TWO HOURS wasted today trying to figure out why an image wasn’t loading on some web page and what I was doing wrong… when the issue is the friggin’ DSL router is injecting headers into http (non-https) pages. GAH! I’m ready to throw the thing. I’ve never been so mad at CPE. 🤬

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Reading about browser security measures and getting sad we don’t live in a world where cross-site scripting is a feature instead of a bug.

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“You have reached a non-working number at UPS […]” says the recording. If it is a non-working number, it wouldn’t even ring, right? It should have said “You have reached an outgoing calls only number at UPS […]”, or better yet, route outgoing call only numbers to the one we should be calling instead. Problem resolved.

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Summary of Discussions (as best I can):

  • @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org and @sorenpeter@darch.dk express simplicity. Both Lyse and Sorenpeter support location-based addressing.
  • @falsifian@www.falsifian.org believes we should continue to develop ideas and extensions progressively over time like we’ve always done.
  • @david@collantes.us @quark@ferengi.one and @bender@twtxt.net would like a better user experience, especially when threads break due to edits, deletions or feed location changes.
  • @anth@a.9srv.net would like to see utf-8 mandated, and the threading model remain largely the same as it is today, which is primarily based on the convention of a Twt Subject anyway, Twt Hash(es) just make the threading “more precise”. Anth also states that format, client and server specification/recommendations should be kept separate.
  • @movq@www.uninformativ.de @xuu sorry you two haven’t said too much really, so I’m not too sure?

Overall, the 22 votes we’ve had on the poll from the community (if you can call it a community?) have clearly shown that:

  • We continue to support content-based addressing. (65/35)
  • We think about formally supporting edits/deletes (60/40)
  • We do not increase the use of cryptography (thworing things like authenticity and identity out the window) (70/30)

And overall the NPS (net promoter score) of “Would I recommend Twtxt to a friend” is a whopping 7/10 (which is crazy! 🤯)

Let’s have our monthly catch up soon™ (1hr) and discuss together. My own take on the direction we should take at this point is as follows:

  • We continue to use hashing for the threading model.
    • We think about changing this to SHA-256 for simplicity.
  • We either adopt @anth@a.9srv.net’s UUID approach or @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Dynamic URL approach.
  • We continue to incrementally/progressively improve things over time as @falsifian@www.falsifian.org suggested.
  • We think about mandating utf-8 as @anth@a.9srv.net suggests which makes things so much easier for everyone.
  • We further discuss the merits/ideas of supporting formal Edit/Delete requests or other ways to better support this in some way.

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Diving into mblaze, I think I’ve nearly* reached peek email geek.

Just a bunch of shell commands I can pipe together to search, list, view and reply to email (after syncing it to a local Maildir).

EXAMPLES at https://git.vuxu.org/mblaze/tree/README

So far I’m using most of the tools directly from the command line, but I might take inspiration from https://sr.ht/~rakoo/omail/ to make my workflow a bit more efficient.

*To get any closer, I think I’d have to hand-craft my own SMTP client or something.

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“First world” countries problem number x:

More than 3,600 chemicals approved for food contact in packaging, kitchenware or food processing equipment have been found in humans, new peer-reviewed research has found, highlighting a little-regulated exposure risk to toxic substances.

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I passed a mountainbiker with a helmet camera in the forst, saw a four centimeter long black beetle that rolled over its side to change directions and finally spotted three deer on the paddock. An hour well spent I reckon.

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Hmm this question has a leading “Yes” in favor of so far with 13 votes:

Should we formally support edit and deletion requests?

Thanks y’all for voting (it’s all anonymous so I have no idea who’s voted for what!)

If you haven’t already had your say, please do so here: http://polljunkie.com/poll/xdgjib/twtxt-v2 – This is my feeble attempt at trying to ascertain the voice of the greater community with ideas of a Twtxt v2 specification (which I’m hoping will just be an improved specification of what we largely have already built to date with some small but important improvements 🤞)

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Just out of curiosity, I inspected the yarns database (the search engine//cralwer) to find the average length of a Twtxt URI:

$ inspect-db yarns.db | jq -r '.Value.URL' | awk '{ total += length; count++ } END { if (count > 0) print total / count }'
40.3387

Given an RFC3339 UTC timestamp has a length of 20 characters with seconds precision. We’re talking about Twt Subject taking up ~63 characters/bytes on average.

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My Position on the last few weeks of Twtxt spec discussions:

Feed authors that wish to change the location of their feed (once Twts have been published) must append a new # url = comment to their feed to indicate the new location and thus change the “Hashing URI” used for Twts from that point onward.

This has implications of the “order” of a feed, and we should either do one of two things, either:

  • Mandate that feeds are append-only.
  • Or amend the Metadata spec with a new field that denotes the order of the feed so clients can make sense of “inline” comments in the feed. – This would also imply that the default order is (of course) append-only. Suggestion: # direction = [append|prepend]

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Held another “talk” about Git today at work. It was covering some “basics” about what’s going on in the .git directory. Last time I did that was over 11 years ago. 😅 (I often give introductions about Git, but they’re about day to day usage and very high-level.)

