@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org oooh that’s a good point! woodworking is scary and i don’t have much room for it but i do have SOME room in mind that could work for it… i feel like i’d just hurt myself in the process though LOL

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Off-topic areas are always a good idea. :-) Web forums often had those. And web forums are actually what I had in mind, @bender@twtxt.net. 😅 (While I do have a certain nostalgia for it now, Usenet has always been a bit weird to me. Can’t really explain why.)

@prologic@twtxt.net In few weeks for sure, I have a couple of features in mind that I would like to implement (DM extension for example but I’ll ask for permission to @arne@uplegger.eu to use his PoC or ask him to contribute to twtxtory directly)

That’s exactly what came to mind. Even millionaires would simply pay with a credit card for the convenience, and yes, because what kind of a sociopath will carry $3,000 around?! Just one more stumping item to that despicable person list.

@doesnm.p.psf.lt@doesnm.p.psf.lt Because I’m a lazy project manage and I haven’t grooomed the backlog in a while 🤣 Since you’re there, do you mind cleaning it up for me? 🙏

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev Ahh cool! I’ll try following it again 🤣 Mind @-mentioning/linking@twtxt.net the feed again? 🙏

@kingdomcome@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz i got it a couple weeks ago when i saw it was available i LOST MY MIND lmao

is it like… ethical to offer access to certain self hosted services as patreon exclusives. like i wanna offer the IRC client/bouncer i hosted which seems ok i think because i’ve seen pico.sh offer their instances of that as paid services. but the other ones i have in mind are alt web frontends for stuff like imgur and pinterest. and i just feel weird about it for some reason. idk i’m trying to think of ways to support my server stuff but every time i come up with something it feels weird

i must stop ghosting all my social media except discord and fedi when i am depressed. ghosting is the mind killer

@prologic@twtxt.net hm would there be any loss with the re-fetch option? i wouldn’t mind either but i’d like to hold onto what i got if possible! but if it IS possible but also really annoying to do i’ll just do the re-fetch of feeds because i’m lazy af LMAO

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I am sure @prologic@twtxt.net would not mind sending an invite. Ping him!

Got anywhere in mind? 🧐

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org The bird in the wallpaper? That’s a photo from a trip to a local zoo. 😃 This little guy was sitting in one of the bushes and didn’t mind people getting rather close. Full version and more from that day.

There’s a psychological burden of digital life even heavier than distraction
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well, I assume by syntax you mean Gemtext (which I like a lot, my personal blog is built on top of it), so I think it might work for twtxt clients…

I knew of twtxt in Gemini Antenna, so at least the 2017 spec might work on that protocol. I think the main issue with extensions is that they weren’t designed with many URLs and protocols in mind.

Also I have to admit that the Gemini community significantly reduced in the last few years. I don’t know how worth it is to add support for Gemini now.

@eapl.me@eapl.me I agree. The syntax is weird inside Gemini and twtxt is made with the http protocol in mind and Gemini doesn’t work with some extensions.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de That’s cool! I just can’t justify the amount of space it permanently takes. But it fits nicely with the other gauges you have. And with that in mind, it actually is super tiny.

@eapl.me@eapl.me Interesting, I wasn’t aware that other parts of the world consider them to be a German thing :-)

do you mind sharing a picture ?

I can’t find something similar here, but my wife gave this one last year, and I’ve been using it a bit. I’d say it’s useful as you’ve shared.

Image

We also have a shared calendar in the kitchen for family events, and it’s working great.

@thecanine@twtxt.net I don’t mind the FUTO keyboard either but it is pretty basic. Going to have to try out helio

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev Just before the pandemic, we watched Uncle Bob videos once a week in the lunch break. While almost all of my old teammates agreed with his views, I partially found them to be very odd and even counterproductive.

I didn’t come across John Ousterhout or any of his work before, at least not deliberately. So, this document is my first contact.

I only finished the chapter on comments and I totally agree with John so far. This document just manifests to me how weird Bob’s view is on certain subjects.

