Notices by Mike P (fentiger@mastodon.social)

@silverpill @julian @helge #ActivityPub today is where HTML was in the early 2000s - nobody agreed on what it should look like, and consumers had to go to heroic lengths to interoperate with all the different ways that producers interpreted the spec. (I was paid to work on one at the time. It was ... an experience.)

HTML has come a long way since then - but it took rather more than five years!

@whitequark What we need is "USB endianness". Reverse the byte order, and it's still wrong, but if you reverse it again, it becomes correct.

@whitequark Can you cross compile a browser to run on WASM inside another browser?

If so - how deeply can you nest them?

@whitequark I wish I had enough human sized cats to need one ;)

@whitequark OAuth "Client Entrails Grant"?

(You'll need to repeat it when your token expires. I hope you have plenty of entrails.)

@whitequark Please tell me they at least have a "--maybe-later" command line flag.

@ernie @mattl That's OK. You can get the Internet on a CD these days.

@julian @benpate @evan I think FEP-3b86 only really allows for actions that the home server already knows how to carry out; the advantage of FEP-d8c2 is that it allows clients to add functionality of their own; see eg Evan's checkin app, which can post geo-tagged activities even via a server which doesn't natively support them.

@whitequark Now I'm thinking that instead of data sheets, manufacturers should be required to provide Top Trumps cards for their products.

@whitequark @0xabad1dea We always used to "burn" an EEPROM beck when I was a kid, before flash memory was really a thing.

@whitequark I have some in my fridge ... it's not just for girls ;)

@sundogplanets Engineers? They can do it, no problem. It's the investors who need to be convinced.

@evan Are these really the only options?

So you want to build a piece of high performance, deeply pipelined hardware, and write a device driver for it?

The hardest problem is usually: "How do I bring it to a clean stop?"

Get this right. Early.

I hear SW folks proposing "optimisations" to stop the pipeline 10ms faster at the expense of corrupting kernel memory when unexpected errors occur, and I hear HW folks asking "Why do you need to do that? Just reset it!"

Don't be like these people.

#FPGA #ARGHHHHH #BangHeadHere

@silverpill @steve Fair enough - but in that case I'd suggest linking to a description of the attacks, so that readers can judge the importance for themselves. It's very easy to overlook things like this if nobody's told you that they exist.

@silverpill @steve One suggestion: the content negotiation section should, IMHO, be phrased as a "MUST" level requirement, in the light of the attacks on Mastodon that were discovered at around the turn of the year. That is, senders MUST set the correct Content-Type, and receivers MUST reject any message without it set correctly.

At least, that's how I'm treating them now.

@evan @tomcoates Will this be based on your proposal here?

https://evanp.me/2023/05/19/end-to-end-encrypted-messages-over-activitypub/

@silverpill I'm curious about the "publicly accessible feed" requirement. It's not at all clear to me what this means.

Will they refuse to federate with a site that's entirely hidden behind a login page?

Or a site that doesn't have a web front end at all, and only provides service via, say, mobile apps?

@tedinski @inthehands Junior developers think that writing code is hard work, and they appreciate anything that makes it seem easier.

Experienced developers know that writing code is the easy bit. They appreciate anything that makes the really hard stuff easier.

@feditest Will this be recorded?

I'm interested, but I'll be on a plane at the time, and will be unable to join.