@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io cover
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

jenniferplusplus

@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io

trans lesbian
staff software engineer
devops, reliability, resilience, sociotechnical systems
also, that gay shit

Was @jenniferplusplus

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. For a complete list of posts, browse on the original instance.

hrefna , to random
@hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

Part of my frustration with and one of the things I find baffling giving everything else in it: the lack of tools for backpressure.

Backpressure is fundamental in building reliable distributed systems (c.f., Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods). From a C2S perspective I get why it wouldn't need to be specified, but from a S2S federated protocol perspective its absence is frustrating.

All that it says is to take care not to overwhelm others and a bit on rate limits

jenniferplusplus ,
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

@hrefna yes.

But I also want state convergence. No matter what, different hosts are going to wind up with different views of the state of the graph. Why are there no mechanisms to detect that and enable convergence?

jenniferplusplus ,
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

@SoniEx2 @hrefna These things are all fixable problems, it "just" takes coordination between a few dozen part time volunteer implementers 😭

I tell myself I'm going to just do it unilaterally and then help everyone else catch up. I'm not sure if I'm lying to myself or not.

jenniferplusplus , to random
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

FYI: you do not, ever, gotta hand it to 'em, if they're fascists. If the worst person you know made a great point, they're still the worst person you know and you need to stop letting them shape the way you think.

hrefna , to random
@hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

A long time ago, the worst project manager I ever worked with tried to get involved in a technical decision around database choice.

See, he had a set of demands that he told us were absolute requirements and in his eye this data store solved those problems neatly.

Except.

We talked to the people who worked on said database and we were not just a little outside of the parameters where they made such guarantees, we were way outside of what they were built for.

This was a recurring theme.

jenniferplusplus ,
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

@hrefna was the database web scale? it sounds like it might have been web scale

hrefna , to random
@hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

…whut.
https://hachyderm.io/@molly0xfff/112423082506081414

jenniferplusplus ,
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

@hrefna so nice that crypto is just whatever you want it to be

jenniferplusplus , to random
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

JFC, why can't the bluesky team use ANY established protocol for ANYTHING?

jenniferplusplus OP ,
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

tbh, I can sympathize with someone who looked around at the landscape of protocols to do asymmetric social publishing type things and decided that the only option is to start over.

But chat? Chat!? Use xmpp! Use matrix! Use signal! Use IRC! IDGAF, but do not reinvent this wheel.

what the fuck

jenniferplusplus OP ,
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

@hrefna I really can't see how it's anything other than hostile and protectionist for bsky to ignore every other option for DMs and invent something unique to them.

It casts all their talk about federation in a very distinctive light.

hrefna , to random
@hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

If you feel activated because someone doesn't like your favorite toy language that is on you to figure out. Don't take it out on other people

Not everyone is going to like everything, you don't need to seek out opinions of people who don't like the same things you do in order to yell at them about how their choices are bad and yours are good

You really, really don't

My identity is not tied to the language I use for hobbies or work and, even if it were, there's no need to seek out disagreement

jenniferplusplus ,
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

@hrefna is this about the same parachuting language defender from the other day, or did something new happen?

tchambers , to random
@tchambers@indieweb.social avatar

@mike- new numbers, but ones that tell the same story we discussed on your podcast: on my server, we have about 1 moderator to 500 users. Here are the new numbers on how that dynamic plays out for major social platforms in the EU:

"X does have the worst ratio of moderation staff to users, at 1/60,249, with LinkedIn coming in second (1/41,652), then TikTok (1/22,586) and Meta (1/17,600)."

https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/x-has-significantly-fewer-moderation-staff/714650/

jenniferplusplus ,
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

@hrefna @tchambers @thisismissem @fediplomacy
I think that trying to make broad statements about the (non-threads) fediverse as a whole is likely playing into the hands of big platforms. I think it would be more informative to treat them like big fedi servers, than treat the fediverse like a small platform.

thomasfuchs , to random
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io avatar

Making barricades is taught to 7-year olds in our schools, because our society loves guns more than children, you absolute chucklefuck fartwaffle

jenniferplusplus ,
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

@thomasfuchs students have famously never barricaded a public space as a protest tactic before

jenniferplusplus , to random
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

Reminder not to eat the rich.

The rich are apex predators, and they accumulate high concentrations of environmental toxins.

