#dev 2021-08-06
2021-08-06 UTC
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capjamesg[d] GWG 🙌
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@vishae Day 5 and 6 of #TheShapeOfShadows:
Things I learned:
* that as much as I love journal pages filled with sketches and doodles, I am not good at sketching or doodling
* the Northern Pacific sea star, the Japanese kelp, the European fan worm, and the… https://www.brid.gy/publish/twitter (twitter.com/_/status/1423548546486243332)
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vikanezrimaya aaaaaa I need to write instrumentation for a connection pool library because it doesn't contain ANY kind of logging and has a hard-to-debug problem that triggers whenever I use my database too much
# vikanezrimaya I'd say it violates DRY principle but if you absolutely need it for something feel free to make it somehow generated - preferrably on-the-fly so you don't forget to update it
# vikanezrimaya I was using Granary to generate RSS feeds for legacy clients by inserting a Granary converter link that would simply fetch the page and then convert MF2-HTML into RSS or Atom
# vikanezrimaya This way RSS feeds are available for whoever needs them and I don't incur an admin tax for having them since Granary handles all the dirty work on-demand
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@hondanhon I purposefully bought my kid an MP3 player so he could listen to podcasts without looking at screens and I HATE IT THAT IN OUR YEAR 2021 IT'S SO DIFFICULT TO DOWNLOAD JUST THE GODDAMN MP3 FILE FOR A GODDAMN PODCAST THANKS PLATFORMS YOU RUINED EVERYTHING (twitter.com/_/status/1423476490063147010)
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jeremycherfas Amen to that.
# vikanezrimaya I definitely agree with the fact that platforms ruin everything to lock their users in
# vikanezrimaya I am considering throwing away all of my storage backend code and writing something that doesn't depend on Redis
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[KevinMarks] For the JSON-LD and microformats question it's like any of these things - do you want a specific silo to have markup in the format they insist on?
# vikanezrimaya Since the current Redis backend is utterly broken (thanks to a buggy dependency that I do not currently have the energy to debug)
# [KevinMarks] I explored that in http://www.kevinmarks.com/partialsilos.html
# vikanezrimaya [KevinMarks]: I'd personally say "silos can go do whatever they want and I'm not gonna cater to them" because I don't get a lot of engagement from silos anyway
# vikanezrimaya I guess I can thank myself for being extremely unpopular
# [KevinMarks] Quite - the point of that article is that you can tune your presentation on silos, but then you're adding DRY violations, so I didn't repeat myself and gave every silo a different preview
# vikanezrimaya I think image previews don't matter
# vikanezrimaya Mainly because I think text is the most important medium on the internet
# vikanezrimaya All these fixations on images and pretty pictures are detracting from the original goal - transfer a coherent (and sometimes not) thought from one brain to an arbitrary amount of other brains
# vikanezrimaya And thoughts are mostly represented in text, with pictures accompanying it, not replacing or substituting
# vikanezrimaya But that might be a bit too radical of a worldview to expect others to share it
# vikanezrimaya Besides, some people like sharing pictures
# vikanezrimaya I noticed I usually only watch videos when I have nothing else to do - for example, I find something interesting on YouTube from an array of channels I'm subscribed to, or open a Twitch page to see if any of my favorite streamers are live
# vikanezrimaya When I need to consume a piece of information and reuse it I usually prefer text - which probably impacts my views on information sharing on the Web a lot
# vikanezrimaya Additionally textual information just so happens to be the most accessible out there ♿ - since it can be read normally, converted to audio for those who can't read but can listen, displayed in Braille for those who don't see but have a Braille display and probably adapted in some other ways I didn't think of
# vikanezrimaya Current commercial speech recognition is flawed, resulting in numerous errors when processing audio data. Even I, having a good hearing, sometimes don't recognize words in an audio or video and have to rewind, sometimes several times
# vikanezrimaya I don't have such a problem with text (though some people do, but text-to-speech solutions of acceptable quality do exist and potentially solve the problem of someone not being able to read things quickly enough or at all)
# vikanezrimaya In other words, I believe text to be a superior form of communication thanks to its adaptability to any medium and needs of a user
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Murray[d] Text certainly has a lot going for it, but whether or not it's accessible is very much down to the individual. There are certainly a lot of tools available for text conversion: between languages, to audio, to other sensory input (such as touch). And, ultimately, accessibility for most other media results with text in some form or another: captions, annotations, alt text.
# Murray[d] That said, many people cannot read and to them, text is completely inaccessible. I'm talking about those with reading impairments that are behavioural, cognitive, physical, and more. To many, video (or images) become a lifeline to information, and for many more (myself included) video/images simply *stick better*, so as learning tools are very useful. But to others, those same videos/images would be accessible, or text is easier/more useful
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# vikanezrimaya capjamesg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refreshable_braille_display <- I only know of them because I heard once that the Linux kernel supports these
# vikanezrimaya capjamesg: as far as I know, timecodes on the timeline work only when marked up by the video uploader
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# vikanezrimaya I think I just managed to assemble a prototype web crawler that uses MF2 content! I could probably connect a search indexer to it and create an IndieWeb search engine
# vikanezrimaya this kind of thing probably exists but this one I built myself
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# vikanezrimaya There was a link dropped to whoosh a week or so ago
# vikanezrimaya I plan to integrate that to get an index database
# vikanezrimaya Then I could expose the database as a service or potentially offer database dumps
# vikanezrimaya Depending on bandwidth requirements
# vikanezrimaya The crawler thingie is written in Python and I will probably upload the sources once I go have a break and fetch a burger and a coffee for myself as a treat for coding useful stuff
# vikanezrimaya I feel like hypoglycemia is coming soon... 😵
# vikanezrimaya Python is so good for quickly making something cool
# vikanezrimaya capjamesg: Wait what's the difference between a crawler and spider
# vikanezrimaya capjamesg: Nope
# vikanezrimaya It's very related because text on images needs to be accessible
# vikanezrimaya Then mine is more of a crawler than a spider
# capjamesg Here's pytesseract https://pypi.org/project/pytesseract/
# vikanezrimaya Currently my code jumps from page to page using common mf2 properties for reactions (e.g. comments and likes), authors and reply contexts. If I insert an indexer in-between jumps then I could build a search database
# vikanezrimaya Eeeh
# vikanezrimaya I think I'll upload it now
# vikanezrimaya So I could drop the link
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@tef_ebooks a microservice is what you call it when, three years in, the original monolith programmer is tired of dealing with their own legacy code, tired of code review, and begins a greenfield project to recapture the feeling of working on their own once more https://twitter.com/ChrisAnnODell/status/1423618814390964224 (twitter.com/_/status/1423628574561652738)
# [KevinMarks] Oh yes. One of the motivations for microformats originally was that, as we were building a search engine at the time.
# vikanezrimaya capjamesg: Re: can't rely on everyone's markup: I think we need to encourage correct markup if we build a search engine, for example, by making it somehow affect search rankings
# vikanezrimaya By the way... I will need to research search ranking algorithms too
# vikanezrimaya capjamesg: This could be a nice incentive if user is searching for a specific thing, e.g. a recipe
# vikanezrimaya For example, automatically rank everything containing h-recipe higher
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Loqi Navigation refers to the UI, UX and markup allowing people to move around a website https://indieweb.org/navigation
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# Murray[d] I'm unsure what to do with check-ins (when I get around to making them public), but I'd been toying with the idea of a single item "latest update" style section on the homepage. Reviews, check-ins, and a few other post types might go in there, so that it's ephemeral but at least highlights what I'm currently up to (like a mini /now page, I guess).
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