I always disagreed with the concept of a maximum method length. Sure, generally, shorter functions are probably better, but it always depends. And I’ve certainly seen super short methods that just made the code flow even worse to follow. While “one function should only do one thing” is a nice general rule, I’m 100% in team John with the shown examples. There are cases, where this doesn’t help readability at all. Not even close.

To me, a function always has to justify its existence. Either by reusing it at least at another place or by coming up with dedicated tests for it. But if it is just called once and there are no tests, I almost always decide against it. Personally, I don’t mind longer methods. We just recently had a discussion about that and I lost against two other workmates who are more in Uncle Bob’s camp, they refactored one medium sized method into three very short ones. Luckily, we agree on most other topics.

Lol, what!? The shorter the method, the longer the variables inside? I first thought I misread or the writeup mixed it up. I’ll always do it the other way around.

I’ve been also bitten badly by outdated comments in the past, but Bob must have worked on really terrible projects to end up with such an attitude to dislike comments. Oh well. No doubt, I’ve come across by several orders of magnitude more useless comments, in my experience (autogenerated) JavaDocs fall in the category more frequently than not. So, I know that there are different types of comments. A comment doesn’t automatically mean that it is good and justified.

But I also partially agree with Bob and John and think that a good name has a proper chance to save a comment. Though, when in doubt, I go John’s route and use a shorter name with a comment rather than use a kilometer long identifier. Writing good comments typically takes some time, sometimes much longer than writing the code. It regularly takes me several minutes. It’s a hard art.

I perhaps should read up on John’s work. He seems to be more reasonable and likeminded. :-) Let me continue to complete this document.

Philadelpia - Long run: 14.22 miles, 00:10:02 average pace, 02:22:39 duration
great long run. had a few places in mind to try and visit (tun tavern, rocky steps, the river thing) and hit them all with not really any idea where they were. pretty much just went tourist mode taking pictures and reading signs. it was so freaking cold! 22F i think. took the beanie off and the sweat had turned to ice, and my torso was all red from the rubbing of my clothes.
#running

Hi James, great to hear your interest. So this is an exclusive roundtable luncheon with people in the IT, Engineering, DevOps and Technical professionals. This is an opportunity to benchmark and share stories and experiences with like-minded peers in a closed-door, Chatham House Rule environment where you will be given the opportunity to speak openly and candidly.

I’m not even sure what half these words mean hmm 🧐

@sorenpeter@darch.dk It depends on your requirements. If you just want to put your code somewhere for yourself, simply push it over SSH on a server and call it good. That’s what I do with lots of repos. If you want an additional web UI for read access for the public, cgit comes to mind (a mate uses that). Prologic runs Gitea, which offers heaps more functionality like merge requests.

@prologic@twtxt.net Which one? I don’t mind the ternary operator at all. In fact, I often find myself missing it in Go. I don’t find the two alternatives particularly elegant:

foo := "eggs"
if bar {
    foo = "spam"
}

Or:

var foo string
if bar {
    foo = "spam"
} else {
    foo = "eggs"
}

To my eye, this just would look a lot nicer:

foo := bar ? "spam" : "eggs"

Or at least as the Pythons do it:

foo = "spam" if bar else "eggs"

The ternary operator especially shines with relatively short expressions.

There’s a reason I avoid speaking my mind on the internet like the plague. The same reason I’d set up a {B,Ph,Gem}log months ago but never got myself to publish any of the drafts in any of them.

I fell asleep again during snoozing, and started dreaming intensely. My own mind woke me up in time by setting everything I loved on fire within my dream. That jolted me awake alright.

After I stripped off my clothes and turned around, I came to the conclusion that the plan to shower was cancelled at this moment. The faucet had broken right off and was laying in the tub. I noticed that the diameters of the hot and cold water pipes were surprisingly small, didn’t expect that. Since the pipes were broken flush with the wall, I couldn’t even determine if I had to remove the inner our outer threads, well, remains thereof, in order to attempt to repair this mess. Luckily, I was going to see a plumber mate at the christmas tree collection later anyway.

