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The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

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

#221

Post by manojlds »

askvictor wrote: post #196
sgtnoodle wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a cheeky way to say @ protocol.

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

#223

Post by Ciantic »

pfraze wrote: 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…

I'm still positive about Bluesky, but the company hasn't yet proven itself like many non-profits. You could clear a lot of misconceptions by having multiple demonstrations of the protocol:

If I don't want to use BGS, how can I access the PDSs of the people I follow, and get e.g. 10 latest entries for each:

Starting from a handle, let's say @pfrazee.com, how do I fetch using CURL your content without the BGS?

Of course, there are also other issues regarding monetization, and if BGS becomes the de facto way to get content, then some PDSs might become locked to your official BGS.

I hope you are willing to contribute with known non-profits such as Mozilla to do a wider consortium of players for BGS space, which is mostly inaccessible for self-hosters.

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

#224

Post by anilakar »

duskwuff wrote: post #80
wmf wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AT Protocol is used by the Bluesky app. And yeah, no one outside HN cares about the Hayes AT commands any more.

> no one outside HN cares about the Hayes AT commands any more. You might be surprised. A lot of cellular modems and Bluetooth modules are controlled using a variant of the AT command set.

We still have a ton of remote IIoT edge nodes with with Ericsson f3507g modems as the local SMS gateway for the site. Every now and then they hang and require manual reinitialization with minicom and AT commands (unless you want to reboot the whole edge node)

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

#225

Post by OJFord »

sgtnoodle wrote: post #188
newswasboring wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My reaction whenever I see such headline is always "there must be an engineer out there who worked on this, I wonder how they feel about this". I had the same reaction today, opened comments and you were at the top. I love HN sometimes.

A few years ago I had to work with an obscure 90's era embedded microcontroller with a proprietary language and IDE, and a serial adapter based programmer and debugger. The IDE sucked, and programming would fail 9 times out of 10, but at least the debugger was solid. By complete chance, I happened to interview someone that had, "wrote the debugger for that obscure microcontroller back in the 90's," tucked away in the…

You were interviewing them for an unrelated role? Just trying to understand why that would be 'complete chance' and that you (by the sounds of it) didn't hire them to keep picking their brain on it.

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

#226

Post by asimpletune »

WatchDog wrote: post #151

I don’t know anything about XRPC and Lexicon, but claiming that OpenAPI is better than them because it’s more flexible, is not a great argument. OpenAPI is a very complex spec, and most of the tooling around it, only supports some subset of it. Sure it’s complex for a reason, it’s design goals are to be able to document the wide array of ways that HTTP APIs can be built, but if you don’t need that complexity, it abso…

I don’t know anything about xrpc. Do you know why any of the numerous other rpc specs weren’t chosen?

Thrift, cap’n proto, grpc, etc have already been in production for years now.

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

#227

Post by cxr »

epicsponge wrote: post #66
iptq wrote: post #56

It seems to me that a lot of the problems discussed in this thread (it's using a new protocol that doesn't work with existing tools, it uses crypto, handles auth in the protocol, server can goes down) are just frustrations that don't have to do with the core innovation that Bluesky promises to deliver, and are instead confusing the AT protocol to be another ActivityPub-related protocol, rather than something complete…

> are just frustrations that don't have to do with the core innovation that Bluesky promises to deliver, and are instead confusing the AT protocol to be another ActivityPub-related protocol, rather than something completely different. AtProto is designed to be a federated protocol. The issue I have is that it is not interoperable with the major standard used on the federated internet right now: ActivityPub. You can b…

> the major standard used on the federated internet right now: ActivityPub

This might be a true statement for microblogging, but the major-est "standard used on the federated internet right now" is surely SMTP+IMAP, and I wouldn't be surprised if RSS/Atom were in the #2 spot even though "nobody" is using it anymore (esp. considering "nobody" includes most podcasts).

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

#228

Post by OJFord »

asimpletune wrote: post #215
chrismorgan wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Email had this exact same problem, yet was able to build protocols on top of it in order to fix the authenticity problem. On the contrary, email has no solution to the authenticity problem that’s being talked about. Even what there is is a right mess and not even slightly how you would choose to build such a thing deliberately. If you want to verify authenticity via SPF/DKIM/DMARC, you have to query DNS on the send…

I’m curious about this. So email that I’ve sent, let’s say from a gmail account to an iCloud account, isn’t guaranteed to be verifiable years later because of dkim key rotation? That’s not great. I wonder if the receiver could append a signed message upon receipt with something like “the sender’s identity was valid upon receipt”.

> I wonder if the receiver could append a signed message upon receipt with something like “the sender’s identity was valid upon receipt”.

That's exactly what does happen, if you view the raw message in GMail/iCloud, you should see DMARC pass/fail header added by the receiving server (iCloud in your example).

(Well not exactly, it's not signed, but I'm not sure that's necessary? Headers are applied in order, like a wrapper on all the content underneath/already present, so you know in this case it was added by iCloud not GMail, because it's coming after (above) 'message received at x from y' etc.)

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

#229

Post by chayesfss »

detourdog wrote: post #213
sgtnoodle wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, I came for a critique of the Hayes AT commands.

[dead]

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

#230

Post by aprilnya »

pfraze wrote: 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…

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