Memories

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Much has been written about how Electron apps take a lot of memory; after all, each one is running its own instance of a web browser, and pulling in all of the overwhelming amounts of support code that implies. Slack can easily end up taking over 1GB of RAM, and Discord usually takes a few hundred as well. As someone who used to use IRC back in the 90s, when a single task taking even 1 MB of RAM was considered a lot, this feels rather horrifying:

Activity Monitor showing memory usage for Slack and Discord

On my iMac, with 24GB of RAM, that means that chat apps – doing the equivalent of an IRC client (granted, with a bit more visual stuff, but not that much) – are taking about 6% of my RAM!

But come to think of it, back in the mid 90s, when a typical computer had 8MB, an IRC client probably took around 400KB of RAM, which is also 6%. So have things really grown proportionally in that way?

Well, I’ve figured out a way of getting these chat apps to take half as much of my total RAM overall, but first, let’s talk about my personal history of memory usage.

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Re: Intermediate auth service

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Jacky:

Oh yeah my plan for the indieauth profile service was to also provide h-card and (optional) micropub endpoints. :) I wrote more about that on one of my Subl-related blog posts (which I’m short on spoons to find at the moment).

So I’ve been thinking about this more and more. Having an intermediate service that lets people log in from a silo is excellent for the case you’ve ((@fluffy@queer.party)[https://queer.party/@fluffy]) mentioned. I think I got too far with this and was wondering if they’d use this to do replies, likes and the whole range of responses one could do from their own site.

Having the intermediate service be log-in-able via a silo would certainly be an option but what I was suggesting was actually having an intermediate service where you can also log in with a username/password or whatever. Like, it could be a “silo.” Like, have it as a bootstrap for people getting into IndieWeb without needing to self-host anything.

What I meant by “provide MicroPub endpoints” was me being overly terse and just saying that on the profile you set up on the profile service you could also link your profile to arbitrarily many other services (hosted by others), including MicroPub, as well as authority sources for RelMeAuth or whatever. Basically, a little catch-all tool to fix the bit that I feel is currently missing from the IndieWeb experience for someone who doesn’t have/want to self-host anything.

Incidentally, this is the blog entry I mentioned in that thread where I kind of rambled about this stuff. Also since then I’ve come to realize that there’s no real reason to integrate Pushl directly into Publ since now it does a lot more stuff and more generically than what is suitable for putting into the Publ side of things. (That said, you absolutely can use the same pipenv/venv for both Pushl and Publ, which is how I have things set up on the dayjob website. But that’s getting off in the weeds of minutiae.)

Also, it seems that both of our respective Markdown implementations have gotten confused by the parentheses around the queer.party link. Neat.

Sending ActivityPub backfills

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For folks following this site via ActivityPub, I need to run a WebMention backfill which is going to look quite spammy (one post per five seconds when it gets going). Feel free to mute or unfollow; I promise this will end eventually and then things should be sensible for a while.

The process should take around three hours. I’ll post from my main Mastodon account when it’s theoretically safe to follow again.

Not that I expect anyone to really follow this site via ActivityPub anyway! So far this experiment has proven to me what I’d already suspected – ActivityPub isn’t really a great replacement to RSS/Atom.

More ActivityPub testing

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Okay so it looks like re-pinging of existing content to fed.brid.gy doesn’t cause it to reappear again, although it’s still a bit of a UX disaster how backfilled toots show up (namely as a gigantic flood to every follower’s timeline). I think that’s more of a Mastodon UX problem than ActivityPub or fed.brid.gy though, and it’s probably a necessary evil based on what happens when a Mastodon sidekiq queue gets backlogged or whatever. Not to mention even in a things-are-current context, the nature of how Pushl works means it’ll probably still cause stuff to get missed.

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Haha, oops

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Looks like fed.brid.gy will happily re-ping itself for already-ingested content, and it also shows up on your timeline as a flood of current items with whatever random dates are in place.

That seems… suboptimal.

Progress

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It’s April 1, and nobody seems to have noticed the little joke I put on my site, or at least didn’t react to it. Which is fine, it was mostly a last-minute commentary on web UX patterns and so on.

(If you’re seeing this in the future, I added a GDPR compliance popover that prompts you with, “This website uses cookies to remember if you’ve clicked this button,” and a button which reads “I clicked it.”)

Anyway! It’s been a few days since my last post and I’m feeling somewhat better right now, so I’d might as well share what’s changed.

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Whatever happened to progress?

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Ever since my diagnosis I was doing so much better, because I was able to practice self-kindness. But over time I’ve been slowly ramping up on doing more stuff, and now I’m back to trying to do all the things, and the amount of time I can do all the things gets shorter each iteration. So now I’m back to being in pain and being frustrated and feeling ineffective at everything.

I’m not sure if the medicine isn’t working after all or if I’m just expecting too much out of it; it’s probably a bit of both.

There are so many things I want to be working on but I’m just too tired to do any of them. I haven’t worked on music in a while – when I was so looking forward to getting back into streaming – and I’m coming up with things to do on Publ faster than I’m actually doing them, and am only really focusing on stuff that directly benefits the day job. And forget about comics, even though I really want to work on Lewi and a Unity Book 3 story.

I’m tired of being tired, and it’s useless to feel useless. I need to remember self-kindness.

More fun with encodings

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On a Slack I’m on, there was a conversation wondering why so many websites disallow passwords with spaces, punctuation, “special” characters, and so on; shouldn’t they all be hashing the passwords rather than storing them in plain text anyway?

Yes, they should, but that’s not where the problem is. Once again, encodings become a problem.

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Backslide

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So, whatever positive effect I’ve gotten from the nortriptyline isn’t enough to make up for my current baseline pain levels. At least I’m able to get out of bed again (unlike a week ago) but holy moly do I fall into agonizing pain after not doing a whole lot. This weekend I wasn’t even capable of doing my usual 3-to-5 miles of walking a day, and I’m thinking tomorrow I might end up having to take a bus or even a Lyft to work. Very frustrating.

Also, lately I’ve noticed that the extra weight of my iPad in my purse is taking its toll on me. I should probably switch back to using my backpack as my main conveyance; it’s heavier but at least it’s symmetrical and puts the stress on my back rather than my shoulder and neck.

On the plus side, I’ve finally gotten my CPAP working well enough for me. I ended up finding a decent video on how to adjust the nasal pillows and those have turned out to be much more comfortable, given a second chance. The face mask ends up being too disruptive for a bunch of reasons (the slightest movement makes it leak around the sides and I have no way of scratching my nose without hecking the fit up) and I somehow managed to lose the nasal mask (which was nearly as bad as the full mask anyway) so the fact that I’ve gotten the one I’m “supposed” to be using to work reliably and comfortably is nice.

I still feel like it disrupts my sleep somewhat, though. I hope that’s just a matter of something I Need to get used to. Hopefully I’ll eventually start getting reliable deep sleep on it once I’ve fully acclimated.

Anyway. Being up this late and typing a blog post isn’t exactly helping. But I figured an update was in order.

Encodings are the worst

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These past few weeks I seem to keep on running into issues where things have been really bad about handling character encodings.

Back in the day, encodings were an absolute nightmare. You had different 8-bit encodings for every language, each with a bunch of different ISO standards; a very commonly-used one is ISO-8859-1, aka Latin-1, which is basically the characters needed to render all of English and most of several Romance languages (although a bunch of stuff is missing), plus a little extra stuff for math, scientific notation (µ), and German (ß), as well as a bunch of miscellani which were generally useful.

Unfortunately, a lot of Internet standards decided to default to that, including HTML.

Note: There are some updates based on feedback at the very bottom.

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