tmsr - Log 2019-11-02

mircea_popescu: incidentally : i'm pretty suspicious of something after-i-released it, because ~my~ mp-wp doesn't do the weird thing re chars/encodings spyked & all been comp;laining about.

BingoBoingo: Apologies if anyone has a bunch of incoming pings. I ran http://trilema.com/2015/how-to-fix-your-local-trackbacks/ and the scope of things to ping expanded beyong the local trackbacks. Got a ctrl-c

mircea_popescu: anyways -- i dun think a blog should list pingbacks either in the comment rss or in the "new comments" navbar.

BingoBoingo: And I'm going to move the cleaning recent comments and pingbacks down the work order list

ossabot: Logged on 2019-11-01 16:47:33 mircea_popescu: we hang spyked for shoddy bot coding once he shows up, whynot :D

spyked will look at the mess in 1min and clear up the notification queue/fix other burning problems

spyked: http://logs.ossasepia.com/log/trilema/2019-11-01#1949184 <-- no, it's precisely http://logs.ossasepia.com/log/trilema/2019-11-01#1949191 ; feedbot looks at the rss feed and a. updates its db to reflect what's on the remote end; and b. it queues notifications for items that weren't there on the previous visit.

ossabot: Logged on 2019-11-01 16:40:13 diana_coman: mircea_popescu: but so what, those 1k were still old/seen, no?

ossabot: Logged on 2019-11-01 16:42:34 mircea_popescu: i mean, your rss page was 5 items, which feedbot knew ; then your rss page had 1k items, of which feedbot knew... the first five. so listed the rest.

spyked: fwiw I don't believe this is flaw; the alternative would be for the bot to keep a list of all the items it's ever seen, but then it would be a list of all the items it's seen since the feed was first added to its db, which is an arbitrary cutoff point. wouldn't have prevented this spam anyway, since I've originally added the feed list to feedbot in 2018? and ossasepia's current rss goes all the way to 2017

spyked: nyways, this sort of thing can be handled on the operator end, e.g. I can temporarily disable feeds on demand and now we know the sort of thing that alters mp-wp rss feeds

ossabot: Logged on 2019-11-01 16:20:22 diana_coman: mp_en_viaje: hm, it would seem this has a toggle ie from settings; atm I set it to at most 1000 so it should not bother you there but it doesn't quite solve it.

ossabot: Logged on 2019-11-01 20:49:54 billymg: yeah, when originally ripping it out, my brain parsed a "if (! $richedit ) ..." as "if ( $richedit ) ..." and so removed the line

diana_coman: spyked: oh, I hadn't realised you ran into similar too, didn't quite connect and if you didn't say anything earlier...; so in the end my investigation into this yesterday covered more than I thought, huh.

ossabot: (ossasepia) 2019-11-01 diana_coman: let me see now if I can in the end identify the various problems proposed:

diana_coman: spyked: re bot, I said flaw because I don't think it should spit all entries it hasn't seen before, no; to my mind it should spit all entries *newer* than the *last one* it saw before, simply

diana_coman: if one starts now publishing stuff in the past, that's on them, not on the bot.

diana_coman: I'm also rather weary of manual disables and the like because 1. this never scales, it can't 2. now I need to keep a list of things for which to poke spyked to disable my feed if I as much as touch them on my own blog?

ossabot: (ossasepia) 2019-11-01 spyked: http://logs.ossasepia.com/log/ossasepia/2019-10-31#1008349 <-- ftr, I also stumbled upon this: http://thetarpit.org/2019/a-guide-to-systematically-exploring-the-entrails-of-mp-wp-illustrated-using-some-weird-found-in-the-post-editor . wrapping the input field content in htmlentities did the trick for me, but otherwise I thought this is something particular to my environment

spyked: well, nothing guarantees that rss entries come with a timestamp. afaik the only mandatory field is the guid.

diana_coman: spyked: hm; still a list ie once it finds what it had as "the last previously announced item", why would it look further?

spyked: re. spec, I think there was an earlier trilema post on rss, I tried to dig it yesterday but couldn't find it. I think http://thetarpit.org/2019/feedbot-manual is the closest thing to a spec, but it's a spec for commands, not for other behaviours. bot behaviour is otherwise documented in http://thetarpit.org/2019/feedbot-i (and ii and iii in the same series)

diana_coman: would help to have ...one spec, lol; at least it would help me, what can I say.

