@movq@www.uninformativ.de Humidity was through the sky. We had two thunderstorms pass by. One at 06:00 and and another one this arvo.

Somebody hooked this presumably plastic moon on the tree bark. Not sure why or what the reason is. Let’s just call it art. It looked weird and so I thought that it might poke other people’s interests as well. Worked out great. Got another question about it, too. ;-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I really thought you were playing the bass part, but this is just a picture of the CD cover. :‘-D I’ve got this in my collection as well. It’s good shit!

@movq@www.uninformativ.de https://movq.de/blog/postings/2026-08-05/0/POSTING-en.html Very interesting! I basically never analyze binary files, but this were some great thoughts on that subject. I hope to remember them when I find myself in the situation to look at binaries more closely.

@david@daiwei.me Sorry, I can’t do this anymore. A large part of my work (text, code, thoughts, …) of the last 20-25 years has been stolen and is now being sold at rampant prices to idiots who then complain about me being a backwards bitch (I get to hear this every single day). Everything I say and do in public is being abused.

Fuck that, I’m out.

Bwahahaha, these security folks have a great sense of humor! :-D Got a phishing test e-mail disguised as an overdue anti-phishing training e-mail:

Image

We receive these test phishing e-mails every now and then at work. When you follow the links and log in at the fake login, you probably get assigned another (real) training.

When I got this e-mail, I immediately thought of such a test. Since I actually do have some stupid training deadlines coming up soon, I wasn’t 100% sure, but still doubted that this was one of them. To make the timing even better, in the team meeting last week, our bosses reminded us to complete outstanding trainings before the deadlines. Ideally well in advance. Notifications about deadlines coming closer are sometimes not only sent to the individuals but also to the bosses and their bosses. And then things can get out of hands when somebody doesn’t read the e-mails properly and mistakes them for deadline exceeded reports.

Anyway, the URL also looked kinda legit. It really doesn’t help a single bit that domain names change all the fucking time. So, still with the test program in mind, I thought, I just give it a quick shot out of curiosity. Since I just had logged in before, the empty SSO username field was totally obvious then. Looking at the e-mail headers confirmed that this was indeed one of security’s field checks. :-)

I finally built a prototype of a marking gauge with a cutter wheel out of some scraps.

https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/streichmassprototyp-mit-messerrad/

It had been a long time in coming, I bought some replacement cutting wheels three years ago for exactly that purpose. I also found out that I need more M3 countersink bolts for future marking gauges that I want to make (maybe two or three more). Luckily, I had exactly one. I thought I got way more than that, but M3 is very, very scarce in my collection. My M3 bolt was barely long enough to attach the cutting wheel to the bar. But it’s okay for the prototype.

I was pleasantly surprised that I managed to drill the 2.5mm diameter hole almost perfectly in center in the 8mm diameter aluminium round bar. Center finder, drill press and vise with a vertical prism for the win!

I knew upfront that the M5 steel bolt to lock the bar in place definitely needs to be replaced with a brass or aluminium one (maybe with a knurled head). Otherwise, it cuts into the aluminium bar and leaves ugly marks. These burrs might even scratch the workpiece. But, of course, I don’t have any brass on hand either. Alternatively, I swap out the aluminium bar for a steel or even stainless steel one. Stainless might be tricky to precisely drill and tap, though.

I already learned a few things by making this prototype. The final wooden fence can be even a bit bigger. This round thing behind is also too short, I’d like it to be a tad longer and thicker. The final one will be made from hardwood, not spruce. Other than that, it’s great and already more practical than my store-bought marking gauge with its round fence. This only causes the tool to roll around on the workbench. Or even roll off. Stupid design.

Hmm …

My project pages have this “Downloads” section and I offer tarballs for each release:

https://movq.de/git/jenny/#downloads

I added this many years ago because an OpenBSD dev asked for it (but the project in question didn’t end up in their ports after all).

What are your thoughts on this? Is it necessary to offer tarballs?

I noticed that some distributions have already moved away from using tarballs and instead always clone from Git. 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net Hmmm, I have no idea how to solve that problem. 😅 Some jenny stuff aside, I received zero bug reports or code contributions since leaving GitHub in 2018.

