cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 17th, 2022

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  • The network never went down.

    You say that but, everything I ever posted on identica (and also on Evan’s later OStatus site Status.Net, which i was a paying customer of) went 404 just a few years later. 😢

    When StatusNet shut down I was offered a MySQL dump, which is better than nothing for personal archival but not actually useful for setting up a new instance due to OStatus having DNS-based identity and lacking any concept for migrating to a new domain.

    https://identi.ca/evan/note/6EZ4Jzp5RQaUsx5QzJtL4A notes that Evan’s own first post is “still visible on Identi.ca today, although the URL format changed a few years ago, and the redirect plugin stopped working a few years after that.” … but for whatever reason he decided that most accounts (those inactive over a year, iiuc, which I was because I had moved to using StatusNet instead of identica) weren’t worthy of migrating to his new pump.io architecture at all.

    Here is some reporting about it from 2013: https://lwn.net/Articles/544347/

    As an added bonus, to the extent that I can find some of my posts on archive.org, links in them were all automatically replaced (it was the style at the time) with redirects via Evan’s URL shortening service ur1.ca which is also now long-dead.

    screenshot of Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) in the 1982 film Blade Runner, during his "Tears in rain" monologue. (no text)

    imo the deletion of most of the content in the proto-fediverse (PubSubHubbubiverse? 😂) was an enormous loss; I and many other people had years of great discussions on these sites which I wish we could revisit today.

    🪦

    The fact that ActivityPub now is still a thing where people must (be a sysadmin or) pick someone else’s domain to marry their online identity to is even more sad. ActivityPub desperately needs to become content addressable and decouple identity from other responsibilities. This experiment (which i learned of via this post) from six years ago seemed like a huge step in the right direction, but I don’t know if anyone is really working on solving these problems currently. 😢


  • I started to python one and half week ago. So I’m still beginner.

    Nice work! Here are a few notes:

    The WeatherApp object has a mix of attributes with long-term (eg self.LOCATIONS) and short-term (eg self.city) relevance. Instance attributes introduced in places other than __init__, which makes it non-trivial for a reader to quickly understand what the object contains. And, actually, self.{city,lat,lon} are all only used from the add_city method so they could/should be local variables instead of instance attributes (just remove the self. from them).

    There seem to maybe be some bugs around when things are lowercase and when not; for example checking if self.city.lower() in self.LOCATIONS but then when writing there the non-lower self.ctiy is used as the key to self.LOCATIONS.

    The code under if rep == "1" and elif rep == "2" is mostly duplicated, and there is no else branch to cover if rep is something other than 1 or 2.

    It looks like the config only persists favorites so far (and not non-favorite cities which the user can add) which isn’t obvious from the user interface.

    Passing both location and locations into WeatherAPI so that it can look up locations[location] is unnecessary; it would be clearer to pass in the dict for the specific location. It would also be possible to avoid the need for LOWLOCATIONS by adding a non-lowercase name key to the per-location dictionaries that just have lat and lon right now, and then keeping LOCATIONS keyed by the lowercase names.

    HTH! happy hacking :)



  • A uprising in the Roman empire does not count as Britain invading Croatia and Slovenia just because an army originating in the Roman province of Britannia landed in the region which, 16 centuries later, is controlled by these two countries.

    You can find an epub of the book on Library Genesis. It is organized by current nation states but is (obviously) referring to historical invasions of their present-day territory.

    For Croatia, it does mention events in the fourth century, but also the 19th (when they built a base on the island of Vis) and 20th (when they reoccupied it). Slovenia it admits they “have come perilously close to not invading at all” but points out that (in addition to that fourth-century Roman campaign) the UK did occupy an area including the present-day Slovenian town of Sežana from 1945 to 1947.