boyter

Domain, sub-domain, either works.

Mastodon and indeed ActivityPub do not solve the spam problem. I think they were counting on rate limiting of user creation, and blocks of servers to solve it. However I have shown there is no rate limit on users, and blocks can be circumvented with a simple domain switch, or subdomain in many cases.

In short the current solutions do not scale.

My guess is the best option at this point is a proof of work system similar to bitmessage or what Microsoft proposed for email. Turn this on for any unsolicited request could solve it, or make it so expensive that its no longer worth it.

Other option would be to use the public/private keys that are required for signing for encryption as well. That would slow spammers down a bit.

Which is amusing because it does none of the things that Aral (the linked post) or the comment suggests.

It did provide me with a lot of activity to respond to in the morning when I woke up however, and caused me to re-assess how much people understand about ActivityPub and the fediverse in general.

Also blocked here https://fba.ryona.agency/?domain=mastinator.com

The source is indeed esoteric, and sometimes hilarious. I have been using it to learn how the auth works against mastodon and some other parts of Activitypub. I do recommend it as a decent starting point to learn from.

As do I.

However as with any code I published I would be fairly annoyed were someone to lift it and present it as their own without either first contacting me (which is trivial) or citing me.

I have found a lot of references to things I have done on google scholar et al and I am flattered to have been included.

I don’t understand why anyone would risk being caught out like this. Citing is trivial and indicates you have done research and then built on someone else’s work.

Not really. It’s just another datapoint. People like seeing it though.

Going to say my own https://github.com/boyter/scc/ which I have used to turn down projects of "Oh we just need to do X"

It allows me to evaluate the code-base quickly and see where potential issues are, and find hidden complexity in the code. I have said no a lot due to it. The only reason it exists was because I got caught out from another project, which wasted months of my time.

Otherwise IntelliJ and the JetBrains IDE's in general.

Create your own? There are many implementations over ActivityPub, but you can create your own if you like.

Still one of my “I need this code today” soundtracks. I absolutely adore it.

I understand your point but you have totally missed mine. One of the main reason to have an electric car is the ability to charge from home using your solar. With the way islanding laws work in Australia should rolling blackouts happen you cannot do this.

Admittedly they could change the laws around this. I would love to be able to use a car as my battery as well when I need power overnight.

This. Along with the privatisation of the industry and the miss aligned incentives. Gold plated delivery of electricity, but no guarantees of getting it.

I find it insane that a country with as much natural resources, plus unlimited sunshine and space for wind farms has such high energy prices.

It’s also why I’m not sold on electric cars. I’d hate to suddenly be unable to charge it. If someone is really serious about CO2 emissions we need to transform the economy to be reliant on electricity not oil, and the only way to do that is drive the price down close to zero.

Especially worrying for me is the push to get everything on electricity. Only to then do rolling blackouts, or turn things off selectively so energy providers can fleece end users with price hikes.

Alas everyone is only interested in the next 4 years so there is little vision.

Yes. Very different.

Those exist already. https://humungus.tedunangst.com/r/honk For example.

Hah!

I actually checked, it was aware of your repository and has been tracking it for a while. Just it didn't get indexed due to me de-prioritizing github. If I can scrounge some more RAM back I will try to expand the index yet again.

In any case I manually updated your github star score, so it should pop to the top when I do get around to starting things again. Probably after re:invent.

I really did try to make it as fast as I could. Always happy to write it down too.

I don't know about a fast pace, but I did have fun with it!

Ah I see a vanity search! The ones that always cause issues :)

Its just down to it not being in the index, I shall ensure I add it just for you based on this.

Done. That repository https://github.com/alecthomas/kong will get picked up when I kick off the indexing again (sometime next week once all the activity dies down)

The blog posts about it are great too. This one https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2019-09-29-dcs-positiona... in particular.

It’s actually sitting on my hdd. Just need to finish it off. I got sidetracked.

Probably because I don’t prioritise GitHub anymore. Their own search is great, but it might get picked u[ eventually.

There is ranking, first by a pre rank popularity of the repository and secondly by tf/idf of the trigrams. It’s weighted towards longer matches in the display as well.

But let me know where it’s not doing what you expect and I’ll fix it.

Also bonzamate.com.au

I have always found that my blog is a place for me to dump my thought process and ideas behind things. A journal I can refer back to, with myself being the main audience first. As such I also put in the answers to annoying problems such as overcoming “The "clang" command requires the command line developer tools” issue oh M1 macs.

I have found over time that the posts solving those sort of issues tend to get the most traffic, and give me the most positive responses with people online too.

In either case I strongly suggest to everyone I work with to just write those sort of posts. Keep them online and over years they build up into something you can show off.

They ask but it’s not a requirement to fill it in.

Yes. I wrote a tool to assist with estimating and finding the complex portions of a codebase. It works well for the issues I have been facing.

I wanted to learn how to solve the problem. I wanted to learn a new language. I figured since I was doing it anyway I might as well do it openly.

Now I keep doing it because it starts conversations with others and I occasionally see it being used by others which is a big dopamine hit.

I’d go with caddy. With a domain you get Cerys renewed for you without having to think. It’s what I do for my blog, and the config is very simple too.

Last time I checked there was something in there for search...

Even so you could base it on activitypub I suspect. It would need to be extended for sure to implement the sorts of things believe would be required.

You could get people creating indexes with love such as your own. marginalia could become the de-facto index for long form content. However you probably arent that interested in running the best pokemon website, so someone else could do that.

Enough people add domain specific search endpoints, with perhaps a taxonomy to say "hey send those sort of queries over here" and you have a compelling engine that self heals should someone stop running things, or starts spamming.

That's probably the easiest way I know to get good content into a search engine. Annoyingly however it does not contain all the content available.

It can be very simple to setup. Think single binary to run, or lambda to deploy (yes this is possible) with the URL back to it.

I imagine a binary, with a simple Admin UI allowing you to crawl some domains recursively would be enough to index your own website, and then have those results shared.

Where I could see this being really useful, is let someone who knows everything about pokemon provide the index for searching pokemon information. Then when they federate, provide a taxonomy saying "for queries that have these words, call me". Suddenly you have a very high value search source for pokemon.

Throw in some zero click info information boxes and you have added a lot of value.

Searx is half of it where it calls out to other searches but does not provide its own index as far as I can see. It also does not remix the results.