@julian@fietkau.social
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

julian

@julian@fietkau.social

Human-computer interaction #HCI, computer science & programming, home server & self-hosting, games and other fun stuff.

Increasingly into making tools for the fediverse: FediRoster, Pinhole, more to come(?). See https://fietkau.software/tag/fediverse for project info and downloads. If you do HCI-related research, check out https://directory.hci.social.

He/him. Posting mostly in English, but you might see the occasional German boost.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

aeva, (edited ) to random
@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

graphics research lifehack: you can cut out a ton of paywall scams and inscrutable academic wankery by excluding "we present" from your searches

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@aeva IME the biggest factor is that academics are often simply bad at writing. The eternal style guidance by journals and educators boils down to "clarity above all else," but many brilliant computer scientists have no clue how to convey a series of thoughts in a way that makes sense.

Though strict length limits on paper submissions can hurt additionally. I've gotten "your definition could use an example" in reviews, oddly they never seem to say what should be cut in exchange. ๐Ÿ˜

@topher_batty

davew, to random
@davew@mastodon.social avatar

Understanding AP and RSS

I've been trying to figure out what ActivityPub does that RSS doesn't.

Off the top of my head, it's not the ability to syndicate, RSS already does that. I can follow anyone on any server.

I think it's the timeline? And the ability to delete posts. Keeping all that in sync is a lot of work, and presumably a lot of traffic?

Also replies. If I reply to a post when viewing it on another server, the reply should show up under any other view of that post.

What else??

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@davew What I'm getting at is, as I understand rssCloud (like I said, very cursory research just earlier), when someone follows you you get an IP address or a hostname. Which can be a server somewhere (potentially giving multiple people access to the feed) or the person's home or their VPN or whatever.

With ActivityPub, when someone follows you, you get their account. Which of course doesn't need to correspond to an established identity, but it still seems like a qualitative difference.

gamingonlinux, (edited ) to random
@gamingonlinux@mastodon.social avatar

I want to do a test on how much traffic and resources the Mastodon embed takes on my server, so boost this plz

Edit: all done, you can stop sharing now lol

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2024/05/steam-deck-most-played-for-april-2024-has-plenty-of-fallout/

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@gamingonlinux @rdnielsen The "Mastodon effect" is a real thing, but its impact will depend heavily on how a site is set up. I'm surprised a news site would struggle with it.

Discussion on the Mastodon GitHub here: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/23662 A fix seems to be currently planned for 4.4.0.

Jeremiah, (edited ) to webdev
@Jeremiah@alpaca.gold avatar

Hey @MDN, with Stack Overflowโ€™s ongoing community implosion, now would be an excellent time to launch MDN Answers so people have a better place to help each other learn.

https://answer.apache.org/

Edit: Or @nodebb / other ActivityPub-enabled forum/threaded discussion community server software

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@Jeremiah Might not be wise to count on @MDN to avoid similar issues long-term: https://github.com/mdn/yari/issues/9208

hongminhee, to mastodon
@hongminhee@todon.eu avatar

The max_id, since_id, and min_id parameters in 's Timeline API assume that the post ID is a sortable number. (Is this correct?) , the implementation I'm building, uses UUIDs for post IDs internally, so I'm stuck on how to implement a Mastodon-compatible API.

https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/timelines/

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@hongminhee Does it assume that? I don't see it clearly stated in the documentation that the IDs themselves need to be numerically sortable, just that, when given a specific ID, the server needs to be able to retrieve newer or older posts based on it.

Of course sortable snowflake IDs make implementing this easier on the server side.

julian, to fediverse
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

For this weekend's coding project, I built a tiny single-user Blueskyโ†’ActivityPub one-way bridge I named โ€œPinholeโ€. If there's someone on Bluesky whose posts you want in your Mastodon feed, you can download and run it yourself: :fietkau_software: https://fietkau.software/pinhole

Caveats: 1. I intentionally built it anti-scalable: you can use it to follow one Bluesky account from one fedi account, and that's it. 2. You need experience with web servers.

