James_K

So why are insults permitted against other professions?

Their primary goal was creating a Twitter clone, ActivityPub can do that. The federation stuff is really just a toy part of it, as you can tell from the fact that PLC DIDs are still issued from a central authority. Or they could have done it the way I suggested, with indexes of HTML pages. Both would be preferable.

Something based on ActivityPub would be much more reasonable. I would not have nearly the same objections if it integrated with an existing ecosystem rather than carving up the already limited pool of people interested in the open web and locking a bunch of them into a different silo to the rest of us for essentially no technical advantage.

We already have those capabilities. My website has reposts on it. I just link to someone else's content from my Atom feed instead of something hosted on my own site. Then I attach a https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/atom.html#category node indicating that those are reposts.

The difference is one uses W3C recommended web interfaces and the other does not. I make blog posts to my website using HTML, anyone can open them using a web browser. I can host those pages one of many static hosting services with no need for a special protocol or anything like that. AT on the other hand reïnvents this entire thing. Can you type the AT URI of a resource into the browser and have it open? I do not believe you can. So if I want to publish HTML content I now need both my regular web server and an AT PDS running on my server. There exists, as far as I'm aware, no application that can view HTML hosted on the AT network so I have to produce all of my blog posts in an agnostic format or publish them to no one, or I can use one of the services that automatically posts a link to that HTML as a BSky post. So you have all of that architecture and what it accomplishes is posting a link to content hosted elsewhere.

Why, instead of creating an indexer that works with existing formats, did they choose to create one intentionally incompatible with 99.999% of web content? Because in practice it's not a web protocol, it's not a serious thing. It's just a whole bunch of bullshit for nerds to make blog posts about that serves as the back end of a Twitter clone. It is standards proliferation. It adds nothing and fragments existing efforts. Instead of contributing to the web ecosystem, it subtracts from it. It breaks the important rules of software development, to do one thing and do it well, to use existing solutions. Everything it does is duplicated, there's a new way to sign documents, a new way to host content, a new data format, a new exchange protocol, a new way to serve documents, a new way to send notifications, etc. It's not a tenable way of doing things. If every person looking to make a web indexer created an entire separate web ecosystem, that would not be sustainable. They're clearly not intending to replace the Web, so what are they doing? It's just a complicated way to store tweets.

And the silliest part is that, if I recall correctly, they don't even have decentralised network yet since only they can issue PLC DIDs.

You would repost a page by linking to it from your own. As for uploading content, that is outside of the scope of an indexer. The user hosts their data with some hosting service, or independently. I believe signatures are already handled by XHTML which allows you to add XML signatures to documents, but regular HTML is sadly lacking here thought it would not be too hard to extend (or to just use the XML serialisation of HTML5).

I think it is generally bad to implement new features like this on the part of the indexer. It should just keep track of an existing web of documents rather than creating it's own format and walled garden.

You send a request to a web indexer with a page you want added to the network, it scans your page for outgoing links and sends an email to the owners of any domains who are also on the service.

One can imagine making it a little more featureful, for instance indexing OPML blogrolls which would allow you to see whom a person follows and https://microformats.org/wiki/h-entry which would allow outgoing links to be categorised (like, reply, etc) so notifications filtered. With that, it would be possible to add a front-end site imitating one of the popular social media paradigms (Reddit-style or Twitter-style being the most obvious).

If there's one genuine design decision I would give for it beyond what is basically a cobbling together of existing interfaces, it would be to charge users per page uploaded. Likely very detrimental to growing the service, but I think one of the simplest ways to weed out spam and junk. A real problem with many web services is that the receiver of the message pays for it in terms of attention, where in other mediums the sender has to pay. Given that uploading crap is basically free, that's all you get. Increasing the cost of upload would weed out those endless AI summaries and lists of affiliate links.

The issue with ATProto is that it operates on too many layers. You can see lacking in what I have described here the concept of durable authorship, but this is a property of content not how the content is distributed. Perhaps someone will invent a standard way to sign HTML documents, in which case you could base user accounts on that instead of DNS. AT enforces this centrally but it does not need to. It is walling itself off from the common and decentralised software ecosystem of the web for no good reason.

There are invariably 3 solutions to all “federated” web problems:

- Email

- Semantic HTML

- Web indexing services

In this case, it's mostly indexing and a little of the other two if you want to add social features. I despite ATProto with all my soul for taking a problem with such a simple and standard solution and totally obscuring it behind hundreds of layers of JSON, faux federated services, and technical jargon, all in service of creating an inferior version of Twitter. I guess it wouldn't be as sexy to offer a web indexing service instead.