Instead, you should compost the rich

jenniferplusplus , to random
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

Given how many fedi servers are out there, it's interesting to me that I can only find one written in Ruby. You'd think that a long running successful project would just naturally produce resources that other projects can use. But that doesn't seem to have happened.

jenniferplusplus OP ,
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

For some reason Golang seems to be the most popular choice? Is it the code generation features? Because otherwise, I can only image that handling AP docs is absolutely miserable in go.

jenniferplusplus OP ,
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

@hrefna But for different kinds of projects that just use the same federation protocol? I've never found AP macro blogs or bookmarkers, or etc written in ruby, either.

jenniferplusplus OP ,
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

@phillmv @hrefna At the risk of getting into a programming language flame war, I think pretending it's okay to skip domain modeling is a pretty big anti-feature

jenniferplusplus , to random
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

I don't know who needs to hear this, but I'm getting tired just thinking about the testing path you would need to follow in order to fork mastodon and keep it as an in-place upgrade from baseline.

  1. stand up a baseline mastodon instance
  2. federate with some peers
  3. fill it with realistic data
  4. migrate to the fork
  5. test the fork
  6. test federation
  7. repeat across several combinations of mastodon base versions and other fedi servers
  8. rapidly, during development
jenniferplusplus OP ,
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

If in-place upgrades aren't the goal, then just build something new. Or contribute to one of the various preexisting projects. Don't adopt mastodon's tech debt for no reason. It's not worth it.

I know I'm eager to have more help, if existing projects suddenly sound better.

jenniferplusplus OP ,
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

Extremely not comprehensive list of ActivityPub microblogging projects you could contribute to, instead of forking mastodon

https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial
https://github.com/misskey-dev/misskey
https://github.com/bonfire-networks/bonfire-app
https://github.com/go-ap/fedbox
https://akkoma.dev/AkkomaGang/akkoma
https://iceshrimp.dev/iceshrimp/Iceshrimp.NET
https://github.com/Letterbook/Letterbook

jenniferplusplus OP ,
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

I made a more thorough, yet still not comprehensive list

https://gist.github.com/jenniferplusplus/1814038de7403ace8f35c47d14248418

hrefna , to random
@hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

Really I'm of the view that a hard fork of mastodon is (probably) not the right solution, but it's likely my view on that is for different reasons than a lot of other people who have talked about it (and also substantially similar in some respects, but with some core differences).

But if you want to do the work and it energizes you then go forth. It just seems to be more hassle than I suspect it will be worth versus just building a ground-up implementation (which is already plenty of work).

jenniferplusplus ,
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

@hrefna I strongly agree (obviously). But, if the goal is to move existing servers, a fork seems like the only viable path. Unless someone has a budget for a whole engineering team just waiting to be spent, that is.

jenniferplusplus , to random
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

I'm sure this is true for many people, but I'm having the opposite experience, tbh. Coding (mostly) for myself, and taking a lot of care to make it long term maintainable, has been incredibly restorative for me. Keeping a code base tidy is so much more relaxing than constant tip toeing around a bunch of hazardous piles of legacy junk that you're not allowed to fix.

https://digipres.club/@foone/112340266377188389

jenniferplusplus OP ,
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

Yes, we need the Joy of Programming. But we also need Zen and the Art of Software Maintenance.

rytmis , to random
@rytmis@hachyderm.io avatar

Well, now I’m really glad that I get to contribute to Letterbook (/cc @jenniferplusplus)
https://mstdn.social/@rysiek/112344310687017855

jenniferplusplus ,
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

@rytmis There are a lot of reasons I chose to start a new project rather than trying to contribute to mastodon. This development speaks to most of them. No matter what, a less homogenous fediverse will be better for everyone.

jenniferplusplus , to random
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

Wow, tech oligarchs are really getting tired of our* shit**, huh?

We have so much power. We would win that fight every time, almost immediately, if we can just stop pretending we're somehow above being merely labor.

*software developers, defined broadly
**expecting to have a say in the terms and conditions of our work

gvwilson , to random
@gvwilson@mastodon.social avatar

Starting to wonder if AI is like spreadsheets: for every programmer pointing out flaws and deficiencies, a double dozen people are using 'em to do something they find useful. 1/4

Added: please see https://mastodon.social/@gvwilson/112265751571981599 for clarification.

jenniferplusplus ,
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

@gvwilson @judell imo, there's 2 really important things to teach right now.

