robryk @robryk@qoto.org

@yetzt @evelyn WDYM by public APIs? I thought the only (heuristic) way to tell whether a block exists using server-to-server ActivityPub was to send a message from the potentially-blocked server to the potentially-blocking one and rely on most implementations to claim invalid signature if the block is there (because the most common way of implementing blocking, used a.o. by Mastodon, is to consider signatures from the blocked domain as invalid). Is there an explicit API somewhere for asking about blocks?

@saltire One thing that I sometimes miss is the ability to send a reply to two threads simultaneously. Without that I am left with replying to one of them and linking to the other, which seems just as bad as quotes.

@darius Sometimes it's even slightly better: some TLDs (or subdomains of country TLDs) accept registrations only from entities of some kind, so then you ~only need to trust that registry's vetting processes.

@ichthyos @danluu I saw behaviour with even less upside ("say that a decision was arbitrary" vs "provide reasons that one can verify to be false in 2 minutes") in a situation when there would be no consultants involved, so I would expect that there's some weird reason why people end up bullshitting then.

@jpgoldberg @matthew_d_green TBF that can also be the case of picking that artificial value as "time before all the real events' timestamps", which is a questionable choice but does not mean there has to be a bug (other than arguably displaying that as an actual date).

@June@kitty.town Consider using tailscale for connectivity.

@rysiek Why? Looking for synonyms of its translation and translating them back will sometimes work.

@delroth Do you know why this would require IFD? Naively I'd expect that you could generate whatever is in node-packages.nix using fromJson on package-lock.json and logic written in Nix. We wouldn't then be importing any files created by build rules, so that shouldn't require IFD.

@delroth Ah, it _doesn't_ fetch them using `npm`: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/60762c6576cc8b9e2d615ea9bd8c59ffe34174a1/pkgs/build-support/node/fetch-npm-deps/default.nix

@delroth

> - Requires vendoring parts of the projects being packaged into nixpkgs (package.json, package-lock.json)

Oh :/ Yes, that's terrible.

> - Requires running a code generator on updates

_code_? Do you mean something that updates whatever-the-nix-expression-reads-to-find-hashes-of-all-deps or something else?

> - node2nix itself needs updating for every new nodejs version, and that doesn't happen necessarily in sync with nodejs bumps in nixpkgs

That makes me wonder if the new setup is going to require cache hash updates when npm-the-binary is updated.

@delroth What was roughly the reason for node2nix being a mess?

@ErrataRob If you mean have dependency chains with fewer RPCs in them, I agree.

If you mean fewer RPCs in total (even if they happen concurrently), then I'm confused. How is batching them at the application layer more efficient than causing them to be sent as separate requests at the RPC layer? One way or the other you need to have the client and server keep track of all outstanding requests/parts of batches: it only moves the responsibility for doing so between RPC infrastructure and application layer. Worse, batching at application layer creates problems for the infrastructure: you can't split such a request between two replicas of a backend, the loadbalancing infrastructure has to deal with requests that are variably expensive (depending on their contents), latency measurements are now a function of distribution over batch sizes, etc.

I've seen cases where batching did help performance, but they were either of the "we need these things to happen in order, but we have all the requests ready already" variety or very specialized setups (where for some reason keeping track of subrequests in application code was more convenient or where the subrequests were extremely short). I've seen more cases when someone did implement batching and created headaches for everyone maintaining the system later on, so this makes me extremely doubtful of arguments that point at missing batching as a problem in itself.

@freemo Our math rendering continues to do very weird things (the quoted post gets some expressions rendered into very tall boxes with superscripts at the top and with some white rectangles overlaid on top of everything).

@Ailantd If it's about Dune-like ornithpoters: A piece of headcanon I have for those (contradicted by the recent movie, though) is that the reason for the preference for them over airplanes we'd find more typical is that you can make bending wings without any bearings (which would be hard to keep well lubricated and free of abrasive particles on Arrakis) in the form of some kind of a compliant mechanism.

@bradfitz This was the case in the canton of Zurich 32 years ago. Then, an association of transportation providers was created (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z%C3%BCrcher_Verkehrsverbund), which started issuing tickets for all their members. The result is that over the 8 years I live here, I've never taken a means of public transit within the canton that wouldn't be covered by tickets from that system, with the single exception of taking a bicycle on a ferry.

That's not to say that free-for-the-traveller public transit wouldn't be better, but the problem you're pointing out can be solved (starting from, ttbomk, the same kind of mess you're describing) without that.

@niconiconi Isn't this technically still an at-least-16-bit operation followed by a cast to uint8 (which is equivalent to an 8bit operation on uint8 in this case)?

@Reina I don't buy the reasoning behind "can fix matches somewhat" (as opposed to the other points). You can do that in things-that-are-considered-sports by changing parts of the environment that are not specified in the rules. Obviously, with any sane governing body, that will cause the rules to be made more specific, but that actually relies on the "specification" being mutable.

@cafkafk But it's Sync (if the contents is Send), so it's just a question of appropriate Boxing (well, together with something that will manage lifetime of the thing appropriately).