# I am the Watcher. I am your guide through this vast new twtiverse.
#
# Usage:
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/users View list of users and latest twt date.
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/twt View all twts.
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/mentions?uri=:uri View all mentions for uri.
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/conv/:hash View all twts for a conversation subject.
#
# Options:
# uri Filter to show a specific users twts.
# offset Start index for quey.
# limit Count of items to return (going back in time).
#
# twt range = 1 2032
# self = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=https://anthony.buc.ci/user/abucci/twtxt.txt&offset=32
# next = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=https://anthony.buc.ci/user/abucci/twtxt.txt&offset=132
@stigatle the pictures you posted the other day are amazing!
@stigatle it's a bit before 6am where I am, so, tired. How about you?
@lyse I didn't do anything special to make my web browsers default to utf-8. I just installed and used them.
@eaplmx it's new to me too! I can't pretend to know a whole lot about web tech, but anyway ๐คท
I'm discovering that setting up in the IndieWeb will take a non-trivial amount of work. But since I don't want to ever be stuck in a social media silo again, I think it's worth it. It's interesting to tinker with, too.
@movq @lyse Ah, that was the problem! W3C wants you to have a charset defined within the first 1024 bytes of the HTML, which that comment exceeded. I just moved the comment below the charset and the charset validates correctly now (though a bunch of other warnings and errors appear now lol). I am using a Jekyll theme I adapted from someone else and I guess they never encountered this issue. Thanks for finding it!
It's interesting, though, that some web browsers don't care about that. I've viewed that page in Vivaldi, Falkon, Opera, and Firefox and the unicode arrows showed up fine.
I *think* it worked? I need to read more about microformats2 I think.
@lyse wow that's so bizarre. I viewed the page in Firefox (103.0.1 on Ubuntu) and those arrows look normal! 
Speaking selfishly, of course, as someone who controls a domain.
I wish every web site would offer IndieAuth.
@prologic hmm, it looks interesting and I can't say I disagree with their points, but I'm also skeptical of anything called a "manifesto", and they sound somewhat combative.
I wonder a lot about how much bad in the world can be ascribed to some variation of Hotelling's Law.
@prologic I hope these people change their ways because c'mon!
@lyse I mean, all they have to do is ask, I'll gladly tell them through a megaphone while driving through the city center!
@prologic I was so appalled I filed a ticket with their tech support and with the tech supportof the client of theirs who sent me to their service. Unbelievable to me that such things still exist, but I sure as hell am not going to keep quiet.
@prologic You may already do all this stuff, but here's my 2 cents.
One thing you can do is a use a site like https://myip.ms/browse/blacklist/Blacklist_IP_Blacklist_IP_Addresses_Live_Database_Real-time to download a list of blacllisted IP address in a format suitable for whichever firewall you're using. Then you can hard ban those IPs.
Another thing you can use is install fail2ban and set up rules appropriate to yarnd. I'm not familiar enough to say what those should be, but blocking http POST floods is a good idea. You can also manually add IP addresses to fail2ban jails, or semi-automate that where you read the IPs you want to ban from a list that you update regularly.
Finally, you could use something like akismet to automatically detect spam posts and block ones that fail their test. I'm not sure if you're able to self host if you're dependent on a call to their servers. Maybe there's something similar that you could host locally if nto.
It is 2022 how the heck are you emailing someone login credentials including a password in plain text and then not even providing them the ability to change that password?
@prologic Do you see any regularity in the origins of the registrations? You might be able to ban a few IP ranges at the server level for awhile until it calms down. I've done that on the VPS I manage.
@prologic the Ubuntu "minimal" cloud images are like 195 M! What the hell is in there?
Oof, looks like I have a corrupted SD card in my phone ๐จ
@prologic Oh yes, this isn't my student and he has a video on this page about how it works. So simple but amazing.
Recursive Drawing is really fun to play with. You can make spirally-looking things like
and
(which is a minor variation that looks more feathery). Or you can make more organic looking shapes like
or
This tool was a student's degree project and doesn't have all the bells and whistles you'd expect from a mature drawing program, but the one thing it does well, the recursive drawing, is super cool.
@prologic I saw a release announcement for gum, which looks like a great way to add interactivity to shell scripts.
