Phil

@ireneista@adhd.irenes.space @mttaggart@infosec.exchange @vfrmedia@social.tchncs.de - btw, there's this: https://www.merri-bek.tech/ Which I think is the closest I've found. I also feel that https://toot.wales/ and https://join.cosocial.ca/ are somewhat similar in scope. Tech-wise, there's https://coopcloud.tech/ - @coopcloud@social.coop.

@ireneista@adhd.irenes.space @mttaggart@infosec.exchange @vfrmedia@social.tchncs.de - so I think my take on this is more community first, tech second. Like, if the output is basically a support network and a set of tools to help individuals and community organisations self host, then I think I'd be quite happy with that. Or maybe the solution is lower level services, e.g. shared server management with tools to make it easy for individual users to spin up their own Mastodon instance on their own domain. VPNs are possibly a bit of a special case, and maybe the DEFCON folks reached the right conclusion there when they decided just to support Tor.

@vfrmedia@social.tchncs.de @mttaggart@infosec.exchange @ireneista@adhd.irenes.space - this is something to be figured out, but I'm willing to spend some time doing that. Ideally there'd be some kind of network of local co-ops to share best practice in each jurisdiction.

@mttaggart@infosec.exchange @ireneista@adhd.irenes.space - this is something I very much want to do, for #CambridgeUK. Finding it harder to get started (find other local people who are interested) than I thought though.

@cwebber - completely agree. One thing which I've recently noticed is that it looks like green energy basically *is* solar energy now - solar growing exponentially, wind growing linearly. Maybe batteries are now cheap enough to make that happen.

@hongminhee - 100% agree with this, change comes from a mix of personal decisions and addressing systemic failures, and what's ethically right will be dependent on circumstances. I guess the only universal ethical factor is that everyone should do as much as they reasonably can to enact positive change. In any case, systems are the collective behaviour of individuals, so systemic change still starts with individual action, just of a different kind.

@csara@vmst.io - I use @beasts@social.mythic-beasts.com, and would recommend.

@olibrendel @UlrikeHahn - is https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ the site you were reading about? One thing I find impressive is how fast it is. For me, with all caching disabled, it loads in 2.3s, transferring 490kB over 21 requests. For comparison, the BBC news homepage takes 5.0s, transferring 5.61MB over 117 requests, and even that's by no means the worst by modern standards. Preferring text over images and images over video will help, as will removing as much clutter (and tracking tech, etc.) from the UI as possible. I use tools I've written myself to consume Mastodon content, and one feature of those is that attached media is never automatically downloaded. The Fediverse culture of providing alt text really helps with that, so I only download what I already know I want to see. Keeping things simple also probably means more users per server as things need to scale. One thing which I'm guessing will also make a difference is retaining compatibility with older devices, so there's less pressure for users to replace them every few years. Finally, it's probably worth considering static publishing models such as RSS and Org Social alongside ActivityPub and AP - they're certainly technically much simpler, although less feature rich, and I suspect other things about them (such as the need to poll) could work in the opposite direction.

@drsimevans@mastodon.energy - the contrast between the US and China on this one is staggering - I really can't imagine anyone thinking it would be that way round a few years ago.

@dazo@infosec.exchange @970uts1d3@defcon.social - thanks everyone. I'll go with GNOME for now and see how she gets on. I'll stick with Debian for the distro, as it's what I'm familiar with, and I happen to have install media right in front of me :-)

@hongminhee - boosting as I think this is an interesting discussion to have. I'm working on some ActivityPub adjacent ideas which use semantic web concepts, but I'm not deep enough in yet to have strong feelings about the right standards to use in different places.

Massively overestimated availability of breakfast near my hotel at 8am on a Saturday. Heading to the #FOSDEM campus instead and will hopefully be able to find something on the way.

@staringatclouds - I will send mine at the weekend when I have enough time to draft a custom message.

@govinda_hari@hostux.social @amoroso@oldbytes.space - I always assumed it was the MS-DOS equivalent of ctrl-S / ctrl-Q style flow control too. Super interesting.

