yes, yes that’s right. Mu (µ) now has a built-in LSP server for fans of VS Code / VSCodium 😅 You just go install ./cmd/mu-lsp/... and install the VS extension and hey presto 🥳 You get outlines of any Mu source, Find References and Go to Definition!

So, are you guys up for an experiment?

I’m really not happy with the domain “uninformativ.de” anymore. I’m going to switch to “movq.de” soon (or maybe something else if I get another fancy idea).

If I keep the url = field in my twtxt file, nothing should break, right? Right? 🤣

@prologic@twtxt.net Damn, nice! I know exactly what you mean – the output/screenshot looks trivial, but there’s so much going on behind the scenes. 😃

Did you do the whole dance with BIOS boot and everything?

Took me nearly all week (in my spare time), but Mu (µ) finally officially support linux/amd64 🥳 I completely refactored the native code backend and borrowed a lot of the structure from another project called wazero (the zero dependency Go WASM runtime/compiler). This is amazing stuff because now Mu (µ) runs in more places natively, as well as running everywhere Go runs via the bytecode VM interpreter 🤞

And tcell seems to support my urxvt in general: https://github.com/gdamore/tcell/blob/v2/terminfo/r/rxvt/term.go#L144

I’m trying to implement configurable key bindings in tt. Boy, is parsing the key names into tcell.EventKeys a horrible thing. This type consists of three information:

1. maybe a predefined compound key sequence, like Ctrl+A
   
2. maybe some modifiers, such as Shift, Ctrl, etc.
   
3. maybe a rune if neither modifiers are present nor a predefined compound key exists
   

It’s hardcoded usage results in code like this:

func (t *TreeView[T]) InputHandler() func(event *tcell.EventKey, setFocus func(p tview.Primitive)) {
    return t.WrapInputHandler(func(event *tcell.EventKey, setFocus func(p tview.Primitive)) {
        switch event.Key() {
        case tcell.KeyUp:
            t.moveUp()
        case tcell.KeyDown:
            t.moveDown()
        case tcell.KeyHome:
            t.moveTop()
        case tcell.KeyEnd:
            t.moveBottom()
        case tcell.KeyCtrlE:
            t.moveScrollOffsetDown()
        case tcell.KeyCtrlY:
            t.moveScrollOffsetUp()
        case tcell.KeyTab, tcell.KeyBacktab:
            if t.finished != nil {
                t.finished(event.Key())
            }
        case tcell.KeyRune:
            if event.Modifiers() == tcell.ModNone {
                switch event.Rune() {
                case 'k':
                    t.moveUp()
                case 'j':
                    t.moveDown()
                case 'g':
                    t.moveTop()
                case 'G':
                    t.moveBottom()
                }
            }
        }
    })
}

This data structure is just awful to handle and especially initialize in my opinion. Some compound tcell.Keys are mapped to human-readable names in tcell.KeyNames. However, these names always use - to join modifiers, e.g. resulting in Ctrl-A, whereas tcell.EventKey.Name() produces +-delimited strings, e.g. Ctrl+A. Gnaarf, why this asymmetry!? O_o

I just checked k9s and they’re extending tcell.KeyNames with their own tcell.Key definitions like crazy: https://github.com/derailed/k9s/blob/master/internal/ui/key.go Then, they convert an original tcell.EventKey to tcell.Key: https://github.com/derailed/k9s/blob/b53f3091ca2d9ab963913b0d5e59376aea3f3e51/internal/ui/app.go#L287 This must be used when actually handling keyboard input: https://github.com/derailed/k9s/blob/e55083ba271eed6fc4014674890f70c5ed6c70e0/internal/ui/tree.go#L101

This seems to be much nicer to use. However, I fear this will break eventually. And it’s more fragile in general, because it’s rather easy to forget the conversion or one can get confused whether a certain key at hand is now an original tcell.Key coming from the library or an “extended” one.

I will see if I can find some other programs that provide configurable tcell key bindings.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @prologic@twtxt.net That’s what I like about Go, too. However, every now and then I really dislike the result, e.g. when removing spaces from a column layout. Doesn’t happen often, but when it does, I hate it.

I think I should have a look at Python formatters, too. Pep8 is deprecated, I think, it’s been some time that I looked at it.

@kiwu@twtxt.net what’s going on, Kiwu?

It drizzled all morning when we picked up the old christmas trees in town with the scouts. Right after lunch the snow storm suddenly hit and dumped three centimeters of snow in just 15 minutes. I cycled home in these crazy conditions, freezing rain hammered my face. As soon as I arrived, it stopped. It’s now down to drizzling again.

All my soaked gear is now hung up to dry. The next 11 months, I’m going to find needles over needles in all kind of impossible places.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org It’s not super comfortable, that’s right.

