1,947 karma · joined January 16, 2011
Bluesky: @rmccue.io
Twitter: @rmccue
Email: me at rmccue dot io
> In other words, should he shrink the Mac, which would be an epic feat of engineering, or enlarge the iPod? Jobs preferred the former option, since he would then have a mobile operating system he could customize for the many gizmos then on Apple’s drawing board. Rather than pick an approach right away, however, Jobs pitted the teams against each other in a bake-off.
> Apple was already one of the hottest tech firms in the country. Everyone in the Valley wanted a piece of it. So Jobs proposed a deal: he would allow Xerox to buy a hundred thousand shares of his company for a million dollars—its highly anticipated I.P.O. was just a year away—if PARC would “open its kimono.”
Xerox clearly undervalued the research they were producing, but it wasn't like they just gave it away entirely. Per [2] the valuation of those shares in 2018 would be $1.2 billion had they not sold them - undervalued in hindsight, but not nothing.
Xerox's lack of capitalisation was a problem of their own making, not something inherent about investing in basic research.
[1]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/16/creation-myth
[2]: https://researchnarrative.com/thinkerry/the-company-that-cou...
The ID is deterministic, you can reconstruct it by hashing the genesis entry in the audit log.
The method specific ID for PLC is a hash of the genesis operation, so it’s not just an arbitrary ID that the PLC server creates.
(More info on the linked site; I don’t want to hijack the thread too much.)
As I understand, atproto is intentionally limiting to PLC and Web for now, and monitoring the ecosystem. Every method has to be implemented by every client, so you naturally want to be cautious in how many you support.
(I don’t work for or represent Bluesky, so can’t speak to any plans other than what they’ve stated publicly!)
did:web: eg is literally HTTP, did:dns: is DNS, and there’s loads of others.
This extra level of abstraction allows of arbitrary IDs, which is what the PLC DIDs were created for.
Let’s say that I am currently known as rmccue.com.au. I move overseas and now want to be rmccue.scot - or worse, because I am no longer in .au, I can’t even keep my old domain name. How do you persist this identity?
With PLC, I can instead be an abstract did:plc:hv27plmlx6zkuv7bnzbqb6xr (an arbitrary hash of the genesis entry for my DID). I associate rmccue.com.au with this via a TXT record, and back the other direction by recording the domain as an alias.
If I change my handle, I’m still the same arbitrary handle everywhere, everyone keeps following me, and in theory old references to my alias could even continue resolving.
(Similarly, this solves the issue for trademark changes, name changes throughout a person’s life, and changing job roles.)
The core of it is basic tech:
1. Look up _atproto.rmccue.io for a TXT record
2. If it’s did:plc:… send a HTTP request to the directory - eg https://plc.directory/hv27plmlx6zkuv7bnzbqb6xr
3. Parse the JSON response to get my signing keys and where I’m hosted.
For our non-atproto uses of the PLC directory, we have similar needs, and we’ll likely let users provide their own public key before we create their document to help solve this. We have a technical audience though, so that solution may not make sense for Bluesky - but there’s a lot of people thinking about how to improve this in the atmosphere.
In the Bluesky implementation, this is Bluesky for convenience’s sake, to make it possible for users to easily sign up. (I’m not sure internally if it’s part of the PDS or held separately.)
PLC has a mechanism allowing “higher” keys to override “lower” ones within a certain time window, so being able to add your own rotation key that “outranks” Bluesky’s would solve this issue.
Alternatively, use web DIDs and then it’s fully self-managed just as DNS would be.
This is oversimplified but is a decent question to prompt an explanation for someone new to DNS, HTTP, TLS, etc.
It’s kind of annoying that a huge number of DID methods are specific to cryptocurrencies and are practically abandoned.
We picked the same DID systems for https://fair.pm/ to decentralise WordPress plugin distribution (and general management for user-facing packages; think App Store rather than Cargo).
The Bluesky folks (especially Bryan) were super helpful in helping us out - even shipping Ed25519 key support so we could use libsodium.