@PurpleJillybeans@kind.social - ooh, I helped set this up for the student radio station I worked with around the turn of the millennium - so much fun! I remember it used to crash and need to be restarted after a certain amount of time due to an integer overflow in some internal timer. We were one of the first to do audio-on-demand though - you could go back and listen to a recording of any show from the past week. I vaguely recall that we had a DIY NAT set-up on our home network at around that time, and I'm sure I would have listened to it from there, but I may be wrong about that.

I had been thinking about the filtering part of #fcli, my #Mastodon to #email bridge as 'similar to #procmail', but today I realised that if I add custom headers to the email messages it produces I can just use procmail itself. By interfacing #Fediverse ideas with email standards I seem to be needing less and less custom code to get a setup which works for me, and making more and more use of decades old open source software, which is actually a pretty great outcome.

@iris_meredith@mastodon.social - this is great, thanks.for publishing it. Is gender dysphoria a special case of a broader range of conditions to do with suppressing and denying identities? Is that what dysphoria means? Your second hypothesis that there may often be a mismatch between the social values of people in the tech industry and what the companies they work for actually do resonates, but I suspect there are other, potentially related issues. A lot of people, myself included, got into tech because computers, internet culture and the hacker ethic formed a big part of their identity growing up. Corporate software development largely isn't like that. It's therefore more than not having the job you wanted, it's having part of your identity denied. Corporate software culture reinforces this, presenting the work as 'more than just a job', and I think a lot of people early in their careers believe that. I suspect a lot of people who are now developers were brought up being told they were smart, and as a result could have whatever kind of career they wanted. Similarly, the long hours, mentally exhausting work and general burn out make it really hard to pursue creative hobbies outside of work, and that's a big part of defining and expressing your identity, so again l, we have a source of suppression. This is something I strongly feel myself, and only just starting to address after probably 20 years of gradually losing touch with activities (and people) which used to bring joy. I currently have a complex relationship with my gender, but most of this would be true regardless. I'd like to see more effort to create opportunities for people to make careers in open source and socially motivated development, as you say, and I think there are some (small) promising signs in this area, but clearly much more to do. We could maybe also take more time to care for each other - maybe we're sometimes a little too laissez-faire when we see our colleagues displaying these traits.

@kleisli@mastodon.social @reiver@mastodon.social - two points on this:

1. I feel the "don't make me think" attitude, i.e. the idea that any sort of learning curve will reduce adoption of a digital product to zero, was one of the mistakes we made in the the Web 2.0 era, and ultimately it was one of the things which caused us to cede the open web to corporate interests. We need to try a different approach this time around.

2. Keeping the underlying protocols open and simple doesn't mean we can't build tools on top. You could have a standard URL / file structure which one person produces using a user friendly tool and another hand crafts.

This is something I'm very interested in, and have some specific ideas. In particular I'm keen to revisit some semantic web ideas. Very happy to collaborate with anyone else who's interested.

@suetanvil@freeradical.zone - and then in practical terms, to do anything at all, you need a system (in the form of a web browser) so complex that it can only be produced by a handful of huge corporations.

@marquisdegeek@ohai.social - really enjoyed your Eliza talk this afternoon. I have an interest in historical software for the IBM 7094, including CTSS but also the MUSIC-N series of audio synthesis programmes. Maybe surprisingly your talk wasn't the only MAD code which I've read today, and I'm probably one of a very small number of people who've written new FAP code in the last 12 months. I'm interested in any preserved software or documentation, if you're aware of anything which is out there but less easy to find.

Farewell to #FOSDEM for this year. I've had a great time, but I have to get home this evening so I can't stay to the very end.

@raffomania@mstdn.io - fantastic presentation, and it looks like a great project. I'm really interested in discovery on the Fediverse/ small web, so would love to see if there's any way of getting involved.

@Rp12Biker@oldbytes.space - the chipboard bracket to the right of the upper drive, and the cardboard taped under it also make it look homemade to me, although maybe it started as a mass produced machine and was modified or restored much later by a hobbyist? What does it have in the way of I/O ports?

@madduci@mastodon.social - thanks!

@pieceofthepie@social.n8e.dev - I think it's a 17 second 100m, done more than 420 times one immediately after another. I'm fairly fit, and I'm not sure I can do that once.

