Notices by glyn (underlap@fosstodon.org), page 2

@hcj Nice. I tweaked the wording correspondingly.

@henrikjernevad I've been reflecting on the fact that most of the products and open source projects I worked on over my career failed, sooner or later.

OTOH I suspect much of my code in a 54 year old product (!) is still alive and well (although I know a lot of new stuff I wrote was ripped out).

This is an effect of working on new/interesting stuff. I am comfortable with my contribution, even as a senior staff developer, as my skill was good engineering rather than technical direction.

Account portability and the social web https://underlap.org/account-portability-in-the-social-web

I believe this is an important topic for the Fediverse. Please boost for visibility.

Thanks to @dottorblaster @jamesravey @hcj @mima @hirad @devnull for commenting on my earlier survey on this topic (https://fosstodon.org/@underlap/111617691764389915)

#ActivityPub #ATProtocol #AccountPortability #Fediverse

Use boring technology 🥱 · @henrikjernevad

https://henko.net/blog/use-boring-technology/

When I worked in CICS development and customers said the product was really boring, especially when installing new releases, we knew this was high praise.

This is why I love arch and xmonad. Rarely is there anything unusual in an upgrade. Just run one command and reboot - job done. Zzzzz.

@mike @evan @theverge I really hope you can build that amazing UX and well done for taking the bet!

You made another fascinating statement:

> Basically, we’re in the process of replacing our whole social back-end with ActivityPub

Makes me wonder if your social back-end is potentially general enough to be modularised and reused by others.

@evan @theverge @mike

> Flipboard’s bet is that it can build the best reading and discovery tools, without forcing users to only operate inside its platform.

Fascinating, but what is this confidence based on?

Flipboard's existing large user base could enable it to invest more to keep ahead of the competition, at least for a few years.

Maybe some critical Flipboard features (e.g. other than reading and discovery tools) could not be replicated by a competitor.

Something else?

@evan A simple solution would be to reply to the offensive post saying "I do not condone this and will now block your account" or similar. Then block. Presumably your reply will remain visible on others' timelines.

Sadly, the manifestly delusional Rwanda Bill passed its first Commons vote. You can't just redefine an unsafe country as safe.

#HumanRights

I'm not sure what to blog about. I have decades of experience in software development, from mainframes to open source to software standards and now university lecturing. I've lived through the introduction and waning of OO and the rise of testing and open source, plus abortive attempts to spread formal methods. I've coded in some PL/I variants, assembler, C++, Java, Go, Rust, and now bits of Haskell.

What would interest you? Any (polite) suggestions gratefully received. 😅

Boosts welcomed.

@hongminhee Erm, by what measure? By LOCs, it's probably true. By features, probably false.

@hongminhee Either way, it would be good to clarify your prompt requirements, so someone else could help provide that feature.

@hongminhee E.g. are you talking about simply prompting the user for input, or displaying certain information in a prompt, or what exactly?

@hongminhee Would it make sense to create a separate prompt helper library, possibly designed for use with optparse-applicative? What do you think?

@hongminhee What does Cliffy provide that optparse-applicative doesn't? Presumably some kind of interactive code generation.

@trbutler @rose_myrtle Would affinity be transitive? In other words, is my neighbour's neighbour automatically my neighbour too?

@rose_myrtle Fascinating. Would "adjacent" simply mean "in the same neighbourhood" or do you have some kind of adjacency metric (measurement) in mind?

Would this be a general feature, (i.e. not just for faith-based servers)? In that case, any given server could belong to zero or more neighbourhoods of different kinds.

I'm wondering whether this would require ActivityPub to be extended or whether it could be layered on top of the existing Fediverse and, if so, how.

@me Could it be a DNS outage where the friendica server address has already been resolved?

@jond I gather there is a bot which you can follow and which follows you back and sends you a message if you post an image without alt text. I wonder if there's a similar bot for #CamelCasedHashTags?

@davidak Eek! No, but I might if a person explained why it was better than arch. I guess I can now search for those opinions.

@ascott Yeah. I'm intrigued what might typically follow arch. Perhaps void if systemd doesn't suit?