Threads for sevan

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    Here are my thoughts on the author’s closing points. Bear in mind he knows lots about protocols and I know next to nothing about them:

    1. Split the spec into three separate ones: protocol, URL syntax, media type. Expand the protocol parts with more exact syntax descriptions and examples to supplement the English.

    I disagree with the suggestion to split the spec. Gemini was made to be accessible to casual coders. I think all the information necessary to do some hacking should live in a single document. A beginner Gemini developer making some quick tools should not have to think about what a URL syntax spec document is and know to refer to it. Expanding the protocol part, though sounds reasonable.

    1. Drop the TOFU idea, it makes for a too weak security story that does not scale and introduces massive complexities for clients.

    This seems like a hassle-vs-security tradeoff that the Gemini designers made deliberately. Time may prove that they picked this tradeoff wrong, but it comes with some interesting side effects. One is that it makes Gemini completely unsuitable for e-commerce or serious business, which may actually be a good thing. This by necessity keeps Gemini weird.

    1. Consider a way to re-use connections, even if that means introducing some kind of “chunks” HTTP-style.

    Personally I’m not swayed by the “It should be faster” arguments, because Gemini does not need to be fast. It was intended to serve small documents to human beings, who consume them rather slowly. The energy efficiency arguments, though, I do find compelling. It would be nice to see Gemini or some Gemini successor make some optimizations to minimize server energy consumption.

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      I didn’t track the development of the spec so I have no insight, but I very much took some of those decisions as a deterrent for those you want to keep away (a form of neo-luddism and I don’t mean that as a pejorative). Sad news is that if your capsule becomes popular, you will not (never?) reach the ability to serve your content on the scale of faang shrug

      The certificate/tls one does annoy me, because security should be a universal. Since the post was published, I’ve been thinking about the implications of not having the same model as elsewhere with regards to TLS. Aside from the privacy issue which the post points to (are you actually connecting to the genuine destination), the gemini documents don’t really do anything fancy so that’s not really a vector to attack the visitor, but your gemini client is likely linked to libraries which are prone to security issues e.g zlib

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        Interestingly, Solderpunk’s own AV-98 client lists support for both TOFU & CA certificate validation in feature list. Probably because it rides on the support there in Python’s SSL library.

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      From back in February.

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        Is this down for anyone else?

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          Yes, a copy is on the Internet Archive luckily

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          Great idea. If you’re targeting bots, do filenames matter?

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            That’s a great piece of pixelart and a great website style too. I love it!

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              Wish the website was a bit more “portable”, the fonts produce different results on every browser I tried. I suspect the intended target was chrome. There’s a variation on smudged ink look on webkit based browsers, and Firefox just ignores the fonts and uses a different set :D

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                It looks pretty much identical on my Firefox compared to Chromium, except for the font size since Firefox just refuses to render text that small.

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              Similar tool to file(1) but implemented in Java.

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                I thought this was a joke at first, but it’s serious, isn’t it? In unrelated news I’m thinking of designing a pancake for audiophiles. It’s going to have capacitors on it.

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                    Whoa! That is beautiful. I’m pretty sure something black and less cool looking would dissipate heat better, but what do I know. I’m not even an audiophile.

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                      Base of my laptop is now uneven, but I’m hearing things I never heard before on conference calls, thanks to booting my OS from this drive.

                      You’ll need the premium power cable and bracket to help isolate the noise from your wifi when playing MP3s, I reckon.

                      The reviews

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                  This is more about the processes they had in place for developing the game.

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                    I have one of these on order, and can’t wait for it to get here!

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                      Really happy for you. I really want the CPU upgrade with 16GB RAM for the Reform so when I can afford it, I’ll probably spend my money on that first.

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                      Since the twitter buyout I have been reconsidering things regarding the way we share things online. We really have become accustomed to having everything there recorded all the time and I’m not sure that’s a good thing. I guess the reason is that it’s convenient as you can be mindless about it, but soon you end up with a mixture of useful knowledge and noise, stuff that was meant to be ephemeral and of the time and important insight as the article mentions with regards to data export. Think about the amount of institutional knowledge buried in company chat.

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                        I recently build an old plugin for Bukkit (Minecraft server software) from source. This plugin had several dependencies on other plugins which also had their own dependencies. Of course many of these plugins (as well as the server software itself) does not build out of the box anymore.

                        I found that some stuff is archived on Archive.org, but also many plugins are archived on Discord. Apart from the danger of Discord disappearing, it is already hard to find these channels and thus keeping many people from finding the knowledge they need.

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                          wow, been fortunate so far that I haven’t hit that scenario but that it is worrying.

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                          Got the lecture on Demoscene from https://smallfile.ca/ecomedia/ on the “to watch” list.

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                            Just curious, did anyone read any of the essay by their friend by any chance? (it’s linked to in the opening paragraph)

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                              I did not but some comments about this article on lobste.rs attracted my attention on some reactionary tones of the post, something I didn’t caught at first read (because mostly focused on the material aspect).

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                                I gave up on the linked article early so missed some of the references highlighted. Usually going down to using latin quotes is an indirect sign, at least here in the UK (you are of a certain background and maybe privilege). Then the essay by their friend continued on that path (I didn’t get far there either) but interesting that it was the inspiration for a course in life (pun not intended).

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                                Interesting, that’s highlighted something. So they’re using all the users RSS subscriptions to provide analytics for businesses? Other posts by the same author: https://blog.feedly.com/author/gaby/

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                                More of a heads up if you’re a feedly user than something worthwhile.

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                                  and then I remembered the yikes tag. :)

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                                  Shall we treat the Dennis Ritchie tag as synonym for C related submissions?

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                                    Interesting. It would be cool if the ide would highlight the line in source code that resulted in the line in the compiled output.

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                                      This makes me think of the Anti-Capitalist Software License. I don’t know much about these “alternative” software licenses, but they’re interesting to me!

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                                        I wasn’t aware of this license but with everything currently happening, it’s got me re-evaluating my stance.
                                        Before, “just do a mit/isc/2-BSD style license and move on”, now not so much.
                                        I’m not particularly interested in helping businesses get a free ride, among other ethically dubious entities.

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                                        It’s about Sierra Online

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                                          Was tempted to use the windows tag ;)