The first thing that came to mind when I woke up was that I didn’t catch the logical flaw in my dream: absolutely no water was coming out of the burst pipes. The whole scenario took place in summer, so the water couldn’t be frozen either.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz ah, thanks for letting me know that! i’ll def be keeping that in mind.

Pinellas County Running: 3.12 miles, 00:08:53 average pace, 00:27:44 duration
first day of marathon training. i do not have a race in mind but wanted to start training again. was going too fast but 48F and just feeling overall good.
#running

nice! would you mind elaborating a bit?
Is that the scientific method?
I couldn’t find anything related when I searched for it.

@xuu@txt.sour.is ROFLMAO! 🤣 reading that, the Tech bro sounded in my mind like Cow from Cow and Chicken

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh! no need to be sorry and feel free to keep at it if it helps, I don’t mind. It’s just that I’m always on the lookout for corpo-bots and crawlers slipping through the cracks (a fun little game of sorts) 😅 the only thing I let them see is a robots.txt telling them to :diffoff

Also, I’m curious about the invalid lines in my feed. is it something I should lookout for in future?

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org oh nah it came out like that lol! i actually love how squished it looks it feels accurate lol

oh yeah i think i might have a tripod around but i do need a sandbag or something i could use as one. maybe yeah a giant bag of rice could work LOL. thanks for the tips!!! i took a video class last year in college and we worked with cameras and tripods with sandbags so it was on my mind

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev What do you mean by API? yarnd (which powers Yarn.social pods like twtxt.net) does have an API, however that API is designed for clients to interact with the pod and the user’s account and feed. e.g: there is a command-line client called yarnc and I used to maintain a mobile native app (using Flutter).

What use-case did you have in mind?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I know, nobody asked 🤡 but, here are a couple of suggestions:

• If you’re willing to pay for a licence I’d highly recommend plasticity it’s under GNU LESSER GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE, Version 3.
  
• Otherwise if you already have experience with CAD/Parametric modeling you could give freeCAD a spin, it’s under GNU Library General Public License, version 2.0, it took them years but have just recently shipped their v1.0 👍
  
• or just roll with Autodesk’s Fusion for personal use, if you don’t mind their “Oh! You need to be online to use it” thing.
  

(Let’s face it, Blender is hard to use.)
I bet you’re talking about blender 2.79 and older! 😂 you are, right? JK

Fartlek: 7.12 miles, 00:09:56 average pace, 01:10:41 duration
kept it chill the first three miles then took a walk break to lower the heart rate and started off again into a fartlek. the intervals helped because my mind was starting to fuck with me with the steady pace. got some pretty good rain in the last two and a half miles which was great too!
#running

@prologic@twtxt.net I bet our twts are already being fed to circuit monsters… Remember the other day when I’d snapped out about some nonsense, being an A-Hole and what not? I’ve seen an AI company employee lurking around with not much interaction (if I’m not mistaken), so my mind went on auto-pilot mode thinking “This !#@%$ must be feeding us to the circuit peggy monster!! Arrr 😤” 🤣🤣🤣 but then again, one shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover (or an employee by his title) right?

So long Blue Birdy 👋 it was a … Never mind, GTFO of my life already! 😆

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

Regarding section 4 about feed discovery: Yeah, non-HTTP transport protocols are an issue as they do not have User-Agent headers. How exactly do you envision the discovery_url to work, though?

This is from a twt of mine from January 2022:

https://www.uninformativ.de/files/twtxt/2022%2D01%2D22%2D%2Dfollow%2Dendpoint.md

(This idea gets lost all the time, so I put it into a file now. 😅)

Not sure if this is what @eapl.me@eapl.me had in mind, obviously.

@eapl.me@eapl.me here are my replies (somewhat similar to Lyse’s and James’)

1. Metadata in twts: Key=value is too complicated for non-hackers and hard to write by hand. So if there is a need then we should just use #NSFS or the alt-text file in markdown image syntax ![NSFW](url.to/image.jpg) if something is NSFW

2. IDs besides datetime. When you edit a twt then you should preserve the datetime if location-based addressing should have any advantages over content-based addressing. If you change the timestamp the its a new post. Just like any other blog cms.

