indieterminacy

Just discovered Combobulate:

Combobulate takes the syntax tree created by tree-sitter and uses it to provide structured editing and movement. It can do it better than traditional, imperative or regexp-based approaches, because it has a perfect understanding of your code. That means there’s never any ambiguity as to whether { ... } is a statement block or an object in Javascript, for example.

https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/combobulate-structured-movement-editing-treesitter

https://github.com/mickeynp/combobulate

c/o https://social.coop/@cpbotha@emacs.ch/109788552701305561

Im looking forward to Emacs 29 maturing so that I can utilise this functionality.

XTDB is a general purpose database with graph-oriented bitemporal indexes. Datalog, SQL & EQL queries are supported, and Java, HTTP & Clojure APIs are provided.

XTDB follows an unbundled architectural approach, which means that it is assembled from decoupled components through the use of an immutable log and document store at the core of its design. A range of storage options are available for embedded usage and cloud native scaling.

Bitemporal indexing of schemaless documents enables broad possibilities for creating layered extensions on top, such as to add additional transaction, query, and schema capabilities. In addition to SQL, XTDB supplies a Datalog query interface that can be used to express complex joins and recursive graph traversals.

https://github.com/xtdb/xtdb

https://www.xtdb.com/learn

Here is a problem with most open-source software projects have, including most #Fediverse software —

• there are no or very, very few: • UX researchers, • UI designers, • illustrators, • industrial researchers, • QA specialists, • project managers, • strategists.

This is bad!

If you want to produce 'good' software that people will want to and like using, you need these people!

Someone needs to do these roles!

Some software developers can also do some of these roles. And that is awesome. But most software developers cannot

I see this same problem with a lot of #Fediverse software, too

The thing is, I know there are people with these skills — UX researchers, UI designers, illustrators, industrial researchers, QA specialists, project managers, strategists — who want to get involved with #openSource projects.

But they don't know how.

Displaying information through maps has shaped how humans sense space and direction. Communicating effectively through maps is a challenge for many cartographers. For example, symbols, their color, and their relative size have an important role to play in the interaction between the map and the mapmaker.

The study of Geo-ontology also has interested researchers in this field. Geo-ontology involves the study of the variations among different cultures in how they view and sense landforms, how to communicate spatial knowledge with other cultures while overcoming such barriers, an understanding of the cognitive aspects of spatial relations, and how to represent them in computational models.[7] For example, there might be some geographic meaning that might not be well explained using words. There might be some differences in understanding when spatial information is explained verbally instead of non-verbal form.

c/o doopledi, in room Social Coding FSDL https://matrix.to/#/#socialcoding-foundations:matrix.org

This is galaxy-chat-server, a prototype of a chat system designed within an implementation of a standards-compliant Gemini server.

galaxy-chat-server is a fork of egalaxyd, a gemini/spartan file server https://sr.ht/~slondr/egalaxyd/

c/o https://social.coop/@fatboy@fosstodon.org/110254055600009856

“AI goes around the internet and scrapes all of the lyrics but never provides any credits,” says Bryan-Kinns. “If an AI makes a song, gets famous, went to No 1, who would get money from them? Certainly not the people in the huge dataset of millions of songs. ...

Last summer, the [UK] government set out proposals to amend copyright laws that would allow AI creators to exploit musicians’ back catalogues without permission or compensation.

I like keeping track of things I do but I like doing it with as little overhead as possible. Hence I have years of food data tracking but that only really started being real when the ability to enter that data became so simple as to be effortless. The same is true for development on projects. I want to see how things evolved. When I look at something years later and think to myself, “What the hell was I thinking?” it’s nice to be able to look back at notes from that time. Likewise as I’m working on something and I have a thought pop in my head like, “We need to fix this later,” or, “Gee wouldn’t it be nice if this program did this thing,” it’d be nice to have a place to collect all of that and have it be something which doesn’t interrupt my train of thought. I’ve tried collecting that in issue trackers and the like but honestly I’ve never been able to keep up with that. Issue trackers that become the reservoir for things to do start having inefficient signal to noise ratios. Even when I thinned out old issues it often proved hard to find what I was looking for as well. Lastly it also disrupts the flow.

Carmack’s “.plan” file concept was an absolutely perfect solution to this problem. It’s a simple text file you have open and you put in short statements with a simple key that you can decipher instantly. It’s searchable so you can easily find stuff. It’s shareable so it doubles as providing status as well as a means of keeping track of your own thoughts. Lastly, everything about the project is in one place. I don’t have notes in one place, issues in another, feature ideas elsewhere, etc. While I liked Carmack’s idea I have tweaked it a bit for my own purposes.

