There are 82.108 read statuses, but only 24.421 messages in the cache. In contrast to the cache with the messages, the read statuses are never cleaned up when a feed was unsubscribed from. And the read statuses also contain old style hashes, before we settled on the what we have today. Still a huge difference. Hmm.

Thanks, @movq@www.uninformativ.de!

My backing SQLite database with indices is 8.7 MiB in size right now.

The twtxt cache is 7.6 MiB, it uses Python’s pickle module. And next to it there is a 16.0 MiB second database with all the read statuses for the old tt. Wow, super inefficient, it shouldn’t contain anything else, it’s a giant, pickled {"$hash": {"read": True/False}, …}. What the heck, why is it so big?! O_o

you just haven’t read this yet.

[47°09′19″S, 126°43′56″W] Raw reading: 0x67E30B41, offset +/-5

[47°09′40″S, 126°43′39″W] Reading: 1.66000 PPM

[47°09′10″S, 126°43′40″W] Raw reading: 0x67E26281, offset +/-1

@eapl.me@eapl.me I think the benefits do not outweigh the disadvantages. Clients would have to read and merge the information from 2 txt and a new metadata would have to be added with the address of this file.
Also, it is very easy to filter or ignore it.

[47°09′27″S, 126°43′59″W] Raw reading: 0x67E0F4E1, offset +/-4

[47°09′26″S, 126°43′32″W] Raw reading: 0x67E03E11, offset +/-3

[47°09′40″S, 126°43′14″W] Reading: 1.22 Sv

[47°09′03″S, 126°43′04″W] Reading: 0.30000 PPM

Hmmm, when I Ctrl+Left to jump a word left, I get 1;5D in my tt2 message text. My TERM is set to rxvt-unicode-256color. In tt, it works just fine. When I change to TERM=xterm-256color, it also works in tt2. I have to read up on that. Maybe even try to capture these sequences and rewrite them.

i really wanna learn golang it looks fun and capable and i can read it kind of but every time i try it i’m immediately stuck on basic concepts like “what the fuck is a pointer” (this has been explained to me and i still don’t get it). i did have types explained to me as like notes on code which makes sense a bit but i’m mostly lost on basic code concepts

[47°09′59″S, 126°43′50″W] Reading: 1.02000 PPM

I saw 100% I/O wait in htop today but couldn’t find a process which actually does I/O. Turns out, I/O wait isn’t what it used to be anymore:

https://lwn.net/Articles/989272/

In my case, it was mpd which triggered this:

https://github.com/MusicPlayerDaemon/MPD/issues/2241

mpd doesn’t actually do anything, it just sits there and waits for events. To my understanding, this is similar to something blocking on read(). I’m not quite sure yet if displaying this as I/O wait (or “PSI some io”) is intentional or not – but it sure is confusing.

Image

@eapl.me@eapl.me Good job! I have added these comments:

1. It is only long for humans. Clients can only leave a hyperlink.
   
2. The nickname is just a decoration, only the date that acts as the id and the URL matter. The nick is used for humans reading the feed.
   
3. It can be migrated with a script, if the feed exists.

[47°09′10″S, 126°43′05″W] Reading: 0.73000 PPM

Are there any clients to read gemini?

@thecanine@twtxt.net It suits your site very well, but I find this font hard to read. In any case, keep on pixeling.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Ha, “imps”, when I read imps, I think of these guys: https://dungeonkeeper.fandom.com/wiki/Imp 😂

[47°09′36″S, 126°43′39″W] Reading: 0.73 Sv

[47°09′53″S, 126°43′52″W] Raw reading: 0x67D3C5E1, offset +/-1

[47°09′10″S, 126°43′22″W] Raw reading: 0x67D27461, offset +/-2

[47°09′10″S, 126°43′25″W] Raw reading: 0x67CFED82, offset +/-4

idfk where the error came from it just broke one day, maybe from one of my many server crashes which are becoming frequent and UGH i have to fix that too but i have a headache right now so one thing at a time. the error was ‘unexpected end of JSON input’ or something, for a while i thought oh permission error but turns out i can’t read the error that clearly indicated something syntax related (i did double check my env file though)

[47°09′02″S, 126°43′14″W] Reading: 1.28 Sv

re reading so NewRAMStorage(…) is just something that setups your storage and initial data.. that can probably live with storage/sqlite. The point is the storage package does not import the implementations of storage.Storage It just defines the contract for things that use that interface. Now storage/sqlite CAN import storage and not have a circle dep.