But these mouse events come with a caveat anyway:

ncurses uses the XM terminfo entry to enable mouse events, but it looks like this entry does not enable motion events for most terminal emulators. Reporting motion events is supported by, say, XTerm, xiate, st, or urxvt, it just isn’t activated by XM. This makes all this dragging stuff useless.

For the moment, I edited the terminfo entry for my terminal to include motion events. That can’t be a proper solution. I’m not sure yet if I’m supposed to send the appropriate sequence manually …

And the terminfo entries for tmux or screen don’t include XM at all. tmux itself supports the mouse, but I’m not sure yet how to make it pass on the events to the programs running inside of it (maybe that’s just not supported).

To make things worse, on the Linux VT (outside of X11 or Wayland), the whole thing works differently: You have to use good old gpm to get mouse events (gpm has been around forever, I already used this on SuSE Linux). ncurses does support this, but this is a build flag and Arch Linux doesn’t set this flag. So, at the moment, I’m running a custom build of ncurses as a quick hack. 😅 And this doesn’t report motion events either! Just clicks. (I don’t know if gpm itself can report motion events, I never used the library directly.)

tl;dr: The whole thing will probably be “keyboard first” and then the mouse stuff is a gimmick on top. As much as I’d like to, this isn’t going to be like TUI applications on DOS. I’ll use “Windows” for popups or a multi-window view (with the “WindowManager” being a tiny little tiling WM).

@prologic@twtxt.net Yep! I like that this distillation metaphor makes it explicit: You have to go ahead and actually distill something. It doesn’t happen automatically. The metaphor acknowledges that this is work that needs to be done by someone.

I came across this on “Why Is SQLite Coded In C”, which I found interesting:

“There has lately been a lot of interest in “safe” programming languages like Rust or Go in which it is impossible, or is at least difficult, to make common programming errors like memory leaks or array overruns.”

If that’s true, then encountering those issues means the programmer is, simply, horrible?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I think they are Windows users, going by the lack of attention to detail, and the fact they love DFS. Ha!

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe Yeah, probably. Not going down the CURRENT route, that’s for sure. 😅

** 2026.01 week notes **
Will I succeed in making week notes a weekly activity this year?

Only time will tell!

…also, I mean…I feel like the answer is already“no” and that is fine, but anyways.

• I don’t usually take the holidays off from work, it is a nice time to catch up on stuff while still being able to hang out with my family who are all off from school and work.
  
• I’ve moved where I work in the house so that it is easier for me to hang out with the dog who’s struggling to go up and down stairs, which is kinda problematic since … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Not bad for a start, ey! Looking forward to see you going down these rabbit holes and opening one can of worms after the other. :‘-D Very, very impressive, hats off to you. :-)

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe Because you might not want to commit all changed files in a single commit. I very often make use of this and create several commits. In fact, I like to git add --patch to interactively select which parts of a file go in the next commit. This happens most likely when refactoring during a feature implementation or bug fix. I couldn’t live without that anymore. :-)

If you have a much more organized way of working where this does not come up, you can just git commit --all to include all changed files in the next commit without git adding them first. But new files still have to be git added manually once.

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe Yeah, they don’t truly support XDG. In fact, I looked in the Go stdlib source code to notice all the differences and shortcomings.

Ok, the standard library implementation is wonky at best, at least in regards to XDG, because it really doesn’t implement it properly. https://github.com/golang/go/issues/62382 I stick to my own code then. It doesn’t properly support anything else than Linux or Unixes that use XDG, but personally, I don’t care about them anyway. And the cross-platform situation is a giant mess. Unsurprisingly.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Thanks! I’ll have a look at SnipMate. Currently, I’m (mis)using the abbreviation mechanism to expand a code snippet inplace, e.g.

autocmd FileType go inoreab <buffer> testfunc func Test(t *testing.T) {<CR>}<ESC>k0wwi

or this monstrosity:

autocmd FileType go inoreab <buffer> tabletest for _, tt := range []struct {<CR>    name string<CR><CR><BS>}{<CR>   {<CR>   name: "",<CR><BS>},<CR><BS>} {<CR>  t.Run(tt.name, func(t *testing.T) {<CR><CR>})<CR><BS>}<ESC>9ki<TAB>

But this of course has the disadvantage that I still have to remove the last space or tab to trigger the expansion by hand again. It’s a bit annoying, but better than typing it out by hand.

** Year in review, 2025 **
Here, an obligatory end of year wrap up kinda post that, as I started to write in what I assume is the classical platonic form for all blogs wherein I reflect thoughtfully on stuff I read, or games I played, or projects I twiddled at, and what not, I became overwhelmed by the act of creating a kinda cursory and meandering review, because, what, in this run on sentence, do I have to contribute that I really wanna commit to you, dear reader?

