaries. "well, I dunno. I'll use they, and hope I don't make them uncomfortable." Even with folks like @Drew who have an obviously "male" profile image. Maybe drew feels all femmy inside and would prefer "she". ¯_(ツ)_/¯
So, I think it'd be good if we could have a prompt that specifically addressed that just for practical communication means, but obviously the things that are more interesting, the things we really want to get people to share, are the bits about life and loves rather than their internal gender construct.
(putting my money where my mouth is i just added pronouns to my profile...because... hypocrite ;) )
{ "type": "about", "about": "@LzTjF5eAVC6xprPMGeNzqEP/EEBIGpM6hDaaY10hrz8=.ed25519", "description": "an [adventurer](https://www.corporaterunaways.com/) with a penchant for illustration, programming, writing, Esperanto, and ukulele\n\nPronouns are good, but I don't really care which ones you use. \n\n[http://masukomi.org](https://masukomi.org/) \n[@masukomi](https://twitter.com/masukomi) on twitter krom se vi parolas esperanton. En tiu okaze mi estas [@praktiku](https://twitter.com/praktiku)" }
Welcome @corlock. I'm curious to see what the combination of you + ssb will produce. ;)
for me it's just idea of maintaining (possibly on multiple computers) the shared items of and changes to a todo list forever just seems such a waste. Maybe if each todo list was its own blockchain separate from the people working on it and could be abandoned and deleted when you were done with it.
I can see some legal / publicly accountable situations where that kind of non-deletable history of tasks would be useful and good, but in general... I don't want to have 10 years worth of history to my daily task list. Yes, maybe i'd have a "life goals" or "bucket list" type list where history might be nice, but that's really the exception if you think about the lists people create in their typical days. Also, I feel wrong asking everyone who follows me to have to host that history too. It's a bit better better if replication is limited to just the people working on the todo list but still...
I agree with @jeswin-n53 about there being a lot of possibilities for a distributed todo list, although syncing is probably going to be a serious problem with multiple list editors and intermittent connectivity. Even simple questions, like how do you know someone else isn't already working on item x?
Things become slightly better with a recipe / workflow like @nanomonkey mentioned, because it's less of a free-for-all but still it's difficult to stop 2 people from starting the next step unless you also build in assignments. A free-for-all todo list without assignments sounds.... VERY hard to manage. With assignments it's still hard if those assignments aren't created at the time the task is created or if they're allowed to be changed. If you can change assignments then it can be assigned to you, but then i change it to someone else, but you haven't gotten the sync yet so now it's functionally assigned to 2 people who could both start on it... what if they do? how do you resolve this.
Collaborative todo lists combined with intermittent connectivity and serious sync delays (sometimes days) sounds like a crazy hard problem to solve at an intellectual level, nevermind a code level.
I was thinking about how some folks specify pronouns in their profile and some don't, which lead me to thinking about all the profiles that are, well, just lacking in much of anything.
What if, when you create a new profile, Patchwork presented you with a template to fill in. You could choose to ignore it and delete it all, or fill it out.... but i think if we gave hints it would lead to better profiles, which would lead to more human connections.
I'm thinking something like
## Likes
insert likes here
## Dislikes
insert dislikes here
## Hobbies
insert hobbies here
## Wishes
insert wishes here
## Pronouns
What pronouns do you prefer? He, she, they, etc.
Maybe something simpler and more open ended, like "What would you like folks to know about you?"
Yes? no? maybe? Good idea? Bad idea?
looks like the icons got reversed in the disk image window....thing.
First I made something like yo, but this replaced an easy problem with a harder one… now you had to write code instead of config.
When i first read that i thought you meant Yo! and i was like... wow yeah... coding with a series of "Yo!" exclamations would be hard. You'd have to write a parser and .... maybe timing based ? and...
so.... lighter than normal? ;)
i think i generally have 4 or 5 local terminal tabs open across the bottom of my screen on any given workday plus a series of many terminal windows that come in out out of existence when connecting to remote machines though the day...
What does a "4 terminal window day" imply for you that results in a "whew" ?
one of things I still dream building is Workflowy.com but on SSB -- @andrestaltz
FoldingText is i similar standalone app that does that but its data storage is markdown. It gives things the
.ft extension to make sure it is the app to open its things, but it's really just markdown. I'm thinking that that's a much closer starting point for porting.
I totally get what @Dominic
is on about with regards to the problems and feature set he's craving. It wasn't clear though if he wanted it IN ssb or FOR ssb. Personally i just don't get the idea of using a blockchain for managing todo items or some notes document. It feels like the wrong tool for the job.
Now, getting sent a PM in/on SSB about something i need to take action on. THAT makes sense to me.
Cotton balls! That's brilliant, I've always used my finger to obviously nasty results. - @nanomonkey
re the "nasty results" part. Changing tubes has a way of making your hands gross anyway. We always cary medical gloves. Primarily in case we come across a stranger and need to administer first aid, but if you carry 2 pairs then you have one for first aid and one for unexpected dirty things like changing tires, mucking with grimy chains, etc.
A trick for not getting pinched tires is to partially inflate the tire, rotate it across the ground while pressing on it and then let out the air and refill it again a couple of times, this usually gets the folded bit to work itself out.
The advice we've always followed on our motorcycles is to stick it in, get it as evenly spread out as possible, then inflate it just enough to give it the right shape and a vague hint of resistance, pop the 2nd edge in with it inflated like this, then finish filling it and set the bead.
a) welcome @richard
b) re " I want to go to the top of every state.".... of which country... or... all of them?
hey @nicoHz. Welcome.
Where'd you hear about all the good people here? And what do you do when you're not trying to improve your internet life?
I'm the release manager at work. I wrote a script that combines the PRs against the target release branch in GitHub with the local git log output. it hunts down patterns that look like ticket numbers in commit messages, branch names, pr titles, pr bodies, etc.
I pass it the tag we're building on, and the current release branch and get something like this (anonymized) and then compare it to what we expected to be in the release (extra? something missing?)
gimme_tickets v16.5.9 rel_v16_5_10_rc
SUP-1159: pr title here
SUP-1159: another pr title here
SUP-1123: a third pr title here
Git log (merges only):
a5782b40e7 2018-02-14 A Person (HEAD -> rel_v16_5_10_rc, upstream/rel_v16_5_10_rc) Merge pull request #14969 from someoneelse/sup_1326_planogram_coverage_report
d6044cc749 2018-02-14 Some Guy Merge pull request #14967 from AnotherGuy/1278_mark_campaign_is_active
ebb561f638 2018-02-14 Some Guy Merge pull request #14959 from AnotherGuy/fix_store_id_typo
b62eb54614 2018-02-14 A Person Merge pull request #14958 from judngu/SUP_1333_show_fixture_comments_newest_first
2052820927 2018-02-14 Nice Lady Merge pull request #14957 from Someone/20180214113807-update-magellan-assets
4bd9eb658d 2018-02-14 Another Guy Merge pull request #14950 from AnotherGuy/order_status_feed_validate_store_ids
e0322b7eb8 2018-02-14 Another Guy Merge pull request #14948 from anothernicelady/sup1256_v16_5_10_fix
e6a2392bcb 2018-02-13 Another Guy Merge pull request #14945 from AnotherGuy/1159_validation_for_valid_store_id
e9dfde2b1f 2018-02-13 A Person Merge pull request #14938 from AnotherGuy/add_times_to_order_and_shipping_job_migrations
adf6a0704b 2018-02-13 Someone Merge pull request #14921 from anothernicelady/sup1246_v16_5_9
d6407e6421 2018-02-13 Someone Else Merge pull request #14929 from nicelady/SUP_1288_unable_to_place_multiple_orders_rel_v16_5_9_rc
(butt-summaries #6: Feb 12-18 2018 part 2)
Community Geeky Intersection
@mix released TickTack 0.3.1
Patchwork v3.8.7 and v3.8.8 were released
@Matt McKegg wrote a Grant Postmortem on "Multi-device Feeds AKA sameAs". My ultra-summarized version: promising experiments, but nothing that can be rolled into clients yet, but lots of details are in the dev diary.
@mijkl the Category Theory Study Group meeting had meeting #1
@glyph started a thread asking for a Master of Ceremony for the grant process
If you're reading this thinking "hmm...I could probably do that", then you're the one!
@dominic started a draft of a paper on the SSB replication protocol
@mijkl is "having a nondeterministic dev problem that's really hard to track down and could use some help" It involves
flumeview-reduce for those of you who know such things. Which Dominic eventually tracked down as a bug in muxrpc@7
New People
@Matt has rejoined us under a new identity after having learned the lesson of backing up your keys (and everything else on your computer).
Current top 3 interests:
Synthesizers / Music Making
Liverpool Football Club
Kayaking / Canoeing / Paddling
@Jake found us but was a bit concerned we were "kinda techy". Hopefully they'll find some of the wonderful non-geeky conversations we've been having.
@mozz is a photographer trying to do some good for society, and helping some kestrels along the way.
post 2 of 2
(butt-summaries #6: Feb 12-18 2018 part 1)
Followup / missed items
@Elouen joined us with the promise of owl pics instead of cat pics. Somehow just mentioning them spawned many pics from others.
Totally Random
@glyph hosted their first mushroom related workshop.
(#)cats encountered a cat with mad computer skills and an illustrated calico, and a snoozing tabby, but even without any pics (#)dogs are undeniably in charge, owing to this being the Year of the Dog.
@cameralibre discovered some cool sawhorse, stool, things that stack together horizontally.
@dangerousbeans took Occam out of the marina for the first time
Forwards gear wouldn't engage, so we slow-motion crashed into the pier opposite us, then the current sort of gently pinned us there on our side in such a way as to make it look like we knew what we were doing and wanted to be there.
@mix put together a banner for this week's Butt Summaries. :D And also suggested maybe having a guest artist create a new banner each week. That sounds like it could be fun and I heartily encourage folks to PM me their submissions (so they're a surprise for the others).
@Emile wondered why participation here isn't stickier.
I see it in # New-people — the ½-life of participation seems to be in hours, not weeks or months — leaving a pretty profile corpse in their wake.
A number of folks responded with interesting observations and thoughts.
@Richard D. Bartlett wrote about The Vibes Theory of Organizational Design "...exploring anti-patterns of using written agreements for decentralized community governance."
@Dan Hassan was reminded of just how little we know about the people right in front of us, and how important it can be to keep in mind when dealing with others, especially online.
@Rivet went from the woods to the city and realized just good they'd had it and just how important community is.
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I believe connected pubs are pubs that are online and within 2 hops of you. In patchwork there's a little progress bar circle when you're exchanging data with them. While there's some esoteric value in seeing those pubs i think it's just extra confusing data for new folks.
The problem isn't the weapons. It's the "angry assholes". It's not like the angry assholes didn't go around murdering people before the invention of guns. We fought wars with swords and pikes, and we would kill many enemies in a day.
I keep coming back to the fact that it's roughly as easy to get a gun in Canada as the USA, and we share thousands of miles of border, they're also a first world country, they have similar laws, but there isn't a regular stream of Canadian assholes shooting each other up.
I understand why people rails against the guns, but there's too much evidence that the problem is our society and we're going to continue to have problems with or without the guns.
I have the same leatherman as @dangerousbeans (although silver) and yes, those bits are really useful, but honestly, the thing I use it for the most is filing my nails @Joub . I love that big diamond grit file. Sadly I'm in the middle of a hunt for where I put it last...
I did feel a little weird, pulling out this big-ole multitool at work and then filing my nails with it, but the file is just so good. ;)
Welcome @chadoh :
That's an interesting app you've created. I wonder what happens when we start looking at social networking relationships and posts on a timeline like that... maybe with activity and automated mood extraction from posts...
I took a quick scroll through the dev diary @Matt McKegg. Am I right in thinking that, if you're stopping work on this now, it would be helpful if you made a brain-dump post of the current state of your repo, what needs to be done, and what thought problems (that you're aware of) still need to be resolved before code can be written for them?
You can right click on any link (like the one on your username) and choose "Copy External Link" and then give that to someone. As long as the person who posted it hasn't requested that their posts not be shared on public gateways it will work. Although, viewer.scuttlebutt.io does tend to go down occasionally.
huh. i hadn't thought of having a banner image @mix . I like it. :) Practically speaking it'll be a good visual indication that you're looking at the first post of the week too.
I don't think discussing the realities of human biology and the problems related to it are insensitive unless you're doing some intentionally disrespectful like making fun of women who've had hysterectomies, or men missing testicles.
I don't think the only person making this an issue about anything other than neutral biology was the woman who took it personally, and that's her issue. There will always be people who identify with some marginalized group who will take anything that has any possibility of being "against" them or "insensitive" to them. This sounds like one of those people.
that's a long winded way of saying that I don't believe that what you said (as described) was insensitive or triggery, or anything like that.