diana_coman: ftr I do enjoy reading otherwise your crisp descriptions there but as they build up, in the end I'll still have to summarise & basically extract a "spec" out of them.

spyked: okay, I'll post a spec sometime in the next coupla weeks. guess I didn't post one back in 2018/early 2019 since closest denominator I had was deedbot rss and just used that.

diana_coman: spyked: no hurry now and I'd wait anyway for other people to comment on this thread too, first.

spyked: http://logs.ossasepia.com/log/trilema/2019-11-02#1949254 <-- there's no considerations re. order at the moment. a feed entry/item is uniquely identified by the "guid" field (there's a similar field for atom feeds, dun recall the name) and feedbot maintains a set of items for each feed in the db, also grabbing, when present, title, link etc.. so if remote end rss operator wants to add an item without a date

ossabot: Logged on 2019-11-02 05:27:48 diana_coman: or does the order also change?

spyked: this could be limited to something more restrictive, but with some risk associated to breaking compatibility with feeds people might wanna subscribe to later

spyked: altho ftr, most feeds currently handled by feedbot are wordpress rss, so if that gets declared the reference point, could use it as such

spyked: anyway, I'll fire up the bot in a few mins and will be around for a while to check whether everything's alright.

spyked: http://logs.ossasepia.com/log/trilema/2019-11-02#1949252 <-- actually scratch that, there's *no* mandatory fields, ugh. so current feedbot code could still go nuts on some feeds.

ossabot: Logged on 2019-11-02 05:26:32 spyked: well, nothing guarantees that rss entries come with a timestamp. afaik the only mandatory field is the guid.

diana_coman: no mandatory fields huh, what a great... standard! spyked there is though some description inside the blog spec and possibly that's going to be the actual spec anyway (maybe iterated if more details are needed)

mircea_popescu: http://logs.ossasepia.com/log/trilema/2019-11-02#1949237 << imo the correct approach would be to try and find "what it seen" into "what it saw", and correctly recognize abc === abcdefgjiklmn

ossabot: Logged on 2019-11-02 04:24:16 spyked: fwiw I don't believe this is flaw; the alternative would be for the bot to keep a list of all the items it's ever seen, but then it would be a list of all the items it's seen since the feed was first added to its db, which is an arbitrary cutoff point. wouldn't have prevented this spam anyway, since I've originally added the feed list to feedbot in 2018? and ossasepia's current rss goes all the way to 2017

mircea_popescu: there's an aspect under which it's currently agnostic, namely that articles come in an entropy-locked timeflow, whereas it expects to see them as random lists.

mircea_popescu: how to do this, however, is admittedly a very hard problem, and i don't expect a solution has to be found/deployed rightnao.

mircea_popescu: but i suspect we'll eventually need a good algo because we'll prolly keep running into this problem. it's a first class primitive, to my eye.

ossabot: Logged on 2019-11-02 05:17:19 diana_coman: spyked: re bot, I said flaw because I don't think it should spit all entries it hasn't seen before, no; to my mind it should spit all entries *newer* than the *last one* it saw before, simply

mircea_popescu: http://logs.ossasepia.com/log/trilema/2019-11-02#1949252 << i woukldn't even protest if you expected a monotonically increasing guid tbh.

ossabot: Logged on 2019-11-02 05:26:32 spyked: well, nothing guarantees that rss entries come with a timestamp. afaik the only mandatory field is the guid.

spyked: http://logs.ossasepia.com/log/trilema/2019-11-02#1949269 <-- hm, I'd keep that distinct from the bot spec (which'd spec bot inputs/outputs and behaviour), but it does bring to light the question of whether feedbot should accept non-mp-wp-style feeds. on one hand I might want to subscribe to heathen feeds on the internets. on the other, the rift is growing anyway (e.g. feedbot doesn't do https), so it's pro

ossabot: Logged on 2019-11-02 05:57:45 diana_coman: no mandatory fields huh, what a great... standard! spyked there is though some description inside the blog spec and possibly that's going to be the actual spec anyway (maybe iterated if more details are needed)

spyked: lly not worth supporting the current (very lax) rss spec. minimally, feed items should contain at least the stuff that's being spat currently in the chans by the bot

spyked: http://logs.ossasepia.com/log/trilema/2019-11-02#1949277 <-- guids are currently arbitrary strings tho. mp-wp puts the link in ?p=postid style there iirc.

