What you mean you can’t easily tell what this is?

- foo:
  -
  - :
    - bar:
      baz: [
        - -
      ]

Because non-open ones are not available, even for a price. Unless you buy something bigger than the “standard” itself of course, like a company that is responsible for it or having access to it.

There is also the process of standardization itself, with committees, working groups, public proposals, …etc involved.

Anyway, we can’t backtrack on calling ISO standards and their likes “open” on the global level, hence my suggestion to use more precise language (“publicly available and sharable”) when talking about truly open standards.

It’s a historical quirk of the industry. This stuff came around before Open Source Software and the OSI definition was ever a thing.

10BASE5 ethernet was an open standard from the IEEE. If you were implementing it, you were almost certainly an engineer at a hardware manufacturing company that made NICs or hubs or something. If it was $1,000 to purchase the standard, that’s OK, your company buys that as the cost of entering the market. This stuff was well out of reach of amateurs at the time, anyway.

It wasn’t like, say, DECnet, which began as a DEC project for use only in their own systems (but later did open up).

And then you have things like “The Open Group”, which controls X11 and the Unix trademark. They are not particularly open by today’s standards, but they were at the time.

datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6214

It’s also worth noting that switching from ANSI to ISO 216 paper would not be a substantial physical undertaking, as the short-side of even-numbered ISO 216 paper (eg A2, A4, A6, etc) is narrower than for ANSI equivalents. And for the odd-numbered sizes, I’ve seen Tabloid-size printers in America which generously accommodate A3.

For comparison, the standard “Letter” paper size (aka ANSI A) is 8.5 inches by 11 inches. (note: I’m sticking with American units because I hope Americans read this). Whereas the similar A4 paper size is 8.3 inches by 11.7 inches. Unless you have the rare, oddball printer which takes paper long-edge first, this means all domestic and small-business printers could start printing A4 today.

In fact, for businesses with an excess stock of company-labeled #10 envelopes – a common size of envelope, measuring 4.125 inches by 9.5 inches – a sheet of A4 folded into thirds will still (just barely) fit. Although this would require precision folding, that’s no problem for automated letter mailing systems. Note that the common #9 envelope (3.875 inches by 8.875 inches) used for return envelopes will not fit an A4 sheet folded in thirds. It would be advisable to switch entirely to A series paper and C series envelopes at the same time.

Confusingly, North America has an A-series of envelopes, which bear no relation to the ISO 216 paper series. Fortunately, the overlap is only for the less-common A2, A6, and A7.

TL;DR: bring reams of A4 to the USA and we can use it. And Tabloid-size printers often accept A3.

Clearly the rest of the world are communists! It’s not us, it’s you! I’m not crying you’re crying! 😭😭😭

I’ve literally never even seen A paper in America. Probably would have to special order it from another country

file sharing between planets, obviously /s

IPFS would replace Content Delivery Networks in present day.

It would also allow you to host software and other content from your own network again without the constraints modern Internet Service Providers pose on you to limit your self-hosting capabilities.

If applications are built for it, it could serve as live storage for your applications too.

We ran ipf-search. In one of the experiments we could show that a distributed search index on ipfs-search, accessible through JavaScript is likely feasible with the necessary research. Parts of the index would automatically be hosted by clients who used the index thus creating a fairly resilient system.

Too bad IPFS couldn’t get over the technical hurdles of limiting connection setup time. We could get a fast (ElasticSearch based) index running and hosted over common web technologies, but fetching content from IPFS directly was generally rather slow.

Yeah it’s basically a benevolent-store-static-data, where static is you cannot change it (or you have to upload new data and make a new link to it).

Cool name though.

I also like the POSIX “seconds since 1970” standard, but I feel that should only be used in RAM when performing operations (time differences in timers etc.). It irks me when it’s used for serialising to text/JSON/XML/CSV.

I’ve seen bugs where programmers tried to represent date in epoch time in seconds or milliseconds in json. So something like “pay date” would be presented by a timestamp, and would get off-by-one errors because whatever time library the programmer was using would do time zone conversions on a timestamp then truncate the date portion.

If the programmer used ISO 8601 style formatting, I don’t think they would have included the timepart and the bug could have been avoided.

Use dates when you need dates and timestamps when you need timestamps!

The week-of-year is far more relevant in Western Europe, and is used quite a bit in business. I have a Junghans watch that has a week complication.

