Mika Feiler @mkf@functional.cafe

[description: it’s a sign that says “CHRISTMAS BAZAAR & CRAFT SHOW

Fight Children with Diabetes Fundraiser

Sunday December 1st 10am - 4pm at Royal Canada Legion

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Here's my opinion on the whole #Keybase #Zoom acquisition.

https://kevq.uk/keybase-zoom-and-me/

#100DaysToOffload

http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/I_did_it_for_you_all

I was gonna tell you a joke about UDP…

…but you might not get it.

Why do developers make stupid database queries

It (always) bears repeating that the phrase "open source" is defined by the open source definition:

https://opensource.org/osd

The OSI invented the term "open source" and it has always been defined by the OSD. There are systemmic gaslighting campaigns ongoing to convince you otherwise. Remember: the only people who are trying to convince you that the OSD does not define open source have ulterior motives, namely convincing you that their propreitary software is open.

I was thinking about chat protocols.

Had a federated design in mind, where each channel had its authoritative server for metadata, and then mirror servers for redundancy and scaling out, with rules for complex netsplit/netjoin situations, etc., and then users had their homeservers.

But then I thought:
Why not have the authoritative server only host the list of members, and version it, and then have all the clients put a reference to specific immutable version of channel's member list as destination of the messages they send.

And then all the messages would bypass the authoritative severs, going directly between users' homeservers. And history replay would be much simpler because you wouldn't have to go back and recalculate past membership lists based on past joins/parts.

It seemed like such an elegant solution, making everything way simpler and more scalable at the same time. I didn't like it, but rationally it seemed like a superior solution...

And then it occured to me - either this is what Matrix did, or it has the same problem:

Just joining a room makes your homeserver receive new connections from every other homeserver in the room.

Join the biggest room, change your DNS to point to your enemy, and bam, that person gets DDoSed by all the other homeservers.

Wish gaming motherboards had SFP+ slots instead of those stupid 10GBASE-T sockets.

Paradoxically, at 10G, fiber is cheaper.

Not making ChanServ is hard.
It means the chat server needs to have a lot of flexibility with its ACLs.

In a way, ChanServ is a neat way of separating policy from mechanism.

Take the 0.5 seconds needed to make sure the person you're boosting doesn't have slurs all over their profile for god's sake it's not that hard