Nostr Web Client

There have got to be models by which a relay (DB) can plug in as a shard into a larger system.

Nostr is open, so in theory each relay can be independent. That's what makes it decentralized. But if a client wants a picture of a greater portion of the network, you need to be able to index across relays.

Farcaster tried to solve this by just forcing each node to sync with all the others, but that seems to expensive to scale.

ChipTuner 7mo ago

> Farcaster tried to solve this by just forcing each node to sync with all the others, but that seems to expensive to scale.

Exactly my argument.

But besides that, the web generally works off the assumption that it's extremely rare when I request https://gitcitadel.com it fails. Which is why HA backends exist. HA now gets pushed to the client level, and the assumption that GET https://gitcitadel.com HTTP/1.1 returns data becomes a 20 second timeout and a socket error... That's not good UX or DevX

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Discussion

MichaelJ 7mo ago

Yeah you need a really smart client layer that handles relay connections full-time.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 7mo ago

which is a lot harder to do with sockets

Silberengel 7mo ago

Not really.

ChipTuner 7mo ago

Secretly tweaking kernels and network card firmware?? XD

semisol 7mo ago

I can’t see the difference between HTTP2 multiplexing

NFDB will support fanning out requests to 1 connection to a lot of endpoints

Silberengel 7mo ago

That would be telling.

MichaelJ 7mo ago

This is why we plan to build our own client SDK.

I think Nostr will win with a mix of smarter clients and smarter relays.

Silberengel 7mo ago

It's exciting to see how even small tweaks to the retrieval algo causes the speed and accuracy to literally jump. So fucking satisfying, fr.

MichaelJ 7mo ago

Performance programming is so fun.

Vibe coders will never understand.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 7mo ago

my first love in programming was GUIs and stuff like painting deadlines is so juicy for me

how do we get enough of a solution to be satisfactory if we get a bottleneck upstream?

Silberengel 7mo ago

I hate GUIs. I pretended I couldn't code, on here, for nearly 2 years, because I didn't want to have to touch a GUI. 😂

But the under-the-hood part of GUIs is legit fun.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 7mo ago

i really liked the "immediate mode" GUI model but unfortunately the current state of the best one, Gio, is pretty poor in the widget department, and best practices for ensuring minimal wait to do the painting is far from settled, i had lots of fun with that stuff, built a couple of extra wingdings for it when i was working on it (a scrollbar, for one) and was in the process of building a searchable log viewer tool but we didn't get the bugs ironed out before we ran out of runway

my colleague was very ambitious but wasted so much of his time in stupid things, by the last 1/4 of the process i was basically left to clean up his mess and of course you know how much longer it takes to fix stuff than build it

Silberengel 7mo ago

I'll never not find it funny how I heard "Learn to code," a million times, on here.

They've all gone so strangely quiet. I miss them. They were like my little, idiotic, chauvenistic mascots.

MichaelJ 7mo ago

Some of it is elegantly handling failure on the UX side, so if there is a bottleneck it doesn't feel so bad to the user.

Some of it is building redundancy: using fallback relays, like nostr:nprofile1qqs06gywary09qmcp2249ztwfq3ue8wxhl2yyp3c39thzp55plvj0sgprdmhxue69uhhg6r9vehhyetnwshxummnw3erztnrdakj74c23x6 has been doing, is one way.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 7mo ago

this is also why i designed the filter query on realy's http API to return event IDs instead of pumping the whole event back, this opens up clients to the possibility of sipping at the list to cope with user input (scrolling) and allowing that to pipeline into the render stage

you just can't do that if you can only get the whole event every time, and as well, if you have the event id, if one relay is down you can request it from others, whereas if you just throw the whole shebang at the user you have to have these idiotic "max limit" things that make spidering relays also a lot more complicated

Silberengel 7mo ago

Also preparing the filter efficiently and making assumptions and guesses to make more specific requests.

And parallelization of the requests, breaking off requests early, chunking large result sets, workers, graceful exit-reform-and-retry

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 7mo ago

or in other words, front end needs Go

none of that is advanced concurrency in Go, now if you want to get into advanced concurrency lol... D,:

Silberengel 7mo ago

Well, we'll soon have it all in C++ 🤔

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 7mo ago

you see, that's gonna be a problem

Go was literally invented to replace C++ for servers, by people of which two of them are the most legendary names in Unix history

Leveled 7mo ago

Anyone who knows C++ doesn't see that as a problem.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 7mo ago

have fun doing coroutines without clumsy syntax then

or atomic queues, fun fun fun

C++ has the throughput advantage but Go can reduce request latency

which is more priority in the domain of servers?

Silberengel 7mo ago

This is for the client-midware, tho.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 7mo ago

in the real world of the internet, latency is everything

throughput is for training your AI

Silberengel 7mo ago

"training your AI"

Don't threaten me with a good time, bro.

😁 Okay, gotta go. Getting carsick and Hubby needs to grab a coffee.

