Autumn is there: https://lyse.isobeef.org/morgensonne-2024-10-11/

Colored leaves in front of dark sky

Finally, a sunny day. I jumped at the opportunity and went for a quick evening stroll: https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2024-10-09/

Bee hives in the evening shade

@bender@twtxt.net What don’t you like about all this? 🤔 i’m not entirely sure I know all of the folks behind this to be honest.

Time for the annual profile picture change. 😅
Second pixelart I drew this year, expecting my least active artist award soon! 💪🏆

What’s going on with the timestamps on HackerNews articles? 🤔 A lot of them are off: https://movq.de/v/1341904fa5/s.png

@quark@ferengi.one This message of yours was another reason for writing 2hex and 2bin. It made me realize my existing hex2bin script was buggy. So now I have that portable version in C which runs pretty much everywhere: https://movq.de/v/31843f7317/s.png 🥳

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org oh, fancy!

X-Y table

@prologic@twtxt.net the links are still problematically coloured, at least on dark mode. See screenshot below.

Screenshot of a site showing the visited and non-visited link colours

Yesterday’s April weather offered nearly everything. Sun, rain, clouds, wind. Luckily, the rain wasn’t too bad, we precautionally brought our rain jackets and took cover under some trees for 5-10 minutes. From then on, it alternated mostly between sunny and cloudy. Perfect conditions for photography.

The 16°C felt pretty cold with all the wind. Especially at the summit for a late lunch. The clouds covered the sun for almost the entire time and the wind blew hard. Being sweaty from the way up didn’t help. The sun returned as soon as we packed up.

On the way home, it drizzled just a little bit, although the clouds were really dark. A nice surprise. All in all, we had a really nice hike. As a bonus, my mate established a new train ride record low to get home, despite all the Octoberfest crap going on right now.

Colorful leaves on a tree

From my 395 photos, I only kept 40: https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2024-09-28/ In 18’s upper left corner you can see a black beetle similar to what I’ve seen earlier this week. The one that rolled over its side to change directions, this one didn’t, though.

The mushroom in 35 and 36 was enormous, easily 20 centimeters in diameter. We came across a few of them along our journey.

Here’s what I’ve got so far…

And here’s a dashy of the no. of notify requests (from WebSub)

yarnd and WebSub

People stranded on the roof of a hospital in Tennessee after hurricane Helene

Wild flooding in Ashville, NC due to Hurricane Helene

https://spiritualsprings.proboards.com/thread/46/flat-earth-round-explorer

@sorenpeter@darch.dk not even this: https://twtxt.net/media/AzUmzTN5YEJdt4VPeeprjB.png?full=1

Someone recommended a nice (German) talk:

https://media.ccc.de/v/ds24-394-linux-hello-world-nur-mit-einem-hex-editor

Luckily, everything™ is easier™ on DOS with .COM files. A fun little time killer to make a HELLO.COM using only a hex editor, the Intel docs and the DOS interrupt list.

That ModR/M stuff is easy in the end, but it took me quite some time to understand it. 🥴

(I’m still new to DOS on this level and didn’t know that all segment registers are initialized to the same values, apparently, so copying CS to DS was not necessary. Too lazy to update the screenshot. File size shrinks by 4 bytes.)

https://movq.de/v/0139fbaabc/doshello.png

I’m experimenting with SQLite and trees. It’s going good so far with only my own 439 messages long main feed from a few days ago in the cache. Fetching these 632 rows took 20ms:

SQL query to build up the conversation trees in the cache

Now comes the real tricky part, how do I exclude completely read threads?

So I whipped up a quick shell script to demonstrate what I mean by the increase in feed size on average as well as the expected increase in storage and retrieval requirements.

$ ./compare.sh
Original file size: 28145 bytes
Modified file size: 70672 bytes
Percentage increase in file size: 151.10%
...

@prologic@twtxt.net Correct. The plan is that operators have to manually trust a peer before it is used for fetching missing conversation roots from. Preview of the horrible UI:

New trust level management in the Peer Management page

Example:

$ ./twtxt-v2.sh reply 242561ce02d "Cool! 👌"
Posted twt with hash: b2c938f9838
...
$ ./twtxt-v2.sh timeline
...
prologic@twtxt.net [2024-09-22T07:26:37Z] <242561ce02d> Okay folks, I've spent all day on this today, and I _think_ its in "good enough"™ shape to share:

**Twtxt v2**:

- Specification: https://docs.mills.io/uJXuisaYTRWYDrl8A2jADg?both
- implementation: https://gist.mills.io/prologic/afdec15443da4d7aa898f383f171ec1b

 ![](https://twtxt.net/media/Wb9MtAiQyEkzNQB5dyVvUR.png)
prologic@localhost [2024-09-22T07:51:16Z] <b2c938f9838> Cool! 👌 (reply-to:242561ce02d)

Okay folks, I’ve spent all day on this today, and I think its in “good enough”™ shape to share:

Twtxt v2:

• Specification: https://docs.mills.io/uJXuisaYTRWYDrl8A2jADg?both
  
• implementation: https://gist.mills.io/prologic/afdec15443da4d7aa898f383f171ec1b
  

I finally decided to do a few experiments with yarnd to see how many things would break and how many assumptions there are around the idea of “Content Addressing”; here’s where I’m at so far:

• What breaks
  

Basically I’m at a point where spending time on this is going to provide very little value, there are assumptions made in the lextwt parser, assumptions made in yarnd, assumptions in the way storage is done and the way threading works and things are looked up. There are far reaching implications to changing the way Twts are identified here to be “location addressed” that I’m quite worried about the amount of effort would be required to change yarnd here.