It kinda works in reverse for import directions. usually you have your root package that imports things from deeper in the directory structures.. but for the case of interfaces it reverses where the deeper can import from parents but parents cannot import from children.

- app < storage
      < storage/sqlite
      < controller < storage
                   < storage/sqlite
 
- sqlite < storage

- storage X storage/sqlite

[47°09′17″S, 126°43′25″W] Raw reading: 0x67CBDCE1, offset +/-5

[47°09′48″S, 126°43′07″W] Reading: 1.64000 PPM

[47°09′08″S, 126°43′31″W] Raw reading: 0x67C599C2, offset +/-4

[47°09′12″S, 126°43′48″W] Reading: 0.25 Sv

I really like the proposal and your ideas. I have been reading your articles and several points seem very interesting to me.

Blender-Rendered Movie ‘Flow’ Wins Oscar for Best Animated Feature, Beating Pixar
It’s a feature-length film “rendered on a free and open-source software platform called Blender,” reports Reuters. And it just won the Oscar for best animated feature film, beating movies from major studios like Disney/Pixar and Dreamworks.

In January Blender.org called Flow “the manifestation of Blender’s mission, … ⌘ Read more

@bmallred@staystrong.run I forgot one more effect of edits. If clients remember the read status of massages by hash, an edit will mark the updated message as unread again. To some degree that is even the right behavior, because the message was updated, so the user might want to have a look at the updated version. On the other hand, if it’s just a small typo fix, it’s maybe not worth to tell the user about. But the client doesn’t know, at least not with additional logic.

Having said that, it appears that this only affects me personally, noone else. I don’t know of any other client that saves read statuses. But don’t worry about me, all good. Just keep doing what you’ve done so far. I wanted to mention that only for the sake of completeness. :-)

@prologic@twtxt.net I formed my opinion about this before reading/watching any additional media coverage. And yes, this is extremely bad. These two have no place on the “world stage”. They are deciding on our future. (And I am well aware that my country is heading into a similar direction – unless we stop it.)

[47°09′42″S, 126°43′56″W] Reading: 1.59000 PPM

I like this syntax, you have my vote, although I’d change it a bit like
#<Alice https://example.com/twtxt.com#2024-12-18T14:18:26+01:00>

Hashes are not a problem on PHP, I dont know why it’s slow to calculate them from your side, but I agree with your points.

BTW, did you have the chance to read my proposal on twtxt 2.0? I shared a few ideas about possible improvements to discuss:
https://text.eapl.mx/a-few-ideas-for-a-next-twtxt-version
https://text.eapl.mx/reply-to-lyse-about-twtxt

[47°09′10″S, 126°43′19″W] Raw reading: 0x67C09A11, offset +/-3

[47°09′06″S, 126°43′05″W] Raw reading: 0x67C01B82, offset +/-4

I agree. finding good writings on architecture is hard to find. I used to read architecture reviews over on the high scalability blog. i suspect the reason why is that the arch is how the big tech companies can build moats around their bases. I know in AWS world it only goes as far as how to nickle and dime you to death.

I have the books but they don’t grow much more past interview level.

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev Just before the pandemic, we watched Uncle Bob videos once a week in the lunch break. While almost all of my old teammates agreed with his views, I partially found them to be very odd and even counterproductive.

I didn’t come across John Ousterhout or any of his work before, at least not deliberately. So, this document is my first contact.

I only finished the chapter on comments and I totally agree with John so far. This document just manifests to me how weird Bob’s view is on certain subjects.

I always disagreed with the concept of a maximum method length. Sure, generally, shorter functions are probably better, but it always depends. And I’ve certainly seen super short methods that just made the code flow even worse to follow. While “one function should only do one thing” is a nice general rule, I’m 100% in team John with the shown examples. There are cases, where this doesn’t help readability at all. Not even close.

To me, a function always has to justify its existence. Either by reusing it at least at another place or by coming up with dedicated tests for it. But if it is just called once and there are no tests, I almost always decide against it. Personally, I don’t mind longer methods. We just recently had a discussion about that and I lost against two other workmates who are more in Uncle Bob’s camp, they refactored one medium sized method into three very short ones. Luckily, we agree on most other topics.

Lol, what!? The shorter the method, the longer the variables inside? I first thought I misread or the writeup mixed it up. I’ll always do it the other way around.