The later version is from 1970, and the comment has changed to: THE FORMAT OF 'SUPER LINE MARK' IN ASCII ARCHIV FILES IS DEFINED AS FOLLOWS: FF NL NL NL DEL DEL DEL DEL NAME1 SP SP NAME2 SP SP MM/DD/YY SP SP HHMM.M SP SP ZZZZZZ DEL DEL DEL DEL NL NL NL NL TOTALLING 14 WORDS. ZZZZZZ IS THE WORD COUNT. So by now we've switched to #ASCII. From the code, NL is what is now called LF. The code also implies that ASCII is internally represented with 9 bits (i.e. 3 octal digits), so 4 characters per 36 bit word. 6/n #CTSS #retrocomputing #IBM7094

@tommi@pan.rent @boris@cosocial.ca @Holly@pan.rent @youjungnoh@pan.rent - I'm potentially interested. I learnt Linux system administration running a fairly large scale community server in a university environment, and I really like the idea of there being community groups to share knowledge and teach the skills needed to participate in the open (social) web. Eventually I'd like to do this in my local area (Cambridge, UK), but I can get to South Holland without flying, and I'd like more excuses to travel and hang out with Fediverse people.

Unifortunately, the actual archive files I have (which are modern ASCII files) use neither of these conventions, and instead have 4 blank lines (CR LF termination) followed by something like: AARCHV BCD 10/04/70 1545.9 42312 00000 The fields are identifiable, apart from the 00000, which doesn't appear in the source code, however, assuming the 42312 is a word count, I'm really struggling to relate that in any meaningful way to the actual length of the following file (as identified by scanning for the next super line mark). There's a good chance that the files I have have been processed in unknown ways since they were written by the original machine, but I would like to have a complete understanding. As an aside there are also page and section headers in the file, and I'm not sure whether these are part of the ARCHIV format or from the original files. I'm going to have to park this for now, but will investigate when I next have some time. 7/7 #CTSS #retrocomputing #IBM7094

To round this off, DEFBC = convert integer to decimal string. BZEL = strip leading zeros. RCONV = convert BCD string to ASCII, right justified. so I was interpreting the files correctly, and I still have no idea how to get the reported length from the content.

... I need to take a look at the actual code for the 1970 version.

@Daojoan - I completely agree with examining the VC model and not assuming it's the best (or only) option for all ventures, but I'm not sure I agree on your distribution point - in 2007 my colleagues and I were able to get our app into the hands of millions of people through organic SEO, which I don't think would be possible now - the gatekeepers have more control now, and are better at monetising. I also feel that funding needs are very dependent on stage - I agree that it's now possible to run very lean up to roughly series A level (i.e. initial evidence of product market fit), but it's less clear that that extends to the same extent to growth phases. VC also isn't homogeneous - the massive, generalist funds are a lot more visible, but there are many smaller funds, and crucially many more specialist firms (including the one I work with), who in my opinion do provide plenty of non-financial added value. Pursuing growth at all costs is a response to a specific perceived dynamic of markets for digital products - it's easy to characterise it as simplistic, but I do think that there's a bit more nuance that, and thinking has evolved over the years.

@raffomania@mstdn.io - I'm generally interested in what I see as the 'static' side of the Fediverse, i.e. what you can do if you view your social graph as part of a linked data structure to be queried, rather than as a communication network for ephemeral messages (although I realise that there's overlap between the two). I'm interested in the extent to which existing web technology can be deployed to enable this, especially semantic web ideas - I've already played with this a bit, converting my own social graph and metadata from my ActivityPub feed to RDF so I can use SPARQL to query it. I do feel that distributed search and discovery is important, as that's an area which still seems very centralised and therefore a point of control. I think there will be several components to a solution for this, but recommendations from your social network will surely play a part. Having said this, I'm also very happy to fix bugs or implement features in ties to get started. The tech stack isn't massively aligned to what I'm used to, but I have a good track record of picking new things up quickly. Let me get a personal instance set up and take things from there.

@wild1145@mastodonapp.uk - Ansible? Is it much more complex than periodically running apt update / upgrade on each of the machines?

@shoq@mastodon.social - also likely AI generated - at least it has the Palace of Westminster and the Tower of London on opposite sides of the Thames, which isn't the case in real life.