The first tweak I have is that each project gets its own DevLog. I started off trying to have it in one big file but since I work on multiple projects it just didn’t scale well. Since these are text files there is no disadvantage to having them split out since search tools can just as easily traverse multiple text files in a directory as one big text file. In the rare cases where something I’m working on is related to both projects I make a footnote in the one about seeing something in the other or some other mechanism. It’s such an uncommon occurrence even on projects that have entanglements that I don’t worry about it.

===== References in text

https://bookshop.org/books/masters-of-doom-how-two-guys-created-an-empire-and-transformed-pop-culture-9780812972153/9780812972153

https://twitter.com/JohnCarmack

https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive

Example GUI diagram making tool

Packages:

https://github.com/yukimochi/Activity-Relay

https://github.com/yukimochi/Activity-Relay/api

https://github.com/yukimochi/Activity-Relay/deliver

https://github.com/yukimochi/Activity-Relay/control

https://github.com/yukimochi/Activity-Relay/models

c/o https://social.coop/@jeff@newsie.social/110210693637375998

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/957811

Ariadne Conill 🐰 @ariadne EN

i hate to say it, especially as the person who started IRCv3 in the first place, but there is literally no world in which i would deploy a new project on IRC.

i can manage all moderation tasks on discord with terraform. that is something impossible to realize with IRC.

any project to take back mindshare from Discord has to frame their strategy from this perspective.

with Discord, or any other SaaS, you are dealing with a loss of software freedom, and that should be highlighted, but the solution is to provide a libre alternative that is competitive. IRC (and frankly Matrix) isn't that.

https://social.treehouse.systems/@ariadne/110199185608729068

Ariadne Conill 🐰 @ariadne EN

this has always been the problem i was trying to solve. with atheme, with ircv3, with all of it. how do we provide community plumbing that is usable and scalable?

but IRC failed to evolve fast enough despite all of those efforts, because people didn't understand the real evolutionary threats.

the reality distortion field is a real threat to any free software project: it is very easy to become complacent, because the product is 70% of what is actually needed.

but as the world evolves, that 70% turns into 60% and then 50% and so on, while people resist the concept that product fit and focus are slipping.

everything is Fine™️ because everything is Free™️, and instead of focusing on the real threat (I have been saying that IRC would be eaten by proprietary services since the 2000s), people, thinking that everything is fine, actually, tend to focus on their little kingdoms rather than the big picture.

and so we slipped, and slipped, until eventually, IRC does 20% of what we want, and IRCv3 brings that to maybe 25%, and then when a rich charlatan buys the largest IRC network and ruins it, at least half the people still there who haven't left yet realize that, upon having their reality distortion field shattered, actually 25% of what is needed perhaps isn't the right thing, and they too move their projects to Discord or Slack.

this is a problem, and it needs to be fought, but any such fight needs to write IRC off as a loss and start over. this isn't about "how do we win over the 1990s chatroom user", it's about "how do we win over the 2023 discord user."

https://social.treehouse.systems/@ariadne/110199267432776043 Ariadne Conill 🐰 @ariadne EN

like, seriously, you have no idea how frustrating it was to try to mold IRC into a competitive product. i tried for a decade. i even worked on this as a full-time SRE for a while (Ustream really needed UnrealIRCd to be rewritten).

we even had some wins, for a while: the decline of IRC's userbase was reversed and it even grew for a while.

but for the most part i had the pleasure of advocating that IRC developers do not do stupid shit, like add spying features (looking at you InspIRCd m_invisible.so).

at the ecosystem level, the strong desire of IRC developers to do stupid shit for short-term gains in users, outpaced the desire to promote the health of the ecosystem, and add new competitive features that end-users would care about.

this is because projects cared far more about admin mindshare than user mindshare, and basically shows how the whole IRC mentality is doomed to failure.

community infrastructure projects have to be community focused, not admin focused. Rob Levin (the founder of freenode) used to derisively refer to the people who didn't get this point as "traditional IRC users."

https://social.treehouse.systems/@ariadne/110199317380320492 Ariadne Conill 🐰 @ariadne@treehouse.systems

incidentally, the fediverse is in a similar position, where it is threatened by the free software reality distortion field.

Mastodon isn't good enough for the long run. we laugh at BlueSky, but it is a legitimate threat, and it could very easily wind up eating the fediverse. all they have to do is make it more palatable to the mainstream.

https://social.treehouse.systems/@ariadne/110199369743497066 Ariadne Conill 🐰 @ariadne EN

one last thing. the people who are suggesting FOSS chat alternatives to me.

you miss my point. you're offering me oranges when Discord has offered me an apple.

Discord is not "just a chat platform." I would describe it as an "integrated community management platform."