3. Caching, Yes all good ideas, but that is more a task for the clients not the serving of the twtxt.txt files.

4. Discovery: User-agent for discovery can become better. I’m working on a wrapper script in PHP, so you don’t need to go to Apaches log-files to see who fetches your feed. But for other Gemini and gopher you need to relay on something else. That could be using my webmentions for twtxt suggestion, or simply defining an email metadata field for letting a person know you follow their feed. Interesting read about why WebMetions might be a bad idea. Twtxt being much simple that a full featured IndieWeb sites, then a lot of the concerns does not apply here. But that’s the issue with any open inbox. This is hard to solve without some form of (centralized or community) spam moderation.

5. Support more protocols besides http/s. Yes why not, if we can make clients that merge or diffident between the same feed server by multiples URLs

6. Languages: If the need is big then make a separate feed. I don’t mind seeing stuff in other langues as it is low. You got translating tool if you need to know whats going on. And again when there is a need for easier switching between posting to several feeds, then it’s about building clients with a UI that makes it easy. No something that should takes up space in the format/protocol.

7. Emojis: I’m not sure what this is about. Do you want to use emojis as avatar in CLI clients or it just about rendering emojis?

Righto, @eapl.me@eapl.me, ta for the writeup. Here we go. :-)

Metadata on individual twts are too much for me. I do like the simplicity of the current spec. But I understand where you’re coming from.

Numbering twts in a feed is basically the attempt of generating message IDs. It’s an interesting idea, but I reckon it is not even needed. I’d simply use location based addressing (feed URL + ‘#’ + timestamp) instead of content addressing. If one really wanted to, one could hash the feed URL and timestamp, but the raw form would actually improve disoverability and would not even require a richer client. But the majority of twtxt users in the last poll wanted to stick with content addressing.

yarnd actually sends If-Modified-Since request headers. Not only can I observe heaps of 304 responses for yarnds in my access log, but in Cache.FetchFeeds(…) we can actually see If-Modified-Since being deployed when the feed has been retrieved with a Last-Modified response header before: https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/yarn/src/commit/98eee5124ae425deb825fb5f8788a0773ec5bdd0/internal/cache.go#L1278

Turns out etags with If-None-Match are only supported when yarnd serves avatars (https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/yarn/src/commit/98eee5124ae425deb825fb5f8788a0773ec5bdd0/internal/handlers.go#L158) and media uploads (https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/yarn/src/commit/98eee5124ae425deb825fb5f8788a0773ec5bdd0/internal/media_handlers.go#L71). However, it ignores possible etags when fetching feeds.

I don’t understand how the discovery URLs should work to replace the User-Agent header in HTTP(S) requests. Do you mind to elaborate?

Different protocols are basically just a client thing.

I reckon it’s best to just avoid mixing several languages in one feed in the first place. Personally, I find it okay to occasionally write messages in other languages, but if that happens on a more regularly basis, I’d definitely create a different feed for other languages.

Isn’t the emoji thing “just” a client feature? So, feed do not even have to state any emojis. As a user I’d configure my client to use a certain symbol for feed ABC. Currently, I can do a similar thing in tt where I assign colors to feeds. On the other hand, what if a user wants to control what symbol should be displayed, similar to the feed’s nick? Hmm. But still, my terminal font doesn’t even render most of emojis. So, Unicode boxes everywhere. This makes me think it should actually be a only client feature.

@david@collantes.us No worries, I got you. And I’ll keep the “Handle with care” reminder in mind, might even use it as mantra if I ever take an arrow in the knee 😆

It is past 16:00 ET, and so the weekend begins. Here is to hoping it transcurs slowly in our minds—or, at the very minimum, in mine.

@bender@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net I’m not exactly asking yarnd to change. If you are okay with the way it displayed my twts, then by all means, leave it as is. I hope you won’t mind if I continue to write things like 1/4 to mean “first out of four”.

What has text/markdown got to do with this? I don’t think Markdown says anything about replacing 1/4 with ¼, or other similar transformations. It’s not needed, because ¼ is already a unicode character that can simply be directly inserted into the text file.