I’ve been also bitten badly by outdated comments in the past, but Bob must have worked on really terrible projects to end up with such an attitude to dislike comments. Oh well. No doubt, I’ve come across by several orders of magnitude more useless comments, in my experience (autogenerated) JavaDocs fall in the category more frequently than not. So, I know that there are different types of comments. A comment doesn’t automatically mean that it is good and justified.

But I also partially agree with Bob and John and think that a good name has a proper chance to save a comment. Though, when in doubt, I go John’s route and use a shorter name with a comment rather than use a kilometer long identifier. Writing good comments typically takes some time, sometimes much longer than writing the code. It regularly takes me several minutes. It’s a hard art.

I perhaps should read up on John’s work. He seems to be more reasonable and likeminded. :-) Let me continue to complete this document.

Reading into the so-called CLEAN architecture reminds me of the work I did nearly two decades earlier called circuits hmmm 🧐

This document is the result of a series of discussions between Robert “Uncle Bob” Martin and John Ousterhout, held between September 2024 and February 2025. The text addresses three main topics: method length, comments, and Test Driven Development (TDD).
https://github.com/johnousterhout/aposd-vs-clean-code/blob/main/README.md
This is something to read and reflect on for days.

I read a lot about Clean Code, SOLID, TDD, DDD… now I’m discovering «A Philosophy of Software Design»… but nobody talks about the importance of the project architecture. Do we depend on the framework to do the work for us?
You know I’m a big fan of Clean Architecture, but I feel alone when I share my thoughts on social media or at work.
You have to think outside the framework.

[47°09′38″S, 126°43′34″W] Raw reading: 0x67BECA01, offset +/-2

[47°09′36″S, 126°43′22″W] Reading: 1.92 Sv

[47°09′54″S, 126°43′10″W] Reading: 0.16000 PPM

[47°09′06″S, 126°43′10″W] Raw reading: 0x67BA0291, offset +/-5

here is my progress so far: https://github.com/eapl-gemugami/twtxt-direct-message-php
The encryption part seems to work, if I decrypt it the message with OpenSSL.
I think it can help you for some key parts not well explained in OpenSSL documentation.

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev reading your spec I wrote a few notes here: https://github.com/eapl-gemugami/twtxt-direct-message-php/blob/main/direct_message_spec.md

@arne@uplegger.eu I haven’t check your repo yet, although you are using sodium, right?

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev Could you share (perhaps in the extension document) the private key for alice?

I want to compare that I can read the encrypted message both from OpenSSL CLI and from the PHP OpenSSL library, following the spec.

[47°09′49″S, 126°43′44″W] Reading: 1.07 Sv

[47°09′40″S, 126°43′36″W] Reading: 1.24000 PPM

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I am a big fan of “obvious” math facts that turn out to be wrong. If you want to understand how reusing space actually works, you are mostly stuck reading complexity theory papers right now. Ian wrote a good survey: https://iuuk.mff.cuni.cz/~iwmertz/papers/m23.reusing_space.pdf . It’s written for complexity theorists, but some of will make sense to programmers comfortable with math. Alternatively, I wrote an essay a few years ago explaining one technique, with (math-loving) programmers as the intended audience: https://www.falsifian.org/blog/2021/06/04/catalytic/ .

@falsifian@www.falsifian.org Oh, that’s neat! Interesting how “obviously” isn’t all that obvious at all, even to the contrary. I reckon I have to read up on that subject on the weekend. :-)

I like how Ian’s and your photo complement each other, winter and summer join forces for something special. :-)

[47°09′18″S, 126°43′44″W] Reading: 0.06000 PPM

[47°09′59″S, 126°43′44″W] Raw reading: 0x67B47641, offset +/-5

Bloody hell 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

$ jq -r --arg host "gopher.mills.io" '. | select(.request.host==$host) | "\(.request.client_ip) \(.request.uri) \(.request.headers["User-Agent"])"' mills.io.log-au | while IFS=$' ' read -r ip uri ua; do asn="$(geoip -a "$ip")"; echo "$asn $ip $uri $ua"; done | grep -E '^45102.*' | sort | head
45102 47.251.70.245 /gopher.floodgap.com/0/feeds/democracynow/2015/Oct/14/0 ["Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/119.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"]
45102 47.251.84.25 /gopher.floodgap.com/0/feeds/voaheadlines/2014/Mar/09/voanews.com-content-article-1867433.html ["Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"]
45102 47.82.10.106 /gopher.viste.fr/1/OnlineTools/hangman.cgi%3F0692937396569A52972EB2 ["Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/114.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/114.0.1823.43"]
45102 47.82.10.106 /gopher.viste.fr/1/OnlineTools/hangman.cgi%3F9657307A96569A52974634 ["Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/114.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/114.0.1823.43"]
45102 47.82.10.106 /gopher.viste.fr/1/OnlineTools/hangman.cgi%3FB7571C7896569A529E6603 ["Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/114.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/114.0.1823.43"]
45102 47.82.10.106 /gopher.viste.fr/1/OnlineTools/hangman.cgi%3FB75EF81296569A529E6617 ["Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/114.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/114.0.1823.43"]
45102 47.82.10.106 /gopher.viste.fr/1/OnlineTools/hangman.cgi%3FC6564ADB96569A5A9E660C ["Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/114.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/114.0.1823.43"]

