IRC channel logs

<mhcat>moin moin (est) - I just noticed 2 trailing chars in the tor-config.txt example in the goblins doc which I do not believe should be there

<mhcat>or, put another way, caused tor not to work, which it then did when I removed the chars

<mhcat>it has been that way for a year or two I think, but I'm not sure where to report doc bugs

<mhcat>last line of the eg: "Log notice file /home/<user>/.cache/goblins/tor/tor-log.txt}|"

<dthompson>mhcat: hi! looks like that was a doc bug we fixed since the last release so it will be fixed in the next release (which is looking like next week)

<mhcat>sweet! so a fresh goblins inbound?

<dthompson>yup!

<dthompson>working on something for it rn

<mhcat>iirc you'd been focused on hoot for the last while

<dthompson>yeah I mostly focus my time on hoot

<mhcat>I think cwebber mentioned it attracted better funding than goblins in the first instance

<mhcat>good to see work happening on goblins though!

<dthompson>well we've gotten funding for both

<mhcat>much more interesting to me personally

<mhcat>excellent

<dthompson>it's just that tsyesika is our lead engineer on goblins, not me :)

<tsyesika>ACTION waves

<dthompson>but I am trying to finish up a websocket netlayer for ocapn for this upcoming release.

<mhcat>hello tsyesika!

<tsyesika>hey :)

<mhcat>dthompson: presumably that will help goblins in hoot - is there more to do to get that working (assuming it still doesn't)?

<tsyesika>the next goblins release is focused on goblins + hoot

<cwebber>mhcat: it's a bit hard to measure because when money goes to general things it's hard to point at which thing it's going to, but in a sense, Goblins has gotten more funding than Hoot so far. What you're probably thinking of is me saying that Hoot has gotten more *attention*, which is true

<cwebber>more people have picked up, played with, and used Hoot than Goblins so far

<cwebber>and part of that is that we need Goblins on Hoot to change that... which is exactly what's happening ;)

<dthompson>yup!

<dthompson>well I've just figured out one annoying bug I've been hitting with the websocket netlayer... getting there

<dthompson>phew, got websocket netlayer working on hoot again. made some changes to guile-websocket along the way so that we could use the same client interface when using the browser websocket api.

<dthompson>guile-websocket is gonna be a pretty decent little library after all this.

<mhcat>cwebber: I guess I read this https://community.spritely.institute/t/is-hoot-scope-creep-what-is-spritelys-scope/304/4 way back when

<dthompson>for those that weren't already aware, we're going to be at guix days and fosdem this year. here's a blog post about the talks we're giving and some non-spritely talks that we're excited to see! https://spritely.institute/news/spritely-is-going-to-guix-days-and-fosdem.html

<cwebber>\o/

<civodul>woot wo0t!

<civodul>really great to have y’all there!

<civodul>meeting dthompson in person for the first time, even

<civodul>really cool

<cwebber>oh yeah you've never met have you!

<cwebber>I guess dthompson hasn't met the whole "FOSDEM Guix crew" before :)

<cwebber>one of my favorite groups of people to hang out with :)

<civodul>good times ahead :-)

<dthompson>yeah I've somehow never been fosdem before

<dthompson>"somehow" I know exactly why. I hate flying :)

<dthompson>but I will go for spritely! looking forward to meeting you irl civodul and the rest of the gang too

<cwebber>ACTION also hates flying

<cwebber>hopefully I get my Pocket Reform back in time

<civodul>dthompson: yup, i undertand and sympathize, but happy to meet you at last :-)

<civodul>(and i do think we have a travel problem in FOSS too, but that’s another story)

<cwebber>civodul: I would love to stop traveling in many ways, or just use trains only

<cwebber>alas, it's a bit tough when you're in a remote org and especially if your job is to spread the word and fundraise (which, as Executive Director, mine is)

<cwebber>but I would like to see more online conferences again

<cwebber>I thought those were great

<civodul>cwebber: oh yes, i’m not blaming, i perfectly understand, having done that for a long time!