It’s an important format outside of the US, and gives ISO-8601 an edge as a standard of conformance.

Your day to day use isn’t everyone else’s. We use times for a lot more than “I wonder what day it is today.” When it comes to recording events, or planning future events, pretty much everyone needs to include the year. Getting things wrong by a single digit is presented exactly in order of significance in YYYY-MM-DD.

And no matter what, the first digit of a two-digit day or two-digit month is still more significant in a mathematical sense, even if you think that you’re more likely to need the day or the month. The 15th of May is only one digit off of the 5th of May, but that first digit in a DD/MM format is more significant in a mathematical sense and less likely to change on a day to day basis.

DDMMYY is perfect for daily usage.

Except that DDMMYY has the huge ambiguity issue of people potentially interpreting it as MMDDYY. And it’s not straight sortable.

My team switched to using YYYY-MM-DD in all our inner communication and documents. The “daily date use” is not the issue you think it is.

That looks like an interesting diagram, but the text in it renders too small to read easily on the screen I’m using, and trying to open it leads to a javascript complaint and a redirect that activates before I can click to allow javascript. If it’s yours, you might want to look in to that.

The table below works, though. Thanks for the link.

7 digit years feels way to optimistic, but I’ll be rooting for us.

Are sockets not files?

Basically smaller file sizes than JPEG at the same quality and it also automatically loads a lower quality version of the image before it loads a higher quality version instead of loading it pixel by pixel like an image would normally load. Google refuses to implement this tech into Chrome because they have their own avif format, which isn’t bad but significantly outclassed by JPEG-XL in nearly every conceivable metric. Mozilla also isn’t putting JPEG-XL into Firefox for whatever reason. If you want more detail, here’s an eight minute video about it.

• Existing JPEG files (which are the vast, vast majority of images currently on the web and in people’s own libraries/catalogs) can be losslessly compressed even further with zero loss of quality. This alone means that there’s benefits to adoption, if nothing else for archival and serving old stuff.
• JPEG XL encoding and decoding is much, much faster than pretty much any other format.
• The format works for both lossy and lossless compression, depending on the use case and need. Photographs can be encoded in a lossy way much more efficiently than JPEG and things like screenshots can be losslessly encoded more efficiently than PNG.
• The format anticipates being useful for both screen and prints. Webp, HEIF, and AVIF are all optimized for screen resolutions, and fail at truly high resolution uses appropriate for prints. The JPEG XL format isn’t ready to replace camera RAW files, but there’s room in the spec to accommodate that use case, too.

It’s great and should be adopted everywhere, to replace every raster format from JPEG photographs to animated GIFs (or the more modern live photos format with full color depth in moving pictures) to PNGs to scanned TIFFs with zero compression/loss.

Do you know QOI format ? I would appreciate your opinion about it.

Exactly. The Semantic Web is broader than Solid but Solid is great for personal apps.

Say you buy a smartphone. The specifications of the smartphone likely belong elsewhere than in a Solid Personal Online Datastore, but they can be pulled in from semantic data on the product website. Your own proof of purchase is a great candidate for a Solid POD, as is the trace of any repairs made to it.

These technologies are great to cross the barriers between applications. If we’d embrace this, it would be trivial to find the screen protector matching your exact smartphone because we’d have an identifier to discover its type and specifications. Heck, any product search would be easier if you could combine sources and compare with what you already have.

The sharing tech exists. Building apps works also. Interpreting the information without building a dedicated interface seems lacking for laymen.

I remember using Xiph’s integer implementation of Ogg Vorbis on my Nokia N-Gage (Symbian S60). I wonder if it’s not a priority for Opus. IIRC, Opus is floats all the way down.

update: it exists.

wiki.xiph.org/OpusFAQ#Is_there_a_fixed-point_impl…?

TMI

I love that there’s someone out there who’s that passionate about JSON.

I hate grammers in anything that don’t support trailing commas. It’s even worse when it’s supported in some contexts and not others. Like lists are OK, but not function parameters.

Do you know if it allows dependent tasks?

0 degrees Celsius, the water is freezing, 100 degrees Celsius, the water is boiling. Celsius has a direct link to Kelvin, and Kelvin is the SI unit for measurement temperatures.

Knowing whether it may snow or rain depending on whether you are below or above 0 is very useful though. 0 and 100 are only intuitive because you’re used to those numbers. -20 bring very cold and 40 being very hot is just as easy.

