Short dated entries, links, and microblog-style notes.
Steve Klabnik writes up his own take on How does Bluesky work
I think the separation of concerns between atproto and BlueSky are very meaningful, as having a “killer app” for the network gives a reason to use it. It also is a form of dogfooding, making sure that atproto is good enough to be able to build real applications on.
Rui Carmo writes up his experiences with LLMs etc in Living with our machine sidekicks. Here’s his comment on trying to import his 20 year old digital garden:
In my experience, summaries for personal notes either miss the point or are hilariously off, suggestions for related pages prioritise matching fluff over tags (yes, it’s that bad from a knowledge management perspective), and “chatting with my documents” is, in a word, stupid.
Congrats to the Bluesky team on opening up federation yesterday! Read the blog post announcement
I almost got a PDS up and running yesterday for my birthday.
I’ve been talking to Nathan Schneider and Robin Berjon about running a co-op PDS, Sky Coop.
Manton from Micro.blog intends to enable the service as an atproto PDS:
The long-term plan for Micro.blog is to fully support AT’s PDS — Personal Data Servers. Any blog hosted on Micro.blog would plug into Bluesky seamlessly, with data portable to other AT Protocol hosting providers.
Micro.blog already functions as an ActivityPub server, and currently supports cross-posting to Bluesky.
Following on Paying people to work on open source is good actually, Chad Whitacre proposes Software Commons as the big tent definition of open source in his post Towards Software Commons.
From the Wikipedia definition:
The software commons consists of all computer software which is available at little or no cost and which can be reused with few restrictions. It includes open source software which can be modified with few restrictions. However the commons also includes software outside of these categories
I like it!
Blog tinkering on my birthday ✅
The aliases field in notes are now used to generate the lines of the IPFS _redirects file. View source on Github
There are 14 JavaScript runtimes, via @wesbos.
This was a glitch post that I didn’t end up publishing, but the link made it through my RSS pipes and got posted. So I’m retconning the link that got posted.
Let’s make a JavaScript Runtimes notes page for this info to live.
Rosano writes an encryption rant as he attempts to backup and transfer data from a handful of apps:
there’s no feigning moral superiority in using ‘alternative tech’ until it includes a real foundation to stand on for people without this domain expertise.
Bryan Cantrill, CTO of Oxide Computer, Moore’s Scofflaws:
software costs can potentially absorb the entire gain from a next-generation CPU…software vendors never would have been allowed to get away with charging by the gigahertz; we should not allow them to feel so emboldened to charge by core count now!
Signal is adding usernames to protect visibility of phone numbers. Usernames are effectively a privacy work around, not a social feature:
Signal usernames are not logins or handles that you’ll be known by on the app – they’re simply a quick way to connect without sharing a phone number.
They also go on to describe that they’re easily changeable/disposable to share with different groups over time.
The Signal Wiki documents the generation of nicknames and UUID-based links (links don’t publicly display your username)
“We have lost the ability to do RAD (Rapid Application Development) due to the prevalence of web applications” says Rui Carmo.
He has a page collecting his research on Native Development
Apple detects Mastodon with a link tag — but then still uses OpenGraph to load the preview for iMessage. Any app that has a Mastodon shaped link tag can thus get rich previews.
Deltachat blog post about updated webxdc docs and sample apps
Like Farcaster Frames, webxdc “messenger apps” are interesting to me as it combines distribution with new app functionality.
Tom Critchlow writes up notes on his Remarkable Tablet. I have a reMarkable tablet myself and think Tom’s suggestions are pretty great.
I’d also love a more formal diary / daily entry system. Kind of like Obsidian’s daily notes. Some kind of date-based notebook inside the Remarkable would be rad
Notes, daily entry, and sync as core primitives are very powerful.
I pre-ordered a stealth tablet a couple of years back and then wrote a post about Kickstarting an app ecosystem which suggested similar things.
Apparently reMarkable is only getting more tied to mandatory, single source subscription services, which is not a great way to build an ecosystem around a device.
The Polkadot ecosystem has defined salaries and grades for fellowships. Via Dietrich, who put together background context on Parity/Polkadot decentralization.
Fits my open source as a job thinking, and is roughly what I suggested when I was working in the Ethereum core ecosystem: $10KUSD per month is a decent engineer salary.
I spent way too much time this past week being annoyed and disappointed at the hate thrown at Bridgy Fed developer Ryan Barrett, connecting ActivityPub to Bluesky’s ATProtocol.
Sean Tilley has a great opinion piece on We Distribute that does a good job of summarizing.
OWA on Apple killing web apps in the EU
This feels … complicated. There are new browser engines allowed in the EU.
You can still have a Home Screen “bookmark” & it will open in the browser of your choice.
Any of the new browsers — including Chrome or Firefox — could be a great host for PWAs on iOS now, decoupled from Safari versions.
Jacob Kaplan-Moss writes Paying people to work on open source is good actually which very much matches my thoughts so I’m clipping it to my local notes.
I’ll share a handful of quotes:
“Yelling at maintainers who’ve found a way to make a living is wrong.”
“Open source is good for humanity…I want people who want to work on open source to be able to do so, and should be able to live comfortable lives, with their basic needs met.
I’ll even use the terms “open source” and “free software” interchangeably just to hammer home how, in this context, the precise definitions of these terms don’t matter to me
One of the core things that I’m ready to fight for alongside Jacob is that “lower case” open source should be a bigger tent than OSI-approved Open Source™️ licenses, and it’s what I mean when I use the term.
if my sloppy use of these terms bothers you in the context of talking about how people make their living, it implies that you care more about terminology and definitions than about the people, and I’d like you to sit in that discomfort for a while
Read the whole thing.
Great read about the recent Mastodon CVE (which could allow taking over and forging content for remote accounts).
I’m quoting a bit here about open source:
how people seem to only care for the ‘gratis’ of free software, and seldom the ‘libre’, and millions of users leaning on the work of primarily a couple developers, assuming they have the attentiveness to catch every mistake themselves alone
There aren’t enough funded people - both teams and individuals - working on Fediverse software, and both the users and the admins seem averse to paying for it.
Ink & Switch lab notebook for new Patchwork project. First post, Universal Version Control:
“We believe that simple, powerful, universal version control tools could help all kinds of creators produce better work. Perhaps this is even built into the storage layer of your OS! That’s the vision for this Ink & Switch research project, codenamed Patchwork.”