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The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

urbanists.social

191–200 of 493 posts

Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

#191
post #159

> "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." This... doesn't seem too bad at all? Let's assume an average of 150 bytes of text per tweet, and an additional 50 bytes of actually important metadata. That's only 10 megabytes for the entire archive of 50,000 items. A single HDR photo from a modern smartphone…

What about images in tweets?

Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

#192

Anyone else read "AT protocol" and thought of old modems?

I work in IoT and write firmware, among other things, that talk to modems. I got really excited to explore a good, in-depth analysis of why the Hayes AT command set is terrible (because it objectively is), instead, we were treated to complaining about a relatively obscure social network API.

Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

#193

It's not that bad. ATZ and ATDT are the main two you have to remember. Wait, is that not what we're talking about? So, it has a confusing name too?

As a keyboard nerd, I was expecting it to be about the IBM PC/AT keyboard wire protocol.

Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> Cryptographic verification is intentionally compute heavy after all

You're thinking of password hashing functions like argon2, there's no reason for normal signing and verification operations to be intentionally expensive as that's not where the security guarantees come from.

Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

#195
post #191
post #159

> "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." This... doesn't seem too bad at all? Let's assume an average of 150 bytes of text per tweet, and an additional 50 bytes of actually important metadata. That's only 10 megabytes for the entire archive of 50,000 items. A single HDR photo from a modern smartphone…

What about images in tweets?

Still likely within the capacity of most modern phones.

Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

#196
post #54

Okay 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…

Not having read the article, I got pretty far into your second paragraph before realizing you all aren't talking about configuring a modem over a serial link. It's funny because the "Hayes AT command set" protocol is also an obtuse crock. I was really hoping you were going to open my mind with some deep wisdom straight out of 1981.

Yeah, I wish they hadn't clobbered the name of an existing, well-known protocol. It's still used in drivers for cellular modems (I'm working with it right now), which are getting more and more numerous for IoT applications.

Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

#197
post #53
post #45

Even 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.

The Hayes AT command set is still the primary way to talk to embedded modems. I would argue quite a few people outside of HN care about it to this day while very few people outside of HN know or would care about the AT Protocol.

Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

#198
post #191
post #159

> "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." This... doesn't seem too bad at all? Let's assume an average of 150 bytes of text per tweet, and an additional 50 bytes of actually important metadata. That's only 10 megabytes for the entire archive of 50,000 items. A single HDR photo from a modern smartphone…

What about images in tweets?

In this hypothetical minimalist Twitter clone in the 2009 spirit, images are elsewhere. We have a widely used hypertext protocol that lets you reference media objects from anywhere, so let’s use that. Client apps can individually solve the image upload usability question in ways that fit their user base.

Yes, there will be broken links. But IMO that’s better than having all your data in one centralized location where it can eventually be taken over by private equity looking to make a buck, or a billionaire who wants to be a media mogul.

Edit: Looking back at historical Twitter news, it’s clear that in 2010 their vision was still to have images embedded from other sites. Here’s a relevant TechCrunch article:

https://techcrunch.com/2010/09/14/new-twitter-tips/

Note how they added display support for embedded Flickr photo set links. Your pictures could be on the dedicated photo service and you’d still get the nice set browsing UI inside Twitter. They should have stuck with this and built a protocol that lets sites interoperate on things like “here’s a set of photos to be embedded” (so you could use something else than Flickr). But instead they wanted to chase the wannabe-Facebook dream of sucking everything into their servers and using a closed client to sell inline ads.

Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

#199
Seeing .bsky.social under every username is all I need to see to know the federated aspect of Bluesky will be dumped if it ever reaches success.

Normies do not care about this stuff in the slightest and it isn’t worth confusing them to include it and doesn’t benefit the site now it’s gunning for being “new Twitter”

Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

#200
post #54

Okay 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…

Some of this seems very familiar, in a good way, which makes me very interested in Bluesky and the AT protocol. I worked with XRIs and was on the XDI TC. I also was on the fringes of some of the early DID spec work, and experimented with Telehash for while.

I know Jeremie Miller is on the board, is Telehash or something similar being used within Bluesky?

Also, I'm sure you get this a lot, but I'd love a BlueSky invite please.

=Bill.Barnhill w dot a dot barnhill at gmail.com

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