0° being “very cold” and 100° being “very hot” is intuitive.

As someone who’s not used to Fahrenheit I can tell you there’s nothing intuitive about it. How cold is “very cold” exactly? How hot is “very hot” exactly? Without clear references all the numbers in between are meaningless, which is exactly how I perceive any number in Fahrenfeit. Intuitive means that without knowing I should have an intuitive perception, but really there’s nothing to go on. I guess from your description 50°F should mean it’s comfortable? Does that mean I can go out in shorts and a t-shirt? It all seems guesswork.

Ask someone in the north of finland how hot is “very hot”, and how cold is very cold. Then ask the same in middle Africa. Spoiler: it will vary alot.

This is strictly untrue for many climates. Where I live in Canada, 0F is average winter day, 100F is record-breaking “I might actually die” levels of heat.

-30C to 30C is not any more complicated or less intuitive than -22F to 86F

For traffic Celsius is more intuitive since temps approaching zero means slippery roads.

You’re long passed that with Fahrenheit. And on a scale from 0 very cold to 100 very hot, 32 doesn’t seem that cold. Until you see the snow outside.

A degree Celsius is not coarse and does not require decimals in weather reports, and I suspect only a person who has never lived in a Celsius-using country could make such silly claims.

Installed RabbitMQ for use in Python Celery (for task queue and crontab). Was pleasantly surprised it also offered MQTT support.

Was originally planning on using a third-party, commercial combo websocket/push notification service. But between RabbitMQ/MQTT with websockets and Firebase Cloud Messaging, I’m getting all of it: queuing, MQTT pubsub, and cross-platform push, all for free. 🎉

It all runs nicely in Docker and when time to deploy and scale, trust RabbitMQ more since it has solid cluster support.

Maybe a bad markdown viewer?

There’s a reason nobody uses it anymore.

Yeah, Google and Faceebook EEE’d it.

XMPP is not a good protocol though.

Do elaborate.

I use xmpp. It happens to be a great fit for a private family messaging service. Good interoperability between modern clients. I get that “nobody uses it” is hyperbole, but the internet is a big place and there is room for services without mass market appeal to thrive.

There’s a reason nobody uses it anymore.

I and many others use it! And Google, meta, etc. Have used it but decided to lock it down.

Yes you’re right, there’s a reason people don’t use it as much, which is because these corporations embraced it, dominated it, then extinguished it.

But XMPP is honestly my favorite comm protocol and the most impressive imo.

The content of the feed depends on the content creator, not on RSS.

RSS works great for me though.

I have an app on my not-so-smart phone to read news when commuting. It is not a long journey so I just want to have a quick glance at the headlines and read the actual articles that I want to. There are only 6 sites that I am interested, but still will take quite some work to crawl from the proper websites. RSS in turn is unified so I don’t need to worry about their website layouts, formats, etc. It also gives me an URL to the actual content which I can use readability/reader mode library to parse and further reduce unnecessary contents.

Quite the opposite, I hope more informational sites offer/keep RSS! (Some removed RSS typically after a revamp, design change)

Miniflux is likely to tick most of your boxes. It’s self hostable and can download the full article without extra clicks / having to visit the source.

What’s the use for having update feeds in a unified format when I still have to go to each fucking site to view the full text

This has nothing to do with RSS, it is the author’s choice. It’s like someone who posts links to their articles on Twitter / Facebook / Reddit, same thing. The platform doesn’t prevent you from putting the entire content there, and in fact, many do, especially with RSS.

One benefit of RSS though is that because it is an open protocol, the problem you mention already has solutions, which auto fetch the articles for you. That wouldn’t be possible without an open protocol like RSS

Moreover, I’d argue even with that, RSS is still a huge plus. To have all your content’s headlines in one UI, and potentially you can filter or sort them however you want, that’s pretty awesome.

There is an option in the settings to use markdown formatting. I haven’t tried it but I guess it at least makes formatting less annoying.

The syntax is only difficult to read in their example.