I’ve gotta say, Git is one of the very few pieces of software that I love using and teaching. The files on your disk follow a simple enough format/pattern and you can actually teach people how it all works and, for example, why things like rebasing produce a particular result. 👌

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Yesterday, both temperature and wind picked up. There was even wind in the night, which is rare over here. Today, we also got a lot of sunshine, around 22°C and heaps of wind. The leaves and twigs were blown at the house door, it reminded me of a snow drift, basically a leave bank. I should have taken a photo before I swept it, it looked quite bizarre.

But I photographed something else instead:

Possibly a large roof panel on a crane
Download

Possibly a large roof panel on a crane

My mate and I went out in the woods earlier and we came across 08 which broke off in roughly 6, 7 meters from 09. When it hit the ground, it made a 30 cm deep hole. Quite impressive. https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2024-09-19/

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I have configured my twtxt.txt as simple as possible. I have setup a publish_command on jenny. Hopefully all works fine, and I am good to go. Next will be setting the announce_me to true. Here we go!

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With a SHA1 encoding the probability of a hash collision becomes, at various k (number of twts):

>>> import math
>>>
>>> def collision_probability(k, bits):
...     n = 2 ** bits  # Total unique hash values based on the number of bits
...     probability = 1 - math.exp(- (k ** 2) / (2 * n))
...     return probability * 100  # Return as percentage
...
>>> # Example usage:
>>> k_values = [100000, 1000000, 10000000]
>>> bits = 44  # Number of bits for the hash
>>>
>>> for k in k_values:
...     print(f"Probability of collision for {k} hashes with {bits} bits: {collision_probability(k, bits):.4f}%")
...
Probability of collision for 100000 hashes with 44 bits: 0.0284%
Probability of collision for 1000000 hashes with 44 bits: 2.8022%
Probability of collision for 10000000 hashes with 44 bits: 94.1701%
>>> bits = 48
>>> for k in k_values:
...     print(f"Probability of collision for {k} hashes with {bits} bits: {collision_probability(k, bits):.4f}%")
...
Probability of collision for 100000 hashes with 48 bits: 0.0018%
Probability of collision for 1000000 hashes with 48 bits: 0.1775%
Probability of collision for 10000000 hashes with 48 bits: 16.2753%
>>> bits = 52
>>> for k in k_values:
...     print(f"Probability of collision for {k} hashes with {bits} bits: {collision_probability(k, bits):.4f}%")
...
Probability of collision for 100000 hashes with 52 bits: 0.0001%
Probability of collision for 1000000 hashes with 52 bits: 0.0111%
Probability of collision for 10000000 hashes with 52 bits: 1.1041%
>>>

If we adopted this scheme, we could have to increase the no. of characters (first N) from 11 to 12 and finally 13 as we approach globally larger enough Twts across the space. I think at least full crawl/scrape it was around ~500k (maybe)? https://search.twtxt.net/ says only ~99k

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I’ve been using Codeium too the last week or so ! It’s pretty good and like @xuu said is a pretty desent Junior assistant, it helps me write good docs and the tab completion is amazing!

It of course completely sucks at doing anything “intelligent” or complex, but if you just use it as a fancier auto complete it’s actually half way decent 👌

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One thing that’s on my mind over the last few days about all this Twt editing and identity stuff we’ve been having hot debates over is this…

I don’t really have a problem with editing twts, or someone changing their feed’s URL.

Personally I think the folks that do are rightfully pedantic and like a good user experience, which I don’t blame ‘em. I would expect the same too. Anyway, just wanted to get that out there, I believe we can support editing and identity in a way that is still simple, as long as we bring clients along for the ride with us. The old/legacy original client though will have to remain well, ya know 😅

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Can anyone recommend a decent Android ROM that strips out as much of the spyware as possible? Is GrapheneOS a good option? I need to get a new phone anyway so I don’t mind buying within a supported device list as long as I can get one on the used market for $300-$400 or less.

If anyone could recommend some learning resources for this stuff I’d really appreciate it.

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The bug in jenny that @aelaraji@aelaraji.com found:

Jenny has to look for the metadata fields, it must find the # prev = ... line. To do so, I naively wrote something along these lines:

for line in content.splitlines():
    if line.startswith('# prev = '):
        ...

Problem is, we use \u2028 a lot in twtxt feeds and Python interprets those as line separators as well. That’s not what we want here. Jenny must only split at a \n.

Now @prologic@twtxt.net had a quote/copy of some of his metadata fields in a twt. Like so:

# prev = foo bar

Perfectly legitimate, but now jenny found the # prev = twice (once in the actual header, once in a twt), didn’t know what to do, and thus did not fetch the archived feeds. 🤦

Should be fixed in this commit: https://www.uninformativ.de/git/jenny/commit/6e8ce5afdabd5eac22eae4275407b3bd2a167daf.html

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Je cherche un espace où publier une sorte de blog. Juste du texte. Un truc comme faisait rawtext.club ou midnight.pub, mais qui accepte les nouvelles inscriptions. Vous auriez des suggestions? #smolweb

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Introduction to JuiceFS | JuiceFS Document Center – Thinking about using JuiceFS to solve a long-running problem I’ve always had.

  • Be able to run services on any node in my cluster and let Docker Swarm pick whatever node it likes (instead of now where I have to pin some workloads to specific nodes, as that’s where their local storage volume is)
  • Manage the scalability of data and growth over time instead of what I do now which is to extend EXT4 filesystems on my Docker Swarm nodes every few years.

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