  1. How ai works, so that people can actually evaluate the claims that AI companies are making.
  2. The power dynamics involved. Who is helped or hurt under this vision of computing. Who will be empowered and disempowered. Who makes decisions vs being subject to decisions. Etc.
jenniferplusplus , to random
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

A bit of unsolicited advice for executives everywhere: try not to create a work environment that people are relieved to be fired from.

Apropos of things happening at my previous job.

BTW, if you're hiring for mid-career devops/sre folks, let me know. I can connect you with a couple good and available engineers.

hrefna , to random
@hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

This is amazing.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4749322

jenniferplusplus ,
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

@hrefna that really is amazing

jenniferplusplus , to random
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

Are we still talking about supporting open source maintainers? I hope so, because I wrote about a more holistic solution than giving everyone a patreon or whatever.

https://jenniferplusplus.com/the-free-software-commons/

jenniferplusplus OP ,
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

The toot length version goes like this

🌸 Open source is a public, common resource. Anyone can contribute, and everyone benefits
🌸 That makes it a "commons", or perhaps many commons
🌸 Commons need long term organized care to sustain them. That's called governance
🌸 The governance of the open source commons has been neglected for a long time, and that burden falls on maintainers
🌸 What if we didn't do that?

https://jenniferplusplus.com/the-free-software-commons/

devnull , to random
@devnull@crag.social avatar

When @BeAware asks for help scaling out Mastodon because his SINGLE USER INSTANCE is falling over, and he reveals that he's paying for an 8 vCPU server with 16GB of memory, and all the comments are talking about tweaking postgres.

What the flying fuck.

jenniferplusplus ,
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

@hrefna
[nathan-fillion-speechless.gif]

But. But the indexes. Partitions also break up the indexes. You can keep them in reasonable amounts of memory again.
@devnull @ryansingel @baris

jenniferplusplus ,
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

@hrefna
It should even be a reasonably tractable implementation for mastodon. They already use db generated monotonically increasing primary keys. For all the drawbacks of that strategy, they are at least time-ordered, in an application with a strong recency bias. So you would expect to overwhelmingly serve queries from a single partition.

@devnull @ryansingel @baris

devnull , to random
@devnull@crag.social avatar

Federated NextDoor?

ducks

jenniferplusplus ,
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

@hrefna @devnull what if it was for tenants instead of old racist nimbys?

jenniferplusplus , to random
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

I've seen like 100 people say something to the effect of "we need to find ways to support open source developers" in the last couple days.

But I don't get the impression that most people know what that would look like. Can I suggest listening to Astra Taylor's lecture series as a place to start imagining that future?

https://www.cbc.ca/radiointeractives/ideas/2023-cbc-massey-lectures-astra-taylor

Or the book version, if lectures aren't your thing

https://houseofanansi.com/products/the-age-of-insecurity

hrefna , to random
@hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

"if it is a nation-state actor that will significantly raise the stakes and has implications for the integrity of open source!"

It really, really does not.

Or rather, if that's your concern then the stakes were already that high and you just didn't realize it before this. You not realizing the stakes is not the same thing as the stakes not being that high.

jenniferplusplus ,
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

@hrefna if it was a state actor, that suggests the level of resources that can be dedicated to ongoing or future attacks, and I think that does change the response a little bit. But only a little, and we could just as well assume those resources will be brought to bear regardless.

jenniferplusplus ,
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

@hrefna And that is the reasonable conclusion.

jenniferplusplus , to random
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

Free™ Software™ was never sufficient. It always needed to be a step on a larger path, and maybe this weekend's news with xz illustrates some portion of why that is, and also where the rest of the path lies.

hrefna , to random
@hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

This is someone who knows exactly what they are doing and has been around enough in enough spaces that they know the lingo intimately.

This needs to cause serious reflection among maintainers and users of OSS tools and libraries.

How many of the utilities that we use daily are maintained by one or two burned out people who would be highly susceptible to this kind of social engineering? Who would look at this language and think "this person can help"?


https://hachyderm.io/@joeyh/112184224610321326

jenniferplusplus ,
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

@hrefna I keep thinking that I don't know what a defense against this attack would look like, but it would have to start with recognizing this situation as insecure. Both in the infosec sense, and in the human security sense. And recognizing that both are a problem and one causes the other.

hrefna , to random
@hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

Credit card companies and the app stores are going to love this, and there's a long, long list of companies I would rather trust for this sort of thing other than Twitter/X in its current state.