I thought I had made that super easy, because you can just send me an email – no sign-up process, nothing. But that’s way too old-school, people don’t know how to use git format-patch (let alone git send-email) and they also don’t understand that they can just send me a link to their forked Git repo (which can be hosted anywhere). Git is super flexible and powerful, but those features are hardly ever used.

Maybe people even need some kind “reward”, or “fame”. Like those “achievements” that you can unlock on GitHub. (Something to put in their CV … ?)

@david@daiwei.me I first thought that this is a real lake, but it’s just a lake of craziness. :-D A town owned by a company (or so it reads to me), that’s insane.

Let me send you some nice 17°C.

Unread messages are yellow, while read messages are white in tt. Focusing them just alternates the fore- and background colors. With the old color scheme, I disliked that inline code and code blocks were basically just the opposite of normal text. Hence, unread code was white and read code yellow. I found this often confusing, especially with larger code blocks. Sure, there are the timestamp and author columns that still show the usual white (read) and yellow (unread) background for selected messages, but still.

This is how it was before with unread messages:

Image

Before with read messages:

Image

So, I just reworked the code styles. Not sure if I like that or if it is actually an improvement. Unread code is teal on gray when not in focus and becomes blue on orange when focused. I thought the dark gray code background on a black regular background is still nice and subtle. The same similarity in colors for focused messages meant to go with an orange code background on a yellow regular background. The teal was too light, so went with a blue foreground color:

Image

When read and unfocused, the new color scheme calls for the same code style teal on dark gray. However, with white as the main background for selected messages, I went with a light gray code background and a blue code foreground. Again, the contrast with white and teal wasn’t good enough. Vice versa, blue on dark gray is also not all that readable:

Image

It looks like a parrot. Let’s see if I begin to like it.

@david@daiwei.me Oh, really? I thought I’ve posted compose view screenshots before. Anyway. Glad you like it as much as I do. :-)

The update interval has always been one second. I just didn’t remember and thus tried to time it by watching the preview update while typing. It felt like roughly under two seconds, but apparently my inner clock was off. After taking the screenshot and then examining it more closely, I noticed that the interval is stated right in the UI. :-D So, I just amended my message and didn’t bother taking a new screenshot. I figured I just leave it alone and see who spots the change, if at all. And, of course, you found the easter egg. Congrats, mate! 8-)

Just thought it an interesting Hacker News article that caught my eye 👁️

@prologic@twtxt.net @bender@twtxt.net is it normal that twtxtapp’s <tab> (white space) between the timestamps and posts look a bit shorter than the ones from jenny? just noticed that and thought maybe it’s someting you’d want to know.

The Rectangle highlights the whitespaces from Jenny and the Ellipse is over the ones from twtxtapp.

Image

@balloonfu-sen@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Thank you for doing this 🙏 – Just a thought… It might be possible for this to be fully automated from the Twtxt Search engine / crawler? Right? 🤔 It has all of the data… I also think it might be possible to distinguish between 1-way feedsa and “real folks” (ya know, 2-ways feeds) 🤣

Oh, crap! It’s only Thursday! I thought we had Friday already … nnnnooooooo, not another day. 😭

@prologic@twtxt.net I linked you some of my findings on the twtxt.app on IRC. The main problem is the hashing. Totally broken. But you have got to give it some thought, because GitHub hosting of the feed is tricky (even more so if they are CNAMEing their domain to it). It is also finicky because Pages is auto-enabled on username.github.io, so actions must run each time you twt.

My mate and I hiked up the backyard mountain. We got 25°C and quite some wind, so it was actually not too terrible. The wind could have blown harder or the temps a little lower, but oh well.

I saw the squirrel’s bushy tail stick up on the forest floor in the sunlight and immediately thought of this cute little feller. Since it didn’t move at all, even when we came closer, I got irritated and reconsidered that it might actually be some kind of dried up farn. But then we also were able to see its body. Unfortunately, the squirrel ran up the tree too quickly, so all the shots are kinda crap.

At one flower spot, there were sooo many butterflies, wasps, flies, bugs and other insects. The botanic was completely crowded.

The workers were transferring logs from one log truck to the other in a parking lot. I’ve never seen this happening before. When we passed the same place on the way home, they had moved logs into a sea container. That was surprising. This semi wasn’t there on the way there. One log was probably too long and sticking out the container, so they probably had to wait for somebody to return with a chainsaw. Crazy that they’re shipping logs from here probably overseas. Why else would they put them in a sea container?