Pretty sure gatherings are open to anyone. :( The UI doesn't seem to offer the option of sending it out as a private message.... yet. ;)
Yeah, while i'm a geek i don't actually come here for the geekery. I stay for all the interesting non-geeky things that people keep discussing. So, i dunno about "humanities" people, but there are certainly people talking about humanity, and how we can be better at it, and some people just sharing interesting tales of being interesting people.
Welcome (back) @Matt
Are you in England?
Ash decided this computer needed to be shut down. The computer then asked if she was sure she wanted to quit the various running apps, and she said, "Yes! Yes this computer must be shut down."
She paused for a moment of silence after a job well done.
a) yes!
b) why not ones with a specific tag or keyword or some other special sauce? I'm thinking if it was every public post then you'd have posts on your site that were replies to threads people couldn't see and it would be confusing.
This week in Scuttlebutt
(butt-summaries #5: Feb 05-11 2018 part 2)
@mikl started talking about category theory and asking for pointers, and then about how to discuss it without spamming people with ultra geeky stuff. There's a Category Study Group kickoff post if you're interested.
@haileycoop has been teaching herself git, github, & git-ssb and posted this quick trip report with notes on her progress and what helped her. Her post is probably a good place to start for people wanting to learn about these things.
If you're going to be in Lund Sweeden on Wednesday February 21st @Powersource is talking about Making Decentralized Apps with dat & ipfs.
@Luandro shared more plans about their #mohino-mesh
Been seeing people having trouble connecting to viewer.scuttlebot.io. I'm running the between-two-worlds.dk server and thought I'd document what I do to try to keep my pub and viewer stable. - @arj
details here.
...was debugging a longstanding problem I have had with scuttlebot that it over time becomes slow and seems to get stuck.
and came up with a patch, which has since been merged!
@Piet started their dev diary for ssb-loomio.
New People
@Sander went to school for music but ended up a developer, and joins us from New York USA.
@godfried is a South African in Berlin, for the moment whose long memory brought them to Scuttlebutt.
@jay made his way back here from london.
@mark is a retired manufacturing geek who joined us from Arizona, USA.
@emiel joined us and brought along their sneaker addiction, and love for comics, which you can learn more about in their intro post.
@Fergal joined us and eventually said hi after n attempts and distantly observing us for a couple years.
post 2 of 2
This week in Scuttlebutt
(butt-summaries #5: Feb 05-11 2018 part 1)
Totally Random
(#)cats had an encounter with The Perfect Blep via @noffle
(#)dogs encountered a suspiciously human looking dog via Grampian Batz
I stumbled across @𝕷𝖎𝖆𝖎𝖟𝖔𝖓 𝖂𝖆𝖐𝖊𝖘𝖙 who has a username that is simultaneously the looking and least typeable on the network (IMNSHO).
Meanwhile @Jackalope may have the coolest colored beard on the network, while @Lerana rocks the funkiest glasses.
@A-pantz posted details for making an "Un-dumb wicking bed" for those of you who want to keep your plants watered but don't want to have to constantly water them.
@mix started discussing "some of the patterns we've explored while community gardening"
They also added a post to Pause & Review: SSBC Grants. More specifically, to "discuss what's working / not working about this whole grant money thing."
@ev is going to be talking about ssb at Chicago Node.js on Wednesday February 21st 2018 at 6pm.
Community Geeky Intersection
@AndreSaltz has released version 0.0.11-Alpha of MMMMM our first mobile SSB browser (for Android). As this is very early alpha software I would strongly recommend you do NOT use this with your primary identity. Instead use it with one you can connect to your primary via
Installation appears to still be in the "geeks only" stage, but that's fine for alpha software.
@kas mentioned how to get rid of metadata in your images before uploading. Useful if you're uncomfortable about the where, when, and other info in them being shared. @arj pointed out that we should have an option for that when uploading.
@mix made a Pause & review : SSBC-Grants post
I think we should pause and discuss what's working / not working about this whole grant money thing.
Like how's it been for the ecosystem. How have people felt receiving / not receiving grants.
An important post for people participating in the grants process. Unfortunately the post had some unnecessary drama injected into it. The original grants post is here.
If you're interesting in applying for one you should follow #ssbc-grants tag. This is the February grants thread and Tim's explanation of the grants process. The rules are reposted with each month's post now.
@Richard D. Bartlett raised their hand to act as a facilitator for the grants process, and posted some thoughts about what that role would be.
post 1 of 2
Recursion can easily blow the stack, so it is a form of unbounded memory usage.
This is an even bigger problem when your language doesn't support tail recursion.
A practical example from my work of how a recursive function can go wrong. We have a few hierarchies in our app. One of them is a hierarchy of "regions" like USA->East->Georgia->Atlanta->East. I wrote a recursive function that displayed the things under your current region. Then someone went an made one parent region a child of one of its children, as my function went down the tree it eventually looped on itself and took down the whole app. I think it was just making a pull-down.
There was technically nothing wrong with the function, but because it was recursive and no-one had put sanity checks on the data, everything went to crap. Damn my lispy tendencies!
But yeah, data should always be suspect. It can be malformed, it can be corrupted, it can be created by people not using their brains. A perfectly good recursive function can make your day miserable if not protected against bad data.
I've been thinking very similar thoughts BUT I don't think what you're proposing AS you're proposing it is actually legal (in the US at least). You need to make sure you're sending them to yourself as private messages otherwise you're publicly distributing copyrighted material without consent.
My similar thoughts have been making a gateway that I could send private messages to. Since my blog is a markdown based static-blog it could then extract them images and post the whole thing as a new blog post. Maybe some YAML frontmatter at the beginning of the post for the metadata (as with most static blog posts).
The next step, for my travels, is to make a 2 way SSB gateway between me and the forums where i cross-post our journeys.
Also similar to your RSS idea i'm thinking new posts go to the appropriate thread on a forum, and any posts to that thread from other people get sent to me via private messages. Now, I can interact with the many pages of conversations that happen on our threads without having to be on the network. I really want to write this, or something similar together before January.
a) cool
b) interesting that somehow the image of the typewriter generated text makes it even cooler.
it's a way to have multiple blockchains / identities that the clients know can be treated as the same "person". I'm pretty sure it still requires geekery, and I have not managed to dig up instructions yet. It's not clear to me if it's "coming soon" or actually implemented. If you find instructions, I would greatly appreciate a link to them. @yi
This sounds a lot like @mihara's setup of an ssb piratebox
I love the idea of a "flying pub" coming by at regular intervals delivering and receiving data.
@Rezha Julio this is very alpha software. I would strongly advise AGAINST using the same identity as the one on your computer. Use a new identity and (at some point in the future?) connect them via
sameAs. This isn't like a centralized network. If anything happens to your identity's blockchain (in this case it becoming forked) you'll have to abandon it.
This is very cool @Richard D. Bartlett. Just shared it with our engineering leadership team at work.
Thanks @moid that's exactly what i was looking for. That and his link to @tim 's explanation of the grants process.
Apologies if this has already been covered (such a big thread), but... We've got a bunch of new people, and many of them are geeks filled with enthusiasm and excitement, and they've probably seen posts like this one about the grant system, but it's not easy to figure out how to apply for one, or even that they are still being given out.
I'm not sure what the right solution is to this. I was able to find the original grants post but i'm not sure if that was luck (findability still feeling like there's an aspect of luck to it for me), but as noted above I still don't know what the right way to apply for one is. I'm not looking to apply now, I'm just looking to make sure that people who want to easily can.
I feel like there should be some central doc for this, but I also don't think it should be posted on the general web site for google bring in just random people looking for money.
@rabble you can find instructions in the Getting Started Guide for "Linking To Things" for linking within Patchwork and for linking outsiders to posts on ssb.
Right now there's no support for opening it directly in a browser BUT we're getting close because @SoapDog managed to get the ssb, dat, ipfs, ipns, & dweb protocols whitelisted for firefox extensions Which means that now Firefox will allow
ssb:// links. We just need to make plugins to help it do something when it gets them.
This should be an option when uploading!
that would be a really nice feature in... every social networking app.
Thanks @SoapDog
@masukomi be aware that the police in many locales are not so benign, and mixing up with them can get you beaten up, thrown in jail, or killed.
i'm sorry to hear you had such experiences. Yes, my thoughts were definitely written with the assumption of non-corrupt cops who wouldn't be attacking (in any form) the victim. I've been in multiple countries where i would not say anything to the cops because they were corrupt from the word "go".
@masukomi i found your initial response and follow-up wall-of-text defense about "desperate bike thie[ves]" to be a shallow painting of a complex situation and unempathetic for the humans involved. i don't think it's healthy for us as a society to think about ourselves as independent and competing agents,
To a degree you're right @dinosaur. @tunabananas made a good argument for the potential complexities and why the thieves may need our compassion and consideration. I didn't feel i had anything to add there. But, what hadn't been discussed was the other side of the equation.
I'm sorry that the posts came across as unempathetic, and it was not my intent to "put everyone in uniformly black boxes". I have empathy for people having a hard time. I have empathy for people who think they need to take desperate measures. I have empathy for the shit situation our people are put in by how our society disrespects the poor and needy.
Let me change the perspective for a moment.
Let's talk about school bullying, because it comes down to a lot of the same issues. When one kid is bullied we don't say "well [victim], [aggressor] has an unbelievably shit home life so you should be more understanding." No. You tell [aggressor] that what they've done is unquestionably not acceptable and is not tolerated in this community. You have a school meeting to talk about bullying and why it's not acceptable (without calling out the bully), and you teach the other kids to speak up if they see it or experience it and let them know that they will be protected. You also make sure [aggressor] sees the school counsellor who will try to help them deal with whatever made them think that action was ok. AND you ask them to apologize to the victim, and if possible, to make it up to them.
The fact that the people are adults and / or bike thieves doesn't change much of anything. The fact that the victim may have funds to pay for a new bike, or be physically strong enough to withstand a bully's blows doesn't change anything.
When @noffle 's bike gets stolen we don't say "well you should accept it because the thieves probably have a shit life" We empathize with them and say "that sucks" (sorry i didn't say that earlier noffle). We let our neighbors know. We start watching out for each other a little more.
We don't have the power to help the thief directly because we don't know them, but if we raise awareness that the situation has gotten that bad for some people then we can, as a community, take action to improve the situation. We have the power to help our community, both the victim, potential victims, and the aggressors, but only if we speak up.
and @cybervegan 's intro post was here (failed to link it correctly)
failed to correctly tag @Joey Hess in the 1st of this week's posts... consider yourself tagged Joey ;)
This week in Scuttlebutt
(butt-summaries #4: Jan 29-Feb4 2018 part 3)
@markwylde has joined us and has "...been playing around with some of the github repos..."
@thrilway is "... a grad student from Toronto, doing my PhD in Linguistics."
@Richard Simes is a web developer who said "Hi!" from New Zealand.
@sakrecoer is a multidisciplinary humanoid robot born tomorrow with a curious makeup, and if you click through you'll find a link to some of their music.
a @cybervegan joined us which is hopefully much safer than a Cyberman joining us. This one also comes from the UK... coincidence I'm sure. This one's [been eating healthy and coding ]
@RenatoCoimbra is an architect who joined us from Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, BR with a number of interests mentioned in their intro post which turned into a "hey I do martial arts too! thread".
@Viktor Zaunders is a community organizer from Sweden who likes growing things Local Food Nodes, and the nature of reality.
@Joub wandered in from parts unknown and found themself a little lost, but found a warm welcome. He warns about an ongoing problem with puns. I think we can deal.
@Justin is an engineering student fascinated by open source and decentralized projects
@jared delurked and their intro on new-people included interesting phrases such as
...my main interest lies in #education and #pedagogy and especially #constructionism (topic I can rant for hours on: relationships between blockchains/distributed computing environments + social structures + constructionism). My work right now is in trying to build a credentialling system that reflects, respects, and encourages, the actual act of learning, and scales.
@Cole Albon joined us with a plan.
'm here because we'd like to give our students a portable transcript that they can share with their employer, prospective employers or whomever they want. This is an industry wide initiative not just a simple corporate project.
post 3 of 3
This week in Scuttlebutt
(butt-summaries #4: Jan 29-Feb4 2018 part 2)
@Luandro posted an intro to #mohino-mesh "a replicable process that aims to encourage economic resilience and self governance within a rural community." It seems to currently be in the planning stages. Later on there was a geeky post about using BATMAN-ADV for the mesh protocol.
Patchwork made it to the front page of Hacker News with this post and thread, which brought in a few new users.
@vtduncan posted some really pretty visualizations of our network.
@mix suggested new devs might be interested in adding drafts to Patchwork and that they'd be available to help. @Space-ED suggested they might be interested in taking up the challenge.
@mikl has been making progress on ssb-playbooks which should help with testing ssb apps. I believe this is the first post about it, which has useful notes for people interesting in testing their ssb apps.
@Joey Hess made an interesting observation:
other than private messages, #scuttlebutt has all the information you need to experience it through someone else's eyes. See their friends, their subscriptions, their names for things, etc.
