Daily Journal 📓

• Nov 17th, 2022 https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/install-linux-macbook-pro/ id:: 63c3c7ed-965d-4a8c-9445-964606df6563
• Feb 23rd, 2022 How to Dual Boot macOS Monterey and Ubuntu on Mac | Step By Step Guide | No Virtualization Required #video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbUulXVZIBI
• Mac Linux USB Loader https://www.sevenbits.io/mlul/ — likely stale, from 2017 or 2019

Today, Medium is launching a Mastodon instance at me.dm to help our authors, publications and readers find a home in the fediverse. Mastodon is an emerging force for good in social media and we are excited to join this community.

Recently, the Open Collective CTO François Hodierne spotted an upsurge of activity in Mastodon Collectives on the platform. Many instances rely on crowdfunding to cover costs, and are seeking open source, community-oriented, transparent fundraising solutions that meet their needs.

• I suspect one of the reasons for this is that Pinafore is written in Svelte v2 and Sapper – both of which are deprecated in favor of Svelte v3 and SvelteKit. Not only is there no migration pathfrom Svelte v2 to v3, but there isn’t one from Sapper to SvelteKit either. (And on top of that, I had to fork Sapper pretty heavily.) Anyone making a bet on learning Pinafore’s tech stack is investing in a dead framework, so it’s not very attractive for new maintainers.

First off, ActivityPub does have a client-to-server API, but as far as I can tell, it’s not really worth implementing. Mastodon is the 800-pound gorilla in the fediverse, it doesn’t implement this API, and other servers (such as Pleroma and Misskey) implement their own flavor of Mastodon’s API.

I suspect that barring urgent intervention, within two decades, most of interactions on the internet will be fake.

• I think we will need to sign everything to signify its validity. When I say sign, I am thinking cryptographically signed, like you sign a transaction in your web3 wallet.

Any AROEP heads here read The Redemption of Time, the fanfic paraquel that was so good that Liu made it canon and published it under his mark? @basche42

{                                                                                                    
    :title            "This time last year"                                                                        
    :query            [:find (pull ?b [*])                                                              
                       :in $ ?span                                                                      
                       :where                                                                           
                       (between ?b ?span ?span)                                                         
                       ]                                                                                
    :inputs           [:365d-before ]                                                                   
   :collapsed?       false} 

picking a server is also like picking your landlord. Do you trust the admin of the server to host your identity? Do you think they have the technical know-how to maintain and secure the infra as needed? Are they making backups? What if they get lazy, and you’re stuck on a 2-year-old version of Mastodon lacking all the new features? Do they have a plan for financially supporting the infra? Or are they running an overloaded server that is extremely slow?

Apple is said to prefer hand tracking as an interface, but is experimenting with alternative input devices such as a wand and a kind of thimble.

Apple also wants to enable a transition between the Mac screen and the XR display: If you pull the 2D Maps app from the Mac screen, it can show a 3D model of a city in XR mode.

• Or as Ryan said, “The shared workspace will straight up be a Bret Victor [Seeing Space](Seeing Spaces).”

I wrote the End Poem for Minecraft, the most popular video game of all time. I never signed a contract giving Mojang the rights to the End Poem, and so Microsoft (who bought Minecraft from Mojang) also don’t own it. I do. Rather than sue the company or fight with my old friend, who founded the company and has since gone off in the deep end, I am dedicating the poem to the public domain. You’ll find it at the bottom of this post, along with a Creative Commons Public Domain dedication.

It’s only slightly clearer to me why a businesswould choose a native app over the web. I wrote up why I think a business might go that route about a year ago, and I didn’t even do a good job of convincing myself. The problem is mostly all the examples out there. All the biggest and best apps around have chosen the web. Figma, Slack, Discord, GitHub, Spotify, Netflix, you name it, the biggest successes have picked the biggest platform first: the web.

• Do they though? This is just platform owners, being able to make a choice at a very large scale
• From the perspective of people with native app skills… it’s way easier to just build a native mobile app

URLs are of the web, not native apps. URLs are what makes search engines a thing. Farewell to global, helpful search

Easy to deploy applications are table stakes. Easy to secure and manage data is the new north star. id:: 63b6f2ae-1301-4748-8db1-18d40c938ea0

Applications only exist to process and create experiences around data, and if a platform wants to set itself apart from the others, focus on the data.

Kelsey Hightower on Twitter

Disconnecting this tool and connecting another is a trivial-enough thing that does not warrant the trouble of transferring ownership to someone else.

{{query (page-property tags article)}}

• The self-hosted microfeed instance is deployed via GitHub Actions and runs on Cloudflare’s serverless platform, taking advantage of products like Pages, R2, D1, and Zero Trust.

  Your microfeed instance can distribute content through a customizable website, an RSS feed (compatible with podcast RSS), and a JSON feed. And with the simple, yet powerful admin dashboard, adding new content to your feed is a breeze.

The principle behind it is ‘decentralization’, but decentralization is heavily dependent on indexing. Thats why Google was made and became so popular. A good search engine is less critical to a centralized net.

Until then, I am not your supplier. So all your Software Supply Chain ideas? You are not buying from a supplier, you are a raccoon digging through dumpsters for free code. So I would advise you to put these rules in the same dumpster. And remember. I am not a supplier. Because THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”

• .DS_Store
  database/tweet.db
  database/tweets.js
  img/*

• My tweets are over 60MB and the database ends up over 50MB — the #Github limit for individual files is 50MB
• Those images are cached images, I also don’t want to check them into Github

• Video request error ENOENT: no such file or directory, open './video/970011759846178816.mp4'
• Repeated for every video. I haven’t uploaded much raw video to Twitter, so this is fine
• Also a handful of images with 404

• I do have a Twitter developer account that has v2 access, so I went in and created a new Bearer Token, and added it to the local .env file
• I ran it to test, and since my Twitter archive is from Nov 15th, 2022, it did grab new tweets

• Retweets id:: 63b23c86-9850-453a-ae84-15471f94a2f9
• Replies (oh god, I guess I’m a Reply Guy!)
• Sites Linked To
• RTs, Likes, Emoji, Hashtags, and swear words
• And, my first tweet!