Much as I'd love to help, I have my hands full right now! Job+kids takes up 200% of my time! I've been meaning to play with salty chat just to see how it looks but so far I haven't even had time to do that!
it's nice that you can self host the charm cloud part of it. Even though they say they end-to-end encrypt anything sent to or stored on their servers, and even though I mostly believe that, there's no way to verify. Reading the source code is not verification because there are no guarantees that what's running on their servers matches what's in the source code. So, it's safest to self host, and I'm glad they provide that option.
Charm
This whole set of libraries looks incredibly neat.
Firefox Focus is meant to be one of the more privacy friendly browsers on Android, yet after install it has Google set as the default web browser and it collects telemetry. So you still need to hunt through the settlings to find and turn off these things if they concern you (which they should imo)
@prologic lol, well I was venting so I had to be creative
Android always has seventeen different apps for any particular thing you want to do, where five are so full of ads they're unusable, three are hobby projects, two are paid and cost more than you're willing to spend on a phone app, three haven't been maintained in over two years, and four might possibly work for you. But you can't know any of that till you install all seventeen and try them.
Resurrected some old formal concept analysis code I'd written years ago. It's not great, but it works well enough and now it's dusted off.
I am a night owl by nature but ever since having kids I almost never sleep past 6:30am and am often awake by 5:30am. ๐ฉ Gone are the days when I'd go to bed at 2am or later.
@prologic there is only one active user on my pod lol. Someday I may invite friends and family to use it though so we will see.
@prologic a little experimental framework for helping to build agent-based models. I'm unhappy with the existing frameworks I know about so I'm trying a different tack and so far I'm pretty happy with the results.
for instance, I'm just firing all the agents' workloads asynchronously at the CPU and hoping for the best, where it'd probably be more efficient to batch up the work. I'm using scala and haven't done any jvm heap of GC tuning yet, so that's another way to improve performance.
OK lovely, I have a little demo of my nascent agent modeling framework thinger that can run 100,000 agents doing non-trivial (but faked for now) computations at about 1/3 of my screen refresh rate, meaning near real-time. I haven't tried optimizing it yet, just tinkering so far. That's pretty promising.
Anyhow, in the scala world I like the approach the Laminar library takes. Somewhere in the guts of it is an Observer pattern but the abstraction presented to the typical library user is a bunch of signals that you wire together, some of which require responses.
As we all know, Earth subscribes to the Sun's gravity Observable and that is why its orbit is the way it is ๐
On a related note, I think the Observable pattern has caused a lot of damage to how people think about reactive systems.
Spent a fair amount of time today working on an agent-based modeling framework I've been stewing on for a long time.
@prologic The main reason I used "likes" on twitter or on mastodon is as a kind of acknowledgement that I read someone's post. Back when they used to be stars on twitter I did that more often, but likes remind me too much of facebook ๐คข Anyhow I think it's maybe better to cut down on noise by not doing that, and only replying when there's something to say?
and they're starting to add features to promote "popular" toots and hashtags, which of course is a recipe for disaster. You'd think people would've learned by now how easy it is for a group of people to game popularity-based systems ๐ค
@prologic oh, totally. The fediverse has some of the same dogpiling problems as twitter, and you're often beholden to the administrator of the instance you joined to take care of that for you. There are tools for blocking people and whole instances, which helps, but if a dozen people dive into your mentions to harass you because they decided they didn't like something you said, you're stuck with the labor of identifying each one and blocking them. At some point it'd be easier to abandon your account.
I don't have a clear view of how I'd deal with something like that on yarn.social (not that I think it'd happen), but at least since I administer my own instance I have a lot of power ๐ช
@retrocrash nah, this isn't accurate. I'm on the fediverse and the Nazi problem is very real and always in your face. There are hundreds of Nazi instances and new ones pop up every day. Every day I see toots about some new asshole. And I don't know what you're talking about "the radical left"--in the US at least there is no such thing.
I guess what I do with a phone is pretty tame and doesn't require too many resources but what I do with a computer is pretty intense and does. So maybe that says more about me than anything!
@mckinley Thinkpads are great. I have a circa 2013 Thinkpad that is still going strong. For my day to day work though I'm doing some heavy coding of a big simulation and need as much RAM, CPU, and GPU as I can fit in a box.