One use for this would be to look through the #new-people who didn't stick and see what the experience was like for them, to get better insights to improve new user retention.
@andrestaltz posted about a graph search problem
Lately I've been considering how Thought is better described as a graph search problem. Each node is an idea / opinion / conclusion, and edges are associations between ideas, in other words, logical "if this then that".
@arj provided instructions for getting everything running if you want to help provide benchmarks from your machine of the scuttlebot tests.
@mikl was pondering about the lack of restrictions on ssb plugins and raised the idea of sandboxing.
New People
@KB1LQC said hi. They're an Electrical Engineer who has been working with FaradayRF on Delay Tolerant Networking and combining things like ssb with ham radio communications and has already been chatting a bit about that before officially saying hi.
A "random new person" called @niek wanted to say hi, and did. Amongst other things they enjoy "... toying around with vintage communication methods..." and "...hanging around at hackerspaces..."
post 2 of 3
This week in Scuttlebutt
(butt-summaries #4: Jan 29-Feb4 2018 part 1)
There haven't been many geeky conversations this week, so I've gone hunting for random interesting things for you to pass the time with.
@dangerousbeans has taken ownership of Occam the latest member of the scuttlebutt fleet.
It's 36' fiberglass smuggling boat from the 70s, originally called "Texas Vegabond" until they all got caught, fought with the police and had their boat possessed
@Dominic linked to a video of a cool tiny hydrofoil sailboat.
@nanomonkey and @kas showed us their orchids, after which kas posted "The Dead Orchid (a tale from the Southern Hemisphere)"
The #cats channel was glared at by @threetees, while the #dogs got to see one of @alanz's beasts and one of mine. On a related note I thew up a series of posts about traveling with dogs last week. @Teq decided to post about #birds instead.
@emile posted some dramatic pics of Moore's Cove in Nova Scotia Canada.
@Joey Hess admitted that it took them 7 years to notice a star in the middle of their living room floor, which it turned out to have been something that @maggie had actually created. Then Joey set things on fire
@noffle's bike got stolen but they managed to find the silver lining
I figured mine was probably OK because it was an old rusty $80 bike from the 70s, but I was wrong. I think this is a reasonable thing to happen though. I'm kind of excited about what new set of wheels the universe has in store for me!
With Valentine's Day looming on the horizon you may find @kaz's Vegan Meringue Kisses recipe useful
@SoapDog is organizing the February Community Call which will be February 5th at 21:00 GMT.
@InternalFX joined us and set up a new pub server at technology.ssb-pub.com "for tech enthusiasts."
post 1 of 3
i honestly don't blame desperate folks for stealing relatively well-off peoples' bikes to feed their families. - @tunabananas
I see that you're upset about this. Please know i'm not trying to be some "morally superior" jerk.
he said it was "[a] old rusty $80 bike from the 70s" Someone who steals that has zero reason to believe that they're stealing from the rich. Similarly, there are a lot of people who buy a good bike because they can't afford a card but want something that's going to get them to work reliably. Additionally, just because the person can afford to be stolen from doesn't make it any more "right" to steal from them.
also, can i just say - your morally-superior stance of "catching the crook" and "convincing a jury they need more than just a slap on the wrist" when you know nothing about the motivations of the "crook" and clearly have a half-assed analysis of the "injustice system" in america is pretty fucking infuriating.
i wasn't attempting to analyze the "injustice system". If it was a one-off incident my suggestion would have no effect on the thief. If it was a repeated incident then you're talking about an individual or individuals who are doing many thousands of dollars of harm to the community. Does being a desperate individual with no house or income mean that it's acceptable for them to repeatedly steal from others, and possibly cause other to loose their jobs and be in the same situation? I don't think so.
Also, while we may have a somewhat broken justice system, at the core of most (all?) justice systems is the question of harm to community / others, and that penalties are relative to the harm done. I don't think that's a terrible idea. Yes, we could be better about ranking relative harm but i think the core of it is good.
I also don't think that saying you shouldn't repeatedly steal from others is a "morally superior stance" You ask any desperate person if they think it's morally acceptable to repeatedly steal from others and i'm betting that the vast VAST majority of them will say no. They may still do it, but i think it's unlikely they think it's morally acceptable. I think they'll also be pissed off if someone steals from them too, because they agree that it's "wrong" and unfair to the person that was stolen from.
yeah, let's give desperate, fucked-over-by-society human beings time in jail for stealing fucking bikes.
that's an assumption on your part. I used to live next door to a guy who regularly stole bikes and had a loving mom who put a roof over his head and food on his plate. And even if your assumption is correct it doesn't make their actions acceptable. Yes, throwing people in jail is generally a bad solution. At the same time, it's a bad solution to say "well you're having a rough life so we'll just let you off for the tens of thousands of dollars worth of bikes you've stolen.... repeatedly." I think tens of thousands is a realistic valuation for people stealing entire bike racks.
but seriously, suggesting to call the cops is one of the shittiest things you could possibly say, since it does functionally nothing and only puts tags on vulnerable people.
Would it not do good for those who have bikes and need them to be aware "hey, there's a rash of thefts going on in your neighborhood? Maybe you should take your bike inside tonight." If no-one reports them then the law abiding citizens are unaware, and thus made vulnerable, to someone known to be running around and hurting folks (by stealing from them).
In Cambridge MA the cops were pretty good, I think, and would let folks know "hey, there's been a rash of muggings in this area" "Hey there's been a rash of bike thefts in that area" and being one of the people IN that area i was very thankful for the people who reported the muggings and bike thefts because then my wife and i knew to be more careful and knew to keep an eye out for certain behaviors that we might otherwise overlook. Especially the muggings, which frequently go unreported just like bike thefts.
reporting a crime isn't just a tool for punishing criminals. It's also a tool for protecting potential victims of those criminals. Does the thief potentially being desperate mean we shouldn't raise awareness amongst their future victim pool that they are potentially vulnerable?
alas, i'm not going to be able to make this call ( s at work ) . If someone could record it and throw it up where people like me could download it that would be very nice.
the following may come off as something of a jack-ass comment. I apologize in advance. It's not intended that way, sometimes existentialism just come across that way to folks.
It sounds like this is going to happen regardless of if you want it to or not. So, your flatmates are going to be stressed. With that as a given now, there's no need to stress over them being annoyed because there's nothing you can do to stop it. They're going to be annoyed. It's probably going to suck. But, no matter how much you stress, you won't be able to change that. So, if you can, try and accept that as unchangeable, and point your energies at the things that can still be changed for the better.
Good luck @nanz. I think you'll make it through ok, because you're smart enough to ask others for help when you're feeling overwhelmed. :)
Another thing I sometimes do is to see within my ecosystem there is someone who would be willing to take on a paid job with a fixed rate who could essentially do the project management in return for some cash and in-kind payment. - @Dan Hassan
a good suggestion. I'd go with a variant of it.
If you can accept that this is going to be expensive, you can turn it to your advantage.
Let's assume it's plumbing related for the sake of argument. Hire a plumber with good yelp reviews for trustworthiness . NOT to do the work, but to find someone else to do the work, and verify the quality of the work after the plumber THEY hire does it. Tell him you'll pay him the difference between whatever price they get and the top quote you've gotten. You could even say that as part of guaranteeing that they don't just hire the cheapest guy they can find that they're responsible for fixing any problems resulting from this within the next year. that'll incentivize them to hire someone with decent quality not just the cheapest.
Yes, this means you'll be paying whatever the top quote is, but if you can accept that then it also means you'll be outsourcing the worry and no longer have to make decisions based on info you don't have because the professional plumber does have that info.
This is the same concept as a buyers agent when buying a house. Their job is to help you get the right house, at the right price, and help you to see pitfalls the seller wasn't upfront about. In this case it's just plumbers, or whatever. It's a nice deal for who you pick too, because they have to do very little work.
I'm fortunate to be a programmer who gets paid well. I'm also really stressed. When I can i find ways to take the money I make and use it to make the stress go away. Money is directly translatable into / exchangeable for time, and a lack of time is generally at the core of most stress. It sounds like you may be tight on funds, so this isn't as much of an option for you in general.
Sometimes though, we have to pay for things we can't afford. If you can accept that something is going to hurt financially, then you can leverage that acceptance of pain to make a slightly larger financial cost take some of the other stresses and pains with it.
You can specify a different network hash which only the folks on your intranet use. @nanomonkey
a) how / where do you do that?
b) am i right in thinking that even if you do do that there's still no way to prevent folks from disobeying and connecting to unauthorized nodes? And even then we're ignoring sneakernet.
What drew you to the martial art you study, with so many styles to choose from? - @noffle
I love Aikido. I've done it, Tai-Chi (24 posture yang-style), and Jujitsu. Had a lot of fun with a Tai-chi Sword form and a staff form I don't remember the origins of.
For me Aikido is just perfect. I love all the "circles" of motion flowing together, but Tai-Chi was just great for the daily physical and mental health benefits.
Welcome @Cole Albon
Care to expand upon why a blockchain or blockchain-like "portable transcript" is useful to students?
I feel like there's some key bit of this that I'm missing.
but I also feel pretty bad for people who steal people's bikes.
Don't. it does far more damage to the community than it does help to a desperate bike thief.
Think of all the folks who are going to have trouble getting to their jobs now. Some may get fired for being late. Some may have to spend money they don't have on a cab or public transit.
Also, your old crappy bike may be notable enough to help catch the crook.
Definitely file a report with the cops. It probably won't help you, but it may help catch the person, and it may help convince a jury that they deserve more than a slap on the wrist for a "first time offense" that's really a 31st time offense.
clicking on it doesn't help much @alanz / @Grampian Batz
Sorry, this content isn't available right now
The link you followed may have expired, or the page may only be visible to an audience you're not in.
I get that with so many links people post to facebook that I generally just don't bother clicking them because it's a waste of effort.
I think you'd be better off with Friends chat. It appears to be early stages but I suspect it wouldn't take much work to wrap it up with an installer like most electron apps.
UI-wise Patchwork just isn't a good client for real(ish) time chat. It doesn't automatically refresh with the constant stream of chats like slack does. You have to click the refresh. even if it did refresh I think the design just doesn't lend itself well to that usage.
However, I would warn that just about any "distributed" solution is going to fall flat on its face with regards to "data must not be replicated to nodes outside the network" The only way to control that is with a centralized system that's installed behind your firewall.
Welcome @Mario
new person brain dump: My advice is to search for topics you're interested and follow people who talk about them. Channels are really more like tags,and don't hesitate to ask questions. Folks here are pretty nice to new people.
There are no d-star users around here — I'm in DMR land here in ve9. Boo.
@Emile There are no D-star users around here that i'm aware of either. ;)
We have the DV Access Point usb adapter.
Radio->Access point->computer->internet->the world
In a way the D-Star stuff really fulfills the promise of Ham Radio ( being able to talk with people all around the world), while still maintaining the spirit and feel of ham radio.
We got it partially out of curiosity, and partially to experiment as we think it could be useful with our EMA.
Use APRS much?
Not yet. I think i may on my next big trip, but how is still up in the air.
We've got two Kenwood TH-D74A . If you looked at them you'd mistake them for the non-existent (as far as i can tell) TH-D74 because there is no A on the display. Very weird.
We got those because I was sick of our Baofengs which are effectively impossible to program without a computer.
This (or something like it) happened a couple times:
Them: Hey, glad you could make it. The band plan changed and now we're on XXX.XX
Us: .... good thing we've got these useless bricks with us!
Fortunately our handhelds were just backups in those situations.
Yes, i know the Baofeng's are technically programmable from in the field, but the horror stories from people who've tried, have convinced me it's a terrible thing to rely on when helping out in an emergency.
We decided to spend the money to get a good handheld that we could program without a computer. I wasn't happy about just how much they cost, but I am happy with the results. They're really nice.
The other day, with only a whip antenna, I was able to have a conversation bounced off a repeater twenty miles away, from within our house.
Now that we own a house (recent acquisition) I'd like to set up a real antenna but we're trying to save money so that'll have to wait.
That being said, using D-Star I've spoken with people in Wales on this thing, so that's cool.
I think you'd want to do that with a packraft instead of a kayak. Hard to backpack with those ;) Of course, hard to climb with a packraft too...
Karun is a pretty nice little movie about two folks packrafting and walking along Iran's longest river "aiming to go beyond the politics and showcase the culture and geography of this misunderstood nation. "
You two might enjoy it @happy0 & @Justin
re being a bit lost:
My advice is to just search for topics you're interested in and find people who have been talking about them. Then follow those people.
Also, channels are really tags. ;)
Reach out when you have questions. There are many people here who are happy to help.
What are your main interests in #amateurradio?
A friend of ours has some specialized skills that would have been useful in rescuing people during 9/11. he called up to volunteer his services and they asked him if he was a licensed ham. He said no. They told him thanks, but no thanks.
After talking with him we learned more about just how important hams are during natural (and unnatural) disasters that affect communications. Now my wife and I are both licensed. We help out with our friend's EMA, and I enjoy being part of helping keep the Boston Marathon safe.
