I seriously thought that this page would discuss the AT modem protocol(s). I remember ending many a late night with ATH...
The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit
161–170 of 493 posts
Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit
#162Okay well. I work on Bluesky and helped build the AT Protocol. I'm sorry Sam differs with us on this, and I'm glad that Activity Pub is already there for him. However, Sam doesn't understand the ATProto very well and I want to clear it up a bit. Before I do, let me just say: Bluesky and the AT Proto are in beta. The stuff that seems incomplete or poorly documented is incomplete and poorly documented. Everything has m…
Having done a decent bit of hacking around ActivityPub, when I read the (thin, which 'pfraze and others have copped to) documentation I immediately went "oh, this is going to be way more scalable than ActivityPub once it's done." It's not all roses. I'm not sold on lexicons and xrpc, but that's probably because I am up to my eyeballs in JSON Schema and OpenAPI on a daily basis and my experience and my existing toolki…
If they'd proposed (or even just implemented) improvements that at least suggested they'd considered existing options and wanted to try to maximise the ability to do interop (even with proxies), I'd have been more sympathetic. But AT to mean seems to be a big ball of Not Invented Here that makes me worry that either they didn't care and try, or that they choice to make interop worse for a non-technical reason.
Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit
#163Okay well. I work on Bluesky and helped build the AT Protocol. I'm sorry Sam differs with us on this, and I'm glad that Activity Pub is already there for him. However, Sam doesn't understand the ATProto very well and I want to clear it up a bit. Before I do, let me just say: Bluesky and the AT Proto are in beta. The stuff that seems incomplete or poorly documented is incomplete and poorly documented. Everything has m…
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Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi, original author here. Some comments: > We sign the records so that authenticity can be determined without polling the home server, and we use a repository structure rather than signing individual records so that we can establish whether a record has been deleted (signature revocation). Why do you need an entirely separate protocol to do this? Email had this exact same problem, yet was able to build protocols on t…
I think it’s important to say this: I think asking questions is great, and I’m glad that we’re not just taking statements at face value because making social suck less is a worthy goal. However, you are coming across as highly adversarial here. Mostly because you immediately follow your questions with assertions, indicating that your questions may be rhetorical rather than genuine. I’m not accusing you of anything pe…
They're explicitly not debating in good faith:
"Also I don't care if I'm spreading FUD or if I'm wrong on some of this stuff. I spent an insane amount of time reading the docs and looking at implementation code, moreso than most other people. If I'm getting anything wrong, it's the fault of the Bluesky authors for not having an understandable protocol and for not bothering to document it correctly."
Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "oh, this is going to be way more scalable than ActivityPub once it's done." Can you elaborate on this?
I think this is referring to the content-hashed user posts. Using this model one can pull content from _anywhere_ without having to worry about MITM forgeries etc. This opens up the structure of the network, basically decentralizing it even _more_. Correct me if I'm wrong on this though.
ActivityStreams just requires an object to have a unique URI. ActivityPub says it "should" be a https URI. However, since this URI is expected to be both unique and unchanging (if you put up the same content with a different id, it's a different object), you can choose to use it as the input to a hash function and put the posts in a content-addressable store.
Mastodon will already check the local server first if you paste the URL of a post from another server in the Mastodon search bar, so it's already sort-of doing this, but only with the local server.
So you can already do that with ActivityPub. If it becomes a need, people will consider it. There's already been more than one discussion about variations over this.
(EDIT: More so than an improvement on scaling this would be helpful in ensuring there's a mechanism for posts to still be reachable by looking up their original URI after a user moves off a - possibly closing - server, though)
The Fediverse also uses signatures, though they're not always passed on - fixing that (ensuring the JSON-LD signature is always carried with the post) would be nice.
Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit
#166Even after reading some of that thread, I have no idea what this AT protocol is. Did someone reuse the name for the thing used in modems?
AT Protocol is used by the Bluesky app. And yeah, no one outside HN cares about the Hayes AT commands any more.
My 5G modem needed some AT commands (AT^CUSTOMER among others) to be made compatible with the linux kernel. It turns out the exact same Foxconn device is rebranded HP, Dell, Telit and possibly some other by simply running AT^CUSTOMER=1(Dell), 2(Telit), 4(HP). The HP variant wasn't compatible with Linux, but the Dell one was.
There's large forums such as wirelessjoint, ispreview and sierra where AT is still extremely relevant.
Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit
#167It says To use the Mastodon web application, please enable JavaScript. Alternatively, try one of the native apps for Mastodon for your platform. Good job, Mastodon. (No, I am not the same guys that complain they don't see javascript games or utilities without javascript. But I think I should be able to see a text on the Internet?)
Sadly, like most web application devs these days, most Mastodon frontends require Javascript to function. There are a few smaller projects that don't but there's no nitter.net for Mastodon just yet. The people behind Mastodon don't seem to have any interest in server side rendering at least.
Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit
#168It seems like blue sky is fun right now because it’s exclusive. There doesn’t seem to be anything fundamental to the technology that differentiates the experience from Twitter.
To be fair, you can have two products that uses different technologies but have a similar UI/UX, and in a way BlueSky is more similar to Twitter than to Mastodon, UI/UX-wise.
And to be honest it's a good thing: many non-tech friends were a bit confused about Mastodon, where you have to understand parts of the technology behind to do basic things (like follow someone from another instance, IIRC). BlueSky is (currently) a bit more friendly UI/UX-wise. I don't know how that will evolve with more instances, though. I also found that discovering people was easier, but YMMV.
Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
The tone of that whole thread in combination with posts like > Imagine if I had to store the 50k+ tweets I've made on Twitter on my device, and upload ALL of them to a new server whenever a community server went down. doesn't make this person seem particularly competent. I'm getting a vague feeling that this is normal discourse on Mastodon though, and that not using social media much shifts your personal overton wind…
Yea I was like, 50K tweets converted to bytes is like… well it’s one second to upload on my home internet connection. After that, it just felt like rant.
For what it's worth, when a server does go down and thousands of people start uploading their 50k skeets that all need to be cryptographically verified, other major servers will have quite the scaling challenge. Cryptographic verification is intentionally compute heavy after all.
50k entries isn't a whole lot but as people hosting Mastodon servers have found out, things start slowing down when 1000 people transfer those 50k entries at the same time.
Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit
#170I'm slightly disappointed this isn't about Hayes AT commands. ATDT is pretty straightforward but some of the ATS stuff can get kinda hairy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayes_AT_command_set
I wrote code for a PC and an embedded system to use modems -- relatively simple stuff like dial up, hang up, wait for a call, set baud rate. Nothing fancy.
We tested about 10 different modems. All of them had their own unique bugs I had to work around. Or maybe one of them didn't have any bugs (that I ran into) -- it's been thirty years.