[47°09′30″S, 126°43′44″W] Reading: 1.74000 PPM

[47°09′42″S, 126°43′33″W] Reading: 0.30000 PPM

Thinking about trying tt. If it really usable i will abandon twtxtdon (service to read twtxt feeds from mastodon client), which currently has only authorization implemented

@prologic@twtxt.net Of course you don’t notice it when yarnd only shows at most the last n messages of a feed. As an example, check out mckinley’s message from 2023-01-09T22:42:37Z. It has “[Scheduled][Scheduled][Scheduled]“… in it. This text in square brackets is repeated numerous times. If you search his feed for closing square bracket followed by an opening square bracket (][) you will find a bunch more of these. It goes without question he never typed that in his feed. My client saves each twt hash I’ve explicitly marked read. A few days ago, I got plenty of apparently years old, yet suddenly unread messages. Each and every single one of them containing this repeated bracketed text thing. The only conclusion is that something messed up the feed again.

[47°09′11″S, 126°43′19″W] Raw reading: 0x67B02D61, offset +/-5

The project is a POC (Proof of Concept) that went into production and the company has customers who are using it. The developers had been working for several years, without testing, structure, isolation and so on. The company hired me to transform the project into a real product. There are in my hands 422 python files to transform that they beg me a refactore, architecture and testing. Every developer’s bad dream.
My first step is to read and understand the tree because there are apps inside other apps call each other. I am very determined to work on a new repository.

@eapl.me@eapl.me Yeah, you need some kind of storage for that. But chances are that there’s already a cache in place. Ideally, the client remembers etags or last modified timestamps in order to reduce unnecessary network traffic when fetching feeds over HTTP(S).

A newsreader without read flags would be totally useless to me. But I also do not subscribe to fire hose feeds, so maybe that’s a different story with these. I don’t know.

To me, filtering read messages out and only showing new messages is the obvious solution. No need for notifications in my opinion.

There are different approaches with read flags. Personally, I like to explicitly mark messages read or unread. This way, I can think about something and easily come back later to reply. Of course, marking messages read could also happen automatically. All decent mail clients I’ve used in my life offered even more advanced features, like delayed automatic marking.

All I can say is that I’m super happy with that for years. It works absolutely great for me. The only downside is that I see heaps of new, despite years old messages when a bug causes a feed to be incorrectly updated (https://twtxt.net/twt/tnsuifa). ;-)

I think it is not easy to implement, you need a database. Timeline is an elegant solution: read and sort.

that’s a fair point.

Perhaps, since Twitter in 2006 never implemented read flags, every derivative microblogging system never saw that as an expected feature. This is curious because Twitter started with SMS, where on our phones we can mark messages as read or unread.
I think it all comes from the difference between reading an email (directed to you) vs. reading public posts (like a blog or a ‘wall,’ where you don’t mark posts as read). It’s not necessary to mark it as ‘read’, you just jump over it.

Reading microblogging posts in an email program is not common, I think, and I haven’t really used it, so I cannot say how it works, and whether it would be better for me or not.
However, I’ve used Thunderbird as a feed reader, and I understand the advantages when reading blog posts.

About read flags being simple, well… we just had a discussion this morning about how tracking read messages would require a lot of rethinking for clients such as timeline where no state is stored. Even considering some kind of ‘notification of unread messages or mentions’ is not expected for those minimalist client, so it’s an interesting compromise to think about.

@eapl.me@eapl.me Read flags are so simple, yet powerful in my opinion. I really don’t understand why this is not a thing in most twtxt clients. It’s completely natural in e-mail programs and feed readers, but it hasn’t made the jump over to this domain.