After our first break, a blackbird was really posing for us with his worm in the dark shade.

Today was my first time I ever saw a hummingbird hawk-moth (Taubenschwänzchen) for real. My mate photographed them many, many times before, but I never came across one myself. So, that was really special.

The forest service installed an outdoor table with two benches next to the timber lion, that was cool to see. We sat down for a few minutes and enjoyed both the view into the Fils valley and ant on the tabletop, but the sun was beating down too heavily on us, so we had to move on.

All in all, it was a very nice few hours long hike. Enjoy! https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2026-07-03/

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org You think I thought about it on that level? 😅 I just heard that weird animal noise in the dark and I was the one who was running. 😂

A deer, multiple frogs, several thousand fireflies and something else. It was already very dark when I was silently drifting along on a nice soft mossy path, enjoying the firefly show left and right and in front of me. I then heard some rustling about 30 meters in the distance in the shrubs. I thought that I must have scared up a deer. But it kept on rustling without any worries. And I closed in without seeing anything.

Only when I heard the quick oink from just 10 meters away, I froze. Shit, no deer, but a boar! Suddenly, I was the one who was scared. It probably hadn’t noticed me before. But did it notice me now? Was that grunt a warning or just completely unrelated? The rustling appeared to slowly come closer. What if there were also piglets around? I couldn’t figure out how many boars there were. Maybe just one, possibly more. A wild boar easily rips a hunting dog apart, so I didn’t want to take any chances and decided I will not wait for them to eventually pass me behind the brush in just a hand full of meters, so I can keep on going. While I was just turning around, I heard another oink and was frighened to death. I ran 20 meters, before calming down a little bit. I listened for half a second and nobody was following me. Phew. I then walked back the path.

What an adventure, I tell you. That was my second (or maybe third?) wild boar encounter in the woods ever. A hell lot more scary at night than during daylight when you can actually see something.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah, that would also be fine with me. I certainly do like the “arbitrary” in your comment.

While writing the article, I also thought about something like that:

date := time.Date(2026, 6, 19,
    17, 0, 0, 0, time.UTC)

Or possibly:

date := time.Date(
    2026, 6, 19,
    17, 0, 0, 0, time.UTC,
)

But it’s four lines for a damn timestamp. I also contemplated whether a comment acting as a separator is all that’s needed:

date := time.Date(2026, 6, 19, /**/ 17, 0, 0, 0, time.UTC)

I might like that the most. Not entirely sure yet. It kinda feels like a hack, but still a little elegant. Add your comment on top and we’re golden. Maybe?

I deliberately excluded them as this only distracted from the points I wanted to make. And I also realized that this example was just not ideal at all. Perhaps I should add them nevertheless?

If I ever invented a programming language, a much more human readable timestamp representation of some sort, RFC 3339 or very close to that would be part of that language. Something along the lines of /pattern/ for regexes in certain languages.

It’s 34°C and all the shutters are closed. Walking past the front door, I was surprised that there is light sneaking through the covered glass next to it. I somehow thought it’s already the middle of the night. :-D

@movq@www.uninformativ.de That’s right, way harder than centrally managed. They even didn’t reach concensus over the main folder: “Alle Programme, “Alle Programme (x86)”, “All Programs”, “All Programmes”, etc. Anyway.

For class 11 (or maybe already in 10, I don’t remember exactly) we could choose either between traditional maths class with a graphical calculator or “Mathe mit CAS”. There were two teachers in my entire school who were able to teach the latter. It was also fairly new at the time I believe. Certainly unheard of for a „allgemeinbildendes Gymnasium“, maybe the technical ones were already offering it for some time, not sure. It was clear to me that I would take the maths with CAS class.

