did-core VS cli

In 1994, Tim Berners Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The W3C is made up of groups of people focused on setting the best practices and standards for building the web. For example, the W3C develops and maintains standards for HTML, CSS, Web Accessibility, and Web Security. In July 2022, The W3C officially published standards for Decentralized Identifiers. This way, technologists would have blueprint for building and managing digital identity as we make the shift towards controlling your identity on the internet. Check out the Decentralized Identifiers specification here.

A few months ago, I started looking into decentralization on the web and how this could impact our world as we know it today - thanks to Web5 and our work at TBD. One of the biggest and most important pillars in achieving this decentralized future is called Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs).

Unfortunate choice of name, given https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/.

I'm also a software engineer, and I'm actively working on making it a thing in a parallel system (referenced above) lol. DIDs have been a standard for a while, and as someone who's had my SIN compromised (by Equifax of all places), our current way of handling ID is far easier to hack than a well implemented digital ID would be. Its actually asinine to me that I was compromised in 2016, and DID existed then... yet here we are 7 years later, with identity thefts only climbing year-over-year, and we still have antiquated, and clearly failing identity systems in place.

DESCRIPTION: We are looking for a Rust developer to join the team developing a cross-platform digital identity application using the Tauri framework and several (cloud-based) Rust components for Identity-as-a-Service solutions. We are a young start-up that is developing digital identity products and solutions for people and organizations, based on the decentralized identity standards. Our work includes developing open-source implementations of standards such as DID and Verifiable Credentials from W3C and OpenID4VC from the OpenID Foundation. Using this technology, people gain control over their own digital identities and data and can easily share verifiable information with third parties, enabling more privacy and digital trust.

DID methods are the W3C solution to decentralized identity: https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/

https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/#key-and-signature-expiration

"9.8 Verification Method Revocation" https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/#verification-method-revocati...

Blockerts is built upon W3C DID and W3C Verified Credentials, W3C Linked Data Signatures, and Merkel trees (and JSON-LD). From the Blockerts FAQ

What do you think about Decentralized Identity (DIDs - https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/)? With it, you can have several identities and easily generate new ones when needed (but you probably need to have a single, government-recognized identity for the real world).

Europe seems to be working hard on establishing an identity for every citizen: https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-... (most countries already have that, but this is about unifying the various countries' ID systems).

Domain names as handles are a cool idea, and you can already do a variant of them in the "fediverse" either by hosting your own instance of a service or by configuring a WebFinger alias (which is what I do).

I'm less convinced by DIDs[1], which is what Bluesky seems to run on: I've yet to see an explanation for why the DID standard exists, given that it effectively punts all semantics (including basic things like cryptographic verification) onto unstandardized "methods" in an uncontrolled global namespace.

[1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/

- very close is the foundation regarding Decentralized Identifiers by the W3C https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/ // https://w3c.github.io/did-core/

This package is widely used for powerful CLI builds, it is used for example for Kubernetes CLI and GitHub CLI, in addition to offering some cool features such as automatic completion of shell, automatic recognition of flags (the tags) , and you can use -h or -help for example, among other facilities.

This Docker image is designed to support implementing Github Actions with Python. As of version 4.0.0., it starts with the official python docker image as the base which is a Debian OS. It specifically uses python:3-slim to keep the image size down for faster loading of Github Actions that use pyaction. On top of the base, we've installed curl gpg, git, and the GitHub CLI. We added curl and gpg because they are needed to install the GitHub CLI, and they may come in handy anyway (especially curl) when implementing a GitHub Action.

You might be interested in GitHub's cli tool, which is open source, if you want to access GitHub without running their proprietary JS code.

https://cli.github.com/

👉 Note: This script uses the GitHub CLI. So make sure you've installed that if you haven't already. Instructions here.

View on GitHub

(Context: I'm pretty thick into Nix, and have been for about four years. Most of this post is focussed on the NixOS desktop experience, so DevOps nerds, ymmv.)

Unpopular opinion: Nix is not that hard.

What's "hard" from a nix-promotion strategy is motivating people to understand why they would want the benefits it offers. Mostly because Nix, especially with home-manager, dramatically worsens UX for several day-to-day tasks, simply by violating the Law of Least Surprise every couple of hours in normal use.

I want a fully idempotent, version-locked, rewindable user environment, with a version-controlled central config, because I have half a dozen devices that, for reasons, I need to keep perfectly interchangeable with one another. Most users do not want this, for the simple fact that mutating their configs and differentiating them locally on specific machines is not a bug, but a feature.

Even more than that, it's an expectation that most software developers share as well.

Case in point: I filed a bug against the GitHub CLI last week. If any org has the scope and motivation to build software that's compatible with NixOS, an OS most of whose users are developers, it should be GitHub, which is, at least notionally, all about developers, developers, developers. A change in GH required a config format migration, which was sensibly done by opening the config .yml and rewriting it.

Of course, this breaks NixOS not just in practice but in principle. NixOS/home-manager makes config files read-only. Surprise! https://github.com/cli/cli/issues/8462

The response from GitHub was basically, "yeah, we knew this was going to happen, we mentioned it to the packagers at NixOS, but we did it anyway, because it was still the best way to proceed for us." (And they weren't wrong.)

Now, once a month is an annoyance, but I run into these problems daily. I can't imagine any sane person -- which I am not -- would persist with using it.

Why do I keep using NixOS, then? Because I am terribly and disproprotionately annoyed by small changes in my user experience, which I find disruptive to my workflow and hence threaten my success. For me, forbidding apps from mutating the config files I established for them is a selling point. Being able to version-control an idempotent declarative config for all of them at once is heaven.

Unless you're like me, you'll hate NixOS. But some were meant for Nix.

Because

To use a proper dynamic auth for ghcr.io you can create a "credential helper" and then it is supported by flux, see here: https://fluxcd.io/flux/cheatsheets/oci-artifacts/#authentication Unfortunately the "official" credential helper for ghcr.io doesn't exist. I use this simple script as a helper: https://gist.github.com/pkit/a98411d21ecc9293066f4579088187d1 Which requires gh cli to be installed.

This Docker image is designed to support implementing Github Actions with Python. As of version 4.0.0., it starts with the official python docker image as the base which is a Debian OS. It specifically uses python:3-slim to keep the image size down for faster loading of Github Actions that use pyaction. On top of the base, we've installed curl gpg, git, and the GitHub CLI. We added curl and gpg because they are needed to install the GitHub CLI, and they may come in handy anyway (especially curl) when implementing a GitHub Action.

Two CLI tools I install right away are the GitHub CLI (via brew) and the Netlify CLI (via npm).

From the second article, a minor point but possibly helpful to other here, he contrasts doing everything in the terminal with stacked commits vs going to the Github UI. If people aren't aware, Github offers a cli tool[1]. I've been using it for a few months now and am finding it does make me more productive -- it's nice to be able to open up a PR directly from my terminal. I do still use the GH UI for a lot of things, but I'll often at least start in the terminal, and it also makes the transition from terminal to browser easy as many commands support the `--web` flag open up the right page for you (eg `gh repo view --web`).

[1] https://cli.github.com/