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Simple Unix Chat

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31–40 of 175 posts

Re: Simple Unix Chat

#31
post #26

Functionally, this is nearly the same as slack, but it's missing the aggressive venture capital funding and marketing team...

In what way is its functionality "nearly the same as Slack"? Or are people these days just using Slack as a generic term for "channel-based chat" without acknowledging the long history of chat apps? (In which case I would argue it is much closer to the functionality of IRC, if still significantly short of it).

I was pitching a related concept to a young investor lately, and she had not heard of IRC. If you stick around long enough, all that is old is new again. If you can profit from this, it's great. If you can't, it is a source of frustration.

Re: Simple Unix Chat

#33

This is pretty cool. Only need to (re) solve the discoverability problem and we will have a better social network than twitter and reddit back

Finger and whois.

It was solved over 40 years ago.

That's the thing with social networking. There's a few core problems and it's been solved many times. Such as in 1973 at Community Memory in Berkeley: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Memory

Or through newspaper classifieds ads, French salons, compuserve, bars, aol, cb radio, friendster, phone phreaking party lines, dialup bbses, icq, irc, myspace, Facebook, netnews, whois/finger/talk/uucp. If you read Carolyn Marvin's book, "When old Technologies Were New" (1988) you'll see her documentation of this in its first digital form - via lonely telegraph operators chatting with each other in the 19th century.

It's the network, not the medium, that matters.

Re: Simple Unix Chat

#34
post #6

I understand the blog post here is about suc, and it is acknowledged immediately and honestly that the headline is slightly misleading, but there's an important message here that ultimately has nothing to do with suc. Almost all modern software is bloated to hell. The idea that one would need 1.7 million LoC for a rich chat server is absurd. To paraphrase Bill Gates, I don't think I could "spend" that many lines of c…

I once was in a meeting about which web authentication framework to use for a site that ran so long because of bikeshedding that I implemented during the meeting and demoed at the end a solution based on the fact that HTTP already provides an authentication facility.

HTTP basic auth? It works well on everything except iOS.

Re: Simple Unix Chat

#36

In case you're passing over this because it sounds like click bait (it KIND OF is), this was actually a good read to me. It goes over a utility called "suc" (Simple Unix Chat) that implements server functionalities from Slack, Discord, etc. using a very small codebase. The novel part is it leverages existing unix tools and methodology instead of re-inventing them. - Auth is handled by SSH. - Channels are just a file…

Big emphasis on “kind of”.

“Here’s how to make $2 million dollars over night”

_reads article_: “have $4 million in the bank…”

Re: Simple Unix Chat

#37

> suc does all that by leveraging SSH, UNIX’s access control API, and UNIX’s text-based modularity. On any fair metric, this should inflate the volume of code metric for any project (whether leveraging those APIs directly or not). It would still favor this implementation on that front, and there are still other merits to the approach besides code volume. But something does irk me about touting supposed minimalism whi…

It’s disingenuous at the least and complete dickishness at the median.

Re: Simple Unix Chat

#38
post #6

I understand the blog post here is about suc, and it is acknowledged immediately and honestly that the headline is slightly misleading, but there's an important message here that ultimately has nothing to do with suc. Almost all modern software is bloated to hell. The idea that one would need 1.7 million LoC for a rich chat server is absurd. To paraphrase Bill Gates, I don't think I could "spend" that many lines of c…

I once was in a meeting about which web authentication framework to use for a site that ran so long because of bikeshedding that I implemented during the meeting and demoed at the end a solution based on the fact that HTTP already provides an authentication facility.

HTTP auth is vastly insufficient for most use cases. You are missing passwords resetting, 2FA, bot/abuse detection, and probably a whole collection of other stuff. I’m also not sure if passwords manager extensions can prefill them. As well as the fact that the login form is only 1% of what an auth library does.

Re: Simple Unix Chat

#39
post #26

Functionally, this is nearly the same as slack, but it's missing the aggressive venture capital funding and marketing team...

In what way is its functionality "nearly the same as Slack"? Or are people these days just using Slack as a generic term for "channel-based chat" without acknowledging the long history of chat apps? (In which case I would argue it is much closer to the functionality of IRC, if still significantly short of it).

In the way a pen and a very long tape is "same functionaltiy as a modern CPU".

Re: Simple Unix Chat

#40

> suc does all that by leveraging SSH, UNIX’s access control API, and UNIX’s text-based modularity. On any fair metric, this should inflate the volume of code metric for any project (whether leveraging those APIs directly or not). It would still favor this implementation on that front, and there are still other merits to the approach besides code volume. But something does irk me about touting supposed minimalism whi…

It’s disingenuous at the least and complete dickishness at the median.

It’s pretty valid disingenuity. It’s just also pretty valid to identify as such.
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