It combines chat with other forms of community media: forums, for example, and a rich suite of AV capabilities.

this is also a symptom of the free software reality distortion field: the alternatives suggested may be sufficient for some usecases, but that doesn't mean they cover the same niche as the product they are proposed as a replacement to.

it's the concision of experience that has allowed Discord to have such great success in their efforts to eat IRC's userbase.

Ariadne Conill 🐰 @ariadne EN

i hate to say it, especially as the person who started IRCv3 in the first place, but there is literally no world in which i would deploy a new project on IRC.

i can manage all moderation tasks on discord with terraform. that is something impossible to realize with IRC.

any project to take back mindshare from Discord has to frame their strategy from this perspective.

with Discord, or any other SaaS, you are dealing with a loss of software freedom, and that should be highlighted, but the solution is to provide a libre alternative that is competitive. IRC (and frankly Matrix) isn't that.

https://social.treehouse.systems/@ariadne/110199185608729068

Ariadne Conill 🐰 @ariadne EN

this has always been the problem i was trying to solve. with atheme, with ircv3, with all of it. how do we provide community plumbing that is usable and scalable?

but IRC failed to evolve fast enough despite all of those efforts, because people didn't understand the real evolutionary threats.

the reality distortion field is a real threat to any free software project: it is very easy to become complacent, because the product is 70% of what is actually needed.

but as the world evolves, that 70% turns into 60% and then 50% and so on, while people resist the concept that product fit and focus are slipping.

everything is Fine™️ because everything is Free™️, and instead of focusing on the real threat (I have been saying that IRC would be eaten by proprietary services since the 2000s), people, thinking that everything is fine, actually, tend to focus on their little kingdoms rather than the big picture.

and so we slipped, and slipped, until eventually, IRC does 20% of what we want, and IRCv3 brings that to maybe 25%, and then when a rich charlatan buys the largest IRC network and ruins it, at least half the people still there who haven't left yet realize that, upon having their reality distortion field shattered, actually 25% of what is needed perhaps isn't the right thing, and they too move their projects to Discord or Slack.

this is a problem, and it needs to be fought, but any such fight needs to write IRC off as a loss and start over. this isn't about "how do we win over the 1990s chatroom user", it's about "how do we win over the 2023 discord user."

https://social.treehouse.systems/@ariadne/110199267432776043 Ariadne Conill 🐰 @ariadne EN

like, seriously, you have no idea how frustrating it was to try to mold IRC into a competitive product. i tried for a decade. i even worked on this as a full-time SRE for a while (Ustream really needed UnrealIRCd to be rewritten).

we even had some wins, for a while: the decline of IRC's userbase was reversed and it even grew for a while.

but for the most part i had the pleasure of advocating that IRC developers do not do stupid shit, like add spying features (looking at you InspIRCd m_invisible.so).

at the ecosystem level, the strong desire of IRC developers to do stupid shit for short-term gains in users, outpaced the desire to promote the health of the ecosystem, and add new competitive features that end-users would care about.

this is because projects cared far more about admin mindshare than user mindshare, and basically shows how the whole IRC mentality is doomed to failure.

community infrastructure projects have to be community focused, not admin focused. Rob Levin (the founder of freenode) used to derisively refer to the people who didn't get this point as "traditional IRC users."

https://social.treehouse.systems/@ariadne/110199317380320492 Ariadne Conill 🐰 @ariadne@treehouse.systems

incidentally, the fediverse is in a similar position, where it is threatened by the free software reality distortion field.

Mastodon isn't good enough for the long run. we laugh at BlueSky, but it is a legitimate threat, and it could very easily wind up eating the fediverse. all they have to do is make it more palatable to the mainstream.

https://social.treehouse.systems/@ariadne/110199369743497066 Ariadne Conill 🐰 @ariadne EN

one last thing. the people who are suggesting FOSS chat alternatives to me.

you miss my point. you're offering me oranges when Discord has offered me an apple.

Discord is not "just a chat platform." I would describe it as an "integrated community management platform."

It combines chat with other forms of community media: forums, for example, and a rich suite of AV capabilities.

this is also a symptom of the free software reality distortion field: the alternatives suggested may be sufficient for some usecases, but that doesn't mean they cover the same niche as the product they are proposed as a replacement to.

it's the concision of experience that has allowed Discord to have such great success in their efforts to eat IRC's userbase.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/956291

Features:

• Lightweight, minimal dependencies
• Extensive support of ActivityPub operations, e.g. write public notes, follow users, be followed, reply to the notes of others, admire wonderful content (like or boost), write private messages...
• Multiuser
• Mastodon API support, so Mastodon-compatible apps can be used (work in progress)
• Simple but effective web interface
• Easily-accessed MUTE button to silence morons
• Tested interoperability with related software
• No database needed
• Totally JavaScript-free
• No cookies either
• Not much bullshit