R. A. Dehi @radehi@social.cleverlibre.org

@rmerriam @shriramk Yeah, Kanren is kind of like a super-Prolog (or a super-Snobol, maybe). I think Forth is maybe actually a little less weird in that sense, with most of its strangeness being syntactic.

@rmerriam @shriramk I think is true that if you know Algol you can figure out Fortran, but Snobol and Lisp are pretty different (at least the sublanguage of Lisp without SETQ) and I think Coq and Kanren are even further out.

Helps to understand a program in a language you don't know well if the language is designed for easy readability by people who aren't familiar with it, like Python and COBOL. Also helps if the author is aiming for that. Lots of Haskell code isn't.

(Obviously none of what say here will be useful to Mastodon admins fighting fires this week.)

Maybe needing multiple machines with gigabytes of RAM to support only 75,000 users suggests that a more efficient reimplementation of #ActivityPub would be helpful. Maybe not using Ruby and using enough backpressure to handle overload conditions gracefully would help.

I don't know, how effectively can ActivityPub implementations apply backpressure? Does the protocol itself make it difficult? Can failed deliveries get reattempted after a short time if deferred due to overload?

How much total bandwidth are we talking about for this number of users? Back of the envelope? This is super stupid because haven't even read the protocol spec, so please let me know if I'm making totally wrong assumptions here.

First, the inter-server traffic. I'm thinking media attachments aren't included in the activity stream itself, but thumbnails are; those are typically 100K; everything that isn't a media attachment is of insignificant size; users typically subscribe to 100 other users on other instances, who each post 100 posts a day; one post in five has a media attachment; and on average each remote user has two subscribers on your instance, so the 10000 incoming posts a day per user gets reduced to 5000, which is 100 megabytes per user per day. Is that about right?

100 megabytes per day is about 9600 baud, so a gigabit pipe should be adequate for the inter-server communications for around 100k people.

But then you actually have to serve those posts to them, which means at least twice as much bandwidth, and maybe more if they reload the page and you can't force their browser to cache those stinky thumbnails forever.

In terms of messages per second, 5000 incoming posts per user per day is about 6000 posts per second for 100k users. That's about an order of magnitude below what RabbitMQ can do (on one machine!) and two orders of magnitude below ZeroMQ. So the bandwidth thing rather than CPU is really probably the crucial limiting factor (though not, of course, with Ruby).

@shriramk Have found learning new languages opened my mind a lot; I wonder what a CS curriculum would look like that embraced Haskell, Kanren, Elixir, Levien's Io, Coq, Pure, Forth, Verilog, APL, ToonTalk, and the pi-calculus? Type of, solving difficult problems in each of them?

Could maybe get bogged down in puzzle-solving without students achieving transferability to other domains.

@micahflee In 2002 wrote my papers in LaTeX or HTML; didn't crash.

From Brink Lindsey's [The Anti-Promethean Backlash](https://brinklindsey.substack.com/p/the-anti-promethean-backlash):

"*No, the revolution I’m talking about can be described as the anti-Promethean backlash — the broad-based cultural turn away from those forms of technological progress that extend and amplify human mastery over the physical world. The quest to build bigger, go farther and faster and higher, and harness ever greater sources of power was, if not abandoned, then greatly deprioritized in the United States and other rich democracies starting in the 1960s and 70s. We made it to the moon, and then stopped going. We pioneered commercial supersonic air travel, and then discontinued it. We developed nuclear power, and then stopped building new plants. There is really no precedent for this kind of abdication of powers in Western modernity; one historical parallel that comes to mind is the Ming dynasty’s abandonment of its expeditionary treasure fleet after the voyages of Zheng He.*"

@espen@eboks.social @allenholub Right, starring adds it to your list of starred posts. Though is less useful than it could be on Mastodon; there's no search through starred posts and no tagging.

@allenholub Also you can reply to a post, the which will see people who follow you both. And you can boost your own reply, which will see anyone who follows you.

@J12t @scottjenson @jeffjarvis Sure, pluggable algorithms have been most of what programming is about for 50 years now. Mastodon is full of pluggable algorithms.

@mmasnick Mastodon users are evangelists? When atheists get angry at theists, is rarely Zoroastrians they get angry at.

@scottjenson @jeffjarvis Might work. Which #Fediverse codebase looks most hackable?