Checking out the Lemmy side of the sea—

  • 0 Posts
  • 27 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

help-circle


  • IPFS has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Ethereum, or indeed any blockchain. It is a protocol for storing distributing and addressing data by hashes of the content over a peer to peer network.

    There is however an initiative to create a commercial market for “pinning*”, which is blockchain based. It still has nothing to do with Ethereum, and is a distinct project that uses IPFS rather than being part of the protocol, thankfully. It is also not a “proof of work” sort of waste, but built around proving content that was promised to be stored is actually stored.

    Pinning in IPFS is effectively “hosting” data permanently. IPFS is inherently peer to peer: content you access gets added to your local cache and gets served to any peer near you asking for it—like BitTorrent—until it that cache is cleared to make space for new content you access. If nobody keeps a copy of some data you want others to access when your machines are offline, IPFS wouldn’t be particularly useful as a CDN. So peers on the network can choose to pin some data, making them exempt from being cleared with cache. It is perfectly possible to offer pinning services that have nothing to do with Filecoin or the blockchain, and those exist already. But the organization developing IPFS wanted an independent blockchain based solution simply because they felt it would scale better and give them a potential way to sustain themselves.

    Frankly, it was a bad idea then, as crypto grift was already becoming obvious. And it didn’t really take off. But since Filecoin has always been a completely separate thing to IPFS, it doesn’t affect how IPFS works in any way, which it continues to do so.

    There are many aspects of IPFS the actual protocol that could stand to be improved. But in a lot of ways, it does do many of the things a Fediverse “CDN” should. But that’s just the storage layer. Getting even the popular AP servers to agree to implement IPFS is going to be almost as realistic an expectation as getting federated identity working on AP. A personal pessimistic view.


  • I use Penpot for every personal project that I can. The new(ish) grid layout is just beautiful. Figma can’t do that, can it!

    Unfortunately, there’s a lot more Penpot can’t do that Figma can. And for any reasonably complex project, or commercial ones, I have to go back to it.

    Hopefully Penpot catches up soon! My biggest showstopper right now is variable fonts. If it was possible to manually set CSS somehow, maybe that would help bridge the gap a lot!








  • I use it almost daily when in bed and thinking of some project or the other—I like to think in text—but don’t want to bring up my notetaker and getting even more distracted.

    And I often get friends and family open one up while troubleshooting their problems. What else would I use, Notepad?

    Ultimately, why not? Why do people make little standalone tools like this? For fun, probably. Or because they can. As a learning exercise? And when it has no cost to the developer to maintain, or the user to use. Why would I even try to second-guess their motivation?







  • I use the AmazFit Band 7, the last sensibly sized watch that exists it often feels like.

    Weather fails to sync, but then it’s probably the least important feature on a watch. The only feature I really wish Gadgetbridge could do that even the official stack can’t is “nap mode”

    As a narcoleptic person still recovering from major depression, I wish I could either press a button to silence the watch and set a “smart alarm” for 30 minutes. Even better if it would turn on automatically if it detects me sleeping during the day!

    The only other thing GB can’t do is stand in for the phone-side ZeppOS API functionality, but who needs that, let’s be honest!

    Fantastic battery life to boot. I have gone two weeks after forgetting to charge it while wearing it almost 24×7!


  • The city (and district) I live in still has its name spelled incredibly wrong, and has had so for the past decade.

    You cannot select a municipality name. They’re not buildings or roads marked by mere mortals. And what you can’t select you can’t correct. It is just believed that they are always correct. Immaculate. Immutable.

    Every attempt to fix it has failed, from contacting support (as a “premium Google One customer”) or looking for senior Google Maps contributors (all of whom lost all their contacts with “higher up” Googlers when the old map transitioned into new, or just vanished once the forums closed).

    In a country where last mile location is often ambiguous, that Google manages to fail at it on a scale large enough to be visible from space says volumes about how worthless their services are.

    P.S: Yes, of course it’s correctly marked on OSM. And a lot more.