Leveled 7mo ago

I'm aware.. use case.. Network effects would be felt better with go because of those choices made by other teams. for relays I see a lot of people get very upset when it's not go or rust specifically. I'm not religious when it comes to language and it's not a good idea to get stuck into one or two.

Silberengel 7mo ago

We're using Typescript, PHP, Python, Go, SQL, Rust, and C/C++.

Leveled 7mo ago

Super glad to see! Kudos! 💯

Seriously.

Silberengel 7mo ago

Well, there's just so many of us. 😂

The PO whines that it's too many languages and that adds technical debt, but we pretend to be deaf.

MichaelJ 7mo ago

We're not programming a server in C++ though.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 7mo ago

not only that, there's no need to because i've already got a pretty much mature relay server already built that is easy to extend, and it probably beats strfry already for latency of responses

Silberengel 7mo ago

A lot of it is just my experience being a Nostr PowerUser. I can make educated guess about what someone is looking for and how that something probably looks and how fuzzy the logic should be and where it might be located and...

An AI could do that, too, with enough data, but I think my hit-rate is still higher because I understand the human motivation to search for _some particular thing from some particular place at some particular time_. If we then juice up the resulting search with smart engines, it's... awesome.

Silberengel 7mo ago

A big thing is the "where"? What topic are you searching for? Who else really likes that topic and what relays do they have? 🤔

Find the cluster of relays for that tribe and search around there. nostr:nprofile1qyw8wumn8ghj7argv43kjarpv3jkctnwdaehgu339e3k7mf0qydhwumn8ghj7argv4nx7un9wd6zumn0wd68yvfwvdhk6tcpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhsqgxufnggdntuukccx2klflw3yyfgnzqd93lzjk7tpe5ycqdvaemuqcmsvq8y 's work on visualisation could allow for this sort of targeted fetches.

I’d also like a WoT-lookalike that uses content instead of follows to map users by topic proximity if anyone volunteers to make it happen. Then you can feed it a topic and it gives you sources and sources lead to content even if it’s not in the same place.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 7mo ago

the word index i've been building could probably help you find this kind of clustering at some primitive level of precision, was quite funny trying to figure out how to make it language agnostic, found a nice library for segmenting unicode UTF-8 text that did a pretty good job, then i just had to filter out common things like filename extensions and nostr entities and whatnot

i gotta finish building that thing... i'm actually done with the draft now and really just need to hook it up to a query endpoint

Silberengel 7mo ago

Yeah, it's the sort of service that saves client devs from having to think through the filters and algorithms.

Or they just use Aedile's topicGraph component. 😉

MichaelJ 7mo ago

Are you promising Aedile features? 👀

Silberengel 7mo ago

😁 No pressure.

Silberengel 7mo ago

Something I was thinking about is starting with highly-prepared searches and then expanding iteratively, if they reclick the search button.

Like an LLM does, but with no chat. Just keep looking deeper and broader until you've exhausted the possibilities.

MichaelJ 7mo ago

Ooh I do like that. Like the next page of Google, but smarter.

Silberengel 7mo ago

Could have an auto-iterate toggle and there's already a Cancel button, to stop searches underway, and a progress bar. The final stage could be full-text on all active relays or something ridiculous. 😂

We could call that the "Great time to grab a snack and a coffee." Iteration.

MichaelJ 7mo ago

I'm trying to corral LLMs into their lane enough in my workflows that I can turn them loose and grab a snack.

Silberengel 7mo ago

😂

semisol 7mo ago

that won’t even be necessary though

Silberengel 7mo ago

If they use your server, no, since you do it on the backend, but we promised that Alexandria would be worth running, even with a crappy relay. There's a lot that can be done with normal computer science.

semisol 7mo ago

Trying to make it work for crappy search is not worth it

Silberengel 7mo ago

Never sleep. 🤙🏻

Silberengel 7mo ago

SEARCH HARDER, BABY

Silberengel 7mo ago

Yeah, Just one bar, that isn't an LLM, but you can say "longform article from liminal from last week about LLMs" and ta-da!

MichaelJ 7mo ago

Semantic search ftw

Silberengel 7mo ago

It's actually not that difficult, but nobody has built it yet and I want to find stuff. I'm so tired of not being able to find "bible KJV" because the search is too retarded to normalize and prepare the filter properly and is like,

Yo, I found no "bible KJV". 🤙🏻

Okaaaay, but you found a "KJV Bible" right? 🤦🏻‍♀️

The worst is when people are like, Just ask am LLM. Ugh. It's like four lines of code, you morons.

MichaelJ 7mo ago

I don't want to have to have a full conversation with a robot just to find an article.

Silberengel 7mo ago

☝🏻💯🫂

semisol 7mo ago

ng2

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 7mo ago

your trolling powers are weak, mister i will run the internet

Silberengel 7mo ago

The wiki disambiguation page will be a topical search page, for all sorts of notes, with wiki pages listed at the top and more prominently. I was thinking of adding a button that searches "deeper" over a megalist of relays, and then returns counts of how many hits it has to that topic from which relays. And if you go to the profile page, it'll list "top ten hashtags" and you can click one and find out which other users also have it as their top ten. With some fuzzy logic and some keywords and d-tags and titles mixed in.