What’s wrong with my original suggestion of doing the transformation before the text hits the twtxt.txt file? @prologic@twtxt.net, I think it would achieve what you are trying to achieve with this content-type thing: if someone writes 1/4 on a yarnd instance or any other client that wants to do this, it would get transformed, and other clients simply wouldn’t do the transformation. Every client that supports displaying unicode characters, including Jenny, would then display ¼ as ¼.

Alternatively, if you prefer yarnd to pretty-print all twts nicely, even ones from simpler clients, that’s fine too and you don’t need to change anything. My 1/4 -> ¼ thing is nothing more than a minor irritation which probably isn’t worth overthinking.

@off_grid_living@twtxt.net mind sharing the PDF, to take a look? Some PDF containing text as images, which makes it more difficult to complete the task you want to perform.

@bender@twtxt.net So…

() @xuu@txt.sour.is wrote:

”@bender I am also in camp no edit signals. deletes only breaks the head of a thread. all the replies are unaffected.”

I figure I could also answer every single twtxt like this, so that if the original gets edited, or deleted, at least I don’t sound foolish without knowing exactly what I replied to. 🤭

It Sounds like a good idea! should that be limited to just direct replays or can it be extended to replays to other replays, that way and With just the right amount of chain-replays, we’ll be RRrrrrrevolutionizing the way people Mailing Lists like, in no time! xD

P.S: Just a reminder! I’ve already told you not to mind my twts for the next couple of hours, right!

as a matter of fact! don’t mind anything I do/say for the next 72 hours xD

Don’t mind this twt!

Hurricane Helene is passing by. Close enough to give us a day off tomorrow, but not that close to cause major harm. Well, we think. Hurricanes often have a mind of their own, and decide changes on their path. Either way, I shall be back at work on Friday 😩. LOL.

@prologic@twtxt.net Thanks for writing that up!

I hope it can remain a living document (or sequence of draft revisions) for a good long time while we figure out how this stuff works in practice.

I am not sure how I feel about all this being done at once, vs. letting conventions arise.

For example, even today I could reply to twt abc1234 with “(#abc1234) Edit: …” and I think all you humans would understand it as an edit to (#abc1234). Maybe eventually it would become a common enough convention that clients would start to support it explicitly.

Similarly we could just start using 11-digit hashes. We should iron out whether it’s sha256 or whatever but there’s no need get all the other stuff right at the same time.

I have similar thoughts about how some users could try out location-based replies in a backward-compatible way (append the replyto: stuff after the legacy (#hash) style).

However I recognize that I’m not the one implementing this stuff, and it’s less work to just have everything determined up front.

Misc comments (I haven’t read the whole thing):

• Did you mean to make hashes hexadecimal? You lose 11 bits that way compared to base32. I’d suggest gaining 11 bits with base64 instead.

• “Clients MUST preserve the original hash” — do you mean they MUST preserve the original twt?

• Thanks for phrasing the bit about deletions so neutrally.

• I don’t like the MUST in “Clients MUST follow the chain of reply-to references…”. If someone writes a client as a 40-line shell script that requires the user to piece together the threading themselves, IMO we shouldn’t declare the client non-conforming just because they didn’t get to all the bells and whistles.

• Similarly I don’t like the MUST for user agents. For one thing, you might want to fetch a feed without revealing your identty. Also, it raises the bar for a minimal implementation (I’m again thinking again of the 40-line shell script).

• For “who follows” lists: why must the long, random tokens be only valid for a limited time? Do you have a scenario in mind where they could leak?

• Why can’t feeds be served over HTTP/1.0? Again, thinking about simple software. I recently tried implementing HTTP/1.1 and it wasn’t too bad, but 1.0 would have been slightly simpler.

• Why get into the nitty-gritty about caching headers? This seems like generic advice for HTTP servers and clients.

• I’m a little sad about other protocols being not recommended.

• I don’t know how I feel about including markdown. I don’t mind too much that yarn users emit twts full of markdown, but I’m more of a plain text kind of person. Also it adds to the length. I wonder if putting a separate document would make more sense; that would also help with the length.