I keep intending to get more involved with ARES and RACES, but haven't gotten around to it yet.
Mostly though, it's just being able to help, and having good backup systems, when things go wrong.
Welcome @Viktor Zaunders , I'd not heard of "Active Villages" I like the idea. It feels like so much of the US has given up on the idea of "village". :/
Somehow i think Pierre was a Francis Bacon (the artist) fan too. ;) I contend that the goal of art in general is to provoke an emotional response. Some of Francis Bacon's stuff is exceptionally good at that, especially when seen in person. Unfortunately it's usually "disturbing"
I would go out of my way to avoid music that disturbed me.
Welcome @RenatoCoimbra
You're the first one I've seen mention martial arts here. I'm sure there must be more. I wish i could include myself in that group but it's been so very long since I practiced any forms. :( I miss it a great deal.
What's the connection between you and "parametric design" ?
Go to the tags that interest you and follow people there. ^_^
good advice that. People are more important than tags / channels.
{ "type": "about", "about": "@EMovhfIrFk4NihAKnRNhrfRaqIhBv1Wj8pTxJNgvCCY=.ed25519", "image": "&OFVGdXEOVo9iX73csTWMbmGf0mwhEzMhckHlUF0Pi5I=.sha256" }
Huh, i hadn't heard about Feld-hell stuff before.
Well if you do decide to get your license, holler. I can make some recommendations for practicing for the exam. Also there are a bunch of Hams here on ssb. ;)
wait... crap.... I just realized that I've been using open source software professionally for 22+ years... so. nevermind. It was about as normal back then as now. It just wasn't much of a "movement". ;)
Sometimes i forget how long i've been coding for a living.
Welcome @cybervegan , you sound like you'll fit right in, and yes how'd you get into free software so long ago? Inquiring geeks want to know. ;)
Welcome @sakrecoer You make nifty music.
Not my particular ball-of-yarn but cool none-the-less. :)
Welcome thrilway. We shall neither ask you to say something funny, nor how many languages you speak. Instead we shall just say "Hi" and "welcome" and "hope you find this community as enjoyable as we do".
Hey niek. Welcome.
What kinds of "vintage communication methods" have you played with?
Sometimes working from home has some very nice benefits.
Might even be me. I know MSFT is trying to get some rep back and has hired some good people...
I think MSFTs books have generally been good, even back before they were trying. Probably my favorite programming book (Code Complete ) came out of Microsoft press years ago.
That being said i'm a little hesitant of this one with the Azure tie-in. Concerned marketing wonks might have been too involved. ;)
Designing Distributed Systems (free ebook)
Thought this free ebook from Microsoft might be interesting to some of you. I have not read it yet, and their idea of "distributed" may be more "bunch o boxes in the cloud" than actually distributed.
From their site:
Distributed systems enable different areas of a business to build specific applications to support their needs and drive insight and innovation. While great for the business, this new normal can result in development inefficiencies when the same systems are reimplemented multiple times. This free e-book provides repeatable, generic patterns, and reusable components to make developing reliable systems easier and more efficient—so you can free your time to focus on core development of your app.
In this 160–page e-book, you'll find:
- An introduction to distributed system concepts.
- Reusable patterns and practices for building distributed systems.
- Exploration of a platform for integrating applications, data sources, business partners, clients, mobile apps, social networks, and Internet of Things devices.
- Event-driven architectures for processing and reacting to events in real time.
- Additional resources for learning more about containers and container orchestration systems.
dunno. That sounds more like "well they haven't complained yet" than "this is totally legit"
The rules are outdated relative to modern tech and usage desires, and so people are going to just ignore them to do what they want.
This is basically the same thing as Napster. No it wasn't legal, but there was no reasonable "legal" means to distribute music online so people went ahead and did it. This is slightly better in that they're at least saying "well yeah this is encrypted which is against the rules but here's the key so... it's ok right?" It's still encrypted. It doesn't matter if i give you the password or not. The rule is against obscuring the meaning which is pretty obviously what's happened. Just because you can UN-obscure it doesn't mean it wasn't obscured to begin with. If anything it proves that it was obscured and thus the rules were broken.
the link you provided even says that:
...it does restrict fully encrypted communications.
providing the key doesn't change the fact that it was "fully encrypted"
I'm not saying any of this is "good" or "right". I'm just saying it doesn't matter how you dress up the pig. it's still a pig.
The rule isn't against encryption per se but "messages encoded for the purpose of obscuring their meaning".
you may be technically correct but as every form of encryption, even the Ceasar Cipher , strives to obscure the meaning.
Encrypting with a (sufficiently) public key does not convey secret messages, because the key is public.
it certainly "obscures the meaning" even if the key is public. no one can interpret what has been said unless they a) know what key they need b) go get it.
Whereas sending non-encrypted messages using a complex and undocumented (but not necessarily analysis-resistant) modulation scheme, or using codenames for things in ordinary voice communication, are disallowed.
how is that not, in essence the same thing as an encrypted message, even with a key that everyone can go get? Hell codenames are a hell of a lot more transparent than encrypted text. You can at least parse out some of their meaning from context.
The same approach of encrypting with a public key is used by hams operating WiFi in the ham bands, to keep muggles from connecting (because you're not supposed to talk to unlicensed stations).
i don't see how this is not in violation of "obscuring the meaning".
I just finished reading Damocles by S.G. Redling. I really enjoyed it, but it's the type of story where a plot summary sounds boring as hell, and yet you find yourself sucked in and wanting to see what happens next. This may be because I'm totally into linguistics and found the representation of just how hard it would be to communicate with an alien species without time to prepare refreshing and intriguing.
Looking at the stack you have there, you might find it interesting too.
Here's to hoping they help lighten things a little for you.
@bentflower felt that we might be nice enough people to say hello to with a big-ole-post that included interesting things like:
Lately I've been thinking about the tension between the privacy of freedom-respecting computer systems and the evidence-guided design feedback of telemetry and analytics.
(post 4 of 4 (apparently)) ;)
This week in Scuttlebutt
(butt-summaries #3: Jan 22-28 2018 part 3)
New People
@Jo Jo Se stopped tattooing people in Barcelona to peek in from the edge of the door.
@Mike is a JS geek who got "...tired of twitter and the brogramming culture." and found us. Yay.
@Huia got sucked in to @mix's scuttlebutt vortex and ended up here. @Alice was also sucked into that vortex after a promise of "...a world of vegan cheese adventures and gender identity debates." I think we should be able to help him uphold that promise.
@Teq appeared and is "...especially interested in dismantling the entrenched tangles of intersectional disadvantage."
@Rory Mir is a Digital Rights Advocate from NYC who organizes cryptoparties and is looking for suggestions on what to do with their Raspberry Pi. Their intro thread covered various interesting topics.
@getifrisstlama hails from the BayArea (presumably the one near San Francisco, CA, USA)"...randomly stumbled across scuttlebutt (googling for some git commands), really liked the concept and just about dived in!"
@Francesca Pick joined us from Europe via Enspiral and works on collaborative finance stuff.
@jeswin is an entrepreneur who Just stumbled upon ScuttleButt, and it immediately resonated.
@Ryan signed up and hoped desperately that they weren't just shouting into the void like so many of the idealistic distributed wastelands that have come before us.
@quernd is a computational linguist, chess playing, off-grid vegan who said hello from "the Swedish woods".
@mean diller came from New Zealand and grows enormous cabbage.
post 3 of 3
This week in Scuttlebutt
(butt-summaries #3: Jan 22-28 2018 part 2)
@Richard D. Bartlett is still experiencing amazing sunsets at his new place in Paekākāriki.
@mix and @piet were trying to get their heads around the following modules:
backlinks. They reported their findings and asked for pointers to help provide clarity.
post 2 of 3
This week in Scuttlebutt
(butt-summaries #3: Jan 22-28 2018 part 1)
Follow-up / Missed items
Geeky Followup
@vtduncan wrote a summary wrapping up the protocol docs grant
If you haven't checked it out already, this guide explains the network protocols Scuttlebutt clients use to talk to each other. It will probably be most useful for people writing new clients in different programming languages, but if you just are just curious how the protocol works then I think you will enjoy it too. Please take a look and let me know what you think!
New People Followup
came here because I deleted my facebook and instagram account, and I was looking for an alternative
and is a thru-hiker.
Every time someone adds something to this thread, the result is that the original material pops to the top of the feed and hits everyone in the eye yet again.
A reminder from a thread with uncomfortable subject matter.
@zach! then broke out a new thread wherein folks started discussing how best to handle that problem in our SSB clients.
In a related note one user ended up using the ability to assign someone a name you recognize them by, as a means for warning themselves, and others about someone with potential trigger warnings, but not going so far as to block them. An interesting solution to something the clients don't address right now, but also one that could be negatively exploited for harassment.
Related to that, @Teq started a long thread
...intended to collate and build-on the ideas I've seen discussed for #saferspaces management around setting up functions blocking, content-indicators, trigger-warnings, etc., in #patchwork and creating a culture of posting-protocols for sensitive-content in the SSB community.
@Go-T103 pondered about how the network will work if/when ssb moves towards a more privacy oriented mode.
For messages stored on the user's computer, what will the ratio be between readable messages (either from friends or made public) and unreadable messages meant for someone other than the user? We mostly depend on a constellation of popular / hobbyist pubs right now, but how can that setup support disparate friend groups? Should it? Can ssb maintain close groups but also a connection to the broader ssb universe? Should it?
@raingloom was pondering about polling people in ssb and @mix pointed out that @Piet's proposal for ssb-loomio got funded in January so we should see it soon.
@mix asked if anyone wanted "to have a go at pulling together the [Sweet Privacy FAQ] and getting it into scuttlebutt.nz and a medium post"
@gickhub was concerned about having been blocked and the resulting thread exposed some of the human / psychological issues regarding the "block" feature. We should probably think about how we can remove the negative connotations in future client releases.
post 1 of 2
I don't want to block people like that because i feel like i would easily start to make my own personal bubble. - @krisa
I can respect that, but i totally disagree in most cases. In general if someone says things that make me uncomfortable / unhappy I think that blocking them is a form of self defense to protect my mental health. I know that the KKK exists. I know what their basic core idea is. That's enough. I don't need to listen to their propaganda.
Then again, some people, like our current president, say things that make us uncomfortable and stressed but can't be ignored, but even they can generally be viewed through the protective lenses of others. Wait for others to relay the important messages. Yes, you risk "echo chamber" effects... but i'm willing to do that a bit to protect myself.
3) Encrypt all communications with a publicly known key. Defeats encryption and obviously a security issue but this is the spirit of #hamradio #amateurradio - @KB1LQC
IANAL but I'm pretty sure it doesn't matter if it's within the spirit of #hamradio because it's against the law (in the US at least). My understanding is that even something as simple as a Caesar cipher would be illegal. It's not about how hard it is to read, it's about is it encrypted or not.
That being said, the non-private messages of SSB aren't encrypted, although i think the in-flight transmission of them is. So, it probably wouldn't be too hard to remove the encryption on that part. HOWEVER you've still got the problem of private groups, which is something we don't have. You could handle it with a pub server that refused to send data to anyone who wasn't on a whitelist. Not sure if they already do that or not, but it wouldn't be hard to add.
Additionally, i don't see how you can share sensitive data like shelter lists without encryption. Yes, it's unlikely a vindictive ex would be watching the waves with the right software at the right time, but I'd be uncomfortable taking that risk. In bad scenarios with lots of people shelters can be a bit chaotic and in many cases easy to penetrate the security of to harm people inside. Doesn't matter if you have police officers on every entrance, they're usually in large buildings like schools which have many many rooms with many breakable windows that will go unheard when someone tries to sneak in.
An interesting solution.
A warning to self without a block, and a breadcrumb for others.
I feel like there ought to be some technical way of enabling the clients to help someone thinking similar thoughts to you.
It also makes me concerned that the solution you took is one that could be exploited by less scrupulous individuals to do harm to & bully someone they disliked.
I don't think that's a particularly good way of implementing the visuals. A collapsable section with a label that expands open sounds like it'd be much better.
The cats channel (politely) demands pictures! ;)
Also that cabbage is ridiculously huge.
Great pics. They just make me want to get back to Mexico. :)
I just looked up La Condesa in Ciudad de México. Is the big park by it nice? And.... is that a zoo in there? Is it good?
The way I've solved this is emigrating. @Alanna
we actually were planning on just leaving if Trump got elected but we honestly didn't believe it could happen. We actively didn't WANT it to happen, so we just kept acting as if it wouldn't, and then it did, and ... now we're still here.
Our plan was to hit the road again, indefinitely. It's been our long term plan anyway, we were just going to start earlier if he got elected, but didn't really set everything up to make it happen that soon.