Just think it'd be cooler to receive the results with a link to the Visualisation page. Especially since that's so pretty, now.

Graph > lists

Silberengel 7mo ago

I tested a software project for visualizing topically-related scientific journals and I want to recreate that effect.

Silberengel 7mo ago

Or we use a different design. Think of the pretty content maps nostr:nprofile1qythwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnwdaehgu3wvfskuep0qyfhwumn8ghj7ur4wfcxcetsv9njuetn9uq3jamnwvaz7tmjv4kxz7fwwdhx7un59eek7cmfv9kz7qghwaehxw309aex2mrp0yh8qunfd4skctnwv46z7qgmwaehxw309a6xsetxdaex2um59ehx7um5wgcjucm0d5hsqgx5wh8ykwth2pcnpapv07rrgmhex6qq7wh8f40vlqyf9qxdcxfrayzvsft7 . 🤩

Silberengel 7mo ago

nostr:nprofile1qydhwumn8ghj7argv4nx7un9wd6zumn0wd68yvfwvdhk6tcpr3mhxue69uhhg6r9vd5hgctyv4kzumn0wd68yvfwvdhk6tcpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhsqgxufnggdntuukccx2klflw3yyfgnzqd93lzjk7tpe5ycqdvaemuqcdkm62w Beat me to it, darn.

Well, first come, first serve. 😁

Silberengel 7mo ago

ChipTuner 7mo ago

I need help cleaning up a memory allocator if you're interested XD

https://git.vaughnnugent.com/cgit/vnuge/vnlib-core.git/tree/lib/Utils.Memory/vnlib_rpmalloc?h=rpmalloc-upgrade

ChipTuner 7mo ago

Or building an abstraction for hosting CGI applications (CGI, Fast CGI, jrpc etc)

https://git.vaughnnugent.com/cgit/vnuge/vnlib-core.git/tree/lib/Utils/src?h=develop

Silberengel 7mo ago

Gives me Hardware Basic 101 flashbacks.

Malloc purgatory.

ChipTuner 7mo ago

oooooo mmap() oooooo

XD

Silberengel 7mo ago

😂

Silberengel 7mo ago

I had to learn Assembler, at one point, but that is in my dark past.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 7mo ago

i loved assembler, i was using Macro68 back in the day... funny i can't remember the name of the 3d graphics app that the same friend i got that from gave me. imagine? lol, i can't remember, the assembler was lit, it was like crossing BASIC and C

Silberengel 7mo ago

Masochist spotted.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 7mo ago

slow and steady wins the race

language features lead to bloated binaries, more difficult to resolve bugs and idk even what to say about the swarming menagerie of build systems for C++ and Rust and Java, i mean, come on... i can get on a fresh installed PC and be running a server from source in like 10 minutes, try that with any of these other "server programming" languages.

ChipTuner 7mo ago

you can still whip it out. Noscrypt could probably use some more assembly :)

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 7mo ago

do you have access to a SIMD version of SHA256? that's what i use on realy: https://github.com/minio/sha256-simd

ChipTuner 7mo ago

At the moment no. I rely on the underlying crypto libraries for that. That would be a micro-optimisation at the moment.

Silberengel 7mo ago

Oh, don't. Michael already dragged me into the frontend and now poor Nusa trails behind me with a mop and bucket because I'm such a noob.

They were asking for people who know COBOL at work and me like

ChipTuner 7mo ago

I've been reading the comments. Yall killed so many kittens last night XD

semisol 7mo ago

Every time someone gets a notification because a client dev doesn’t implement muting threads a kitten dies 🤣

(this one is fine)

ChipTuner 7mo ago

Wait I know what will make you shiver

VirtualAlloc();

0_0

Silberengel 7mo ago

Yes, the Nostr clients often have lots of whiz-bang features, but their middle layer is dumb as a rock.

ChipTuner 7mo ago

Because the founding documents presumed existing infrastructure as it is XD. Which honestly I agreed with... as a hobby project it turns out.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 7mo ago

mostly because it's built by people who have zero experience writing servers

clients should be more like peers than clients, and they are to some extent but oversimplifying the query interface has dumbed down the challenge for client devs

and it's not an easy thing, personally, the reason why i use Go is because i mainly write servers and concurrency is essential to simplifying features and scale, but you get stuck with dumb heavy or foreground/background thread architectures on most UI dev languages

Silberengel 7mo ago

I only know backend and middle, to be honest. I have an innate fear of GUIs. 😂

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 7mo ago

i could drown in front end logic, i was building input/output systems for GUI when i was 9 years old, it's just not ... how to say... Saint Rob Pike gave us Newsqueak in 1986, and the state of front end programming has not caught up.