ossabot: Logged on 2019-11-02 06:22:48 mircea_popescu: http://logs.ossasepia.com/log/trilema/2019-11-02#1949252 << i woukldn't even protest if you expected a monotonically increasing guid tbh.

spyked: well, I'll ruminate a bit on the whole thing and write a proposal for the bot spec. should provide a structured starting point at the very least.

mircea_popescu: spyked, guids in rss are the postid, this isn't exactly arbitrary, it's a numeric gensym for the article -- guaranteed to monotonically increase over time.

mircea_popescu: i'd go as far as to say that any feed without a guid is ~therefore~ broken, and any software putting out such a thing has to be fixed.

mircea_popescu: meanwhile -- as perhaps the strangest case of sycophants & cut-throats hypnotizing the supposed mastermind in recorded history, it turns out that i... actually agree with ~everything~ everyone else said to asciilifeform (not that it's hard, the various rays being remarkably collimated, there's harmonic agreement the likes of which cultists' dreams are made of).

mircea_popescu: minus, i guess, the lsd theory, as the one exception. i'm rather with the classical psychology camp : the fundamental breakage in cognitive development brought into view by the unyielding flow of events was probably definitively formed by age 12 ; developmental delay is sometimes recuperated in later years -- but in the ~early~ later years.

mircea_popescu: a kid who doesn't speak by four might speak by five, and if not by five then by six. but a kid that's not spoken by twenty is not likely to speak by thirty -- the early years matter a lot more than the latter years in the natural resolution of retardation.

mircea_popescu: i understand the more fashionable neoprotestant theory on the topic requires "i can do anything" as a hard prerequisite, and therefore "personal development" or "growth" is a boundless field of possibility. i'm... well, moderately optimistic on this topic, in the sense that i don't for a second credit such nonsense.

mircea_popescu: i also don't subscribe to anon theories re frontal lobe damage & general degenerescence. yes hoarders show very similarily impaired cognition, but they're ~old~, and old only. "engineers" occur like schizophrenia, in the 30s.

mircea_popescu: maybe the way out is rather in the vein of handling addiction, make an Engineers Anonymous, build up a list of tenants, "i understand i have a problem, that i can't fix but i can try to manage, and by the higher power as i understand it ima try" or somesuch.

mircea_popescu: BingoBoingo, you feel like drafting an aa clone ? who knows, maybe your destiny is to run the engineer recovery castle.

diana_coman: I don't think it's in the engineering though; more maybe the other way around ie engineering as a result, not as a cause.

mircea_popescu: yes, well, buboes are also not the cause ; but it's still called the bubonic plague

mircea_popescu: but yes, people afflicted with "being an engineer", the mental disease, often end up working ~as~ engineers. it's a lot like pedophiles working as camp guides or w/e : superficially they're some of the best, most serious & dedicated etc workers in the field ; but as a group they're also pretty much the only serious danger to the field -- people will definitely stop sending their kids to camp if there's enough pedos running c

mircea_popescu: people will give up engineering as an activity if there's enough "being an engineer" nutcases involved.

mircea_popescu: and yes, the average person can scantly tell the difference, "the difference between pedophiles and pedagogues is that pedophiles actually like children"

mircea_popescu: just because we have a word to distinguish pedophiles from camp guides while to date there wasn't a word to distinguish "being an engineer"s from people working in engineering dun mean it's not exactly the same fucking thing.

BingoBoingo: mircea_popescu: I'll give it a thought, but I have low expectations. Also, the other side of the Late 1990's early 2000's Windows verus *nix narrative clicked in my head. The fight wasn't about the merits of any software at all. It was a fuck you to engineers in IT from Management.