But, the road still calls, and soon I will embrace it again. Dachary will follow after a couple years we think. She's working on her writing & publishing empire and wants to sit still until that's a bit more stable and self-supporting. The in-between time will figure itself out.
that telephone trees are another form of UI, and like lots of UIs (that I come across in work), put together by people with limited ability to see through the eyes of others, but a determination to use all available architecture anyway.
that is a brilliant observation / quote.
They are also, for some reason, a stressor out of all proportion to their actual size.
i have 2 tips for voice recognition trees
- swear. Most of them are trained to listen for common swear words thinking that it's a frustrated customer and it will boot you to an operator. You don't need to sound mad. Just calmly saying "fuck" works.
- just say "operator" repeatedly regardless of what prompts it offers you.
I usually combine these as "fuck you, operator" After 2 or 3 cycles of "please choose / say ..." "fuck you, operator"... You will magically find yourself talking to a human.
Promised a world of vegan cheese adventures and gender identity debates. Here we go.
I will always be dubious of claims of vegan "cheese" ;) but i'm pretty sure we can help @mix keep that promise.
I have all but disconnected from the news and social feeds, but on the other hand I personally believe it's also important to stay informed and engaged with what's going on.
I still find it difficult sometimes to find the right balance between the two. - @hb
Yeah i feel the same. I'll read that dichotomy of control after work. :)
@nanomonkey i didn't even know there WAS a wikipedia current events. thanks.
We just wish there was some positive or encouraging comment we could make.
@IBob i think just being heard, and knowing i'm not alone in this is enough. :) thanks.
Before lunch: doo de doo i'm working remotely. doo de doo
After lunch: Why is iTunes saying Apple's certs are invalid? Why is Slack saying it's offline? Wait... google.com is returning a "Welcome to Xfinity!" page
TLDR; Comcast forgot i had a modem, randomly deactivated service because they forgot i had a modem, but kept also billing me for modem anyway.
Call Comcast (paraphrased):
Automated system: Please answer a bunch of questions to prove you are authorize to access this account
Me: here's your proof
Human 1: Please answer the exact same set of questions to prove you are authorized to access this account
Me: here's your proof.
Me: I just answered those to the automated system
Human 1: Yes, but i have to ask them anyway.
Me: something's wrong with my account. it was working this morning. now every web page says "Welcome to XFinity"
Human 1: let me get you to an internet tech person
Me (thinking): Why did the automated system bother asking me ANYTHING if it can't even route me to the right department?
Human 2: do you have a modem?
Me: Of course i have a modem, and i know it's working otherwise i couldn't have connected to the internet and had you send me a "Welcome to XFinity" message. But no if you're asking if i have one of you're modems. I do not. This is my modem.
Human 2: Our account says you have no modem. It also says we're charging you for a modem.
Me: I sent it in months ago, and the new one has been working fine until this afternoon.
Human 2: can you give me the mac address and model number for your modem so i can activate it?
Me: .... for fucks sake.... Here's the info...
Me: Why did it stop working today and what can i do to prevent it from happening again.
Human 2: I don't know sir.
Human 2: ....blah blah please approve these changes to your account. I need to read you a script now.
Me: but I'm not.... oh for fucks sake.... yes
Human 2: now i must play you a recording. stay on the line afterwards.
Comcast Recording: ... long hold music... Do you approve the changes to your account? Press 1 if you do.
Me: for fuck's sake...
... repeat the whole change account process because something went wrong, including reading the script, hold music, automated recording asking me if i approve despite human having just done the same thing...
20+ minutes of back and forth with agent trying very hard to navigate comcast systems to get me refunded all the many months they've been billing me for a modem i returned despite me having called at least twice to tell them to stop billing me for the damn modem i already returned.
I seriously hope they pay him well, because having to spend all day compensating for Comcast systems screwing people over sucks. I'm pretty sure I was talking to someone in India though, so I'm betting Comcast is getting the cheapest people they can find, which sucks for him. At least it's a job, and that's more than many can say in India.
I was asking because I can't see any of your messages. I see them in ssb viewer but not in my client so I need to figure out why that's happening if you can see mine.......... @Go-T103
@xj9 (桃) probably follows someone who follows you (maybe a particular pub) but you don't do the reverse, is usually the case.
@Ryan There are few other people testing this platform.
"There are a MORE THAN a few THOUSAND other people testing this platform."
corrected that for ya @Crest ;)
You're not alone @Ryan .
One thing I discovered after using patchfoo is that if you kill it, it leaves some other node process running, which messes up patchwork. It comes up and scuttles forever.
yes, that thing drove me nuts. I think one of the other clients did it too. I need to do a writeup about the current state of the world of the clients, but first i need to do a side by side comparison of those apps on my borked machine vs my not borked machine, because i'm not sure some of the problems i had with them weren't related to this weird path issue.
First off, Welcome.
I am also thrilled about making SSB apps editable in the browser, but needs more thought. A demo will be ready by March. - @jeswin
There's been some work done in this area, but never completed (as far as i know). Search for Firefox plugin here. Also, we just got the
ssb protocol added to Firefox so urls like
ssb://%3SJvvWChV06UJ7uC378belIi7JlIRqrqXh4AvJaFK5Q=.sha256 can be a thing (not sure when it'll hit the public release).
First Aid
Most of the things in your human first aid kit can be used for you dogs too. I'd recommend taking an animal first aid course. Immobilizing a broken dog leg isn't the same as a humans. Also speaking to your vet about what items to put in a field kit for your dog.
If you have a breed prone to bloat you're going to need drugs to shove down their throat (some of the over-the-counter human drugs are safe for dogs). You may also want to consider some medical tubing, a large needle, and a roll of tape for handling extreme cases, when you're not going to get to a vet in time. Obviously you're going to want to do the research, and talk to your vet to you know what to do with that stuff. They did not cover that in the animal first-aid course I took, but I kept them on hand when I had great danes. ;)
Getting Stuck
If you're going to be traveling any back roads with your dog something to think about is what happens when you get stuck. In the desert, when your car dies, and the battery can't support a fan anymore, how do you keep your dog cool during the day? Do you have enough water for you and them? What about staying warm at night? If you've followed the advice above, and brought plenty of water you should be fine.
The nice thing about roads is that cars use them. Now, a fire-road in the middle of a forest somewhere might not get used for weeks at a time (or more) but normal roads, even dirt ones, tend to exist because people needed to get somewhere regularly enough to go through a boatload of work to make that road. So, someone will probably be by in the not too distant future.
Basically, ask yourself if it will be possible to keep your dogs physically safe and thermally regulated if you're stuck without the normal resources of your car for a few days. What about if you have to walk out from your remote camp spot?
U.S. National Parks
The U.S. National parks are amazing places to be, unless you have a dog.
Most of them only allow dogs in specific camping areas, or on a very limited set of trails. Usually the very touristy ones close to parking lots. If you want to get remote in a National Park you'll probably have to do so illegally.
My point is to not assume that the great outdoors that you've been so encouraged to visit actually wants your dog to visit with you. Find out before you go there. We've been to many national parks with our dogs, but every time we've been frustrated at how little we were allowed to visit with them.
International Borders
Don't assume you'll be able to take your dog across the border. Don't assume you'll be able to bring your dog back once it has crossed the border. The world is divided into different levels of Rabies risk. Traveling from a low risk to equal or higher risk is generally possible, but going from a high risk to lower risk is much harder and may involve a quarantine period.
You should be very careful when traveling with a Pit Bull. I believe that Canada, for example, was able to confiscate your Pit Bull on sight and destroy it. There are/were efforts to change this, which may have gone through since this was written, but never assume your dog can cross an international border. When they can cross you'll usually need recent paperwork from your vet regarding their vaccinations. How recent depends on the country you're entering.
Other Humans
People love to come up to your dogs. It doesn't matter if the dogs are barking and growling threatening warnings. "Dog's love me!" they'll say as your dog threatens to eat them alive. People have no sense of self-preservation when it comes to dogs.
No matter what people are going to want to talk to you about your dogs, and meet them and pet them. If you've got friendly dogs this is great. If you've got protective dogs... not so much.
The good thing about barky dogs is that you don't have to worry about people breaking into your car. The bad thing is you'll always feel guilty when you go into a restaurant without them because you know they'll be out there barking their heads off.
post 4 of 4
You'll need to have water on hand all the time anyway, but flushable baby-wipes are great for humans and dogs. They're moist, and hold themselves together far better than paper towel. Be sure that whatever soap you have isn't going to hurt your dogs if they lick their fur after you wash them with it.
General washing
You and your dogs can use the same stuff. You may want to have a dog specific shampoo with you, but baby shampoo will work fine for you and the dogs. Like the humans, we have a towel for each dog. My advice is to go with lightweight camp towels that can be easily wrung out. On wet days you're going to need to use them multiple times, or else you'll have soaking wet seats and bedding. So, its best if you can wring it out and have it ready for re-use later in the day.
On the road we generally don't wash our dogs very often. Mostly just when they absolutely need it.
For dogs, and people both, we really like the NEMO Helio portable pressure shower. It collapses down into itself and it has good pressure. Great for washing out disgusting things in your dogs fur... or yours.
Food & Water
There are a number of travel bowls that are designed to not spill in a vehicle. We make sure to have water always available in cars and vans. In the outback we just put it in the footwell behind the passenger seat. They can stick their heads around the edge of the dog hammock to bend down and drink. Whenever we stop we refill it, and hold it up for them to easily drink from. In the sidecar we just had to pull over more often to make sure they stayed hydrated.
Most dog foods hold up pretty well at room temperature, and higher. You're going to have to keep your vehicle cool enough for the dog to live in so, by default it's going to be cool enough to keep their food safe.
It is important to try and maintain a schedule with regards to feeding times. It's very easy on a road trip for schedules to... disappear. You're going to have to stop more often anyway. Just be sure to stop around dinner time every day to give them a break to stretch and eat.
In the car, we almost always fed the dogs outside, unless it was raining. In the Vanagon it was much easier. Feeding dogs in a tent isn't too bad, but you have to figure out how to keep the water from getting stepped in or drooled out all over the tent floor.
Physical Comfort
If your in a car, a dog hammock is a great investment. It dramatically increases the amount of space they have in the back seat, and it keeps the seats clean...well, cleaner.
If you've got beading out during the day then make sure that dirty muddy dogs won't be able to make it gross when they inevitably hop onto it. I think keeping them from enjoying your bedding while driving is a fools errand. Plus, you want them to be comfortable right?
If there's not space for the dog to sleep in the bed with you at night, make sure they have something big and squishy to curl up in. A car seat just isn't good enough, and it's not designed for their body shapes. Hell, they're not designed for human body shapes either, when trying to sleep.
If your dog's going to be sticking their head out the window a lot you should consider dog goggles. We had "Doggles" which are kind-of like swimming goggles with a chin strap to keep them on. I'm not convinced they were a great idea, because they actually cut down on peripheral vision a lot. If we had to do it again, I'd try some dog goggles that were more like ski goggles: one big plastic visor that fits across both eyes.
Doggie goggles aren't just to make your dog look stylish. A lot of dogs get things like sand and grit blown in their eyes when looking out car windows. A scratched cornea is very uncomfortable, and that's the best case scenario. Better to just protect your dogs yes.
post 3 of 4
Remember, their pads are sensitive, and they can easily burn their paws on hot surfaces that you won't even notice with your rubber soled shoes. Speaking of which, it should be noted that some dogs just don't have the street-smarts to keep themselves from harm.
We had two dogs, Ben, and Bandido. Ben was puzzle solving smart, but had no street-smarts. Bandido, wasn't very bright, but knew how to keep himself safe. We pulled over one hot day, on some rather toasty pavement. When we got out Bandido immediately crawled under the sidecar to be shaded. Ben laid down on dark black blacktop in the baking sun. He would have overheated very quickly if we didn't compensate for his cluelessness.
Booties with soles, like the RuffWear Grip Tex are great for protecting your dogs paws from hot pavement, and sand. Never underestimate hot sand.
Overall, my advice can be summed up as fans, cooling pads, and lots of water in, and on the dogs.
I should also point out that it doesn't matter how cool you manage to make your dogs inside your vehicle people are going to freak out. One day it was in the mid nineties outside our vehicle and low eighties inside the vehicle. We had a woman yelling at us about how we shouldn't have our dogs in the vehicle, and should let them out. We noted that if we let them out of the vehicle it'd be even hotter, and they wouldn't have shade, but that didn't matter. She'd heard her whole life how dogs will overheat quickly in a vehicle and should never be left in one. It didn't matter that they had fans and shade. Logic was not a relevant consideration.
The best advice we've come up with is to just stay with the dogs as much as possible.
When they're outside it's all down to the coats and boots. Many coats don't cover the underside of dogs, so you'll have to pay attention to how well they work for your dog, and how much cold they can handle for how long with them. Don't go on any long trails in the cold until you know how well your dog can handle it with their gear.
Booties are pretty important too for winter use. Some people use little rubber ballon-like things. They're ok for short trips outside, but if you're going for a long walk, or camping outdoors, you'll need something more substantial.
