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Simple Unix Chat

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Re: Simple Unix Chat

#71

Post by linschn »

peeters wrote: post #26
londons_explore wrote: post #3

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 agree that Slack is much more featureful, but I fail to see what critical piece of IRC functionality is missing ? If anything, you don't need a bouncer for chat history with suc, so it's more featureful than IRC.

With that said, I seldom used IRC so this is a genuine question for people who used it and miss some features.

Re: Simple Unix Chat

#72

Post by lelanthran »

linschn wrote: post #63
numpad0 wrote: post #13

I think the intuition would be that if a determined "core" feature set of something is so easily and trivially reproduced, then it's not the core/source of its value. Which makes me wonder: Just how much of UI development had software engineering had consumed and automated since 1980s, or is it still in the realm of pure human art?

This is a very astute way to look at it. I'd say then that the value of Slack is to be user friendly, which suc definitely is not for muggles. But then more difficult questions arise: - Is the price of slack worth it, when the alternative is having more educated users that can do very basic command line calls ? - Same question, but taking into account that Slack captures your data and won't give it back to you ? How…

> But then more difficult questions arise: - Is the price of slack worth it, when the alternative is having more educated users that can do very basic command line calls ?

I'm not sure that it would be difficult to wrap that up in a web interface running on a single server that does nothing but execute those command-line calls - auth, data and everything but session would be managed by the web server.

You could perhaps even make a local GUI application that spawns ssh once and reads+writes to it, and have your 90% slack functionality done in a weekend.

Re: Simple Unix Chat

#73

Post by shreyshnaccount »

kristopolous wrote: post #33
shreyshnaccount wrote: post #32

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, n…

It needs to align with the evolution of content consumption, which I'm sure it can. That's why i said (re)

Re: Simple Unix Chat

#74

Post by shreyshnaccount »

kristopolous wrote: post #33
shreyshnaccount wrote: post #32

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, n…

This is a great take. Added the book to my list

Re: Simple Unix Chat

#75

Post by mid-kid »

000ooo000 wrote: post #30

As a feat, I like this. It's cool to see what can be achieved with composition. That said, I don't care much for the comparison to Slack etc. No engineer wants to be on the hook for a bunch of things cobbled together like this in production. How are you going to hire talent? How do you test the thing? Debug it? Logs? Analytics? This piece replicates (some of) the chat functionality of Slack et al but the chat functio…

> No engineer wants to be on the hook for a bunch of things cobbled together like this in production. How are you going to hire talent? How do you test the thing? Debug it? Logs? Analytics?

The point was that most of these things become less relevant when the surface area of the codebase gets smaller. Individual utilities are generally easier to understand, test and debug as separate units, logging is already baked into the system (syslog, anyone?), and why would you need analytics?

Re: Simple Unix Chat

#76

Post by sharikous »

lelanthran wrote: post #72
linschn wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very astute way to look at it. I'd say then that the value of Slack is to be user friendly, which suc definitely is not for muggles. But then more difficult questions arise: - Is the price of slack worth it, when the alternative is having more educated users that can do very basic command line calls ? - Same question, but taking into account that Slack captures your data and won't give it back to you ? How…

> But then more difficult questions arise: - Is the price of slack worth it, when the alternative is having more educated users that can do very basic command line calls ? I'm not sure that it would be difficult to wrap that up in a web interface running on a single server that does nothing but execute those command-line calls - auth, data and everything but session would be managed by the web server. You could perha…

Yes and this GUI application should be cross platform so make it Electron.

Wait, there has been a leak from the company so we need some security staff on it and maybe mandated TFA.

And it's nice to have a way to call people and not only chat.

I wonder if there is already an app that does that, even if it's bloated it would be more convenient...

Re: Simple Unix Chat

#77

Post by rnmmrnm »

rakoo wrote: post #55

See also ii ( https://tools.suckless.org/ii/ ) doing something similar but on irc directly: use a single standard file for all conversation, auth and access is managed by the irc network directly and there are many UIs already. Like the article, a plugin is anything that reads a file and writes into another.

or jj (https://github.com/aaronNGi/jj) in awk.

Re: Simple Unix Chat

#78

Post by lelanthran »

sharikous wrote: post #76
lelanthran wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But then more difficult questions arise: - Is the price of slack worth it, when the alternative is having more educated users that can do very basic command line calls ? I'm not sure that it would be difficult to wrap that up in a web interface running on a single server that does nothing but execute those command-line calls - auth, data and everything but session would be managed by the web server. You could perha…

Yes and this GUI application should be cross platform so make it Electron. Wait, there has been a leak from the company so we need some security staff on it and maybe mandated TFA. And it's nice to have a way to call people and not only chat. I wonder if there is already an app that does that, even if it's bloated it would be more convenient...

> Yes and this GUI application should be cross platform so make it Electron.

Why? What's wrong with Qt? or any of the other x-platform UI toolkits I already use to target Windows, Linux and Mac?

(Your other points are irrelevant. I never claimed that suc will match slack 100%, feature for feature).

Re: Simple Unix Chat

#79

Post by zokier »

Unfortunately I don't see any real way to avoid suid here, otherwise neat experiment. Posix ACLs might help, but the crucial part is prefixing the username to the message which requires privilege

Lots of unix facilities are criminally underutilized in modern systems

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