Once again I am exploring scala functional effects libraries ๐
@prologic Will do! Not sure about a PR since I don't know Go, but I can definitely share suggested improvements if I think of any.
@prologic oh yeah, the outrage cycle is horrible. It almost seems like a public health hazard that ought to be dealt with. idk, I just want to be a nerd online and not have all that in my face day after day after day ๐ค
@prologic I played around with Mastodon for awhile, and while it felt like a bit of an improvement over twitter, say, I didn't like how complicated it was to self-host and federate. Also the developers seem to be pushing Mastodon more and more into becoming a twitter clone. I feel like twitter is pretty mean-spirited in part because of how it's structured, so this worried me a lot.
@prologic I guess it's not to everyone's taste ๐ I've been mostly doing functional programming for awhile now and unison seems to address several pain points, and I think their big idea of hashing parse trees and keeping an ever-growing database of code that is easy to marshall over the network if you want is very cool.
btw I have no plans to migrate out--definitely want to give this a go for awhile. I've found some interesting feeds to follow, and I'm sure that will continue. However, I do like very much that the post data is not trapped in some corporation's data center.
@prologic Yes. I noticed quite a few people used to keep up twtxt feeds but then stopped. You can goodl "twtxt.txt" and find lots. Hopefully with a nice web app and phone app and cli tool like yarn.social has enough critical mass will build.
@prologic Both the web app and yarnc. I've mostly been using the web app to experiment, but some days I'm mostly in the command line (I'm in tech and code a fair amount) and it's cool to be able to dash off a thought from there. I liked that about twtxt.
@prologic no worries! I find this to be a feature, not a bug. I like asynchronous communication because I can't always check in (busy with life!) but do want to stay connected...
@prologic hi! ๐ Thanks for writing back! I wanted to see what interacting with another person was like. And also to meet new people!
I'm liking yarn.social a lot so far, so thank you for this.
I have not been using twtxt very long. I stumbled on it long ago, but I've never really been into social networks and always found twitter pretty mean-spirited. But I decided to give it a go again and wanted to try to meet some folks so that I'm not always talking to my @testuser
I don't think I could tolerate a ten-year-old computer, by contrast.
The camera is not good, and the battery life could be better. There are definitely some improvements in modern phones. I'm pretty impressed by how usable a nearly decade-old phone is though.
There's a lot to be said for phones where you can replace the battery and SD card.
I put a new SD card and a new battery in it for about $30 total. One of the reasons I originally mothballed this phone and bought a new one is that at the time replacement batteries were very expensive.
Aside from the 3 Gbyte RAM limit, which hurts at times, and occasional stutters, it's perfectly unable.
My son chewed the screen of my smart phone into nonfunctionality, so I resurrected a 9-year-old Samsung Galaxy Note 3 that used to be my primary phone.
It's nice to be able to read the timeline and write posts from the command line, since I spend a lot of my day there.
Have a computer that keeps dropping off the network and I don't understand why ๐
then again, since I self-host, and since posts are ultimately in twtxt format, it's very easy to to save data and migrate out.
I'm always intrigued by new platforms like this one, but they are hindered by a lack of users. Unless you're draw in by an existing community, you end up talking into the void, or to yourself @testuser
from phone 
Oh I suppose I upload media from my computer. 
@testuser Hmm, a weird thing I don't understand is why that image is not displaying inline. It does on the phone app.
I also wonder what feeds are. I guess I should read the documentation how about that.
I am gratuitously posting just to see how things look when you do that. Sorry for the noise.
Buccipod being my self-hosted yarn.social instance with exactly one user, me ๐
What's the difference between timeline and discover, I wonder.
@prologic hello! I just installed yarn.social and wanted to try sending a twt to an external user!
Tinkering with making my web site comply with IndieWeb recommendations.
...and I've modified it locally, so I'm facing a tricky merge problem ๐
That was the main reason I chose that theme, so it was frustrating. Anyway, it looks like Jekyll Garden has updated in the meantime.
I'm overhauling my blog a bit because I was having trouble getting the Jekyll Garden theme to work the way I wanted with Obsidian.
Let's try some Unicodeโข and an emojus ๐คช
This is a test that pre- and post- hooks are working properly
kitten