Each kid had to buy their own Cassiopeia A-Something. I don’t know how much that thing was (definitely more expensive than a graphical calculator) and whether the school subsidized that in any form. But it was slow and underpowered as hell. We rarely used it in class nor for homework (most if not all had already a desktop at home). Typically, when we worked with the CAS, we sat down on the desktop computers. Our class took place in one of the two computer rooms. The desktops were placed on the three sides (left, right, back, facing the walls or windows) and the regular school desks were in the middle. Since there were more pupils than desktops, we always shared. Nowadays, we call it pair programming. ;-)

For the exams we had the “mandatory part” (Pflichtteil) without any tools. Once we finished that and handed the papers to our teacher, we were then allowed to boot up our Cassiopeias and work with them for the second part. Before the exam started, everyone had to show the teacher that they reset their small computer to factory settings. This second part was called „Wahlteil“. But you had to do it in order to pass. So, I never understood the choice of this term. Maybe it’s because the first part is the exact same for everyone (graphical calculator and CAS class), but the second part was definitely different for the two classes. Each suited to their tools.

After one or two exams, it became clear that the Cassiopeia was far from ideal. So, we took the second part at the desktop computers from then on. Our teacher unplugged the network cables himself to avoid cheating. Each computer had an “HDD Sheriff” running that reset the disk at startup. There was also an issue that the personal user accounts were affected by that. Sometimes all your data were lost. If you were lucky, they were still there. So, we saved our Maple project to local disk (if the computer didn’t crash in between, that was no problem) and at least eventually before leaving the classroom, we then also saved it on the server. For that, the teacher quickly plugged in the cable, we saved, and then the cable was unplugged again immediately. Oh, and everybody used their USB sticks, too.

All in all, this Cassiopeia A-* was quite a useless purchase. :-D I’m not sure if I still have it. At least I thought several times about giving it to the flea market. Don’t know if I did or not.

I went to check on the fireflies this season. But I didn’t see any. Instead lots of moths. At first, I thought it might have been still too light, but it was already dark enough for me to miss and destroy a snail shell. Bummer. Maybe it was too wet tonight. Although, it’s probably just another or two weeks until my glowing friends will finally show up.

In the beginning, I passed two beautiful deer on the edge of the forest. They were just ten meters away, but didn’t run off, really cool. :-) I kept on walking. Before I eventually left the woodland, a frog or toad crossed my path. It was very dark by then, though, so all I could see was a black blob.

Back in town, the street lamps on the first third were all turned off for some reason. I was already glad that I will reach home without getting blinded this time, but unfortunately, the other lamps were all operational.

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@itsericwoordward@itsericwoodward.com I just want to let you know that your mention completion seems to be broken. :-) The URL is duplicated with a comma in between. Actually, the protocols differ. I suspect that you extract all url metadata fields from the feed, not only the canonical one used for hashing (the first one) and join them. I’m not completely sure, I would need to read up on the specs (it’s already past bed o’clock, though), but I guess that there is no explicit rule for picking the mention URL. Without having thought about it too much, I reckon the safest bet is to stick to the hashing URL when in doubt and the URL that was used to subscribe to the feed is not available for whatever reason. The URL from the subscription list is probably even better.

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Logitech G512 X 98 Review: A Hybrid Mish-Mash
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@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Ah, I almost thought so (that you wrote it by hand), but then I looked at the source code and saw the TOC and I was like: “Naah, probably not. I would be way too lazy to do that manually.” 😅 And indeed … ha.

Oh god, yeah, that’s a lot of <span>. 🤔 Can’t really avoid that, I guess, especially if you want to do syntax highlighting of code blocks.

You wrote your own site generator, didn’t you?

In parts. I write everything in Markdown (it’s online, even: https://movq.de/blog/postings/2026-05-29/0/POSTING-en.md), plus a few Vim shortcuts (to generate thumbnails, for example), and then python-markdown renders it: https://pypi.org/project/Markdown/ This process is wrapped in a shell script, like “re-render every page if the .md file is newer than the .html file” and that’s mostly it. And the Atom feed generator is completely custom. 🤔

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@movq@www.uninformativ.de what are your thoughts after reading it?

@prologic@twtxt.net so, “people with no inner monologue—a condition researchers sometimes refer to as anendophasia”, says the AI. Then “it is not a disorder: lacking an inner voice is simply a different, perfectly healthy way of being human”. Ah, so a condition, but a healthy one. Got it.