Instead, let’s try the following.

Right now, in 2025, I’ve go … ⌘ Read more

The tt URLs View now automatically selects the first URL that I probably are going to open. In decreasing order, the URL types are:

1. markdown media URLs (images, videos, etc.)
   
2. markdown or plaintext URLs
   
3. subjects
   
4. mentions
   

I might differentiate between mentions of subscribed and unsubscribed feeds in the future. The odds of opening a new feed over an already existing one are higher.

@zvava@twtxt.net By hashing definition, if you edit your message, it simply becomes a new message. It’s just not the same message anymore. At least from a technical point of view. As a human, personally I disagree, but that’s what I’m stuck with. There’s no reliable way to detect and “correct” for that.

Storing the hash in your database doesn’t prevent you from switching to another hashing implementation later on. As of now, message creation timestamps earlier than some magical point in time use twt hash v1, messages on or after that magical timestamp use twt hash v2. So, a message either has a v1 or a v2 hash, but not both. At least one of them is never meaningful.

Once you “upgrade” your database schema, you can check for stored messages from the future which should have been hashed using v2, but were actually v1-hashed and simply fix them.

If there will ever be another addressing scheme, you could reuse the existing hash column if it supersedes the v1/v2 hashes. Otherwise, a new column might be useful, or perhaps no column at all (looking at location-based addressing or how it was called). The old v1/v2 hashes are still needed for all past conversation trees.

In my opinion, always recalculating the hashes is a big waste of time and energy. But if it serves you well, then go for it.

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe Nah it’s more like there’s a lot of repeated code, because when you go from source language to intermediate representation to machine code, well you just end up writing a lot of the same patterns over and over again. I need to dedupe this I think.

@prologic@twtxt.net Not even entirely sure how I did it myself, but likely a lucky combination of the new tail swirl, the legs closer to the screen being bigger and the head looking slightly to the side (eye & ear position), with bottom part of the hair, going behind the snout. The white is just an outline, around most of my works, so I don’t think that plays a part.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de From 2:50 PM to 3:23 PM AEST (+10 UTC) there was an outage. Everything went “up” on Down Detector, my EU region went offline, numerous sites were unavailable, and so on. Basically everything to/from the EU appeared to basically go kaput.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org These tables get shuffled around every time your OS switches to another process. It’s crazy that so much is going on behind the scenes.

There is a #Processing survey going on at:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSduTT2cWlXzr7QG_g4LJ-Op6LwVTI7dtXHCGVH_FdI0BK00qg/viewform

I’m happy it mentions #py5 at some point.

At the end there is this invitation for the Processing Discord server. I find it unfortunate that the Processing Foundation is moving the community towards a closed, opaque platform controlled by a corporation, when they have the open and searchable forum powered by Discourse. I wish I understood the reasoning. I know Discord can be “convenient” but IMHO the downsides are much bigger.

#CreativeCoding #Discourse

@kiwu@twtxt.net Assembly is usually the most low-level programming language that you can get. Typical programming languages like Python or Go are a thick layer of abstraction over what the CPU actually does, but with Assembler you get to see it all and you get full control. (With lots of caveats and footnotes. 😅)

I’m interested in the boot process, i.e. what exactly happens when you turn on your computer. In that area, using Assembler is a must, because you really need that fine-grained control here.

@kiwu@twtxt.net I’m doing great, how’re ya going? Just two more days and then I never have to work anymore. In this year.

I just baked two trays of gingerbread. One definitely good one and another experiment.

This morning was also super pretty: https://lyse.isobeef.org/morgensonne-2025-12-19/

I finished all 12 days of Advent of Code 2025! #AdventOfCode https://adventofcode.com — did it in my own language, mu (Go/Python-ish, dynamic, int/bool/string, no floats/bitwise). Found a VM bug, fixed it, and the self-hosted mu compiler/VM (written in mu, host in Go) carried me through. 🥳

I just completed “Printing Department” - Day 4 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode https://adventofcode.com/2025/day/4 – Again, I’m doing this in mu, a Go(ish) / Python(ish) dynamic langugage that I had to design and build first which has very few builtins and only a handful of types (ints, no flots). 🤣

I just completed “Lobby” - Day 3 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode https://adventofcode.com/2025/day/3 – Again, I’m doing this in mu, a Go(ish) / Python(ish) dynamic langugage that I had to design and build first which has very few builtins and only a handful of types (ints, no flots). 🤣

Ahh that’s because I forgot to call main() at the end of the source file. mu is a bit of a dynamic programming language, mix of Go(ish) and Python(ish).

$ ./bin/mu examples/aoc2025/day1.mu 
Execution failed: undefined variable readline

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe is that https://github.com/owncloud/ocis (Go based, instead of PHP 🤮)?