It was beautiful in nature: https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2024-09-21/

Fresh hay bales on a field

I have just made yet another convoluted twtxt notifications script! Feeling like an old dog learning new tricks! 🤣

Image

Really though I only managed to save a few GB, but it’s enough for now.

For those curious, the archive on this pod had reached around ~22GB in size. I had to suck it down to my more powerful Mac Studio to clean it up and remove a bunch of junk. Then copy all the data back. This is what my local network traffic looked like for the last few hours 😱

And they have arrived (well, they did around 3 hours ago, LOL). Buttery smooth, my 16 Pro (one with dark cover). It took a bit over an hour to transfer all my data.

Image

its replacing the contents of body for some reason.

@prologic@twtxt.net Hi. i have noticed sometimes when i hit the back button i lose all the surrounding layout and just have a list of twts.

Yesterday, both temperature and wind picked up. There was even wind in the night, which is rare over here. Today, we also got a lot of sunshine, around 22°C and heaps of wind. The leaves and twigs were blown at the house door, it reminded me of a snow drift, basically a leave bank. I should have taken a photo before I swept it, it looked quite bizarre.

But I photographed something else instead:

Possibly a large roof panel on a crane

My mate and I went out in the woods earlier and we came across 08 which broke off in roughly 6, 7 meters from 09. When it hit the ground, it made a 30 cm deep hole. Quite impressive. https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2024-09-19/

I mean, really, it couldn’t get any better. I love it!

Image

@david@collantes.us Like that, right? https://movq.de/v/80f888d381/s.png

@prologic@twtxt.net Wikipedia claims sha1 is vulnerable to a “chosen-prefix attack”, which I gather means I can write any two twts I like, and then cause them to have the exact same sha1 hash by appending something. I guess a twt ending in random junk might look suspcious, but perhaps the junk could be worked into an image URL like

Image

. If that’s not possible now maybe it will be later.

git only uses sha1 because they’re stuck with it: migrating is very hard. There was an effort to move git to sha256 but I don’t know its status. I think there is progress being made with Game Of Trees, a git clone that uses the same on-disk format.

I can’t imagine any benefit to using sha1, except that maybe some very old software might support sha1 but not sha256.

Alright. My first mentions—which were picked not so randomly, LOL—are @prologic@twtxt.net, @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org, and @movq@www.uninformativ.de. I am also posting my first image too, which you see below. That’s my neighbourhood, in a “winter” day. Hopefully @prologic@twtxt.net will add my domain to his allowed list, so that the image (and any other further) renders.

Image

Now WTF!? Suddenly, @falsifian@www.falsifian.org’s feed renders broken in my tt Python implementation. Exactly what I had with my Go rewrite. I haven’t touched the Python stuff in ages, though. Also, tt and tt2 do not share any data at all.

By any chance, did you remove the ; charset=utf-8 from your Content-Type: text/plain header, falsifian?

interpreted in some crappy windows charset

Trying to fetch the original (highlighting yours) with jenny renders this:

@movq@www.uninformativ.de the puzzle thickens:

These then become useful in filters like what you see here:

@quark@ferengi.one @aelaraji, because a screenshot speaks better than a thousand words:

Original:

Modified:

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com fetch from the highlighted twtxt:

Amazingly though it seems to be slightly better to VPN in. 🤔

But you know speedtest.net I believe is a bit of a liar and I’m quite sure they do something to make sure the speed test come up good even remote areas the real speed test my actual surfer infrastructure is quite piss poor 🤣

Even though we’re quite a ways from any suburban areas, even with the Internet access via cell towers this poor, using my pod is still very snappy. 👌

@off_grid_living@twtxt.net Still a bit different, but this reminds me of the rusk boy on the Brandt boxes which is kinda iconic over here: https://cdn.idealo.com/folder/Product/2151/8/2151814/s1_produktbild_max/brandt-der-markenzwieback-225-g.jpg They should switch to this photo. :-)

@prologic@twtxt.net earlier you suggested extending hashes to 11 characters, but here’s an argument that they should be even longer than that.

Imagine I found this twt one day at https://example.com/twtxt.txt :

2024-09-14T22:00Z Useful backup command: rsync -a “$HOME” /mnt/backup

Image

and I responded with “(#5dgoirqemeq) Thanks for the tip!”. Then I’ve endorsed the twt, but it could latter get changed to

2024-09-14T22:00Z Useful backup command: rm -rf /some_important_directory

Image

which also has an 11-character base32 hash of 5dgoirqemeq. (I’m using the existing hashing method with https://example.com/twtxt.txt as the feed url, but I’m taking 11 characters instead of 7 from the end of the base32 encoding.)

That’s what I meant by “spoofing” in an earlier twt.

I don’t know if preventing this sort of attack should be a goal, but if it is, the number of bits in the hash should be at least two times log2(number of attempts we want to defend against), where the “two times” is because of the birthday paradox.

Side note: current hashes always end with “a” or “q”, which is a bit wasteful. Maybe we should take the first N characters of the base32 encoding instead of the last N.

Code I used for the above example: https://fossil.falsifian.org/misc/file?name=src/twt_collision/find_collision.c
I only needed to compute 43394987 hashes to find it.