Again, I am not talking about a true monologue. If you have never thought “OK, let’s do this!” before engaging on an activity, then alright. Weird, in contrast to the rest of us, hard to believe, yes, but I believe you. Much of the troubleshooting, and creativity that comes with thought involves, well, thoughts. Maybe you are closer to AI than the rest of us, indeed! 🤪😂

@prologic@twtxt.net I don’t believe you. For example, you are programming something, and you are planning the steps, or you struggle at certain point. Any train of thought, of any kind, has an addressing. “If I move this here, what will it happen?”. “Hmm if we’re to place this logic here, will it do what we need?“. “If I were to do this, will it work?” “Damn it, you are so stupid, James, how could you miss that?!!” And so on. 😅 And that’s just a minor thing.

Trust me, you do. We all do. Even the crazy ones.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I really like your style of writing, btw. It’s much calmer and less aggressive then mine. :-) When I turned my bullet points into paragraphs, I got a bit mad in the process.

Sure, feel free to include anything you want. Regarding citing, this is where twtxt falls short in my opinion. Especially with feed rotation, classic links die quickly. Message hashes only help so much. Nobody outside the twtxt universe knows how to deal with them. So, not perfect for inclusion on a web page. Linking to a thread or message on some yarnd instance might be the more user-friendly option. But the disadvantage is that it’s “just” a mirror, not the primary or original source. In all reality, this could be considered splitting hairs, though.

I should have probably written a proper article. That would have given me time to review the result more carefully, too. ;-) Perhaps that’s something for the future. But honestly, I’m not sure if I really want to waste my time and energy on that subject. So many other fun or useless things come to mind right away that I could do instead. 8-)

So, yeah, do whatever feels best to you. I don’t mind being cited or linked, but I also don’t mind not to be cited or not to be linked to. :-D Not a helpful answer, I know. Sorry. ;-) But anyway, thanks for asking, mate! I do appreciate it.

To finish my thought, linking to my frontpage is probably also useless, since I deliberatly do not have a table of contents there. In fact, my entire frontpage is rather silly.

@prologic@twtxt.net I have no doubts. Within that parsing thought, I wonder, where in the world is @xuu@txt.sour.is?

SpaceX not the behemoth everyone thought
Article URL: https://www.axios.com/2026/05/21/spacex-ipo-musk-ai

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48231815

Points: 6

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@bender@twtxt.net I misread that sentence and thought that your first crush was called Gisela, and was like “wait, he’s not that old”.

Turns out, Gisela is a much younger name than I thought:

https://namecensus.com/first-names/gisela-meaning-and-history/

A peak in the late 1970is and late 1990ies? What?

But then it turned out that, in Germany, the popularity dropped rapidly in the late 1950ies, which actually matches my expectations:

https://www.beliebte-vornamen.de/5203-gisela.htm

In other words, some other countries picked up the name Gisela after it had already faded away in Germany.

What a fun rabbit hole. 😅

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@kiwu@twtxt.net Dang it! I first thought it was jitters due to your exams. Hang in there!

I completely forgot, I saw my very first badger in the wild the day before yesterday. :-) That was absolutely cool! <3

I heard something comparatively large rustling in the bush right next to me and thought that it must be dear. Naturally, I stopped and tried to see what’s in there. The rustling went up the bank and it suddenly came down again towards the road I was on. That’s when I first layed eyes on it and identified it as a badger. For a split second I thought that it’s going to get after me and was ready to get running. But it just hadn’t noticed me yet. When it eventually spotted me, it froze for a few seconds and ran off uphill. My camera took too long to boot, so it was already gone by the time the photo machine was good to go.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I see him on those photos, and his singing starts ringing in my ears. I also thought, “I am going to miss him” because, you know, nothing is everlasting. But then I reproached myself; “enjoy the moment, dude, don’t taint it”. And so I shall.

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I made the classic mistake. I thought I was smarter than this. I could try to scrub this from my repository, but that seems like more trouble than it’s worth, so here it is for your enjoyment: https://fossil.falsifian.org/misc/info/f6fa59e27781ce75f4cbaf700997ffffab41ad9d2e97b4aa3e360400ead3532c

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There was an endless coming and going of sun, clouds and rain. Not to forget about the wind. I called it quits a bit earlier and went into the woods.

Towards the end I was completeley surrounded by rain curtains in all directions. This looked super cool. I thought I might make it home just in time without having to use my umbrella, but the rain clouds were way quicker than I anticipated. Just after the rain hit me, I met an acquaintance who just started his walk. The wind picked up hard and rain hammered down, mixed with snow. Holding the umbrella was a workout. Shortly after I returned, the rain stopped again.

