arcanicanis

Just a profusely verbose fediverse interloper

XMPP: [email protected]
Matrix (ejabberd): @arcanicanis:matrix.were.chat

Last Notes

2025-12-17 23:48:43 GMT

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I guess by which context (server/client)?
At least from what I remember, most things are pretty tolerant. Sometimes shown in the order it was discovered in (at least in a timeline).
You can always toy experimentally with this by just static files of the JSON-LD context, as long as the correct media type is served. Mastodon (out of all other implementations) just tends to be the most fickle, expecting WebFinger resolution and a few other prerequisites (in terms of "test labbing" with static JSON files), while most others just simply need a resolvable actor object.

2025-11-18 20:30:59 GMT

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I love the irony of the situation so profoundly more, because of the dumbest exchange I've had with a customer, in this week, and later hearing today of Cloudflare go down just warmed my cold, dark little heart:
A vendor wanted an arrangement for handling backups for their webserver, for all their hosting customers. They mentioned their concern, specifically highlighting about all the recent cloud outages.
I offered a plan of $40/month of managing backups for the whole server (meanwhile, they currently charge their customers ~$100/month, each; of approx 40 customers so far; that's ~$4,000/month revenue they get, with just hosting; and they pay for just one $24/month Linode VPS, as their costs) for a max of 500GB. They didn't want that, they clarified that if I physically possess the server (or they physically possess it), "then it's not a real backup".
Instead, they wanted to find "the cheapest" cloud storage, and despite heavily warning and prefacing the ways that object storage can be mishandled and other risks, that Cloudflare R2 could be one option. However, I will not give any uptime/availability/warranty assurances to the service if it's on Cloudflare or other providers (because I don't run Cloudflare, I don't run Cloudflare's servers) instead of my infra, but apparently that's not good enough of an agreement and they'll be finding an arrangement elsewhere.
I'm so tired of trying to negotiate, with people that have such irrational logic, that also charge an extraordinary amount to their customers, reselling off of someone else's platform for cheap, and then turn around and nickle-and-dime me over anything I offer.

2025-11-15 03:23:30 GMT

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Retvrn, with SerenityOS
https://were.social/media/d451c423708df4e0cb247c2e019040d521e65bd3e56f466ecebd29f5d31079c5.png

2025-11-12 02:06:13 GMT

I was recently contemplating ways to get a person's "currently playing" info (given there's no local API to query that directly from the Steam client, for example), then it crossed my mind that a Steam game's AppId might be passed through launch arguments, and apparently that's the case (for example, ATLYSS):
```
somebody 576533 0.1 0.0 29480 23876 ? S 20:40 0:00 /bin/sh -c /home/somebody/.steam/debian-installation/ubuntu12_32/steam-launch-wrapper -- /home/somebody/.steam/debian-installation/ubuntu12_32/reaper SteamLaunch AppId=2768430 -- '/home/somebody/.steam/debian-installation/steamapps/common/SteamLinuxRuntime_sniper-arm64'/_v2-entry-point --verb=waitforexitandrun -- '/ext/SteamLibrary/steamapps/common/Proton - Experimental'/proton waitforexitandrun '/ext/SteamLibrary/steamapps/common/ATLYSS/ATLYSS.exe'
somebody 576534 0.1 0.0 29004 5756 ? S 20:40 0:00 /home/somebody/.steam/debian-installation/ubuntu12_32/reaper SteamLaunch AppId=2768430 -- /home/somebody/.steam/debian-installation/steamapps/common/SteamLinuxRuntime_sniper-arm64/_v2-entry-point --verb=waitforexitandrun -- /ext/SteamLibrary/steamapps/common/Proton - Experimental/proton waitforexitandrun /ext/SteamLibrary/steamapps/common/ATLYSS/ATLYSS.exe
somebody 576843 10.3 0.1 232648 60504 ? Sl 20:41 0:00 /home/somebody/.steam/debian-installation/ubuntu12_32/gameoverlayui -pid 576734 -steampid 3248 -manuallyclearframes 0 -gameid 2768430
```
Then I was having a concern of whether I'd have to query third-party platforms (e.g. SteamDB), just to infer the info about a game, from just it's AppId, but I guess there's actually an open, unauthenticated JSON API to query that data directly from Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/api/appdetails?appids=2768430
So as it stands, it wouldn't take much for a person to write a plugin to whatever XMPP (or etc) client, to push out that data, for those that want that visible.
Meanwhile, for open source launchers (e.g. Lutris), I'm sure someone could probably devise some userspace D-Bus API or something that a person could push that info locally (versus having to infer it off of running processes and their args).

2025-10-20 02:01:41 GMT

Great, the "non profit" ICANN is opening up another gTLD expansion in 2026, for companies to ~~buy~~ "bid" more new TLDs for possibly a couple million dollars each (if I'm not grossly misunderstanding or skimreading it).
https://newgtldprogram.icann.org/en/application-rounds/round2/agb
https://newgtldprogram.icann.org/en/application-rounds/round2
https://were.social/media/de6cb5ef2ce5eb9b32232c14fa8df4a1df3f9b4dc8fa73b9ea38887159e232c7.png