I can see why Musk would find this appealing, and also this is just a terrible idea on so many levels.
https://techhub.social/@Techmeme/112174874737689997

jenniferplusplus ,
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

@hrefna
elon: it's called "X" now
Everyone: ew why?
Elon: it's the coolest letter. Like a cool s, except it's a cool x
Everyone: it sounds like a porn site
Elon: X isn't just for porn
Everyone:
Everyone: just?
Elon:
Elon: porn costs extra

hazelweakly , to random
@hazelweakly@hachyderm.io avatar

Core competencies are something I think about a lot. I love to dig into what makes companies or ecosystems or social groups tick. Especially when that core competency enables what they do:

McDonald's, for example, is a real estate company that happens to make burgers.

Walmart is a shipping logistics company that also sells things.

What other examples can you think of where the core competency of the company is such that the "thing" a company does falls out naturally as a consequence?

jenniferplusplus ,
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

@hazelweakly Uber is a distributed company town that makes an app.

Tesla does government subsidy arbitrage and also assembles cars.

inthehands , to random
@inthehands@hachyderm.io avatar

Yesterday a student came to me with project questions. She was trying to learn some ground-level tool basics (how useState works in React, but details don’t matter), and she was just hopelessly confused: the pieces were there, fragments of nascent understanding littered all around, but somehow it just wasn’t coming together for her.

She walked me through her fragments of non-working code, and as I was trying to figure out how she’d got so lost, she popped back to her documentation source:

1/2

jenniferplusplus ,
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

@inthehands I keep saying exactly this is going to happen, and exactly this keeps happening.

hrefna , to random
@hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

"Meta also can’t promise that when you delete a federated post on Threads, it will also get deleted on the other platforms it was shared on"

I mean that's just the fediverse in general, especially with how it works today. Even the ActivityPub spec doesn't make a strong statement on how this is supposed to be handled ("should remove it" from public view is not "must delete it").

jenniferplusplus ,
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

@hrefna do you really need to delete the activity? Not just the object? That seems unnecessary.

Also it would be entirely valid to batch a bunch of objects into the same delete activity. Not that I have a great deal of hope that would be broadly understood. But it would bring the messages for a whole actor wipeout down by likely 2 orders of magnitude.

jenniferplusplus ,
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

@hrefna
Hm, interesting. That would mean activities performed by multple actors can only be undone by the same set of multiple actors.

If two actors Watch a movie, that is the way it is unless they both Undo it. But you can read this as not having the same restriction on Delete.

@mariusor

jenniferplusplus ,
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

@hrefna
It would be really cool if the AP spec wasn't so LD-pilled that it could stop and define behavior for an object's controlling entity separately from behavior for other entities who just happen to know it exists.

That would solve a ton of problems.

@mariusor

jenniferplusplus , to random
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

Things are happening

Screenshot of an API explorer, listing color coded endpoints Posts POST /lb/v1/posts/{profileId}/post Post POST /lb/v1/posts/{profileId}/post/{postId} Publish PUT /lb/v1/posts/{profileId}/post/{postId} Update DELETE /lb/v1/posts/{profileId}/post/{postId} Delete GET /lb/v1/posts/{profileId}/post/{postId} Get POST /lb/v1/posts/{profileId}/post/{postId}/content Attach PUT /lb/v1/posts/{profileId}/post/{postId}/content/{contentId} Edit DELETE /lb/v1/posts/{profileId}/post/{postId}/content/{contentId} Remove GET /lb/v1/posts/{profileId}/post/{postId}/replies Replies GET /lb/v1/posts/{profileId}/thread/{threadId} Edit
ALT
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    • jenniferplusplus OP ,
    @jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

    @hrefna oh, delightful, I was going to solicit your opinion

    hrefna , to random
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    One would think that someone with Dawkins background would understand the concept of a "bimodal distribution" better than this but alas, bigotry can color any perception.

    95% of the universe is basically dark matter/dark energy, so clearly the visible 5% of the universe is just delusional.
    https://mastodon.social/@babadookspinoza/112123357574601170

    jenniferplusplus ,
    @jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

    @hrefna but also intersex conditions are more common than red hair, and yet we still put the red hair option on forms.

    hrefna , to random
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    Do you understand how hard it is to find a reasonable shoe with a decent heel in SIZE 14 -.-

    My height and the size of my feet don't really give me dysphoria, but they occasionally do give me ANNOYANCE

    I was talking to someone the other day with a size 16 mens and I can't even imagine that.

    jenniferplusplus ,
    @jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

    @hrefna I do, actually. I constantly lament my size 13. But on occasion I also shudder at how much worse it could be

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