Staying warm at night is pretty important too. As with humans, one of the most important things to do is insulate yourself from the ground. Inflatable pads under your sleeping pad are great. They're great for the dog too. While it's generally easy to get your dogs to sleep on something soft, many dogs are not interested in sleeping under the covers. This is simply going to take practice.
I had a great dane that hated being under the covers, until one winter the power went out, and took the heat with it. We pulled the dog into bed, and covered her, and us, and then forcibly held her there until she warmed up, and stopped trying to get away. After that night, she loved being covered. Other dogs we've simply waited until they curled up and got chilly and then covered them with the child-sized sleeping bag we got for them. I'm not sure what the best way to train a dog to allow themselves to be covered is, but that's what worked for us.
In a car / van it's pretty much the same thing. If you've a safe propane heater in your vehicle (a wonderful luxury) you'll all be toasty all night long, but most folks don't have this, so it's pretty much like camping. Obviously there are things you can do to insulate your vehicle, and prevent heat loss through the windows, but that's a bit off-topic for this post.
Sooner or later your dog is going to roll in something disgusting. One of our dogs found vomit and instantly threw himself in it and rolled around before we could stop him. We were traveling in the sidecar and had few resources on hand, but we did have baby wipes, the water in our camel-backs, and some camp soap.
post 2 of 4
Traveling with dogs
We've traveled long distances with dogs in a sidecar to Colorado, and Nova Scotia. We took them in a Vanagon to Arizona and around most of the continental US in a Subaru Outback. We've slept with them in tents, in the Vanagon, and in many hotels.
So, we've got some experience. Here's what we've learned.
They change everything
Dogs completely change the journey. Adults travel very differently than adults with dogs. I imagine it to share a lot of similarities to adults traveling with kids. In addition to the practical complications, which i'll get to below, they change the feeling of the trip. Now you're sharing it with creatures that don't think the way you do. They get all excited about the new smells, and exploring that new trails is way more exciting for them, than you, regardless of how beautiful it is.
Practically speaking this means you're going to make a lot more stops. They need to stretch their legs, and pee or poo. You're going to have to get them comfortable with using the grass on the edge of parking lots, even when there are lots of cars. You're going to have to convince them to go quickly because some patches of grass simply aren't big enough for wandering around and exploring until they're bored enough to pee.
Sometimes you'll have to trudge them through ice covered snow, because it's the only thing that isn't parking lot. You'll both get over it, although they'll rarely be happy about it.
They're gonna need coats. No matter what you're going to need a rain coat, because a soaking wet dog in a confined space with you is pretty much the definition of unpleasant. When it's raining out there's no-where to pause and shake out before getting into the car / van / whatever. They're going to climb in and get things wet, so you need to keep as much wet out of their fur as possible.
In the cold weather most dogs are going to need coats. The challenge here is coats that won't get snow caught in or under them, or get soaked when it starts to melt.
You'll definitely want to pick up some booties. We really like the RuffWear Grip Tex ones. They're pricey, but we've tried a bunch of different types of booties and these really do seem to be the best designed. Also, they'll work well on hot pavement and sand, not just in the cold.
It's very important to measure your dogs feet and get the right size of bootie.
In hot weather many people shave their long haired dogs, but it's something you need to think carefully about when traveling. Elevation brings weather, and travel frequently brings elevation changes. My advice is to leave the fur, but bring cooling pads, and extra water for wetting down your dog. Evaporative cooling is an amazing thing.
We we traveling across Kansas in the middle of the summer. The dogs were in the sidecar, with the cover to keep the sun off, and let the wind flow by. The temperature was over 100°F and us humans were baking. One day we called it quits early, and got a hotel. It was just too hot to continue, and we were concerned about the beasts, but when we picked them up from the evaporative cooling pad they were on their undersides were nice and cool. They were shaded, and enjoying their journey while we baked.
Shade is as important as evaporative cooling in hot weather. You're going to pull over, and the car is going to bake. Obviously you'll need serious airflow, but you're going to need shade too. The car may actually work if you've got some fans going too. When you get out of the car though, you need to have some shade for your beast, and something to sit on that isn't going to bake them from below.
post 1 of 4
I find I am afraid of opening Twitter on my phone these days. The thought of it bumps my stress 10 levels up.
I still use it, but more for putting out some occasional thoughts and checking what my friends have to say. I don't really scroll through my feed. This president has ruined it for me. To much bile. To much stupid. Too much .... just too much. He's infected the world and made war a real possibility, and encouraged misogyny and bigotry, alienated our friends, and made enemies from our world neighbors.
At a time when we need to be doing everything in our power to save the planet, even thought it's too late to retain what we have as it is, our country has moved to do everything it can to hurt adoption of clean energy, and everything it can to encourage measures that will harm our mother.
I'm not saying this to debate it. I just need to say... I can't take it.
I know we need to speak up and fight this, but I just don't have the energy for it.
what we need is a button we can click to stop seeing posts from someone and verbiage so that it doesn't imply the blocked person has been bad, just because someone doesn't feel like seeing their posts.
side note: @gickhub the way you leave a pub is by blocking it. It doesn't mean the pub is a bad bot. ;)
Since Block and Mute are two separate verbs with very different meanings. It seems to me like you would want to have both.
from a human perspective yes, but from a functional perspective? A user clicks the button and stops seeing stuff from some other user. The user no longer sees them so why do they care if they're routing their messages or not. And, do you really have to make that decision every time "huh, is this person so bad that i don't want to pass on their data OR are they just annoying to me? well, I don't want to be mean....so maybe just Mute? But, if i block them i'll save people who follow me from replicating packets from a person i don't want to see... so i'd save tehm bandwidth and disk space... so Block maybe?" I've got enough decision fatigue from my day job. I don't need to be thinking about that too.
ultimately I believe blocking and not passing on packets is best because there's nothing stopping your downstream people from getting that person's data without you and they'll still see that person's old posts even if they don't follow them, and you save bandwidth and disk space for you and them (if they don't care about that person).
I think fundamentally, just thinking about it mathematically, forming a group is an act of centralization, and so requires some sort of governance - @moid
yup, otherwise what's the point in making a "private" pub server. Someone(s) has to control who gets in and what the server will allow to happen.
wow, that is probably the best looking "i had an adventure" web site i've seen. Nicely done.
@Piet macOS
Pretty sure Patchbay worked fine the bare minimum ~/.ssb dir. (installer version) I can test more thoroughly with the master versions later and report back.
@moid there is no file named
config in my
~/.ssb Does it have another name? that sounds very plausible. I don't remember manually doing something like that.
so, i think there's a lot of value in this thread and the implications for clients because i think it's safe to say @gickhub isn't the only one who's going to react that way.
Maybe the solution is something as simple as changing the word "Block" to "Mute" and adding in the getting started guide that you don't just use it to block someone for bad behavior, but also as a tool to minimize things you're not interested in seeing.
also, i'm sure i'm not the only one who would like to see pics from your hikes. :)
Welcome :)
What trail(s) have you Thru-hiked?
What I love most about scuttlebutt is that there seems to be an abundance of really resourceful, friendly and all around awesome people that inspire me.
Come for the fresh air. Stay for the people.
well... in its defense, it probably is "a very rare file" ;)
tldr; partially
Full answer:
We had a dna test done (Wisdom Panel because they have the largest breed database & good reviews) because we couldn't figure it out. She has short legs and is about 30lbs (~13kg). We knew it was Lab, but lab + what?
Her personality really is a mix of most of those. Very snuggly with us, but very protective of our house and car, and likes chasing small prey, which is making introducing the kitten ... problematic. We don't expect to be able to leave them alone, and free, in the same room for probably 6 months. Right now We stick Lita in a crate and let the kitten run around the house for training. We did a bunch of preparatory training before we were comfortable with that. Otherwise the cat lives upstairs in my wife's office and we take turns working in there with her.
We also have a Springer Spaniel + Border Collie mix, but he's larger and doesn't fit in my lap while i'm working. ;) He gets along fine with the kitten. She was playing with his tail tonight.
I want to get off the grid and still work in the JS world. I'm tired of twitter and the brogramming culture.
sounds like you've found the right place then ;)
I'll be finishing this week and then heading off backpacking around the philippines, I'll be in Aus in NZ shortly after.
And you'll have something to read on the long plane flights.
Welcome @Mike
pretty sure you can dump to disk, and AFTER the first time i'd think you'd be inserting very few records per launch / sync. Not enough to make a human notice the pause. And yes, i think you really need to persist. Also, i agree with @arj that 1000 sounds slow. SQLite is actually one of the fastest relational dbs out there (the fastest?) even when writing to disk. Hell, even if you were writing the images into it i'd expect faster.
Also, if you're dealing with an existing client there's no reason you couldn't just build a big-ole-insert statement (or multiple) in memory and write it all at once (or batches) (assuming you're just storing post metadata in the db).Even without an in memory db that ought to be pretty fast. Not sure how efficient string concatenation is in JS or if you'd have to build an array and then concatenate at the end or... Anyway, just an off-the-top-of-my-head thought.
@mix I think it probably ought to be combined with some of the bits from the conversation that led up to it before it goes up. There are some things in there that are not in @marina 's post that i found useful.
it's about to happen - ssb-loomio was funded by grants in Jan. We'l be spinning up dev on it soon - @mix
awesome. i thinking the same thing this morning @raingloom. Or, "Why can i invite people to a gathering but i can't poll people with simple questions?"
I've screwed something up....
once upon a time i was experimenting with syncing via Dropbox until you fine people taught me i just needed the
secrets file on both computers and to wait for everything to sync via ssb before posting.
somewhere along the way one of my computers ended up storing things in
I would not be at all surprised if this was something i did.
What i AM surprised about is this:
With a fresh download of Patchwork.app from the github releases page
If i take my
~/.ssb directory and delete everything but the
secret and the
gossip.json AND i remove the
~/Dropbox/apps/Patchwork directory i just get a blank window when patchwork opens. "blank" meaning a white window with just the close, minimize, and expand buttons (i'm on a mac) and literally nothing else.
if i put that directory BACK in dropbox and relaunch Patchwork it's all happy again.
there's nothing in
secret or
gossip.json that is referencing that directory so where has it stored the idea that it should be looking there?
I'd really like to get it all out of Dropbox but i don't seem to be able to convince this computer not to look there.
And yes, i tried "turning it off and on again"
For messages stored on the user's computer, what will the ratio be between readable messages (either from friends or made public) and unreadable messages meant for someone other than the user?
does it matter? I think the relevant question is more one of disk space required.
We mostly depend on a constellation of popular / hobbyist pubs right now, but how can that setup support disparate friend groups?
I don't see that it can
Should it?
I don't know that it matters. Either you make it easy for a pub to support private groups OR you make it easy for people to launch a private pub. The latter is a FAR easier problem to solve, and the results are practically the same. There advantage to launching private pubs is that now i don't have to depend on a centralized server not going down and taking out 4000 pubs. It's just my pub.
Can ssb maintain close groups but also a connection to the broader ssb universe?
I don't see why not. A private pub only replicates stuff for its members. There's discussion (and need) for an easy way to send group chats and support the concept of groups as a thing. If we assume that's coming then you've got your group chats and people will still connect to the whole.
There is precedent. Think of all the people who just use Twitter or Facebook to stay up to date with a close group. They're effectively in the "my group" modality but many of them still follow more public pages / personalities. Even if they don't some of the people in their group will.
I see no reason to believe that adding good support for private groups will result in ssb being a collection of disconnected islands.
Should it?
if it doesn't we'll never have network effect and adoption will be a handful of hobbyists and no-one else. Even if you don't care about larger adoption the question of utility comes into play. I think most people would far prefer to use a client where they can connect with their group AND see what's going on outside of their group instead of having to switch clients for each context. Remember information crosses those boundaries. I'll frequently see some public thing from outside my group and then pass the info on to people inside my group. You need a client that can do that, because people do that.
Wife texts me:
I respond:
#cats vs #dogs
I will try to gladly share my drop of tattoo designs and tattooing in general.
pictures please!
we need more non-geek things posted here. ;)
@masukomi is there a logic to posting three unrelated posts, rather than one post with two replies?
no. it just didn't occur to me until after this 2nd batch.
The problem for me was
- they aren't "replies" so it didn't occur to me to click that button and there's no UI handling of something like Twitter's "Topic". Takeaway being that wording is important and the wrong wording will lead to the wrong user actions. "Why would i click 'Reply' if i'm not replying?"
- the only reason they're three posts is because i'm compensating for a client limitation and had to try quite a few times to even get them posted, which is frustrating and doesn't leave you thinking as calmly as you should at the end.
Eventually i had to bump the post size down to <=5000 bytes I was thinking 7000 would be low enough for the 8,xxx that the UI claims but no...
Doing that guessing game manually (trying to make them as big as possible to minimize the number of posts) sucks (found that out last time), so i ended up with many cycles of edit, recompile my tool, attempt to post... until i finally got them to post, at which point I was all "screw it. make them go!"