@prologic@twtxt.net Here you go:

(LTT = “Linus Tech Tips”, that’s the host.)

LTT: There was a recent thing from a major tech company, where developers were asked to say how many lines of code they wrote – and if it wasn’t enough, they were terminated. And there was someone here that was extremely upset about that approach to measuring productivity, because–

Torvalds: Oh yeah, no, you shouldn’t even be upset. At that point, that’s just incompetence. Anybody who thinks that’s a valid metric is too stupid to work at a tech company.

LTT: You do know who you just said that about, right?

Torvalds: No.

LTT: Oh. Uh, he was a prominent figure in the, uh, improved efficiency of the US government recently.

Torvalds: Oh. Apparently I was spot on.

@prologic@twtxt.net Ah, shit, you might be right. You can even buy these slot plates on Amazon. I didn’t even think to check Amazon, I went straight to eBay and tried to find it there, because I thought “it’s so old, nobody is going to use that anymore, I need to buy second-hand”. 🤦🤦🤦

It really shows that I built my last PC so long ago … I know next to nothing about current hardware. 😢

@prologic@twtxt.net Well, to be fair, if you show me any picture of a penguin (or in fact any bird), I’ll go “awwwwwww 😍” for a little while. 😅

It was though year. I finished my PhD, yay! Now, I’m on vacation from my main job, as educator at Sesc, and yesterday I wound down some last freelance work obligations. I really need a break.

I want to rest, make some “prints” of my drawings for friends, go to my local museums and have coffee/tea with friends, and that’s it!

Today we celebrate 18 years of our local #Python users group, #GruPySP, and I’m going to meet friends from #GaroaHackerClube, that’s a great start :)

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe yeah, that’s the only reason why I use sub-domains when trying anything federated (I believe Matrix has the same problem), in case things didn’t go as planned I can just migrate and take it down.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org no wonder I picked that cake (albeit coincidentally), I adore almonds, and hazelnuts! Your teammates are absolutely amazing, dude! A very nice project farewell! On leaving places I have a small anecdote.

I know someone who on 3 February 2004 left his job to go elsewhere. At the time his teammates threw a party, and gave him a very nice portable storage. Twenty days later, he returned, and jokingly they asked him for the storage, and money spent on farewell party back. I heard, from a close source, that he gave them his middle finger, but don’t quote me on that. 😂😂😂

The most interesting part about mu is that the language is actually self-hosted and written in itself. There is a stage zero compound written and go on a stage one compiler written in mu

Thinking about doing Advent of Code in my own tiny language mu this year.

mu is:

• Dynamically typed
  
• Lexically scoped with closures
  
• Has a Go-like curly-brace syntax
  
• Built around lists, maps, and first-class functions
  

Key syntax:

• Functions use fn and braces:
  

fn add(a, b) {
    return a + b
}

• Variables use := for declaration and = for assignment:
  

x := 10
x = x + 1

• Control flow includes if / else and while:
  

if x > 5 {
    println("big")
} else {
    println("small")
}

while x < 10 {
    x = x + 1
}

• Lists and maps:
  

nums := [1, 2, 3]
nums[1] = 42

ages := {"alice": 30, "bob": 25}
ages["bob"] = ages["bob"] + 1

Supported types:

• int
  
• bool
  
• string
  
• list
  
• map
  
• fn
  
• nil
  

mu feels like a tiny little Go-ish, Python-ish language — curious to see how far I can get with it for Advent of Code this year. 🎄

@prologic@twtxt.net pretty cool! I like these, wish there was a way (I am sure there is, but not for tourists) to go to the top. :-)

Advent of Code 2025 starts tomorrow. 🥳🎄

This year, I’m going to use Python 1 on SuSE Linux 6.4, writing the code on my trusty old Pentium 133 with its 64 MB of RAM. No idea if that old version of Python will be fast enough for later puzzles. We’ll see.

Image

That’s going to be most of our holidays next year 🤣 Mostly because we bought a van to go “glamping” about the country 😆

@movq@www.uninformativ.de You don’t go on holidays anywhere? 🧐

@kiwu@twtxt.net It also greatly depends on what kind of videos you plan to record. When you go, let’s say, diving, the specs need to be probably more suited to that type of environment. What about zoom, macro shots, wide landscapes, and so on? When typically mounted on a tripod, I’d say builtin image stabilization is not required, but for more action shots, this is fairly important to not get sea sick. :-)

I’ve got a Nikon Coolpix S9300. I typically only take photos, but it also works for the occasional video. Free hand moves are quite difficult, but when mounted to a tripod, this is not too shabby. There’s absolutely no way around a (makeshift) tridpod when zooming in, though. The audio is definitely not the best, especially wind destroys everything. If I recorded more video, I would certainly want to have an external microphone.