(We’re designing our protocol on top of DIDs and using Bluesky’s stackable moderation, but chose not to use atproto directly - but the great thing is that DIDs are a W3C standard, and PLC isn’t tied to atproto.)
Do you have a source for this?
Would be great if it was possible to enter codepoints directly; you can do it via the URL (`/F8FF` eg), but not in the UI. (Edit, the future is now. https://github.com/vishnuharidas/utf8-playground/pull/6)
This isn’t quite true. WordPress.com announced they were planning on ActivityPub support, but that is a separate entity run by a commercial company (Automattic).
Their plan was to support it specifically on Tumblr, as well as helping fund an open source plugin for it; there have been no plans to integrate it into the WordPress software directly.
I believe they’ve also deprioritised it as they did significant layoffs recently.
Many (most?) western societies have a similar concept for civil and criminal law with common law jurisdictions, where precedent is used rather than an explicit, exhaustive legal code. Effectively, the UK's constitution is to written constitutions as common law is to civil law.
> Where is it appropriate to post a subscriber link?
> Almost anywhere. Private mail, messages to project mailing lists, and blog entries are all appropriate. As long as people do not use subscriber links as a way to defeat our attempts to gain subscribers, we are happy to see them shared.
That said, agreed with the GP - places like Boulder, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, or New Orleans are places that we know about through culture and are internationally recognised, while being much smaller than Australian cities. That's mostly a factor of a huge amount of English-speaking media being from the US.
Australia attempts to counter this through laws requiring a certain quota of Australian content in the media, but that hasn't really worked - and is one of the factors which spawned many Australian reality TV shows.
It really is an amazing place to live (although hot in the summer!), but career opportunities can be limiting in Australia and Brisbane. Catriona Drummond touches on the same in her substack [1] mentioned in the OP:
> As I mentioned, before Bluey I’d resigned myself to the fact that if I wanted to achieve something resembling my ‘full potential’ on a technical level as an artist, I would have to not only probably move to the United States [...] > Even deeper than that, was the pervasive thought that perhaps for my whole life I was just never going to be in the right place at the right time. That being from somewhere like Brisbane just meant I was doomed.
[1]: https://goodsniff.substack.com/p/creating-bluey-tales-from-t...
That said, one that's burned into my brain is when they're walking along the South Bank riverside; the episode is apparently called "Ice Cream". The shot at ~0:48 in this video: https://youtu.be/cBti7aQBMk4?si=o3sWwfKJwQ-VEa8e&t=48 Is approximately from here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Y1UmtCK5si8drVaD7 - It's not exactly the same as the show, but that's more a limitation of Google Maps; I bet you could recreate the shot. There's also usually an ice cream vendor just about there. :)
The bridge in the background is Victoria Bridge, the clock on the right is the Suncorp building (I think now demolished), the weird multi-part building next to it is Brisbane Square Library (now also a Suncorp building), and the arched building to the right of that is the Treasury Building (formerly the casino).
The rest of the shots in that episode are from various other parts in the parklands if you walk along it, including the lagoon beach, fountains, and walkway. The whole area (and the ibises) are an iconic part of Brisbane, as a legacy of Expo 88.
Aside from that, I think quite a lot of the shots in the city take place in real places, whether recognisable places like Mt Coot-Tha or random shops in the suburbs.
Despite the huge media industry in SEQ, it's so rare to see it actually represented as itself (rather than dressed up as Manhattan, eg). I also remember growing up and feeling that there was never really any media I could relate to; everything "Australian" is set in Sydney, Melbourne, or some non-descript outback setting. There was always a feeling of being second best - always America in the news, not Australia; always NSW or Victoria for settings, not Queensland; always Sydney or Melbourne, not Brisbane.
The first time I watched Bluey, immediately I could see not just vague Australianisms, but actual places and sights I recognised. From small details like the bus stop signs to scenes which I can pinpoint exactly in Brisbane. Combine that with stories which I don't just identify with, but which I feel I can remember viscerally.