4
points
rmccue
Joined 1,836 karma
https://rmccue.io/
Bluesky: @rmccue.io
Twitter: @rmccue
Email: me at rmccue dot io
- There's a slightly different (I think) bug which I've been hitting since the update with URLs. The URL keyboard allows long-pressing on the . to open various TLDs, speeding how long it takes to write a URL.
In prior versions, you could long press to open the choices, then letting go would insert the default (eg .com)
With iOS 26, the touch target seems to be slightly different for triggering the options vs selecting them. I now frequently long-press, see the TLD choices with the default selected, and then releasing incorrectly inserts a single . instead of the TLD. This is infuriating when typing fast.
- We moved off HashiCorp's Terraform Cloud when they tried to hike the price 100x on us, although that was technically pre-acquisition I think (it was their move to resource-based pricing). In talking with our account manager, they basically said they only really cared about enterprise accounts, and that migrating away would probably make sense for us.
HashiCorp also changed their licenses to non-open-source licenses, but again I think this was technically pre-acquisition (I think as they were gearing up to be a more attractive target for an exit).
- Note that VASAviation's visualisations are not always 100% synched with ATC radio recordings, and the radio usually has gaps removed. It's a useful overview to see the tracks, but take the video's timing with a grain of salt.
- Jon Postel, the original RFC Editor and IANA: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2468
- It’s how Apple (relatively famously?) developed the iPhone, so I’d assume they were using this as a model.
> In other words, should he shrink the Mac, which would be an epic feat of engineering, or enlarge the iPod? Jobs preferred the former option, since he would then have a mobile operating system he could customize for the many gizmos then on Apple’s drawing board. Rather than pick an approach right away, however, Jobs pitted the teams against each other in a bake-off.
- This implies Xerox got no return on their research, and simply let Apple take their research, which isn't true. Rather, it was part of the investment deal they made with Apple [1]:
> Apple was already one of the hottest tech firms in the country. Everyone in the Valley wanted a piece of it. So Jobs proposed a deal: he would allow Xerox to buy a hundred thousand shares of his company for a million dollars—its highly anticipated I.P.O. was just a year away—if PARC would “open its kimono.”
Xerox clearly undervalued the research they were producing, but it wasn't like they just gave it away entirely. Per [2] the valuation of those shares in 2018 would be $1.2 billion had they not sold them - undervalued in hindsight, but not nothing.
Xerox's lack of capitalisation was a problem of their own making, not something inherent about investing in basic research.
[1]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/16/creation-myth
[2]: https://researchnarrative.com/thinkerry/the-company-that-cou...
- This always comes up with this prize, but it’s generally considered one of the Nobel prizes, although it’s not one of the original prizes. Your opinion on whether it should count is up to you, but to call it media manipulation is reading a lot of malice into it.
- You’re using the British definition of “public school” here, which is a “private school” in the US. US public schools are equivalent to UK state schools, in that both are run by the state.
- I never said it wasn’t created by Bluesky, so I’m really not sure why you’re trying to argue that I am. The point is that PLC is usable as a DID method for things that aren’t atproto.
The ID is deterministic, you can reconstruct it by hashing the genesis entry in the audit log.
- DIDs are a W3C standard, not invented by Bluesky. The PLC method specifically is currently hosted by them, but they’re working on moving it, as Dan says.
The method specific ID for PLC is a hash of the genesis operation, so it’s not just an arbitrary ID that the PLC server creates.
- “we” = group of long term contributors and core committers, including myself (I wrote the WP REST API), hosted by the Linux Foundation.
(More info on the linked site; I don’t want to hijack the thread too much.)
- There’s some DHT-based DID methods so it’s possible - one of the nice things about the DID abstraction layer is that could be added.
As I understand, atproto is intentionally limiting to PLC and Web for now, and monitoring the ecosystem. Every method has to be implemented by every client, so you naturally want to be cautious in how many you support.
(I don’t work for or represent Bluesky, so can’t speak to any plans other than what they’ve stated publicly!)
- DID is basically one extra level of abstraction, allowing for different methods.
did:web: eg is literally HTTP, did:dns: is DNS, and there’s loads of others.
This extra level of abstraction allows of arbitrary IDs, which is what the PLC DIDs were created for.
Let’s say that I am currently known as rmccue.com.au. I move overseas and now want to be rmccue.scot - or worse, because I am no longer in .au, I can’t even keep my old domain name. How do you persist this identity?
With PLC, I can instead be an abstract did:plc:hv27plmlx6zkuv7bnzbqb6xr (an arbitrary hash of the genesis entry for my DID). I associate rmccue.com.au with this via a TXT record, and back the other direction by recording the domain as an alias.
If I change my handle, I’m still the same arbitrary handle everywhere, everyone keeps following me, and in theory old references to my alias could even continue resolving.
(Similarly, this solves the issue for trademark changes, name changes throughout a person’s life, and changing job roles.)
The core of it is basic tech:
1. Look up _atproto.rmccue.io for a TXT record
2. If it’s did:plc:… send a HTTP request to the directory - eg https://plc.directory/hv27plmlx6zkuv7bnzbqb6xr
3. Parse the JSON response to get my signing keys and where I’m hosted.
- This is mostly separate to the PDS - Bluesky is more like the client here (albeit, they also currently run the PLC service). It’s part of your DID document which they manage for you mostly, but there’s ways to take ownership of your PLC DID - see Dan’s links for that.
For our non-atproto uses of the PLC directory, we have similar needs, and we’ll likely let users provide their own public key before we create their document to help solve this. We have a technical audience though, so that solution may not make sense for Bluesky - but there’s a lot of people thinking about how to improve this in the atmosphere.
- What stebalien might be referring to is that your DID document for PLC specifically is controlled by anyone with the rotation key.
In the Bluesky implementation, this is Bluesky for convenience’s sake, to make it possible for users to easily sign up. (I’m not sure internally if it’s part of the PDS or held separately.)
PLC has a mechanism allowing “higher” keys to override “lower” ones within a certain time window, so being able to add your own rotation key that “outranks” Bluesky’s would solve this issue.
Alternatively, use web DIDs and then it’s fully self-managed just as DNS would be.
- Imagine it as analogous to “Given a https:// URI, how do you locate the corresponding HTML?”
This is oversimplified but is a decent question to prompt an explanation for someone new to DNS, HTTP, TLS, etc.
- webvh seems to be getting some love as well recently, which addresses at least one of the downsides of it.
It’s kind of annoying that a huge number of DID methods are specific to cryptocurrencies and are practically abandoned.
- Excellent explanation as always from Dan, and timely with the latest news from Bluesky on moving the PLC management.
We picked the same DID systems for https://fair.pm/ to decentralise WordPress plugin distribution (and general management for user-facing packages; think App Store rather than Cargo).
The Bluesky folks (especially Bryan) were super helpful in helping us out - even shipping Ed25519 key support so we could use libsodium.
(We’re designing our protocol on top of DIDs and using Bluesky’s stackable moderation, but chose not to use atproto directly - but the great thing is that DIDs are a W3C standard, and PLC isn’t tied to atproto.)
It’s also pretty common on scientific and graphing calculators; the first time I saw it was in junior school in maths.