Ironic that people without imagination write a page using AI.

Email.

I dislike when people use the term “power” to describe making code slightly shorter to type. Operator overloading is not in any meaningful sense more powerful than a language which lacks it.

I think the better conclusion here is that most programming languages don't deserve Wikipedia articles. You wouldn't want one for every brand of screwdriver or kitchen appliance. Programming languages are likewise, just tools. An article restating the information on Odin's website is a net negative to anyone who reads it, as they'd be better served by visiting the website directly. A bad article should be deleted.

Suppose you wanted to make a Wikipedia article on a certain brand CNC milling machine, would that be useful? Not really. The only thing ever written about it is its own manual, and it doesn't feature notably with the exception of being used by some companies for manufacturing. Programming languages are the same thing. It seems rather entitled to demand Wikipedia articles for random brands of tools that don't have anything particularly significant about them.

And beyond that, it's perfectly useless. A Wikipedia article restating the information on Odin's website is a net negative information wise. You've got duplicate content for no good reason. The point of Wikipedia is to take a topic about which much has been written, and distill that into a smaller and more information dense summary. A person who finds the Odin language on Wikipedia would always be better served looking at the website instead, and thus the article is actively harmful to their understanding of the topic.

Sad that we don't see more high praise of simple things. Not exciting enough, I guess.

Letting users pick their own passwords has always been a mistake. If passwords are needed, the system should choose them.

This could have all been solved if they added a setting for bread, pizza, or cake.

I've always doubted this stuff because I have some memories of things that happened when I was 2.

I will never stop singing the praises of plain HTML. It's accessible, it's portable, it's simple, but for some reason we need horrid JavaScript nonsense to operate.

POLAND MENTION!!!!!

Meditation from first principles.

I feel that Postel's law probably holds up the worst out of these. While being liberal with the data you accept can seem good for the functioning of your own application, the broader social effect is negative. It promotes misconceptions about the standard into informal standards of their own to which new apps may be forced to conform. Ultimately being strict with the input data allowed can turn out better in the long run, not to mention be more secure.

But it's not “lots of people,” it's everyone. Everyone has a picture of their face on their phone. And the information is encrypted because phones use disk encryption by default. “Someone can get a photo of your face and passport if they have full unencrypted access to your phone's hard drive” is like saying “someone could turn off your alarm and make you late for work if they break into your house.” There are simply bigger concerns in that situation.

The “hack” in question is pointing out that the app forgets to delete images of the user's face and ID (stored). A lot of people have pictures of their face already on the phone, and often their ID as well so this is hardly a security flaw in any real sense.

She could have accepted the Email, then printed the documents off and said it was faxed. I highly doubt anyone checks.

Working for an organisation which systematically abuses and degrades disabled people is not a morally neural act. If you're life is difficult then that's sad, but not an excuse to exact that difficulty 100 fold on other people.

I'm almost certain this is from the UK, and here we have a government that is absolutely obsessed by the concept of benefits fraud. Every real analysis has shown that virtually none exists, but it is a good excuse to tighten up the government budget by trimming some fat (disabled people).

That is not a problem with Wayland because specifying this is not a within the purview of Wayland. People like you don't seem to understand that Wayland is specification, and not an implementation like X11.

I think you've got it backwards. Applications like OBS do not typically register default global keybindings to avoid clobbering, you have to do it manually in their settings menu. The only difference with a generic interface is that the dialogue opened from the setting menu would be from the WM instead of OBS.

Or you could write portable software that doesn't rely on reading global input. OBS you give as an example, and it is a good one. They could simply register a D-Bus handler and provide a second binary that sends messages to the running instance. The software is more general in this way as it allows full programmatic control. A Sway user, for instance, could add

  bindsym $mod+r exec obs-control toggle-recording

to their configuration. What's more, they can do this in response to other system events. A user might wish to change the recording configuration of OBS in response to an application opening, and it now becomes possible to write a script which opens the application and applies the change.

If your disdain for desktop isolation is so great, you needn't even use D-Bus. Registering a simple UNIX socket that accepts commands would work equally well in this case.

What's really desired here is a standard way for programs to expose user-facing commands to the system, which is clearly not within the scope of the specification for a display server. The problem with X11 is that it has for a long time exposed too much unrelated functionality like this to the user, and so many apps have become reliant on this and developers have neglected the creation of portable ways to achieve these objectives. A new specification for display servers that excludes this harmful behaviour is a clear long-term positive.

How many keybings do you have and how often do you try new window managers? Compromising the security of the whole system just to save you a few `sed`s when writing some config files seems like a bad trade off.