I didn’t notice the kestrel sitting on the tree when I took the last photo. That was a nice surprise when I sorted through the nearly 300 pics.

https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2026-02-17/

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Fuck me dead! I accidentally confused an HTML file for a YAML file and manually opened it in my browser. Unfortunately, I clicked on the OK button of the popped up dialog a bit too fast, it just caught me off guard. It asked which program to open the YAML file in. Of course Firefox thought that it could handle that and suggested itself by default. Conveniently, the “don’t prompt me again and always use this selection from now on” checkbox was enabled.

And then the endless loop of death started. Turns out, this fucking browser can’t do shit with YAML files and delegated to what had been just configured. Oh, would you look at that!? Firefox! Empty tabs after empty tabs appeared. Killing and restarting Firefox just loaded the last session with all the tabs and the loop continued.

Some bloody snakeoil on my work machine slows down link openening requests by two, three seconds. It’s always absolutely anoying, but luckily, it actually limited the rate of new tabs popping up. I still could not close the many tabs fast enough that had accumulated before I noticed what was going on in the background.

Going to the settings to change them was always interrupted with a new tab opening in the foreground.

Finally, killing Firefox and renaming the file on disk before restarting Firefox did the trick and broke the loop. I was still holding down Ctrl+W for a minute or so to get rid of the useless tabs. I didn’t want to loose the important tabs, so just ditching the session wasn’t an option.

SpaceX proposes orbital data center made up of 1 million satellites
Elon Musk’s space firm is seeking regularity approval to develop a satellite constellation of unprecedented scale. If you thought the current array of… ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I don’t have any statistics, just observe what is around me, so it’s very subjective. I know a bunch of kids with names I’ve never heard before. Sometimes, I first thought other kids were making fun of their friends by calling them by made-up nonsense. But no. Without question, I live under a rock. I just looked up some of them that came to mind immediately and they seem to be of Greek, Swedish and Latin origin, etc.

Elon Musk shares his current thoughts on aliens and consciousness
The SpaceX CEO recently spoke briefly about extraterrestrial life and humanity’s future. While Elon Musk is regarded as something of a controversial f… ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I reckon up until then you had to have another first name that clearly differentiated. Didn’t read through the court decision, though.

Interesting, I always thought that Kiran was a male first name. But I only know one person with that name. As last name, though.

Now I’m wondering, was that also the beginning when parents started giving their kids really weird names?

UFO whistleblower: ‘angels in the Bible may have been alien visitors’
Speaking on the Joe Rogan podcast recently, David Grusch opened up on his thoughts about aliens and angels. Grusch, who previously worked with the Nat… ⌘ Read more

What a beautiful, beautiful 0°C Sunday arvo and evening! The weather forecast delayed the snow by the minute. An hour or so after it finally started very, very lightly, I headed off for the woods to check out the lake again. Unfortunately, with the fresh snow layer, the crazy wild surface texture of the ice sheet wasn’t visible anymore. But it brought some other nice views and photo opportunities.

I initially thought that I just go for a quick turn. However, with the snowfall a wee bit increasing I was hooked and kept going. Visibility was poor, but the snow blankets just looked too stunning. The road surfaces were quite slippery, so I often just walked alongside the pathways. On downhill slopes I had some good fun sliding down the road on my feet. With varying success. Luckily, I managed not to fall.

On the summit of the mountain the twigs had those absolutely magnificently looking windblown crystal coverings. Awwwwwww! They never get old. It was already getting dark, so the camera was tired and wanted to sleep. The snow program then made use of the flash and I’m quite pleased with how these shots turned out.

Two deer crossed the road in front of me and ran into the woods, that was sight for sore eyes. Although I felt bad that they had to flee from me in this white terrain. By the time I got home, the snow had accumulated around eight centimeters in height, even in town down in the valley. Walking on this fresh snow is just amazing. And I love the sound it makes. Today, the snow consistency must have been just right, because the crushing sound was really loud.

I cannot recall that I had frozen hair and beard before, but today, there was a thick ice buildup. In case I had, it was definitely never this much. Felt really cool.

