Notices by Jens Finkhäuser (jens@social.finkhaeuser.de)

@meganmariehart Did you manage to turn this into a bad pun? Dad level 9000 unlocked, congratulations!

(Apropos of... well, this... are bad puns *really* just a dad thing? I know plenty of mums who excel at them... maybe we need a new name.)

@meganmariehart Hey, my intro post warns folk that I *like* puns and dad jokes. I'm not ashamed of that, so I'm also not trying to shame you! The congratulations was earnest, as was my wincing.

@dalias Oh yeah, I know the meme as well 🤷♂️

I'm pretty sure the inside joke wasn't part of that origin, but the current use... I'm not so sure.

When thinking about DOGE, remember:

a) The medieval Italian title of doge comes from the Latin dux, which literally translates to "Führer".

b) Efficiency is what impressed Hitler about Henry Ford's assembly lines, which he translated into running death camps.

I mean, the guy is all but screaming out his intentions.

@ikkeT Yeah, but at the same time, it was always odd for a BMW to stick to the right lane (sorry folks, this joke is central European themed).

@meganmariehart @GossiTheDog It's "funny", when he rebranded twitter and I added those hooks to the X, people were sure I was overreacting.

@clacke I once thought I'd make a flexible magic system for a role-playing game, but quickly realised what I was actually designing was a Turing complete programming language.

Might be fun, but for a rather limited audience, I guess.

I had a scheduling conflict with #FOSDEM this year, which made me sad.

Then I read about Jack Dorsey speaking there. I wanted to post something about changing my mind, because boycotting @fosdem@fosstodon.org would be the better response.

Then I realised that I have fosstodon.org blocked because of the fascist apologism of its founder.

Serendipity, I guess 🤷♂️

@david_chisnall Cthulhu weeps.

Hey, this is to let you know that I'm going to block fosstodon pretty soon. No exact timeline, but it'll be in January.

If you want to keep following this account/instance, I suggest you use an alt on some other instance I haven't already blocked.

Context: https://social.finkhaeuser.de/@jens/113765756511141919

I've been kind of stuck on "too big to block" thinking for too long. Time's up.

:boostRequest:

@SilverEagle I was reprimanded by the fosstodon mods for calling a legally confirmed Nazi a Nazi, because that four letter word apparently is worse than the policies and value system it represents.

Tells you everything you need to know about the instance, and I've had it limited for a while.

@onepict @SilverEagle I keep getting back to that there are two kinds of liberals: those that primarily want liberties for themselves, and those that want to liberate others.

FOSS is essentially based on libertarian values. We tend to call the first kind of libertarian who is also into FOSS a fossbro.

🤷♂️ I don't think it's much more complicated than that.

@jameschip Forget Legos, caltrops^Wd4 are the real danger!

The perfect mug does not exis...

@aral @spanezz All I have on GH is a landing repo that sends people to @Codeberg .

That seems to be the appropriate use for it.

@liztai By some odd twist of fate, I'm acquainted with a nephew or similarly distant relative of the Dutch translator/author. I didn't know until I watched this.

Yeah, it was pretty good, but it did fall a little flat in places, like you said. I can second everything you wrote here.

It was also a lot more enjoyable because of its flaws than many other shows, I think.

@andre actually, @alcinnz worked on an earlier version of the CRDT! Things have evolved since then, though.

The hard part, as he pointed out, is the ordering. Lamport timestamps work - they're logical clocks, where each edit happens one unit after the other, but the units have no real relationship to wall time.

The problem is: how do distributed nodes agree on what is "one unit" and "after?"

Lamport suggested that every node simply keeps its own timestamp, and every edit happens at plus one..

@andre @alcinnz ... relative to the previous one. To get the entire clock state, you have to synchronize the clocks of all the nodes, and take the most recent timestamp (TL;DR). Vector clocks are a generalization of the concept.

The problem here is that you kind of have to know all the participants in the CRDT and keep a timestamp for each.

A different type of logical clock uses a Merkle tree of edit "events". This works, but has other issues. They sort the most recent edit to the root of...

@andre @alcinnz ... the tree, which is useful, but that means updating a partial tree for each edit - the overhead grows O(log(n)).

What we've done is two tiers: on the one hand, vessel is a container - it doesn't have anything to do with CRDTs as such. But it has a different system for ordering chunks of data, which is sufficiently similar to a Merkle tree to work as a logical clock. More specifically, both are DAGs, and it's the DAG properties that make them work that way.

Which means...

@andre @alcinnz ... if you just put a sequence of edits into those chunks, all edits in one precede all edits in another, logically speaking. That's a lot less per-edit overhead, so less stuff to synchronize!

Unfortunately, it also loses enough precision to be potentially bothersome, so I devised a way to do better.

You can combine the logical, DAG-based ordering with a strictly monotonic wall clock per node. The nodes then attach a monotonic timestamp to each edit. It allows merging based...