BingoBoingo: "They can read ALL of the internal parts of the LUNIX thing? Nothing will ever get done!"

mircea_popescu: the problem with the deanged is that they lie, "they don't mean to", whatever, bla bla.

mircea_popescu: they just say words, devoid of particular notional content. "partnership", aka "that thing where i shit on every hand you extend every which way to sunday & for years, but it's okay because mommy loves me unconditionally"

BingoBoingo: Now, Microsofts great sin is that they fed at both ends by selling MSDN subscriptions the Engineers could sell to management. Many engineers got hooked on windows internals

mircea_popescu: so yes, they'll sit there droning about "abstract considerations", when they're, like any 9yo, simply procrastinating, instead of going to take a piss they'll tell you the theory of the parts of the kidney while wetting themselves

mircea_popescu: "the kidney is composed of the maxint part superior, the maxint part inferior, and the lizard hitler part central"'=

BingoBoingo: I'm not entirely unsure I don't have or in the past hed a touch of engineer bogging down my head, but not indentifying as an engineer myself... I am unsure what has to break for an engineer to get the resignation, that can build to a faith, that recovery can proceed from.

BingoBoingo: My youngest brother, not the dentist, is an engineer of the mechanical flavor. Whatever gets other engineers focused on the internals of their computers, it never took with him. Roughly as uninterested to him as the internals of his car. When I started putting together bookshelves back in old country for something to do with my hands, he offered to help.

BingoBoingo: His help took the form of 5-ish pages of hand written calculations covering load/span/materials etc

feedbot: http://ossasepia.com/2019/11/02/come-out-of-the-shadows/ << Ossa Sepia -- Come Out of the Shadows

lobbes: http://logs.ericbenevides.com/log/trilema/2019-11-02#1949288 << annd it is through this logline that I realize my RSS feed on my blog is broken in this sense. For some reason, it has been putting the permalink in the guid field instead of the post id. (curiously, this started once I migrated blog to new box). Ugh

ericbot: Logged on 2019-11-02 10:17:14 mircea_popescu: i'd go as far as to say that any feed without a guid is ~therefore~ broken, and any software putting out such a thing has to be fixed.

diana_coman: mircea_popescu: can I get the random-post-on-landing-page trick that trilema uses? I'm weary of just hacking it into mp-wp atm.

BingoBoingo: In local weather the Fat Forhead vice presidential can-nag-dit, absent from the campaign trail in the run up to the October elections... Is now being loud.

mircea_popescu: BingoBoingo, supposedly these are highly intelligent folk. supposedly the definition of "highly intelligent" is "can learn other than from bitter experience", nfi.

mircea_popescu: diana_coman here it is : http://paste.deedbot.org/?id=ALAE << there's two parts to it ; get_header(); is your syncing anchor.

mircea_popescu: basicaly it 1. establishes the highest article guid ; 2. it picks a value up to that (with a lot of leverage for criteria, turns out i had a special ro-only thing made by alf's request at some point) and then requests it.

diana_coman: aha; atm I'm aiming for basic "random article out of all"; let it be in Ro if it falls that way, what's the problem.

mircea_popescu: item is imo moderately didactic, demonstrates selection-by-enumeration & selection-by-threshold in the bundle. can do errything.

mircea_popescu: hey hanbot how's this sound : "You, with bread and knife at hand, yet die starv't, uncomprehend't."

mircea_popescu: diana_coman, nah, bolund is "madness in young men driven by females their age ensconced in bourgeois walls about"

mircea_popescu: 17yo ilona goes to work "in town", in strul the 59 yo jew's household instead of playing with ferenc at the haystack ; drives ferenc bolond.

mircea_popescu: "Si sa-i spui lui maicata ca tu esti femeia mea si de nu vii tu acasa vine Gyuri nu te lasa. Daca nu vii tu in sura scot cutitul din centura!!!" << bolund.

mircea_popescu: (obviously ~all imbulzeala is pullulative in nature, wtf else could it be.)

mircea_popescu: "Zici ca de m-ai fi cerut mamei tale nora-n casa, n-as fi vrut sa merg? E, lasa! Ca de-o fata cui-i pasa, nu se ia dupa parut! De-ntrebai, ai fi vazut!"

mircea_popescu: as it happens i was just going through the complete works by cosbuc these days

BingoBoingo: Lots of derps out with commie flags today, Still in the awkward between campaigns period where actors in the local democracy gotta pick up all their shit from the previous campaign or get fined to hell.

BingoBoingo has a hypothesis that the politics of most local females can be discerned through the shape of their ass. Seems to have far more predictive power than skin color or any other pseudoscientific traits.

BingoBoingo: The more of a pleasant exercised flare present, the more likely they are to be hostile to the local left

BingoBoingo: Nothing I've associated with the local XY population seems to have the same predictive value for this other than whether or not they are dressed in the traditional manner of the local Vaqueros.