Enough of this preliminary skirmishing, there ya go: https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2026-01-25/

Ark of the Covenant may have had a different purpose, Egyptologist claims
The biblical chest was thought to have been the container in which Moses placed the original ten commandments. One of the most sought-after and mystif… ⌘ Read more

Astronomers detect a mysterious signal from the beginning of time
A signal lasting just 10 seconds is thought to have originated from one of the most distant sources ever detected. 13 billion years ago, a huge star e… ⌘ Read more

Heh I thought I fixed that bug? (is it s abug?!)

Man charged with stealing 100 human skeletons in Pennsylvania
The man is thought to have been responsible for a lengthy spate of grave thefts from a historic burial ground. The bizarre and grim case, which had le… ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org It’s actually not nearly as half bad as I really thought it would be. Just having to eventually deal with the “lowering down” to machine code / ARM64 assembly in the end once you’ve verified the semantics in the VM.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I was surprised by that as well. 😅 I thought these were features that you can use, but no, you must do all this.

By the way, I now fixed the issue that I mentioned at the end and it works on the netbook now. 🥳

Image

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe But I thought Alpine was one of the good distro’s left. 😢 What’s it doing wrong?

Got a nice conspiracy theory for you:

https://mastodon.social/@mcc/115670290552252848

Actually wait I just thought about this and realized that the precise timing of the ACTUAL GitHub seed bank, by which I mean the Arctic Code Vault, on 2020-02-02, makes it more or less a perfect snapshot of pre-Copilot GitHub. Also precisely timed before we all got brain damage from COVID. This is the only remaining archive of source code by people with a fully working sense of smell

(Bonus points because the Arctic World Archive is located in Svaldbard and that’s the name of the AI in Stacey Kade’s “Cold Eternity”.)

#Processing & #py5 tip:
Remember the shapes you put on draw() will be redrawn over and over, and if they don’t move (leaving a trail) you might want to either clean each frame with background(...), or stop the draw loop (noLoop() in Processing or no_loop() in py5), otherwise you kill the anti-aliasing of the lines/strokes/edges!

I’m posting this tip because even using these tools for years and knowing this, today I briefly thought something was odd/broken because my lines were ugly with no “smoothing” :D

”`python
import py5

def setup():

py5.size(200, 200)
py5.stroke_weight(2)
# a line that will drawn once only
py5.line(10, 10, 190, 90)  

def draw():

# you could clean the frame here with background(200)
# this other line will be redrawn many times
py5.line(10, 110, 190, 190) 

def key_pressed():

py5.save('out.png')

py5.run_sketch()

”`

Image

@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. 😢

My current PC is from 2013, so I never even bothered to check, but as it turns out: My motherboard still has a serial port. 🤯 I thought these had long died out by then. To be honest, I didn’t have the need for one, either, not until recently … So I completely lost track if PCs have these things or not.

All I needed was one of those slot-cable-thingies. (And if the order of pins is correct, then it actually works. 🤦)

Image

Cool! One less USB device. 😃

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @bender@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net Four people! Exactly my thoughts, bender, but super cute. :-)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org ugh, well, there goes my thought.

** Sticker party, November **
Some random thoughts including how the band Imagine Dragons is kinda like Metal for kids; distributing apps, even without involving Apple at all, is deeply annoying on macOS; Pokemon ZA is fun, but I think that I’m a turn-based girlie at heart; my partner has been playing a lot of Tears of the Kingdom lately, it has been a lot of fun for me to watch, and hair-pullingly frustrating for our nearly 10 year old who has strong opinions about the correct order of operations in that game; I wrote, but am cu … ⌘ Read more

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 … ?

I was looking at some ancient code and then thought: Hmm, maybe it would be a good idea to see more details in this error message. Which of the values don’t line up. On the other hand, that feature isn’t probably used anyway, because it’s a bit ugly to use (historically evolved). And on top of that, most teams need something slightly different, if they deal with that sort of thing.

I still told my workmates about it, so they could also have a look at it and we can decide tomorrow what to do about it. Speaking of the devil, no kidding, not even half an hour later, a puzzled tester contacted me. She received exactly that rather useless error message. Looks like I had an afflatus. ;-)

It’s interesting, though, that in all those years, nobody stumbled across this before. At least we now know for sure that this is not dead code. :-)

The boss was tougher than she thought (Fizzy) [EldenRing] ⌘ Read more

The gold saga on @quark@ferengi.one’s thoughts continues with https://netbros.com/1750974122. That’s without any doubt the most beautiful 404 page I’ve ever come across in my entire life. What an overall master piece of art. Well done, mate! <3

https://netbros.com/some-rubbish-just-to-see-the-new-birds-on-the-404-page

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org then it was, most likely, space debris—which, sadly, make up for 98% of all space anomalies these days. And thought they have applied to the Grant Wishes Council, they are yet to be approved. Keep playing, though. 😅

@bender@twtxt.net Sounds about right.