<civodul>well “that” being traveling, not being executive director :-)

<cwebber>;)

<civodul>i also think that online conferences are okay but not as pleasant as in-person conferences

<cwebber>civodul: guess we should just travel with solar panel powered boats then ;)

<civodul>heh :-)

<civodul>or we could start decentralizing more, with more local in-person meetings + hybrid/on-line meetings

<cwebber>yeah

<cwebber>though I often feel like hybrid events feel kinda like the worst of both experience-wise. I think it's good to have them and some of them do it extremely well

<civodul>anyways, for now: excitement over the coming month :-)

<cwebber>but you have to really plan for it to not give people a second rate online experience

<civodul>yeah

<cwebber>I've been to a couple really good ones

<cwebber>but most aren't very good

<civodul>ACTION nods

<cwebber>as a side note, I do hope some day we have a Spritely standard-issue laptop which runs Guix and is repairable. This is a ways out, we have to see something actually good enough to do it

<cwebber>I have some hope for the MNT Reform Next

<civodul>would be nice!

<cwebber>but as some following me on the fediverse or my blog may have seen https://dustycloud.org/blog/the-diy-foss-cyborg/

<cwebber>maybe we'll have a standard issue spritely borg conversion ;)

<cwebber>jk jk

<civodul>woow

<travisfw>dadcore, indeed. both in the good and bad ways.

<travisfw>on the topic of travel and online conferences, does anyone like any virtual words?

<cwebber>travisfw: did you ever see my olllld talk https://archive.org/download/feb_2017-live_network_coding_8sync/live_network_coding_8sync.webm

<cwebber>pre-Spritely

<travisfw>way back in the day, I spent a month deep-diving into Second Life, and my big takeaway is it was A) designed for divers. and on the flip side B) not really casually accessible for events where people don't have (and don't want to spend time to have) a custom avatar and the whole mess.

<cwebber>but partly lead to Spritely

<cwebber>and also

<cwebber>Spritely's history is largely drawn from Electric Communities Habitat

<cwebber> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNiePoNiyvE

<travisfw>I have not!

<cwebber>civodul probably remembers it :) I presented it at a few places, fosdem etc. it was a textual virtual world which I could change live as I walked around the world

<cwebber>but one of the questions the audience would ask is "how can *we* extend it?"

<Zarutian_iPad>ya mentioned it wat back

<cwebber>and of course, how to do that without having your computer pwned was an interesting and overwhelming challenge :)

<Zarutian_iPad>way*

<cwebber>until I discovered ocaps

<travisfw>but the thing about the 3d aspect online is it makes you feel like you're there. you identify with the avatar and you feel like what happens to it happens to you, so I think it really delivers *a lot* of the in-person benefits of any kind of event hosted there that you just can't get with zoom or signal.

<cwebber>travisfw: immersion definitely gets you things. though I don't think 3d is the only way to get that immersion

<cwebber>I have felt incredibly immersed in 2d worlds and even textual worlds

<cwebber>but I do enjoy 3d

<cwebber>it's a way higher barrier to entry to produce 3d content though

<Zarutian_iPad>travisfw: ya never partook in a mud/moo event then? purely textual

<Zarutian_iPad>cwebber: barrier to entry, naah not so much if you dont mind minecraft or voxels

<travisfw>Interesting. I always thought the 3d aspect was a big part for me, but now that you say so, books do it, so clearly I only need one dimension there… but I think the immersion has to be explicitly designed for, and not just a little bit.

<Zarutian_iPad>plus lots of SL stuff was rather easy to use. Used a lot of free stuff to customize my av

<cwebber>minecraft manages to get around it, yes. there have been a few other things which did too

<cwebber>I thought Syntensity was really exciting back in the day https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8KMwU1UJmw

<cwebber>it was a Javascript based collaborative multiplayer system

<Zarutian_iPad>and the free stuff was mostly made by folks that wanted to practice their 3d modelling, rigging and scripting skills

<cwebber>could build cames live from inside the game, and also it had a built-in editor

<cwebber>the author (Kripken) then left to be hired by Mozilla to kick off emscripten!

<cwebber> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYgPzXxupBM

<cwebber>It was based off of Cube 2: Saurbraten

<cwebber>which had a cool octree based in-game editor

<cwebber> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_2:_Sauerbraten

<cwebber>the game which has probably done the most with the Cube 2 engine is Red Eclipse

<cwebber> https://www.redeclipse.net/

<cwebber>which is an incredibly good open source FPS if you're into those kinds of games

<travisfw>to be clear, I *am* here to help actualize the "cyberpunk future" you mention near the end of the 8-sync talk

<cwebber>:)

<cwebber>travisfw: we have a little mini MUD system we use sometimes for dogfooding Spritely tech internally

<cwebber>called Fantasary

<cwebber>we go through cycles of using it

<Zarutian_iPad>then there is kpreids den iirc

<cwebber>yes I never got far in looking into Den! But I'd be interested to

<Zarutian_iPad>he didnt go far with it iirc

<cwebber> https://groups.google.com/g/cap-talk/c/Wa6VR-k3bLo/m/tXPKjIbvAQAJ (ignore my deadname on it pls :( ) has a bunch of thoughts that did translate into some of the fantasary work. dthompson and tsyesika took it further.