Edent, to random
@Edent@mastodon.social avatar

๐Ÿ†• blog! โ€œLazy way to cause SHA-256 collisions for lazy evaluatorsโ€

Humans are lazy. That's why we have computers; to do the boring work for us. I recently downloaded a file. The website said the file should have a SHA-256 hash of: ca978112ca1bbdcafac231b39a23dc4da786eff8147c4e72b9807785afee48bb So I ran sha256 filename on my machine. And then lazily compared the hโ€ฆ

๐Ÿ‘€ Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/04/lazy-way-to-cause-sha-256-collisions-for-lazy-evaluators/
โธป

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@Edent There's a topic in the HCI & security field overlap about hash visualization, saying that software may want to offer deterministic visualizations of hashes so people can perceive and compare them more holistically. The quintessential work is Perrig & Song (1999): https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~adrian/projects/validation/validation.pdf

A few years ago I got together with a colleague to survey the landscape and propose our own algorithm: :fietkau_science: https://fietkau.science/hash_visualization_password_validation See slide 8 for more prior work examples.

Fun stuff! ๐Ÿ˜€

julian, to reddit
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

I've emptied out my account, deleted all my posts and comments. There wasn't very much in there that's still worth talking about, but I have a few fond memories I'd like to share with you:

(a) an essay on moving away from GitHub that I wrote on /r/selfhosted
(b) the time I shared a Factorio clone (built in a software development student project I supervised) with the game's community
and (c) how I unexpectedly got contacted by Rand Miller.

A short ๐Ÿงตthread.

julian, to fediverse
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

I made a thing and it's public now: @DailyRucks And the corresponding web page: https://dailyrucks.fietkau.software

If you like the game Bastion or you enjoy what you find on the account, consider following and/or boosting it! I'm curious how well it'll perform in the wild.

This is a fully homegrown standalone implementation. ๐Ÿ™‚ And hopefully a nice example for an ActivityPub learning project, as well as a stepping stone towards bigger things.

Blog post: :fietkau_blog: https://fietkau.blog/2024/daily_rucks

julian, to random
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

Good moment for a breather and a look back on (since I'm not participating in any the workshops tomorrow).

First, it was an interesting at fun conference! The presentations were inspiring, the discussions I've been able to have were fruitful, and I've found a few new people with similar research interests.

The problems for remote attendees (seems many issues were new this year) didn't impact me this time, but next year they will. So I hope the organizers figure that out better.

(1/x)

andresmh, to random
@andresmh@hci.social avatar

Good morning ๐ŸŒค๏ธ Hanging out in the PNW for a week!

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@andresmh That's a real place, huh? I always thought they made it up for What Remains of Edith Finch. ๐Ÿง
@davidthewid

smallcircles, to fediverse
@smallcircles@social.coop avatar

Call to Participate: Help update with the original lead author at the

https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/call-to-participate-help-improve-webfinger-rfc-with-its-lead-author/4208

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@smallcircles I saw the reply button, but that just opens a regular mailto window that would result in a top-level thread reply, instead of the reply to a specific message that I would want. ๐Ÿ˜ฆ

Maybe it's kind of a generational divide, but joining a mailing list just to quickly chime in on an ongoing conversation seems like a lot... but I'll consider it.

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@smallcircles The question is, participate where? Is the mailing list still getting shut down soon? Should I reply to the linked SocialHub thread with my WebFinger concerns? I don't have much experience with development mailing lists, and I don't see a straightforward way to reply to a specific email there if I wasn't on the mailing list at the time it was sent...

julian, to random
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

LB: Cory Doctorow @pluralistic saves me the trouble of having to write a follow-up blog post for my fediverse opinion piece by expressing what I think and more, better than I ever could have. Heavily recommended reading for anyone with opinions on social media. https://doctorow.medium.com/let-the-platforms-burn-6fb3e6c0d980

SweetAmelia, to random
@SweetAmelia@sakurajima.moe avatar

im thinking about just going back to using a spreadsheet for non-anime shows. trakt sucks, simkl sucks, letterboxd is hardly worth mentioning. trakt is the one ive used for the longest time and it just fucking sucks. why is the history tab and ratings tab and progress tab and collections tab different tabs?? these could all be put into one. if i want to see the shit i've rated i have to go to ratings and i can go to history if i want to see everything and then i can't clearly see ratings. the site is done in such an obtuse way. you need to pay to use dark mode. you can only use a 10 point scale. it SUCKS. anilist brought anime tracking into the modern era compared to myanimelist (not happy with how the last actual feature release was in 2021 though, their roadmap is a joke). backloggd made game tracking actually good compared to backloggery. we need something like this for non-anime stuff. hell if it included anime too that'd be perfect. i see no reason why anime and non-anime needs to be separated. someone PLEASE MAKE IT AAAAAAAAAAAAAA

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@SweetAmelia I've been keeping a close eye on the fedi project space and I recently learned about NeoDB: https://github.com/neodb-social/neodb Apparently it's a federated media tracker where you can have a profile with your own entries and be followed from other fedi platforms. I've yet to try it out, but if it's any good I might eventually migrate my own anime list to it. The website makes it look remarkably mature.