[47°09′12″S, 126°43′06″W] Raw reading: 0x67ADDEC1, offset +/-3

Excellent article where you reflect on why it is important to write in your blog, even knowing that nobody will read it.
https://andysblog.uk/why-blog-if-nobody-reads-it/
At least this article does.

[47°09′50″S, 126°43′58″W] Reading: 0.36 Sv

[47°09′31″S, 126°43′08″W] Reading: 1.47 Sv

[47°09′35″S, 126°43′28″W] Reading: 1.22 Sv

[47°09′14″S, 126°43′41″W] Reading: 0.58000 PPM

[47°09′59″S, 126°43′07″W] Raw reading: 0x67A20141, offset +/-5

[47°09′30″S, 126°43′00″W] Reading: 1.80 Sv

[47°09′21″S, 126°43′02″W] Reading: 1.12 Sv

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Thanks for sharing. I really enjoyed it. The beginning part about the history of life on Earth was fun to watch having just read Dawkin’s old book The Selfish Geene, and now I want to read more about archaea. The end of the talk about what might be going on on Mars made me a bit hopeful someone will find some good evidence.

[47°09′14″S, 126°43′50″W] Raw reading: 0x67A07781, offset +/-5

@sorenpeter@darch.dk It depends on your requirements. If you just want to put your code somewhere for yourself, simply push it over SSH on a server and call it good. That’s what I do with lots of repos. If you want an additional web UI for read access for the public, cgit comes to mind (a mate uses that). Prologic runs Gitea, which offers heaps more functionality like merge requests.

[47°09′08″S, 126°43′19″W] Reading: 1.69 Sv

[47°09′16″S, 126°43′48″W] Raw reading: 0x679CBB41, offset +/-5

[47°09′41″S, 126°43′17″W] Reading: 0.18 Sv

[47°09′22″S, 126°43′37″W] Reading: 0.91 Sv

[47°09′13″S, 126°43′55″W] Reading: 0.40 Sv

Reading “Man’s search for meaning” by Viktor E. Frankl

[47°09′57″S, 126°43′59″W] Reading: 0.58000 PPM

OpenAI Says It Has Evidence DeepSeek Used Its Model To Train Competitor
OpenAI says it has evidence suggesting Chinese AI startup DeepSeek used its proprietary models to train a competing open-source system through “distillation,” a technique where smaller models learn from larger ones’ outputs.

The San Francisco-based company, along with partner Microsoft, blocked suspected DeepSeek accounts from accessing … ⌘ Read more

@Prologic@twtxt.net Threema states the findings of that security research are all plugged. Still reading on it. Truth is that my family is difficult to get away from WhatsApp. And yes, I plan to buy them a license key.

[47°09′57″S, 126°43′45″W] Raw reading: 0x67990D11, offset +/-2

[47°09′34″S, 126°43′20″W] Reading: 0.89 Sv

[47°09′39″S, 126°43′56″W] Raw reading: 0x67987261, offset +/-1

@prologic@twtxt.net I’d stumbled upon #FrankenPHP while reading through #Caddy stuff and thought maybe it’s bit overkill for what i need it for but then again, it will be just a “One container in for two out”, that’s win in my book 😆

[47°09′12″S, 126°43′56″W] Reading: 1.21000 PPM

I haven’t read the entire specification, but I think there is a fundamental design problem. Why would someone put an encrypted message on a public feed that is completely useless to everybody other than the one recipient? This doesn’t make sense to me. It of course depends on the threat model, but wouldn’t one also want to minimize the publicly visible metadata (who is communicating with whom and when) when privately messaging? I feel there are better ways to accomplish this. Sorry, if I miss the obvious use case, please let me know. :-)

[47°09′03″S, 126°43′21″W] Reading: 0.58 Sv

[47°09′50″S, 126°43′05″W] Reading: 0.84000 PPM

[47°09′15″S, 126°43′33″W] Reading: 0.54 Sv

damn it i got so excited because bleeding cool ran an article with a title like ‘all of DC april solicits so far’ and i did not read the ‘so far’ part and clicked it excitedly hoping to see all the april solicits but they’re out next week or something T__T

Google Begins Requiring JavaScript For Google Search
Google says it has begun requiring users to turn on JavaScript, the widely-used programming language to make web pages interactive, in order to use Google Search. From a report: In an email to TechCrunch, a company spokesperson claimed that the change is intended to “better protect” Google Search against malicious activity, such as bots and spam, and to improve the over … ⌘ Read more

[47°09′26″S, 126°43′48″W] Reading: 0.46000 PPM