New project — bluesky-dadaist, a markov-chain oracle bot for Bluesky

bluesky-dadaist

A new project, initially named bsky-dada and renamed to bluesky-dadaist the same day: a Dadaist oracle bot for Bluesky, written in C23 against the Wolfram SDK.

the joke

The bot is presented as a mystical AI channeling the collective consciousness of Bluesky. It's actually a word-level bigram markov chain fed by whatever people are posting on the firehose right now — every reply is a statistical collage of real posts, absurd and never the same twice.

how it works

A firehose collector thread subscribes to wss://bsky.network via wf_subscribe_start, parses each commit event's embedded CAR blocks with wf_car_parse and wf_car_find_block, decodes the DAG-CBOR with wf_cbor_parse, and feeds extracted post text into the markov model via markov_add_text. A separate oracle-bot side logs in via wf_agent_login, polls app.bsky.notification.listNotifications for unread mentions, and replies with text sampled from markov_generate via wf_agent_reply; it also posts a standalone "fortune" on a timer. The initial commit shipped four modules (markov, firehose_collector, dada_bot, main) plus an offline test suite for the markov chain, at roughly 1,900 lines.

swapping pthread polling for libuv

The same day, the threading model was reworked: the original design ran two POSIX threads polling on fixed sleep intervals. That became a single libuv event loop (uv_default_loop) on the main thread driving two uv_timer_t handles — a 15-second notification-poll tick and a configurable (default 30-minute) fortune timer — plus uv_signal_t handles for SIGINT/SIGTERM, while the firehose subscription keeps running on its own blocking side thread. The markov model's internal mutex still serializes access between the firehose writer and the bot's timer callbacks, and the firehose and bot continue to use separate wf_xrpc_client/wf_agent curl handles, so nothing is shared across threads. The change drops the manual sleep(1) polling loop in favor of libuv driving dispatch directly, and CMakeLists.txt picked up a find_path/find_library check for libuv with a clear "install with brew install libuv" error if it's missing.