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@SweetAmelia None that I've seen. I hope they have a full UI translation into English at any rate.

julian, to random
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

Life update: this week I learned what insurances call it (in German) when water suddenly starts coming out of your walls. Apparently it is a "bestimmungswidriger Wasseraustritt". A delightfully bureaucratic expression for a phenomenon which is much less delightful while it is being experienced.

Alas, my hope that this knowledge would be somehow useful to me, like how you can supposedly banish a demon by chanting its true name, seems to be just as misplaced as my insurance's priorities.

eniko, (edited ) to random
@eniko@peoplemaking.games avatar

can someone count the number of unique bosses in SMW for me? minibosses count but a recurring boss with slightly different patterns is still just one boss (like boom boom in 3)

i'd do it but i have a headache and it feels hard

EDIT: looks like its 7, thanks!

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@eniko As in SMW on the SNES? Let's see:

  1. Iggy/Larry
  2. Morton/Roy
  3. Lemmy/Wendy
  4. Ludwig
  5. Bowser
  6. Big Boo
  7. Reznor

I just quickly checked an "All SMW bosses" YouTube compilation just to make sure I haven't missed anyone, and they actually showed the Reznor fight four times. ๐Ÿ˜

julian, to random
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

Had a neat idea for a weekend coding project and now I'm too jazzed about it to sleep. ๐Ÿ˜’

sigh 3am coding session here I go! Let's see how far along the plan I'll be by Sunday evening.

treyhunner, to python
@treyhunner@mastodon.social avatar

One of these functions prints and the other returns, but they seem like they do the same thing.

Read more ๐Ÿ‘‰ https://trey.io/ibXciv

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@treyhunner I've been meaning to ask you Trey (I hope it's okay to go off-topic), do you have anything written down about how the Python interpreter behind the Python Morsels pastebin works?

I recently used Pyodide to create a browser demo for one of my old Python projects: https://fietkau.software/timberbot

It was pretty simple to put together, but it suffers from chonky loading and initialization times that I don't see on Python Morsels. Are you using a different engine, or did you create one yourself?

julian, to random
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

I SWEAR YOU CANNOT MAKE THIS ๐Ÿ’ฉ๐Ÿ’ฉ๐Ÿ’ฉ UP! It was negative this morning!

Did I meet any of the people on here for more than 5 seconds, ? I was always masked when indoors, so if I was infectious that presumably mitigated it.

sigh Take care, be safe.

julian, to fediverse
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

So I've been working on a fedi bot that's going to serve as a low-stakes testbed for my homegrown implementation.

This weekend I finally finished up the prep work on the content that the bot is going to be posting, which took longer than I expected.

I thought about asking you for guesses what it might be, based on the attached image. But now I don't think it's humanly possible to guess. ๐Ÿ˜…

Anyway, now I can get back to working on the code...

Dozer, to retrogaming
@Dozer@social.pincade.com.au avatar

Several still frame grabs showing the source footage used for the rotoscoped character animation in the game "Karateka".

Developed by Jordan Mechner and published by Broderbund (1984).



julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@Dozer Obligatory note (for some reason I find myself telling people about this often): Jordan Mechner is on Mastodon @jmechner and posts about his older videogame titles as well as his current artistic work. I can recommend following him. ๐Ÿ™‚

julian, to typescript
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

What am I doing this weekend? Learning , , and @hongminhee's all at the same time, for a project which I'm hoping will be used by many people.

What could possibly go wrong? ๐Ÿ’ช

julian, to fediverse
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

I recently saw someone complain that they missed several recent @itchio game bundles. And I thought, okay, building a notification bot for newly live bundles could be a cool little side project.

Looking at https://itch.io/bundles I realized that it's (a) not sorted nor sortable by anything that makes sense, and (b) incomplete. The current big Palestine charity bundle isn't even on there.

Is there any way to get a list of all current itch.io bundles? Or a news feed of any kind?

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