• fission app register --name bmctwitter
• That gets me a fission.yaml and auto-detects _site as the build folder
• I’ll map twitter.bmannconsulting.com to it

I was asked over on mastodon whether I had any recommendations for studying either the period of computer history post-WW2 (thus “post invention of stored-program digital computers”) or even pre-WW2 (thus “all the random stuff we used before then”).

It is very small and lightweight open source app that runs nicely on services like Glitch , but it has most of what you need to host your own personal social media account.

It’s got a microblogging tool, to make posts. You can customize the design with HTML and CSS. You can follow people on Mastodon or other services and interact with posts and send messages. People can follow you on Mastodon, or with RSS. You run it on your own server so you own and operate the data and the code and the whole service. And you can hack the code and make it weirder so that we can all be part of a better, more diverse and more interesting web. https://hackers.town/@benbrown/109605510788355449

• Page Rules? Redirects? Transforms?
• I first deleted the logseq.bmannconsulting.com subdomain, then brought it back and pointed it at bmcgarden.fission.app
• TODO Figure out how to get #Cloudflare to redirect logseq subdomain to root bmannconsulting.com #BMC
• There aren’t that many logseq subdomain links in the wild

• I even have a 2022 version to link to https://2022.bmannconsulting.com/colophon/

• Got the pop up on requesting to run it

As usual, we aren’t thinking weird enough—both about what’s possible, and about what might go wrong.

• We worry about someone using AI to write a book, rather than whether we’ll still read books.
• We worry about AI writing term papers, rather than whether schools will become obsolete.

Riffing on the Primer from Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age

• Talking about search on Mastodon and having flashbacks to when I was the designer for Technorati. There was a beautiful moment there where blogs weren’t indexed by Google and we were building a truly community-centric product, with tag pages and a blog directory and plans for way more. And it all got eaten when Google started indexing blogs. Another moment the fediverse should probably learn from.

  https://xoxo.zone/@fraying/109592997166940512

• The production model of Mastodon also has consequences for its governance. GitHub statistics show that @Gargron has single-handedly produced and committed at least 80% of Mastodon’s code. But more importantly, as the lead maintainer of the code, Rochko makes all the decisions.

• Better participatory governance is therefore the big challenge ahead of Mastodon, and the Fediverse space more generally. Web3 is usually detested by open source developers, and this negative vibe is also strong on Mastodon. Yet it is in the progressive margins of the Web3 space that debates on governance models take place. Successful governance experiments, conducted for example around the Gitcoin protocol, or the theoretical work of the Metagov project, should be examined and applied to the Fediverse.

• The challenge with governance is that it requires collective action – unlike coding, which can successfully be done, on behalf of millions, by a single coder.

• Launch a participatory project
  • to define a shared mission for building the digital public space on the basis of the Fediverse.
• Secure greater involvement of public institutions
  • Dan Hon proposed for organizations to set up their own Mastodon instances and serve as verified, public interest driven, trusted nodes in the network.
• Build a stronger social and institutional layer

• {{embed Hometown/Character Limit}}

• {{embed ((63ae8744-1f74-4d63-a45f-d5c6caedf43f))}}
• This is a block embed…describing Page Embeds

• It is, sadly, a child of the W3C era, and thus relies entirely too much on lobbing chunks of JSON to and fro via HTTP to various endpoints you discover along the way instead of (say) using persistent connections, binary payloads and a topic structure (but I’m biased here).

• The most promising alternative server for me is Takahē, which I’ve already written about and intend to contribute to. Its core design avoids most of the problems with scaling ActivityPub], it has a solid foundation and (although it depends too much on PostgreSQL) it feels like the logical choice for easy to maintain, small-to-mid instances.

• Points at Pleroma fork Rebased for solid server to run
• Soapbox as a separate front end
  • Announcement of Soapbox 3.0 Release has lots of details

• nothing for #mobile
• #Dat Protocol #Hypercore sites didn’t work in regular browsers
• Couldn’t sync state between multiple devices

I always knew were were trying to steer the Web as outsiders, but what I didn’t expect was how fundamentally hard it is to tweak how the Web works.

The entrepreneurs reading this may recognize a common failure pattern here: we got to a really great demo fast, and then hit a cliff that we couldn’t surmount. Rather than taking the L and re-evaluating, I slammed my head into the cliff hoping I could break through via force of will, but the tech just wasn’t there, and the product wasn’t either.

As decentralizers we may be pursuing a mission, but our work only wins in the market, and to win in the market we need to think like entrepreneurs. Ultimately, my lesson learned is that mission needs PMF.

Don’t get too precious about the Web. It’s a wonderful open platform, but it’s settled into its purpose. Look for opportunities to create new open platforms that fit the moment.

• Not really! But it was fun to see that the site still exists and is all the way up to CSS3 tutorials

“no maintainer is better than an adversarial maintainer!” — just handing the reins of even a single software package that has north of 13k unique clones a week (mux) is just not something I’d ever be comfortable with.

I’ve written something like six or seven personal wikis over the past decade. It’s actually an incredibly advanced form of procrastination

Call it the Great Ravine.  Many companies will not cross the chasm.  But the ones that do will form the bedrock of future AI applications and a new stack that most AI driven businesses use by default.

Think of it as the LAMP stack for AI.