Is there a standard #Linux #CLI tool for managing #OAuth2 tokens? I'd like to be able to call it from other scripts and (I guess) have the token returned on stdout. Appreciate that this will require some sort of out-of-band interaction when no token is already available, but maybe someone has already thought about that. I specifically want this to work with the Microsoft and Mastodon APIs in the first instance (I assume it's probably naive to think that OAuth2 will just work across all vendors). Appreciate that this is a relatively simple use case and I probably could implement it myself, but wanted to check whether there was anything obvious out there first.

The second thing I've been doing is trying to figure out how ARCHIV (roughly equivalent to 'tar') works and therefore how to interpret the file format. This is the file format for most of the preserved source code (which is fortunately pretty readable without understanding the details), but the preserved files also include two versions of the utility itself. 4/n #CTSS #retrocomputing #IBM7094

Actually, the 00000 does appear in the comment in the 1968 version, just not in the 1970 one...

I use a client which I wrote myself, and which has no suport for link previews at all, so I can't give you a useful response there, but have boosted to hopefully give you a bit more reach.

@john_guinn@mo-me.social - welcome! Let me know if there's anything I can help with.

The earlier version is from 1968. The key thing is the format of the 'super line mark', which is the separator between the various files in the archive. The 1968 version has the following comment describing how it works: THE FORMAT OF THE 'SUPER LINE MARK' IN ARCHIV FILES IS: 777777000000K,..,..,..,777777000011K,FLN1,FLN2, $ MM/DD/YY HHMM.M $, $ZZZZZZ$,$$,$ 000$,$00 $ TOTALLING 14 WORDS, WHERE ZZZZZZ IS FILE WORD COUNT. THIS INFORMATION SHLD NOT BE KNOWN ANYWHERE IN THE PROGRAM EXCEPT IN THE FLLWING INTERNAL FUNCTIONS AND V'S STATEMENTS. This describes a #BCD format (6x 6 bit characters per 36 bit word). 5/n #CTSS #retrocomputing #IBM7094

@SleepyCatten@cultofshiv.wtf - appreciate it's not exactly what you're after, but would a software solution with a physical knob work? I was initially thinking along the lines of what I'd do with a midi controller with physical knobs (which I already happen to have), and something like JACK, but it also looks like you can get this sort of thing: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Kdouehg-Bluetooth-Custom-Multimedia-Keyboard-Black/dp/B0F7Y6JQ93/ I suspect that just acts like a bluetooth keyboard, virtually pressing the volume up and down keys when you turn it.

@marquisdegeek@ohai.social - fantastic, thank you.

@Snoro@mastodon.social - I don't think these numbers are even close to being correct. The figure of 4g per email from the article itself gives you a value that's 100 times lower. Relative to typical household emissions that's a reduction of (I think) about 0.00004%.

@quixoticgeek@social.v.st @ahltorp@mastodon.nu - I suspect some of us (myself included) could do more, for example those who can afford it making more concrete plans to improve home heating efficiency. If the problem is with governments then there are still individual actions to take - getting more involved in politics, discussing issues with friends and family, for some of us trying to play a part in developing new technologies which could help. In terms of energy converted to useful work, EVs are also much more efficient than internal combustion engines.

@raffomania@mstdn.io - thanks. I missed @cwebber@social.coop's presentation on Saturday, but will check out the video. I also have one more question: you mentioned that the data model, and specifically the idea of lists containing other lists, followed existing practice. Do you have a reference for that? I'm wondering whether there might already be an ontology.

Thanks for a great presentation @neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk!

@beasts - yes please, if only every website was like this. Homepage loads in 753ms for me, and not a peep from any of my privacy plugins.

@larsbrinkhoff@mastodon.sdf.org - the short answer is curiosity. As far as I know there's very little preserved software and the format isn't used anywhere else, and it's actually trivial to extract the data without fully understanding the format, but there's a field I can't explain and would like to. It's also proving a nice way to get more familiar with the programming languages and the OS libraries, and it gives an insight into how the system evolved over its lifetime. If you do know of any CTSS or IBM 7094 software out there I'd be very interested. As well as Eliza and MUSIC-N I believe that regular expressions were also first implemented on the platform. It'd also be interesting to compare ARCHIV and other tools to their ITS (and Unix) equivalents - I'm sure there's some continuity.