@prologic@twtxt.net Hmm. 🤔 Well, I don’t run that server myself, so I can’t peek into the logs to see what’s going wrong … 🥴

Finally!! I can go to sleep!

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe there you go! What I am trying to say is, if @prologic@twtxt.net truly wants to be able to diagnose something as difficult to diagnose as ActivityPub, he ought to run his own. There is no workaround.

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com I think I’ll just end up using the Official CrowdSec Go library 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net The main thing that I tought of is that whomever is abusing your services must be a well known actor (by range/set of IPs) that got reported by other Crowdsec users. So to my simpleton’s understanding, your reverse-proxy/web server passes the requests by crowdsec for processing, they get banned for $N hours if the source has already been blacklisted by the community or violates any of a set of behavior base rules (and even more hours for repeat offenders); otherwise the requests/responses go as per usual. Not sure if I got things right but this might help paint a better picture of the process.

This caveman is getting too old for the Internet… 😅 It took me 1 hrs and 50 mins to catch up with what’s been going on my feed.

When I try to login to PayPal I now see:

Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker

Here’s the thing. PayPal takes fees from transactions and payments received and sent.

I have very right not have ads shoved in my face for something that isn’t actually free in the first place and costs money to use. If PayPal would like to continue to piss off folks me like, then I’ll happily close my PayPal account and go somewhere else that doesn’t shove ads in my face and consume 30-40% of my Internet bandwidth on useless garbage/crap.

#PayPal #Ads

@prologic@twtxt.net Time to make a new internet. Maybe one that intentionally doesn’t “scale” and remains slow (on both ends) so it’s harder to overload in this manner, harder to abuse for tracking your every move, … Got any of those 56k modems left?

(I’m half-joking. “Make The Internet Expensive Again” like it was in the 1990ies and some of these problems might go away. Disclaimer: I didn’t have my coffee yet. 😅)

Fark me 🤦‍♂️ I woke up quite late today (after a long night helping/assisting with a Mainframe migration last night fork work) to abusive traffic and my alerts going off. The impact? My pod (twtxt.net) was being hammered by something at a request rate of 30 req/s (there are global rate limits in place, but still…). The culprit? Turned out to be a particular IP 43.134.51.191 and after looking into who own s that IP I discovered it was yet-another-bad-customer-or-whatever from Tencent, so that entire network (ASN) is now blocked from my Edge:

+# Who: Tentcent
+# Why: Bad Bots
+132203

Total damage?

$ caddy-log-formatter twtxt.net.log | cut -f 1 -d  ' ' | sort | uniq -c | sort -r -n -k 1 | head -n 5
  61371 43.134.51.191
    402 159.196.9.199
    121 45.77.238.240
      8 106.200.1.116
      6 104.250.53.138

61k reqs over an hour or so (before I noticed), bunch of CPU time burned, and useless waste of my fucking time.

All my newly added test cases failed, that movq thankfully provided in https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/twtxt.dev/pulls/28#issuecomment-20801 for the draft of the twt hash v2 extension. The first error was easy to see in the diff. The hashes were way too long. You’ve already guessed it, I had cut the hash from the twelfth character towards the end instead of taking the first twelve characters: hash[12:] instead of hash[:12].

After fixing this rookie mistake, the tests still all failed. Hmmm. Did I still cut the wrong twelve characters? :-? I even checked the Go reference implementation in the document itself. But it read basically the same as mine. Strange, what the heck is going on here?

Turns out that my vim replacements to transform the Python code into Go code butchered all the URLs. ;-) The order of operations matters. I first replaced the equals with colons for the subtest struct fields and then wanted to transform the RFC 3339 timestamp strings to time.Date(…) calls. So, I replaced the colons in the time with commas and spaces. Hence, my URLs then also all read https, //example.com/twtxt.txt.

But that was it. All test green. \o/

And regarding those broken URLs: I once speculated that these bots operate on an old dataset, because I thought that my redirect rules actually were broken once and produced loops. But a) I cannot reproduce this today, and b) I cannot find anything related to that in my Git history, either. But it’s hard to tell, because I switched operating systems and webservers since then …

But the thing is that I’m seeing new URLs constructed in this pattern. So this can’t just be an old crawling dataset.

I am now wondering if those broken URLs are bot bugs as well.

They look like this (zalgo is a new project):

https://www.uninformativ.de/projects/slinp/zalgo/scksums/bevelbar/

When you request that URL, you get redirected to /git/:

$ curl -sI https://www.uninformativ.de/projects/slinp/zalgo/scksums/bevelbar/
HTTP/1.0 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Sat, 22 Nov 2025 06:13:51 GMT
Server: OpenBSD httpd
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 510
Location: /git/

And on /git/, there are links to my repos. So if a broken client requests https://www.uninformativ.de/projects/slinp/zalgo/scksums/bevelbar/, then sees a bunch of links and simply appends them, you’ll end up with an infinite loop.