Next time they will be multiple replies. Maybe i can even figure out a way to automate post+reply (repeated) with sbot so that i can just pass it a list of files to post.
More pics of Ash.
Do you have any Godzilla pics of your cats?
cc #cat-pics
it turns a system that can be different and surprising to code with for people not used to it into a system that looks basically like any other client/server app except for the fact that you don't generally write to the DB (except when processing events).
i was also thinking that if we had SQLite it'd make implementing bayesian filtering (to pull out interesting things) effing trivial AND we don't want that info replicated anyway because it's irrelevant for everyone else and a privacy violation.
For data that's ONLY needed by the client so much becomes possible, and easy, if we have have a standard, and non-replicated, db available. I dunno if flume has a way to say "don't replicate this data" (but even if it does, it raises the barrier to entry. Maybe that's ok though...
side note: I've really got to watch @mix 's intro to flume video.
re these long multi-part posts, would it be easier if i posted the subsequent parts as replies to the ones before them?
I think so, then it'd just be one long thread.
This week in Scuttlebutt
(butt-summaries #2: Jan 15-21 2018 part 3)
Other Distributed stuff
@noffle announced the next #disaster-radio call will be January 29th. There's a doodle linked in the post to see when folks will be available.*sh
New People
A literal but not actual patch of 200 year old @red_clover sprung up to provide a little herbal & digital remedy. This was followed by a bit of @eloquence, who is writing tools to help free us from massive proprietary companies.
@rob took a moment from his Crystal programming to join us from Colorado. @gickhub read Andre's plan to rescue the internet and felt that maybe we were worth taking a chance on even though the rest of the social networks were... not.
@Teina does interesting things with indigenous people which sound somehow applicable to our #community-gardening.
A @DullBlaze started in Washington state (US) and longboarded into the scuttleverse.
@zelf came on a mission to "Build a new world through local production/digital fabrication with a decentralized network core!" and appears to be traveling across Europe, and beyond to spread the word.
post 3 of 3
This week in Scuttlebutt
(butt-summaries #2: Jan 15-21 2018 part 2)
@nari nari nari pondered aloud about the effects of having undeleteable posts and how they have
...had the effect of making me cautious about what I actually put out there. Even under a pseudonym, I feel like I shouldn't just blather whatever bullshit comes to mind for all to see.
and what that might mean for the network.
Geeky Stuff
@mix started work on scuttle-book ( repo here)
A helper module which covers all your ssb book related needs from fetching book data, creating new book entries, and validating whether a message is of a standard form.
In @dominic's muxrpc dev diary he noted that you should pull messages like this to "read a fixed number of messages and not request more until you've used them." since we currently lack support for "backpressure" to adjust data transmission relative to bandwidth and network quality.
@Dreaming Jade noticed some overlap between the rollup code used in #patchwork and #patchbay and figured extracting a generic rollup library would be nice. That lead into discussions of how and features and other geekery.
Further discussion of the work can be found under the #rollway channel/tag.
@noffle discovered that sbot crashes if patchfoo loads before ssb-ooo plugin
@Dominic put out a request for mid-level application developer docs
> It should be targeted at people building ssb apps or making PRs to current applications.
@x got somewhat confused, being a non-geek, when he discovered that the "Help > Learn more" link in #patchwork went to a page about Electron.js. There's a ticket for this in GitHub now.
@DreamingJade was asking for suggestions on thinks to tackle in #Patchwork that aren't too huge. Some were provided, and someone should probably go through the list and make sure there's a feature request ticket for each of them.
@Dominic put forth a draft spec for credit-based-flow-control extention of MUXRPC protocol
post 2 of 3
This week in Scuttlebutt
(butt-summaries #2: Jan 15-21 2018 part 1)
Found something cool in the scuttleverse that others would enjoy? Send a private message to @masukomi and I'll see about including in the next butt-summary.
NOTE: this update is broken into multiple posts.
Followup / Missed items
@Richard D Bartlett started a thread last week listing things he's noticed people doing to make ssb feel like a productive happy community which others have added to. Worth reading and checking if you are doing those nice things too.
@Dominic built an oar the hard way (with JavaScript an a CNC machine).
Community Stuff
@Richard D. Bartlett had some suggestions for a scuttlenewsletter / or other form of improvement on these data dump summaries.
@cinnamon commented on the new #butt-summaries said
A while back I was thinking about SSB in terms of legibility - a less legible space is a maze of twisty passages where you can't see all the people at once, with no singletons or global points of reference.
A downside to this which we're experiencing now is that it's hard to participate in a community like this one. You have to somehow figure out where the center of gravity is, worm your way into the social orbits of the important people so they follow you, and keep up with the firehose to stay relevant. If you don't have time for that it's hard to meaningfully contribute. It's a clique instead of an open process.
I think this talks to the well discussed need to improve discoverability, searchability, etc.
@mix linked @marina's posts from last week under a "Sweet Privacy FAQ" post
Welcome new people. If you're interested in understanding a little more about how some data gets places, who is going to be able to read what you publish, and how you can stop people receiving your messages
which should make them a bit more findable.
@Ebtessam Zoheir wondered about the future of Parental controls here on Scuttlebutt.
@maymay pointed out the potential privacy violations inherent in posting a public message indicating that you've started following a tag and wondered why we do it.
@xj9 (桃) suggested a possible reason and noted that it might still serve the same function and protect privacy if it were changed to private message.
@mix posted a cool visualization of his view of the scuttleverse which can be flown through in 3D if you have the geeky inclination.
@zach! and @Angelica got engaged!
@nanomonkey revealed his desire to travel across North America and solicited advice from the scuttleverse.
post 1 of 3
Is it the case that all the feeds are also linked in some larger blockchain?
no. each identity has its own personal blockchain.
I was referring to deleting an entire feed, which is associated with a key/pair.
Again, the best you can do is politely request that someone deletes the data they already have from an identity. There's no way to force the matter in a distributed system.
What I'm asking about is the ability to exercise my "right to forget", not only block and no longer replicate but also delete that persons entire feed from my disk.
sure. Wouldn't be a big deal to delete their data from your system after blocking them, but I think it's just a matter of minimizing required disk space at that point / forcefully deleting content because I think you're not going to see anything from someone you've blocked. I am assuming that it hides past posts from blocked people but i haven't checked.
So, the idea that bad actors could flood this system with reprehensibly illegal material that the network would then cheerfully store with the rest of the replicated material I'm connected to is something I hadn't considered -- that's a disaster waiting to happen.
have you heard of web pages? ;)
if you visit a web page and that web page has content on it that is illegal in your country you have just download that illegal material onto your computer. Most people don't perform manual cache control so it's going to sit around on your computer for quite some time and you have no easy insight into what material you have or where.
I have yet to hear of any law that actually addresses the reality of how the web works and compensates for the fact that you have no way to know you've downloaded illegal content until after it's already happened, and even then i can silently put illegal content onto your machine without you being aware of it if you just visit my web page.
the disaster is already here, and has been on your computer for many years now.
blockchain technology is an append-only log at its core. You can't delete from something that's append only. Each entry in the log points to the prior entry in the log. If you delete an entry in the log you break the chain of blocks. That's why the best that can ever be done is requesting that the clients pretend that a post isn't there anymore.
Additionally, and this is the key point: This is a decentralized system, so the only one who can force anything to happen to my copy of your data is me. There is no command you can send that I must obey. You can request that i do something, and if i'm using a client that chooses to honor that request I will. BUT there's nothing stopping me from saying "Oh man, someone has asked me to delete this. I bet it's juicy! Let me highlight it and bring it to the top." If i was a gossip reporter this would be a spectacular feature that i would pay money for.
I feel like this is a solved problem with standard relational DBs. You just have a thread id and a timestamp then sort.
Flume doesn't seem like the right solution for this problem. Why does the info need to be stored in the distributed db? Email clients figure this out client side so fast you don't notice. Why can't Patchwork and friends? Would it be so bad to add SQLite to the clients? Wouldn't that open up a whole world of possibilities for local analysis?
Perhaps this is something that's already managed or could be by at least allowing a right to forget at the grain size of an entire feed, .ie. not only block a feed but delete it locally - @moid
This has been discussed before. Short version it's just not possible with the underlying technology. The best you can get is putting out a request for people / clients to kindly pretend that thing in their log doesn't exist anymore.
i'd like (some) privacy through (likely) isolated public spaces. like irl.
People are working towards that. :)
"Post as if you mother was reading over your shoulder" -- @alanz
For me it's "post as if your boss is looking". That's a far more restrictive bar. Saying something that upsets your mom doesn't kill your income too.
Is this just my own neuroses at work, or do other people feel something like this? - @nari nari nari
I spend a little more effort checking that the spelling is right.
And I think there is something to what @Richard D. Bartlett has been talking about lately relative to interface leading the form. Because Twitter is always teeny tiny things (or horrible to make "topics") I'll post more stream of consciousness stuff there. I still post as if my boss was watching, because i think he does sometimes.
Because the UI here allows for longer posts I tend to make longer posts (and get annoyed by not being able to make much longer posts).
I think that if Patchwork's UI encouraged shorter twitter-like posts i would post more stream of consciousness things here. I think the permanence isn't affecting me as much because i've been thinking about that for years on other social networks anyway. I don't want to look back at my social stuff years later and say "OMG what an ass!"
But, I'm having trouble deciding if the permanence would have any effect on the people who say things like "I hope you get raped". They're not thinking "oh well I can always delete this, so it's ok". There are still going to be serious social repercussions if that makes it back to any of the women in their day-to-day lives.
I think for people who are generally good, it might improve the signal to noise. I think for people who use the cloak of anonymity to say whatever they want it won't matter.
Welcome @zelf.
Mind expanding upon what the "decentralized core" of "local production/digital fabrication with a decentralized network core" looks like to you?
South America isn't bad, but there are parts of it that definitely aren't great. What good is a policy that covers local care if the local care sucks? Sure, it's better than NOT having local coverage, but...
Speaking from experience, there are many places where I'm pretty sure that a local doctor would take a day or days to get to, and a hospital that even approached American standards would be not happening anytime soon, if at all. If you're staying near the major metropolitan cities this obviously doesn't apply. I'm not sure where you're going, but just in case, i'm going to put it out there that Venezuela would probably be a terrible idea right now. Everywhere else, is probably fine.
Jumping in this conversation, do you know if evacuation insurance can let you choose a country or use a different country than your nationality as reference?
um. I'm not sure i understand the question. Are you asking if they'll evacuate you to any hospital in any country? I don't know, but i would assume NO. You'd have to check the specific policy though. I would assume they just evacuate you to a hospital in your home country. I'm pretty sure that with mine, they'd get me to essentially any hospital in the US (my home country).
Yeah, they probably just never overwrote the defaults for that menu. ;)
but can't you see the value that twitter offers by supporting a different form of content than medium?
not really. I'd be perfectly happy to have a twitter UI that maintained short little views and had a "view more" button for longer posts. Limiting it doesn't seem to actually benefit anything.
People still make long posts...they're just really obnoxious and Twitter has admitted that long posts are a thing that should be supported by adding support "topics" which are really just long posts that have been broken down into a bazillion wee tweets. Instead of just supporting longer tweets they make people jump through hoops, but provide a visual tool to support the results of that hoop jumping.
that's pretty cool. I've been pondering reading that, but there's no audiobook version yet and that's how i accomplish most of my "reading" these days.
obviously at the start of that i missed which vehicle but figured it out by the end... sorry.
The Base camp is just a rocket stove with thermogenerator driven blower fan. It works amazingly well, and should be my main cooker, using the little guy only for heating coffee water.
maybe we just travel really differently. So much of my cross country travel involves stopping for the night in places that don't have wood or where the only wood is in places where you shouldn't / couldn't gather it. Also there's the whole beetle blight issue with transporting wood so you really shouldn't bring it with you...
re the shower. that seems overdesigned re teh toilet. Look at most wet baths out there. They just have the toilet right there IN the shower. No reason it can't get wet. Just keep your toilet paper somewhere that'll be dry.
Also, what kind of vehicle are we talking about? If you are determined to do a shower i'd recommend against a solid walled one in most vehicles. The thinking being that the psychological effects of blocking off that much visual space and making the vehicle that much skinnier inside (visually) is pretty unhappymaking and leads to a cramped feeling. The only way i've seen this NOT hit that problem is in a sprinter van where they did the bathroom against the back doors with a full-width wall in front of it. Since you can't really do that in a Range Rover Classic i'd suggest something with a shower curtain and a tub. That being said i'm not sure how you plan on fitting even a sit-down with a shower curtain in that vehicle. I think standing outside would be much easier, although it'd kinda suck in the winter.
just heat up a bit of water on the stove then soap+sponge! - @Dominic
yeah. it sounds crude to most house dwellers but it's surprising how far that plus the occasional baby-wipe can get you.