I had a brainfart yesterday, though. For whatever reason I thought of subdomains, which are modeled with server entries in nginx. So, each could define its own access_log location. However, there are no subdomains in place! Searching around, I didn’t find any solution to give each user their own access log file.

One way would be a cronjob, aeh, systemd timer as I learned the other day, that greps the main access log and writes all user access log files with only the relevant stuff.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Haha, right. :-D

Ah, it’s this famous font. :-) I already thought so, but wasn’t sure if it’s actually the same.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Wow, that’s a hell lot of food! If it doesn’t spoil, it’s easily enough for the rest of your life and all your neighbors and surrounding cities, probably more. :-D

That’s a great font. I like it. It just suits the print style incredibly well. No offence, to the absolute contrary, I would not have thought that you actually designed that. It looks just so right. Hats off! :-)

Oh, and I forgot (because I thought it was obvious, my bad), set a nick, and a url at the very minimum on your feed. See “Metadata Extension”.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de my apologies if I crossed some lines, I only meant it as a friendly engagement (which, all aside, was achieved!). Thank you for sharing your thoughts; please know that I appreciate them.

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. 😂

This brings a thought I had for a long time, why can’t we upload arbitrary files to a twtxt? If not an image, make it simply a link. I could have used such feature to upload the text.

Thoughts/Opinions on Cap 🤔

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@bender@twtxt.net Hahaha, great, mission accomplished! :-D The cleanup took half an hour, that was the annoying part. But the immediate aftermath of this accident looked really funny, I thought about taking a photo for a second. However, in order to confine the damage quickly, I decided against it.

@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:

Image

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

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Don’t you worry, this was meant as a joke. :-D

There was a time when I thought that Swing was actually really good. But having done some Qt/KDE later, I realized how much better that was. That were the late KDE 3 and early KDE 4 days, though. Not sure how it is today. But back then it felt Trolltech and the KDE folks put a hell lot more thought into their stuff. I was pleasantly surprised how natural it appeared and all the bits played together. Sure, there were the odd ends, but the overall design was a lot better in my opinion.

To be fair, I never used it from C++, always the Python bindings, which were considerably more comfortable (just alone the possibility to specify most attributes right away as kwargs in the constructor instead of calling tons of setters). And QtJambi, the Java binding, was also relatively nice. I never did a real project though, just played around with the latter.

Der ganze Vorgang ist archetypisch für die seit Jahrzehnten völlig ohne Not stattfindende politische Selbstverzwergung Europas.

A comment on heise about the recent AWS outage.

https://www.heise.de/meinung/Kommentar-zum-Totalausfall-bei-AWS-Nichts-gelernt-in-den-letzten-30-Jahren-10794622.html?wt_mc=sm.red.ho.mastodon.mastodon.md_beitraege.md_beitraege&utm_source=mastodon

(Too bad there’s no good translation for the great word “Selbstverzwergung”.)

I’m paraphrasing: Europe (and other regions) depend on US IT services, a lot, without an actual need. We saw AWS, Google, and Microsoft build large datacenters and then we thought “welp, shit, nothing we can do about that, guess we’ll just be an AWS customer from now on.” Nobody really went ahead and built German/European alternatives. And now we completely depend on the US for lots of our stuff.

The article even claims that there’s now a shortage of sysadmins in the EU? I’m not so sure. But I’d welcome it, makes my job more secure. 🤣

Hosting services, datacenters, software, everything, it’s all US stuff. Why do we accept this, why not build alternatives …

Follow-up observations by Webb confirm GRB 250702B is most energetic cosmic explosion ever recorded
Considering the immense size of the universe, it’s no surprise that space still holds plenty of secrets for us. Recently, astronomers believe they stumbled upon a kind of cosmic blast never seen before, and it’s challenging what we thought we knew about how stars die. ⌘ Read more