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In-reply-to » I'm contemplating the idea of switching my activity pub instance from Gootosocial to a Pleroma one. While GTS is kinda cute (lightweight and easy to manage) of a software, the inability to fetch/scroll through people's past toots when visiting a profile or having access to a federated timeline and a proper search functionality ...etc felt like handicap for the past N months.

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com good luck with that! Their installation requirements, and install document in general give me headache. While on the contemplating topic, I too am contemplating shutting down my ActivityPub altogether. No GoToSocial, no nothing. I am mostly a lurker, so will not miss it much.

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In-reply-to » There are no really good GUI toolkits for Linux, are there?

FTR, I see one (two) issues with PyQt6, sadly:

  1. The PyQt6 docs appear to be mostly auto-generated from the C++ docs. And they contain many errors or broken examples (due to the auto-conversion). I found this relatively unpleasent to work with.
  2. (Until Python finally gets rid of the Global Interpreter Lock properly, it’s not really suited for GUI programs anyway – in my opinion. You can’t offload anything to a second thread, because the whole program is still single-threaded. This would have made my fractal rendering program impossible, for example.)

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In-reply-to » It is harder to regain ownership of an IRC channel than crossing the Mexico/US border. 😅

@bender@twtxt.net Hahaha! :-D But I actually do like their approach. I don’t know what staff should do differently when they are not involved in the channel topic. At least in the general case. Maybe in this specific scenario here they could have cross-checked domains, git repos and stuff like that. But I also reckon that it’s only fair if they treat everybody the same.

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In-reply-to » Just a small update, on my birthday (on the 5th), I accidentally deleted the main page, of my website, so I'm using that as an opportunity, to try something new, at https://thecanine.smol.pub or gemini://thecanine.smol.pub - depending on your preferred protocol.

Double congrats, @thecanine@twtxt.net! \o/

I’m not a fan of the gemtext limits. This being only a single page (which probably doesn’t get updated a whole lot), the efforts of having two dedicates files are not all that big, or so I’d at least naively imagine.

I always recommend checking the W3C validator results, even though I’m very guilty of not doing that myself. It just doesn’t occur to me in the heat of the moment. I reckon if I were writing HTML on a more regular basis, I would pick up on making that a real habit. Anyway, your HTML being generated, you probably can’t address the findings, though. So, might not be even worth the time heading over to the validator.

From a privacy point of view, personally, I would definitely host the CSS myself. Other than that, nice link collection. :-)

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In-reply-to » @bender Thanks for this illustration, it completely “misunderstood” everything I wrote and confidently spat out garbage. 👌

@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.

The criticism of AI as untrustworthy is a problem of misapplication, not capability.

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.

Skill Erosion vs. Skill Evolution

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.

3. The Technical and Legal Perspective (Scraping and Copyright)

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.)

tl;dr

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?

Never again

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

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** 
but I can do that with regex? **
The other day a co-worker showed me a project that seemed genuinely useful, but I didn’t love some bits of how complicated and resource intensive its architecture were, so, I made my own version of it! Check out diff heatmap.

Your browser does not support the video tag. You are rad as hell.

As an aside, I put this one on github which I don’t generally choose to use for personal projects, but I’d love to see folks contribute rules to this projec 
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In-reply-to » There are no really good GUI toolkits for Linux, are there?

@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.

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In-reply-to » @lyse

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Uh, that actually looks not that terrible. Somehow, I remember Swing GUIs being way uglier.

As for Visual Basic, I only had to use VBA once in my life. That was in the beginning of my career when I inherited a project from a leaving coworker. Fuck me, was that awful. Just alone the damn compiler error dialog box popping up in my face all the time while editing and the compiler already trying to parse the unfinished and hence of course uncompilable code. Boy, that left a lasting impression on me. I ported everything to Java very quickly. Luckily, the code base wasn’t all that large at that point in time. I had to add a bunch of new features after that, so I was very glad that I convinced my workmate/project manager to do that first. We didn’t even need a GUI, the button in Excel was transformed to a command line program that just generated the large file.

But I cannot comment on the VB GUI designer, I never used that. Your screenshot looks very similar to the Delphi one, though. Only towards the end of my Delphi days I found out about the possibility to make the widgets snap to window edges and corners (I don’t remember how that was called), so that resizing the windows was actually possible without messing up their entire contents.

Switching to Linux, Delphi wasn’t an option anymore. For some reason I couldn’t use Kylix. Maybe it was already dead by the time I changed OSes. Or I couldn’t get it to run. I just don’t remember. I just recall that the unavailability of Delphi was the reason it took me a while to actually settle on Linux. I then fully switched to Java. The GridBagLayout was my absolutely favorite Swing layout manager. I reckon I used it 98% of the time, because it was so powerful and made the windows resize properly, just as I had learned to do in Delphi shortly before.

Up until discovering Swing, I used Java’s AWT for a short amount of time. That was very limited I think and I hit the limits fairly quickly. Later at uni, we had one project making use of SWT. Didn’t convince me either. I could be wrong, but I think there was also a SWT GUI designer plugin for Eclipse. If there really was, that one wasn’t in the same street as Delphi’s (there must be a reason I forgot about it ;-)).

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In-reply-to » Hmmm 🧐 I'm annectodaly not convinced so-called "AI"(s) really save timeℱ. -- I have no proof though, I would need to do some concrete studies / numbers... -- But, there is one benefit... It can save you from typing and from worsening RSI / Carpal Tunnel.

@prologic@twtxt.net Ah, I see. Yeah, you might be right. (Still a fragile process due to the general AI wonkiness, but it can help to some degree, yes.)