Is that what’s going on here or are my redirects actually still broken … ?

@prologic@twtxt.net I couldn’t have phrased it any better than @bender@twtxt.net. :-)

Twice or three times the money as before sounds a bit suspicious to me. Of course, I could be wrong, but I always was under the impression, that your last jobs weren’t all that badly salaried. If the new offer is really paid this highly, it might be a shit job. For me, money isn’t everything, I’d rather opt for a lower income where the job is fun than hating to go to work every day. But if the new job ticks all boxes, go for it. :-)

Also: Consult your pillow, don’t rush it.

@bender@twtxt.net That’s actually kind of what I was going for, just with a stylized “t” and some blue/purple/red shades 🤣

@prologic@twtxt.net Hm, same startup delay. (Go is not an option for me anyway.)

It’s hard to tell why all this is so slow. Maybe in this particular case it has something to do with fonts: strace shows the program loading the fontconfig configs several times, and that takes up a bulk of the startup time. 🤔 (Qt6 or Java don’t do that, but they’re still slow to start up – for other reasons, apparently.)

To be fair, it’s “just” the initial program startup (with warm I/O caches). Once it’s running, it’s fine. All toolkits I’ve tried are. But I don’t want to accept such delays, not in the year 2025. 😅 Imagine every terminal window needing half a second to appear on the screen … nah, man.

@prologic@twtxt.net we are not going to get far by blaming the other side. 😅😂

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org nginx allows logging per user, via using defined variables on configuration. Not sure, though, if a Tilde would be willing to go to those “extremes”.

Demon girl not letting go (TheSafeAnnaAnon) [Anna Anon] ⌘ Read more

Lol, YouTube supports increasing the playback speed, but when you want to go to 4x, they want you to pay extra:

https://movq.de/v/a1c79485fb/s.png

Android shopping list apps disappointed me too many times, so I went back to writing these lists by hand a while ago.

Here’s what’s more fun: Write them in Vim and then print them on the dotmatrix printer. 🥳

And, because I can, I use my own font for that, i.e. ImageMagick renders an image file and then a little tool converts that to ESC/P so I can dump it to /dev/usb/lp0.

(I have so much scrap paper from mail spam lying around that I don’t feel too bad about this. All these sheets would go straight to the bin otherwise.)

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Thank you for the encouragement and love and kind words, @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @movq@www.uninformativ.de @bender@twtxt.net @doesnm@doesnm.p.psf.lt and others along the way I’m not sure of their feed uris 💕 I’ll keep at it, but for the time being I will keep my distance, mostly off IRC, because I don’t have the energy to spare in that kind of engagement (what//if the worst happens, it’s so draining). I need to remember what I ever did any of this for, it was back in ~2020 and I wanted really to build small interconnected communities that any non “tech savvy” person (more or less) could also benefit from ane enjoy. Even if there are aspects of the specs we’ve built/extended over time that aren’t “perfect”™, they’re “good enough”™ that they’ve last 5+ years (I believe this is 6 years running now). I want to spend a bit of time going back to why I did any of this in the the first place, and get a little micro-SaaS offering going (barely covering running costs) so encourage more folks to run pods, and thus twtxt feeds and grow the community ever so slightly. Other than that, I plan to get the specs “in order” to a point (with @movq@www.uninformativ.de and @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org’s help) where I hope they’ll stand the test of time – like SMTP.

Thank you all ! 🙏

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org an advent of code, I love it! Go, Lyse, go!

I should work on my client again and add some new features. Like adding a new feed directly in the client and not having to go to the config first. And showing a preview of a feed before actually adding it. Also, a search would be something to add. And finally combining my User-Agent analyzer with my subscription list to spot new feeds automatically.

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Thanks for sharing your thoughts! I’m going to bed, but I’ll have a closer read/think tomorrow 🤞

@prologic@twtxt.net Let’s go through it one by one. Here’s a wall of text that took me over 1.5 hours to write.

This section says AI should not be treated as an authority. This is actually just what I said, except the AI phrased/framed it like it was a counter-argument.

The AI also said that users must develop “AI literacy”, again phrasing/framing it like a counter-argument. Well, that is also just what I said. I said you should treat AI output like a random blog and you should verify the sources, yadda yadda. That is “AI literacy”, isn’t it?

My text went one step further, though: I said that when you take this requirement of “AI literacy” into account, you basically end up with a fancy search engine, with extra overhead that costs time. The AI missed/ignored this in its reply.