#scuttlebutt (thought i'd posted it there... :/ )
For almost exactly the same amount of physical space as a luggable loo you can have a small porta-potty like this that keeps the smell away when you use it and is easy to dump down a toilet or any RV septic dump which you can find for free at many truck stops that also cater to RVs (and of course rv campgrounds). We usually just dump it in the toilet because that's easier. I don't remember what brand we have but i can go find out if you're interested. I would strongly recommend this over a luggable loo.
I'm not a fan of the Biolite. Hunting down tiny pieces of wood is just annoying, especially when you're in between places and at a truck stop. I'd go with one of the small canister ones like a JetBoil. Personally I've got ultra small titanium one for backpacking but if space and weight aren't an issue the JetBoil is fine. They have a pot which is nice too. Pretty much anything else in that vein that has decent reviews is fine. Also, if you're building stuff you can just embed something like that in your counter top as long as you can pull it out to change the canister. Or you could get a propane tank and a burner that you embedded, but that means more space taken up.
Electric hot plate sounds like too much wattage. You'd need so much solar and battery to compensate for using it with any regularity, or a couple deep cycle batteries for that and other stuff. I, obviously, haven't done the math on it but it doesn't sound a good plan.
I'd likely stick to a small wok, a kettlepot for boiling/steaming and the smallest pressure cooker I can find. Maybe a dutch oven for baking. Wondering if I can get away with using a cordless drill for immersion blending.
I love this kettle from GSI small, lightweight, and works great. We used it for years in our vanagon and at home. didn't feel the need to upgrade to a "real" one.
if you swing by southern VT I think we still have a small dutch oven we got for our vanagon, but never used, that you could have. I'd have to check. We ended up just using pots and pans.
re grinding and blending. do you need to? that sounds like extra stuff to bring that just wouldn't be used often enough to justify its existence, but i dunno about your typical meal prep.
For showering NEMO Helio Portable Pressure Shower with Foot Pump is great. It packs down pretty small and works well. We used it with a pop up privacy tent behind the vanagon. they pop up fast and pack flat... still a wide disk, but a flat wide disk. I wouldn't recommend giving up that much space to build a shower inside what i assume is something van-sized. Also, I've seen many attempts and they're almost all really annoying kludges, and frequently have problems with water escaping. I agree that grey-water is overkill. And draining grey-water onto the road / ground is illegal in many places.
We've kitted out a Vanagon for off-grid living (including mid-winter living). And now I'm working through the mental calculations for a 6+moth trip at the end of this year (we don't have the vanagon anymore). If i end up in a 4 wheel vehicle i think i'll just take a spare battery maybe go all fancy with a Goal Zero that can be charged by the car (solar's not worth it if you're driving regularly), my camping gear, my computer, and not much else.
if i end up on a motorcycle again, well it's tent-city baby!
Good luck. I've been through this stuff before and my wife's done the electrical so I'd be happy to act as a sounding board.
A quick and dirty hack to compensate for max post length
So the weekly summary was 3 posts. The next one is probably going to be similarly large. I have also written multiple posts that i had to break up into multiple smaller posts.
Doing this manually sucks, and i don't know enough about ssb / patchwork's guts to implement
blob support. So I wrote ssb-splitter
- Reads in a markdown file
- Splits it into multiple files with as many paragraphs as possible in each
(roughly 7000 bytes to be safe)
- adds a line to each post indicating which one it is and of how many. E.g. "post 2 of 12"
Usage instructions are on GitHub along with the source.
And if you're reading in the future and the download links don't work just go to the GitHub repo and download it from the releases page.
Blah blah, running unknown executables from strangers is an obvious security risk, blah blah. Quick hack. blah.
Mac users
If you're on a mac you can find a binary here
Linux users
I don't have a linux box but if you do you can download this and run this command to compile it:
cc 'ssb-splitter.o' -o 'ssb-splitter' -rdynamic -lpcre -lgc -lpthread /usr/local/Cellar/crystal-lang/0.23.1_3/src/ext/libcrystal.a -levent -lrt -ldl -L/usr/lib -L/usr/local/lib
If that doesn't work I can't help you. Sorry. This is a quick hack and I don't have a linux box. ;)
When i do get access to a linux box I'll compile something and make a release on GitHub.
Have fun (if this sounds interesting). I wrote it for me so ignoring it is totally cool too. ;)
I was just musing on the benefits of having separate spaces for short and long form content. - @Richard D. Bartlett
I have trouble with that. From my perspective I have a collection of people who like hearing what i have to say. Sometimes I have short conversations. Sometimes I have long ones. I shouldn't have to switch languages, or rooms because i have more words to say.
Now, sometimes people simply don't have the energy to listen to some long thing regardless of who is saying it. Here we can simply do what Patchwork already does, and truncate it visually at some point and say "show more".
I love that people can use different tools. I hate the default twitter client. I love that I have so many opinionated choices to go with for posting to twitter. I'm also very thankful that an effectively random subset of my posts aren't restricted to being seen by my followers who happen to use the same client. Doubly so when on twitter and SSB I'm just sending some text, and maybe some images.
Side note: I understand (or at least have the impression) that there's some underlying technical reason why the clients initially limited things, and that switching to
blob for long posts solves this.
We're not really looking to engage with authorities at this time. We're really trying to make this a grassroots flat decentralized network and starting with top-down buy-in doesn't seem like a good way to achieve that. @juul
Having worked with our EMA i'd think that a combination would work best. Get a couple local people to set up a couple nodes to prove that it works "and here you can come over and test it" then talking to local EMA ( or EMA Adjacent ) people who actually care about disaster planning. No reason you can't have the best of both worlds, and it's l lot easier to convince someone who actively plans for disasters and has a place to put these (town land) than it is to convince a whole network of individuals, in the same town, that they should bother sticking one of these on their land and let you occasionally come on their land to check on it.
re wasach 100
The Wasatch Front 100 Mile Endurance Run is held in Utah the first Friday and Saturday after Labor Day each year. The run stretches from East Mountain Wilderness Park, Utah to Soldier Hollow, Utah and covers some of the most beautiful scenery the Wasatch Mountains have to offer. There is a cumulative gain of approximately 24,000 feet, as well as a cumulative loss of approximately 23,300 feet throughout the course. This is a premier run that will test the endurance of any runner.
That sounds like it'd need a LOT of disasterradio nodes since they're using normal wifi frequencies. What's the range with clear line of sight? How many you planning on making @viduno ?
It also has a single database at the race end which probably contributes to bottlenecks in data transmission. -- @viduno
they using D-Star or ?? for data transmission over ham ?
I went to BU and miss Boston. I lived on Strathmore closer to BC. Loved living there.
heh. we just moved to southern VT to get away from the city. Our CERT work with the town in MA is now purely remote help (calls, putting together maps for remote calls while they sleep, etc) ... well except for the marathon. I like helping with that, and learn a ton from listening to the totally professional ham net they manage, so I'll drive the 4hrs back for that.
my understanding is that @mfitz situation is actually better than most. Most EMAs seem to be all "civilians?! Radio people?! We have radios right here. Why do we need them?"
@viduno: I'm eager to hear how your tests goes. I'm a CERT member in a Massachusetts EMA. We work with the EMA police officers regularly, and Ham volunteers play a huge part in the Boston marathon relaying info between all the various officers and groups. Our primary contact at our town's EMA is a Ham who understands the value of things like this, so if it gets to a point where it's ready for more real world deployment i can start talking with them about the possibility of making it happen in town.
@Petromir Dzhunev I would also note that following a tag/channel is fine but I believe you will have a better experience here if you search for topics that interest you and then follow people who are talking about them.
i like the idea of the parental controls being hooked in to the data stream so that they would recreate themselves if you reloaded from scratch, and would be visible to parents.
Are you thinking it's just a big blacklist of keywords? I dunno that the age specific sets are really going to work. We've got a global community here and what's acceptable at what age can change dramatically from country to country. You could probably do some sort of named sliding scale from "highly restricted" to "slightly restricted" and let people figure out for themselves what is appropriate for their kid.
Tech-wise I guess we will soon be marking inappropriate content @Ebtessam Zoheir
unless you're thinking of coding this yourself i'd be dubious of the "soon" part. I don't have the impression there are a lot of geeks interested in coding parental controls in their free time. Maybe i'm wrong. There are certainly a lot of geeks with young kids...
Regardless, I think it's something worth filing a feature request ticket for. You want to do that or should I? I think the implementation details could be hashed out in the ticket.
Are there any places where I can find some list of pub servers sorted by topics? - @Petromir Dzhunev
There has been a lot of discussion recently about how to improve groups so that they can better support being topic or location specific. There are good reasons to encourage people to set up their own servers and become their own little topic islands, but right now we need to do work before we can really get there.
I'm not entirely sure what your work means (practically speaking) @Teina , but I'm pretty sure it'll be useful in #community-gardening ;)
Congrats @Zach!
I love seeing people willing to take their lives into their own hands and make it what they want.
... do you think that was intentional @Dominic ? or just happy coincidence?
What has it been like to do this? - @Dan Hassan
I'm just taking notes in a markdown file whenever I come across something notable.
The annoying bit is having to make the links, especially for the usernames, because if i did them in Patchwork it'd autocomplete them, but i have to make them manually because this doc has to live outside of Patchwork until it's finished.
How likely is it that you will continue doing this?
I don't see any reason I'll stop in the near future. A) I'm surfing the butts anyway B) I want to help this community to succeed. C) while I am a programmer I'm somewhat burnt out and not capable of contributing code right now so....
Also, I love to travel across countries where i have zero internet access. So, i have a personal interest in seeing it succeed.
Is there anything that would help you continue this work?
better tooling for long posts. I'm thinking of writing something that'll take the starting doc, split it into pieces <= 8k, add the header to each. Then I think next time I'll have to post them in reverse order so that i can have the link of the last one to add to the penultimate, and the links for both of those to add to the one before and... (maybe eventually write a tool to do that) it just feels like a lot of make-work that shouldn't have to exist. I'm wondering about posting them with TickTack since that should handle the length ok, but i'm not sure if the other clients will be able to see / read them or if i can even post to a channel with that. :/ Need to investigate.
mostly i just don't get why Patchwork wants to limit my post size. it's already got a visual thing for shortening long posts and expanding them when a user wants to see it all. So, why does it care how much i type? I get limiting attachment size, but text size? Sure, don't let me post the entire library of congress but... 8k seems an arbitrary and unnecessary restriction.
I would be happy to sling some crypto change into a pot for this type of work...
That's a kind offer, and if this becomes more time consuming (say if i actually do a podcast of SSB stuff) maybe i'll ask, but for now, I'm happy to keep doing this for free.
the following information is important to be shared amongst your social graph, - @dinosaur
i think generally most people here are more focused on the positive case
I think you're right, and that the tools do need it, but with all the media hype of any perceived privacy violation made by FB I can't help but wonder why i haven't seen any complaints about this. I don't think you're average FB user is thinking about how the underlying software must be aware of these connections to do their job, and wouldn't care if it did. They care more about what's publicly visible which FB can control.
I think there is a difference between showing people who you follow, and what subjects you follow. Maybe the key is that you can always say "i don't agree with [person] I just want to keep informed about what they say" but you can say that about some socially unacceptable porn type, for example.
Anyway. I think the key takeaway is it doesn't really matter if people are concerned about your social graph being public because the system can't function if it isn't. The channel follows however are a valid potential privacy concern, and if we can make those into private messages we probably should.
I don't know if that makes it better, or worse @pod but thanks for the info.
On a related note, what about the notification that x person started following someone else. Twitter, and Facebook make it easy to see who someone is following / friends with.
It seems obvious to me why my following some channel that might be socially taboo amongst my peers would be a privacy violation, but why doesn't the same seem to apply to people? I, for example, would not want people to know that i listened to that "Info Wars" radio personality ... person. So why does it appear that no-one cares about people seeing who they follow on social media? Do they care but just not have the option ?
i thought that article always had that cover image -- @dinosaur
really? maybe i conflated the two, but damn that's a stupid image for the Atlantic to put with that article. I have higher expectations for them.
I am not sure why said article is infamous? -- @gickhub
I should have said "famous" not "infamous". Too many people use "infamous" and "famous" interchangeably, and I appear to have been brain-sucked into doing the same thing. I suspect that it's just a matter of time before it joins the ranks of "inflamable" meaning "flamable" and "literally" now meaning "metaphorically" ... sometimes language evolution sucks.
It shouldn't be too hard to filter posts based on keywords. You could totally add that into a client but you'd also need to add password protected controls on that client.
BUT @kumavis, what's to stop the kid from just taking their "secret" and "gossip.json" files, deleting everything else and reloading their from the network with no restrictions. All the other hacks i can think of off the top of my head to make it so that you couldn't edit the dir either make ssb not work or are easily circumventable.
I think to do parental control properly you need a centralized thing only the parent controls that can't be so easily circumvented. Because you know that the moment there are enough kids to warrant parental controls there will be a teen who posts "how to disable parental controls on ssb"
You could do simplistic parental controls that would only work for the very young, but as soon as you get to