I fixed their example here: programming.dev/comment/12087783

deleted by creator, who realised their misunderstanding

I read this somewhere. Since i didn’t find it anymore and don’t remember all the advantages aside from concurrence (don’t have to unpack a zip archive) i asked chatgpt:

Using SQLite instead of ZIP for office formats can offer several advantages, particularly in terms of data management, performance, and functionality. Here are some key benefits:

1. Structured Data Storage: SQLite is a relational database management system, which means it can store data in a structured format with relationships between different data entities. This allows for more complex data queries and relationships compared to a flat ZIP file structure.
   Query Capabilities: With SQLite, you can use SQL queries to retrieve and manipulate data efficiently. This is particularly useful for applications that require complex data retrieval, filtering, and aggregation, which would be cumbersome with a ZIP file.
   Integration with Other Tools: SQLite can be easily integrated with various programming languages and tools, making it a versatile choice for applications that require data storage and manipulation.

1. Concurrency: SQLite supports multiple readers and a single writer, allowing for better concurrency when accessing and modifying data. This can be beneficial in collaborative environments where multiple users may need to access or update the data simultaneously.

1. Data Integrity: SQLite provides features like transactions, which ensure that a series of operations either complete successfully or leave the database unchanged. This helps maintain data integrity, especially in scenarios where multiple operations are performed.

1. Ease of Updates: Updating specific pieces of data in an SQLite database can be more efficient than modifying a ZIP file, which may require decompressing, altering, and recompressing the entire file.

1. Reduced File Size: While ZIP files compress data, SQLite can store data in a more compact format, especially for structured data. This can lead to smaller file sizes for certain types of data. Built-in Data Types: SQLite supports various data types (e.g., INTEGER, TEXT, BLOB), which can be beneficial for storing different kinds of data in a more organized manner compared to the generic binary format of ZIP files.

1. Versioning and History: SQLite can be used to implement versioning and history tracking for documents, allowing users to maintain a history of changes and revert to previous versions if necessary.

I put related points together. One point was moot, removed.

Does unicode have bold/italics/underline/headings/tables/

Yes, and even 𝓈𝓉𝓊𝒻𝒻 𝕝𝕚𝕜𝕖 🅣🅷🅘🆂. And table lines & edges & co. are even already in ASCII.

Isn’t that outside of its intended goal?

🤷<- this emoji has at least 6 color variants and 3 genders.

If not, how is markup unnecessary?

Because the editor could place a 𝗯𝗼𝗹𝗱 instead of a **bold**, which is a best-case-scenario with markdown support btw. And i just had to escspe the stars, which is a problem that native unicode doesn’t pose.

Honestly I just haven’t looked at Matrix yet. Unfortunately like many of the privacy-centric protocols it’s mostly used by people trying to hide something.

Those problems you speak of about XMPP are not really a concern anymore and haven’t been for a while.

Matrix on the other hand is very difficult to implement, and currently there’s only one (maybe two?) viable implementation choices. It is way over complicated, resource intensive, and has privacy issues.

Definitely not matrix.

I’d think they’d get it back by not having to share their ad rev with Google. There’s something to be said for the economies of scale Google benefits from but with cloud services that’s not as relevant as it was.

I can’t say that it is, no.

org-mode is awesome for many reasons, but the similarities/overlap with markdown are an incidental benefit. I wouldn’t learn org-mode for that reason, however there are many other good ones that make it worthwhile. I’ve been using it for years for my own project management, tasks tracking, notes and many other things - it’s one of those rare tools that can do many things incredibly well.

Your concerns are all valid, but about 1 and 3 there are possible solutions. I’m using Rust+Tonic to build an API and that’s eliminate the necessity of proxies and it’s very simple to use.

I know that it don’t solve all problems, but IMHO is a question of adoption. Easier told tools will be develop for it.

Depends on HTTP 2.

Doesn’t work from the web.

Am I the only one who is weirded out? Requiring a web server for something and then requiring another server if you want it to actually work on the web?
How expensive do people want to make their deployments?

There’s a cool video from In a Nutshell about it some years ago.

Oh many years ago in school I created something like that for an arts/creative writing project once, a calendar with 12, 30 day month based on sailor moon. Having it based on a magical girl manga gave me the freedom to declare the rest of the days to “days of evil” Was a fun project because I created a whole religion around it. 😁

You’re using a purposely convoluted example from the spec. And I think it shows exactly how TOML is better than JSON for creating config files.

The TOML file is a lot easier to scan than the hopelessly messy json file. The mix of indentation and symbols used in JSON really does not do well in bigger configuration files.

JSON5

Nice. I mostly use Qt JSON and upon reading the spec, I see at least a few things I would want to have out of this, even when using it for machine-machine communication

That’s “country-ist”. Nothing to do with the genes of people living over there.

What in tarnation

.