Okay, so, the AI also said that you should use AI tools just for drafting and brainstorming. Granted, a very rough draft of something will probably be doable. But then you have to diligently verify every little detail of this draft – okay, fine, a draft is a draft, it’s fine if it contains errors. The thing is, though, that you really must do this verification. And I claim that many people will not do it, because AI outputs look sooooo convincing, they don’t feel like a draft that needs editing.

Can you, as an expert, still use an AI draft as a basis/foundation? Yeah, probably. But here’s the kicker: You did not create that draft. You were not involved in the “thought process” behind it. When you, a human being, make a draft, you often think something like: “Okay, I want to draw a picture of a landscape and there’s going to be a little house, but for now, I’ll just put in a rough sketch of the house and add the details later.” You are aware of what you left out. When the AI did the draft, you are not aware of what’s missing – even more so when every AI output already looks like a final product. For me, personally, this makes it much harder and slower to verify such a draft, and I mentioned this in my text.

You, @prologic@twtxt.net, also mentioned this in your car tyre example.

In my text, I gave two analogies: The gym analogy and the Google Translate analogy. Your car tyre example falls in the same category, but Gemini’s calculator example is different (and, again, gaslight-y, see below).

What I meant in my text: A person wants to be a programmer. To me, a programmer is a person who writes code, understands code, maintains code, writes documentation, and so on. In your example, a person who changes a car tyre would be a mechanic. Now, if you use AI to write the code and documentation for you, are you still a programmer? If you have no understanding of said code, are you a programmer? A person who does not know how to change a car tyre, is that still a mechanic?

No, you’re something else. You should not be hired as a programmer or a mechanic.

Yes, that is “skill evolution” – which is pretty much my point! But the AI framed it like a counter-argument. It didn’t understand my text.

(But what if that’s our future? What if all programming will look like that in some years? I claim: It’s not possible. If you don’t know how to program, then you don’t know how to read/understand code written by an AI. You are something else, but you’re not a programmer. It might be valid to be something else – but that wasn’t my point, my point was that you’re not a bloody programmer.)

Gemini’s calculator example is garbage, I think. Crunching numbers and doing mathematics (i.e., “complex problem-solving”) are two different things. Just because you now have a calculator, doesn’t mean it’ll free you up to do mathematical proofs or whatever.

What would have worked is this: Let’s say you’re an accountant and you sum up spendings. Without a calculator, this takes a lot of time and is error prone. But when you have one, you can work faster. But once again, there’s a little gaslight-y detail: A calculator is correct. Yes, it could have “bugs” (hello Intel FDIV), but its design actually properly calculates numbers. AI, on the other hand, does not understand a thing (our current AI, that is), it’s just a statistical model. So, this modified example (“accountant with a calculator”) would actually have to be phrased like this: Suppose there’s an accountant and you give her a magic box that spits out the correct result in, what, I don’t know, 70-90% of the time. The accountant couldn’t rely on this box now, could she? She’d either have to double-check everything or accept possibly wrong results. And that is how I feel like when I work with AI tools.

Gemini has no idea that its calculator example doesn’t make sense. It just spits out some generic “argument” that it picked up on some website.

The AI makes two points here. The first one, I might actually agree with (“bad bot behavior is not the fault of AI itself”).

The second point is, once again, gaslighting, because it is phrased/framed like a counter-argument. It implies that I said something which I didn’t. Like the AI, I said that you would have to adjust the copyright law! At the same time, the AI answer didn’t even question whether it’s okay to break the current law or not. It just said “lol yeah, change the laws”. (I wonder in what way the laws would have to be changed in the AI’s “opinion”, because some of these changes could kill some business opportunities – or the laws would have to have special AI clauses that only benefit the AI techbros. But I digress, that wasn’t part of Gemini’s answer.)

Except for one point, I don’t accept any of Gemini’s “criticism”. It didn’t pick up on lots of details, ignored arguments, and I can just instinctively tell that this thing does not understand anything it wrote (which is correct, it’s just a statistical model).

And it framed everything like a counter-argument, while actually repeating what I said. That’s gaslighting: When Alice says “the sky is blue” and Bob replies with “why do you say the sky is purple?!”

But it sure looks convincing, doesn’t it?

This took so much of my time. I won’t do this again. 😂

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I am genuinely curious as to why you think Geminis summarization and the categorization of your gopher post was and is as you say misunderstood?