<cwebber>though not all of the original plan got implemented yet

<cwebber>the idea there was "MUDs are REPLs"

<cwebber>"chat is a very diminished REPL"

<cwebber>"chat is also a diminished MUD"

<cwebber>"can we have ocap-safe chat / MUD REPLs"

<travisfw>that makes all kinds of sense

<cwebber>:)

<Zarutian_iPad>there is even an mmo sandbox that plays with it hackmud.com

<Zarutian_iPad>folks write es6 scripts in it. I am half of mind importing lot of agoric stuff into it

<Zarutian_iPad>es6 with mongodb

<cwebber>oh fun

<Zarutian_iPad>basically I am thinking of using js-in-js, serialize, jsondiff and lz4 compress for persisting the agoric vats

<travisfw>I very much enjoy games, but my main interest is bringing the immersion to all kinds of human human connection -oriented activities like business, conferences, and families, as an upgrade to video calling.

<Zarutian_iPad>with SAO VR immersion or?

<Zarutian_iPad>there are vr headsets getting onto the market that use EEG readings to enable av movement without you needing a huge vr room

<travisfw>VR is great, but it covers your face, and is still not terribly common. too much of a barrier to be a necessity for such tech. I want people to be able to jump in just by giving access to microphone and video and that's it

<Zarutian_iPad>joypad or gamecontroler out of the question? for moving around

<travisfw>*my* concept, though not necessarily the only way to do it, is to generate a 3D avatar on-the fly based on what you actually look like, and possibly to combine environmental elements from attendees to generate the environment as well. Basically 3d video calling. But however you can make it single-click accessible to everyone who isn't interested in learning about the platform.

<travisfw>I would want it to support joypad or game controller, but also support touch for tablets, and keyboard for laptops

<travisfw>I've started in on this concept a few times in various forms. but I can't do it alone.

<travisfw>I'm more interested in advocating for such a thing, and for the value of immersion in remote work/collaboration/social connection, and I think the point that it doesn't have to look like a game (but *maybe* it could be written in a game engine anyway) is an important one.

<dthompson>regarding 3d, even simple 3d is an order of magnitude more work than a 2d environment

<dthompson>and also more expertise needed to produce things

<travisfw>yeah. but IMO the *necessary* work is the immersion aspect, which, thanks to this conversation, I now realize is not necessarily 3D!

<dthompson>I recall a talk where John Romero noted the huge gulf between doom and quake in terms of user mods/map for each

<dthompson>making a doom map is very easy compared to quake because it's essentially a 2d floor plan.

<travisfw>Yeah a 3D illusion can be easily fabricated with some up-front trig, and a bit of parallax.

<civodul>cwebber: that 8sync talk was awesome!

<civodul>everyone in the audience remembers it, no doubt :-)

<cwebber>:)

<travisfw>ACTION thanks for this Electric Communities demo too. I've been told about this before but hadn't seen it. awesome.

<travisfw>10 megs.

<cwebber>:)

<cwebber>yeah

<fr33domlover>o/ I'm considering whether to implement remote actors using local actors that serve as facades (their method handlers simply send TCP requests) - are there benefits/drawbacks to that? Haskell's lacking type-level mapping is making it difficult so I'm considering to drop these facade actors but some intuition of elegance is telling me I shouldn't -

<fr33domlover>happy to hear any thoughts "^_^ (hopefully to avoid wasting days on the wrong path)

<dthompson>fr33domlover: that sounds kind of like how goblins does thing. we have a remote reference type and you send messages to it as if it were local but it gets sent over the network via ocapn

<fr33domlover>Thanks dthompson :)

<jfred>maybe someday we can have some goblins-powered online conferences :)

<cwebber>:)

<dthompson>would be cool to have a little goblinsy virtual world to hold the conference in

IRC channel logs

2025-01-16.log