Notices by Alan Zimmerman (alanz@social.coop)

Hi! People might know me for my contributions to https://scuttlebutt.nz - I have been working on a #golang implementation of it, intensely for a year now. https://github.com/cryptoscope/ssb - Always happy to answer questions about it or SSB in general! #intro

In this episode of Libre Lounge, @emacsen site down with Frank Karlitschek, the founder of @nextcloud to talk about #FreeSoftware and companies, the dangers of VC funding, 90s optmism about the Internet and the role of federation in the future of computing and society.

Check out this amazing conversation at

https://librelounge.org/episodes/32-companies-money-and-society-with-frank-karlitschek.html

The latest in my series of case histories of #AdversarialInteroperability and the role it played in keeping tech competitive is the history of Gopher, which I was able to write thanks to the generous assistance of Gopher's co-inventor @lindner@twitter.com.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/02/gopher-when-adversarial-interoperability-burrowed-under-gatekeepers-fortresses

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RT @ImmyKaur@twitter.com

‘The 20-minute neighbourhood is all about ‘living locally’ – giving people the ability to meet most of their everyday needs within a 20-minute walk, cycle or local public transport trip of their home’
https://theconversation.com/people-love-the-idea-of-20-minute-neighbourhoods-so-why-isnt-it-top-of-the-agenda-131193

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/ImmyKaur/status/1230781135610929153

Wonderful, empathetic discussion of open source dynamics, emotional associations and mindset: https://blog.burntsushi.net/foss/

#TIL about #LibreLingo, a collaborative language learning project that is considering implementing #ActivityPub:
https://github.com/kantord/LibreLingo/issues/65

I think Spritely Crystal is useful. Unlike Magenc, it's not as rock-solid... crystals can shatter. That doesn't mean it isn't useful. And one reason I spent all this time on it is not just because I think it's useful, but because it illustrates so well a problem many folks in our community don't even realize we have... and one born out of serious challenges.

Anyway, as always, feedback is *most welcome*. I hope people are finding these writeups enjoyable and valuable.

In case you want the tl;dr of this particular update:
- Spritely Crystal is vulnerable to all sorts of weird behavior if we write out conflicting revisions
- Oh no, now this seems like bad design, right?
- Oh wait a whole bunch of our technology has this problem...
- Git has this problem! Secure Scuttlebutt has this problem!! ActivityPub has this problem!!!
- It turns out there are theoretical limits that force us to make tradeoffs
- So, we should at least know what those tradeoffs are

I don’t particularly care for your unique characters in unique circumstances.

I want to taste your society’s fabric.

How frequently your garbage is collected. How you far you go to get food. Who tells you what to do. How much do you pay in taxes. How often is the tax man replaced. How do you raise capital for an uncertain venture.

That's the bad news. The #GoodNews in federated networking land is that there are way more federated social web projects than there were a year ago, covering a much wider range of use cases (video, events etc). Also, we have a much greater understanding of the issues that are blocking universal inter-operation (portable identity, privacy and encryption, lack of standardized extensions, lack of implementation docs), and projects like #Spritely actively working on demonstrating ways to solve them.

TFW when you hear John Bercow shouting 'order' in a rave mix

Improved Notifications and Direct Messages will be shipping soon! #pixelfed

for those wondering how to establish trade relations with crows:

- feed crows food A regularly
- when crows decide to bring you gifts, feed them food B
- when crows bring you different categories of gifts, feed them a food-per-category, ex: food C for jewelry, food D for paper money, etc
- crows will recognize these exchange patterns and opt to bring you things in order to acquire desired treats

good luck! 🐦

Pushed some major updates to the #Spritely Crystal docs: https://gitlab.com/spritely/crystal/blob/master/crystal/scribblings/intro.org
- Our characters learn how different crystal registries can be synced to have the same revisions
- Our characters discover all the "fun" that is version conflicts.

Coming up soon:
- We discover how the problems described in this document are very general
- In fact, the existing fediverse already has them!
- We'll learn more about the CAP theorem and the tradeoffs we can make

Now we hide in the mud from the Amazon Hunter-Deliverer drones

No matter our best strategy, they always know exactly what we want to buy, and when.

Linux has epoll, BSDs have kqueue, and the #Hurd has... well, neither, nor is there any replacement.

There of course are select & poll, but they work differently: with poll/select, the calls themselves block until an event occurs, whereas epoll/kqueue let you create a new fd and then wait on it. This makes them composable, so you can nest event loops, even between processes.

So for the past few days, in between finals, I've been writing a little epoll server for the Hurd; today it finally started working.

https://knzk.me/media/R_-bGWwfIDqVK_QEdXo