2025-02-03 23:03:38 GMT

Imagine if we had a protocol where it was required that you'd open up your SQL server to the public internet (with access control on writes, or reads on protected data, of course), and just have remote servers/clients just query straight off your database, regardless of query complexity.
So how is Solid any different than that with SPARQL, N3, Shape Trees, etc?
Every time I look at the stack of protocols to Solid ( https://solidproject.org/TR/ ), it feels like the engineering mess that was the OSI protocols, of overcomplicating a [relatively] simple problem.
I'm not saying SPARQL, semantic data, and alike don't have utility, as I'm sure it's probably used in various massively-scaled production environments; but that I don't see how you expect to have something publicly internet-facing that any entity on the internet could incur a heavy query on the server, or just with offloading so much compute responsibility to a server, instead of making a dumber server (just like how you can achieve an ActivityPub implementation in just static files, since it doesn't have a query language).
I could be uninformed (and I only periodically peek at it, and skim through some of the specs at times, I don't know it in depth), but I still don't see how this is going to be anything that could be operated cost-effectively and not be prone to trivial Denial of Service abuse.

2024-12-11 07:08:00 GMT

From periodically lurking X (and I'm sure the same applies to Bluesky), I don't understand the fixation of all the people that want to act as some self-appointed justice system that declares people 'pedophile', 'zoophile', or whatever else, based on some Google Doc of just alleged Discord/Telegram/etc screenshots, of conversations with people you have never heard of.
Should I demonstrate how trivial it is to edit conversation history in Discord with developer tools (when accessed from a browser)? Is it worth making a tool to fake Telegram screenshots, to also illustrate the same?
Why is it almost never verifiable court documents, charges, local news reports, etc? If the conversation screenshots are "proof", and there is reasonable evidence to a crime, why is nobody bothering to report to law enforcement, to then officially legally request those conversation logs from the platform and investigate further?
Then there's also times when people will decry any accusations against their friends or acquaintances as baseless, as nothing more than a desperate measure to take them down, but then clap like seals for any campaign against people they hate, for probably no different of quality of 'evidence'.
Just to be clear: anyone advocating for pedophilia or zoophilia deserves the woodchipper. What I'm complaining about is the people obsessing over and recirculating gossip, playing 'moral authority' of the internet, and all the factions that are just a constant inward firing squad.
And hell, it doesn't even have to be alleged crimes, there's some subsets of people that are just appear so insufferably miserable to each other, like some alleged Christian groups throwing each other out and advising people to stay away from certain people, for barely any justification at all.
I don't understand how people aren't self-aware of their own behavior, especially when it very likely is the cause to why they have no stable friendships or are usually alone.

2024-10-10 03:05:03 GMT

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I stole a few ideas from did:plc and did:tdw, yes. It's just an experiment insofar, as I'm using it as a stand-in for other methods, as something I can adjust to my needs as I toy with DIDs in a way with reverse-compatibility to standard non-DID ActivityPub.
As it currently stands, there doesn't seem to be a lot of methods that clarify whether DID URLs are permitted or not with the method.
There were a few adjustments I was going to add, such as what other 'authoritative' servers the did:fedi can be discovered from, within the method-specific protocol, maybe.
Either way, I haven't been public about it yet. Just finished a basic key wrapping and serialization format to go along with it, and I'll probably push out a newer version of the generator demo (which presently lacks a polyfill for browsers that don't have native Ed25519 within WebCrypto) in a day or two. I'll probably be more vocal when I have results.
As for the primer, that was probably over a year ago, and the mentioned FEPs, even a year before that (with all those FEPs devised by @npub19yg…wysk )

2024-09-17 18:59:39 GMT

I wonder if there's utility in having some sort of "degrees of association" ranking system for dealing with spam accounts. Whereas like the 'Web of Trust' model originally envisioned for PGP, but in this case, not being about asserting legitimacy of real identity, instead just a "not a bot" rating.
Mainly where you'd endorse someone else's account as 'not a bot' on some sort of scale of: recent online acquaintance, long-time online friend, or have met in-person plenty. The risk of course is that such a thing could be abused for datamining, although, some of that could already be heuristically inferred (follower status + frequency of interaction/replies).
This is just a musing of distantly watching the happenings of Nostr in dealing with spam, and seeing if there's ideas that could be implemented in ActivityPub-land first *before* implementations of key-based portable identities are more widespread.

2024-09-06 04:00:58 GMT

On an unusual train of thought I had: it'd be an interestingly dark and depressing reveal in a dystopian novel to have a subtle detail where nearly anyone that's a threat to some tyrannical government, that whenever they covertly "disappear" someone (of anyone that's not a major highly-visible public figure), that their online accounts are taken over by a government-ran generative AI trained on their collected conversation history, which would continue posting online and holding conversations to their likeness as if nothing happened (and not with any sudden 'change in tune' in beliefs or anything, like some 1984-style compelled speech).
Whereas you're following the story of the protagonist, they've made various connections with people along the way (some that they've met in-person on a few occasions), but where they correspond primarily online and usually in a private and semi-pseudonymous nature. Then it's at some late point in the story, where the protagonist is about to pull off some big feat, of something that requires the resources of their long-time connections, whereas most of them uncharacteristically back out or give very indirect responses/excuses.
Through some deductive reasoning, careful probing, and other hints, the protagonist comes across some hidden information revealing said government program, connects the dots, and realizes most of his contacts are compromised and probably haven't been alive for nearly a year, and they're just being led on as some entrapment scheme to catch them, as the protagonist is one of the very last few remaining of their mindshare.
Obviously I'm not any sort of storyteller nor writer, but that'd be neat to see someone carefully insert something like that into some story idea.