I wanted to write a fun little experimental ActivityPub server. I have a solid idea how to handle this in go, or at least I think I do, so that’d be pretty boring. Instead, let’s try a new technology.
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We’ve gotten libjxl built for wasm. It was a struggle, but we got it done, and we’re ready to run it. WASM is a straightforward standard designed for ease of implementation, so this should be a walk in the park.
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I was planning on working on a redesign of a photo site, and wanted to use JPEG-XL as the preferred image format for storage. The only implementation I know of is the libjxl reference implementation written in C++. Alas, it hasn’t been a good week for JPEG successors, and I would much prefer not to run this code on my server.
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Some people, when presented with a data structure, think let’s encode this to json. Now they have two problems. Encoding and decoding. In response to this dilemma, various libraries were created, such as rust serde or go encoding/json, to facilitate drama and debate about which approach is best.
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ActivityPub August rolls on. Now with more (some) ActivityPub support in flak.
I held off on adding it before because I wasn’t sure how deep I wanted the integration to go, and I had some doubts about how useful minimal support would be. Time to find out.
Posts are now available as activity Article objects. There’s a minimal Person actor as well, since every post needs an author, but that’s about it. No inbox support, no following, no replies, etc. Getting into delivery adds a lot more code, and admin maintenance. I prefer not to think about flak when I’m not thinking about it. I think the objects are complete enough even for fussy implementations to accept them, but one never knows.
Another issue is that sometimes I like to experiment with posts that include custom scripting or styling, and that’s not going to federate well. Oh well, I guess you can figure it out and click through. Or not. WASM over AP when?
It’s been four years since honk 0.1. Before that, the preview, and shortly after the followup. But finally, after a long journey, we’ve reached honk 1.0. (Narrator: honk is a microblog server that federates with other servers via ActivityPub.)
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One of the traps in go is the reuse of loop variables, confounding novices and even catching the unwary expert. It’s so bad they may even change the language to fix it.
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Reddit is deddit. Everybody needs to write a replacement. Mine is called azorius.
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Here at Enterprising Enterprise, we love technology, but we’re also pushing it hard, constantly trying to expand the frontier of what’s possible. Along the way, we frequently find we’ve outgrown an earlier technology choice, and it’s time for us to migrate to something new. There’s a cost to doing this, but it’s the only way to keep moving forward.
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OpenBSD has provided binary patches for a select few architectures for a while now, to save users from the daunting task of running make on their own. Alas, this means you might now apply a patch without first reviewing it. In the olden times, you had a source patch, so obviously you meticulously studied every line before application, just like you advised new users on IRC to do. But now, who will believe you do this when the binary syspatch is right there, so easy, so tempting.
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