I asked this very genuinely because before reading @bender@twtxt.net’s comments and Gemini summarization I actually went and unplugged your post into flood gaps go for proxy, and then listen to the text intently with my own human ears 👂

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@prologic@twtxt.net that poke will go no where. It is 502d. 😅

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@kiwu@twtxt.net wanna trade? I would be willing to become celibate to go back to my 20s, and believe me, if there is something I don’t want to do is becoming celibate, so that ought to tell you something! 😅

@prologic@twtxt.net Nothing, yet. It was sent in written form. There’s probably little point in fighting this, they have made up their minds already (and AI is being rolled up en masse in other departments), but on the other hand, there are – truthfully – very few areas where AI could actually be useful to me.

There are going to be many discussions about this …

This is completely against the “spirit” of this company, btw. We used to say: “It’s the goal that matters. Use whatever tools you think are appropriate.” That’s why I’m allowed to use Linux on my laptop. Maybe they will back down eventually when they realize that trying to push this on people is pointless. Maybe not.

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@kiwu@twtxt.net I wouldn’t go that far haha 🤣 I’m not sure I’m all that wise 😂

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Someone I grew up with happened to go to the same college as me, and now we happen to live in the same relatively small city. We’ve been totally casual but pretty consistent mainstays of each others’ lives for going on 20 years at this point. She’s also one of the few people that I run into who knows that I can’t actually see well enough to reliably tell people apart from any further away than like 4 or 5 feet, and I always feel really appreciative whenever she waves that she also always says“hi” and who … ⌘ Read more

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ProcessOne: AI Bots Can’t Use WhatsApp Anymore. So… Who Are They Going to Talk To?

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Meta just closed the gates on AI chatbots. I think this is an early warning.

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@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah, give it a shot. At worst you know that you have to continue your quest. :-)

Fun fact, during a semester break I was actually a little bored, so I just started reading the Qt documentation. I didn’t plan on using Qt for anything, though. I only looked at the docs because they were on my bucket list for some reason. Qt was probably recommended to me and coming from KDE myself, that was motivation enough to look at the docs just for fun.

The more I read, the more hooked I got. The documentation was extremely well written, something I’ve never seen before. The structure was very well thought out and I got the impression that I understood what the people thought when they actually designed Qt.

A few days in I decided to actually give it a real try. Having never done anything in C++ before, I quickly realized that this endeavor won’t succeed. I simply couldn’t get it going. But I found the Qt bindings for Python, so that was a new boost. And quickly after, I discovered that there were even KDE bindings for Python in my package manager, so I immediately switched to them as that integrated into my KDE desktop even nicer.

I used the Python KDE bindings for one larger project, a planning software for a summer camp that we used several years. It’s main feature was to see who is available to do an activity. In the past, that was done on a large sheet of paper, but people got assigned two activities at the same time or weren’t assigned at all. So, by showing people in yellow (free), green (one activity assigned) and red (overbooked), this sped up and improved the planning process.

Another core feature was to generate personalized time tables (just like back in school) and a dedicated view for the morning meeting on site.

It was extended over the years with all sorts of stuff. E.g. I then implemented a warning if all the custodians of an activitiy with kids were underage to satisfy new the guidelines that there should be somebody of age.

Just before the pandemic I started to even add support for personalized live views on phones or tablets during the planning process (with web sockets, though). This way, people could see their own schedule or independently check at which day an activity takes place etc. For these side quests, they don’t have to check the large matrix on the projector. But the project died there.

Here’s a screenshot from one of the main views: https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/k3man.png

This Python+Qt rewrite replaced and improved the Java+Swing predecessor.

Cool. I think I’ve improved this abit. Update going out shortly… Also added optional support for displaying gravatar(s) if you supply your email address (optional of course).

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Go complain to the BeerCSS 🍻 developers 🤣

And maybe I should go back to using GUI designers. Haven’t used those since the Visual Basic days. 🤔 It wasn’t pretty, but you got results very quickly and efficiently.

(When I switched to Linux, I quickly got stuck with GTK and that only had Glade, which wasn’t super great at the time, so I didn’t start using it … and then I never questioned that decision …)

https://movq.de/v/eaa24b109b/vb.png

@prologic@twtxt.net Hmm, I’ll have to take a look. Appears to be Go only, doesn’t it?

I’m not quite sold yet on the idea of “immediate mode” GUIs. 🤔

@bender@twtxt.net You are totally correct! The thing is: The Caveman within was thinking how minimal can one go before things start to get too uncomfortable? And if cavemen weren’t supposed to be too self-conscious about their spelling, I could have just ssh remote echo "$(date -Is)\tTwt Twt Mother-Lover! 🤣🤣" >> /path/to/twtxt.txt and called it a day.

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@prologic@twtxt.net That sounds horrible. 😅 I wouldn’t want to own such a car. (My plan is not to buy a new car after my current one finally broke down entirely.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org First time I heard about eCall. I don’t think I like this. 🫤 Feels like another attempt at going for complete surveillance. Yes, yes, it’s about “security”/“safety” … it always is.

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