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In-reply-to » Der ganze Vorgang ist archetypisch fĂŒr die seit Jahrzehnten völlig ohne Not stattfindende politische Selbstverzwergung Europas.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de My impression also is that good sysadmins are missing. No wonder if they all get laid off because they’re “not doing anything” and developers can just operate their shit themselves. Or so the bosses and plenty devs think. Sadly, that’s the general view.

Hell no, devops is bullshit in my opinion. Most developers (including myself) are rather bad at administrating. A good sysadmin offers other skills. Great admins appear to just sit around, but they’re much more proactively working than programmers who also operate the same stuff. The latter have a waaay more reactive work model in comparison. When things have already gone south. The sysadmin, on the other hand, would have noticed and thus prevented the vast majority very early on when it was far from becoming a problem in the future.

At least that’s my personal experience in all those years in different projects and what my mates tell me from their companies. Sure, skills can be learned, but it’s just not happening (enough). And obviously, there are people out there who excel in both disciplines, but they are rare. Most fall in one of the categories. Not to forget, plenty are just bad at everything. :-)

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Triad Prague, is perhaps the only mainstream “Contemporary advertising” company, who fucking AI generates “pixelart” and everyone there is either too blind, dumb, or lazy, to at the very least, align the pixels, to a grid (or even check they’re square, the same size,
anything really).

I guess they must have some remains of shame and self preservation instinct, that made them sweep these off their portfolio website and set the video ads with them, to “Private” on YouTube.
https://youtu.be/s7GZK8FGRvA
But sadly not enough shame, to stop putting these on billboards, I have to see on daily basis and making new versions of them, with different inconsistent styles, of badly AI generated “pixelart”!

I checked their website, this is their footer, with the text that always overlaps - maybe they also never heard about CSS, can’t blame them, it’s only been a thing, since 1996.

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In-reply-to » Well, it sure has been a while since I last posted here. Just up late doing yet another Linux installation. Debian turned out to be about as stable as a plutonium Jenga tower, and Alpine refused to boot, so I gave it the boot. Here's to hoping that Arch fares better. Oddly, I've always found Arch to be considerably more stable than other distros...

@dce@hashnix.club Arch is the most stress-free OS I’ve ever run (I last reinstalled it 14 years ago, only rolling updates since then) – but to be honest, I sometimes wonder what role my general choice of software plays. I mostly run minimalistic software or programs that I wrote myself. I guess that greatly reduces the chance of breakage. đŸ€”

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Generation of harmful slow electrons in water is a race between intermolecular energy decay and proton transfer
When high-energy radiation interacts with water in living organisms, it generates particles and slow-moving electrons that can subsequently damage critical molecules like DNA. Now, Professor Petr Slavíček and his bachelor’s student Jakub DubskĂœ from UCT Prague (University of Chemistry and Technology, Prague) have described in detail one of the key mechanisms for the creation 
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Poorer health linked to more votes for Reform UK, 2024 voting patterns suggest
Poorer health is linked to a higher proportion of votes for the populist right wing political party, Reform UK, indicates an analysis of the 2024 general election voting patterns in England, published online in the open access journal BMJ Open Respiratory Research. ⌘ Read more

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I noticed Google put out this article: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/09/lets-talk-security-answering-your-top.html it’s very current day Google, but the comments under the YouTube video are pretty on point and I saw a few familiar faces there. There is also, unexpectedly, ways to contact Google.

First a form for “teachers, students, and hobbyists”, that I filled politely, as someone who falls under their hobbyist category. It can be filled both anonymously, or with an e-mail attached, to be contacted by them (I chose the second option).

Also a general feedback and questions form, that I was not as polite in and used to send them the following message:

I have already provided some feedback, in the teacher, student and hobbyists form/questionaire, as well as an open letter I’ve recently sent to the European Commission digital markets act team, as I do believe your proposal might not even be legal, given the fact it puts privacy-focused alternative app stores at risk (https://f-droid.org/cs/2025/09/29/google-developer-registration-decree.html) and it was proposed this early, after Google lost in court to Epic Games, over similar monopoly concerns. Why should we trust Google to be the only authority for all developer signatures, right after the European courts labeled it a gatekeeper?

Assuming this gets passed, despite justified developer backlash and at best questionable legality, can you give us any guarantees, this will not be used to target legal malware-free mods, or user privacy enhancing patchers, like the ones used for applying the ReVanced patches? I have made a few mods myself, but I am in no way associated with the ReVanced team. I just share many peoples concerns, Google Chrome has been conveniently stripped of its manifest v2 support, that made many privacy protecting extensions possible and now you’re conveniently asking for the government IDs, of all the developers, who maintain these kinds of privacy protections (be it patches, or alternative open-source apps) on Android.

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10 Unique Ancient Peoples Whose Cultural Footprints Still Shape the World
History has a funny way of remembering the loudest voices—the emperors, conquerors, and generals whose names echo through textbooks and tourist guides. But for every Caesar or Alexander, countless quieter civilizations shaped the world we live in today. Their contributions hide in plain sight, etched into our laws, our languages, our festivals, and even the [
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The post [10 Unique Anci 
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When Will Apple’s Macs Get M5 Chips? 2025-2026 Launch Timeline
We’re just about due for the next-generation Apple silicon chip, which will kick off a new wave of Mac refreshes. The M5 chip is expected to make an appearance in some new products before the end of the year, but most Mac refreshes will happen in 2026.

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We’ve rounded up current rumors on when we might see updates for Apple’s notebook and desktop machines.

MacB 
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How England’s ‘Golden Generation’ describe the reasons why they failed
Tactical shortcomings, misguided managers or stellar opponents - why do England’s so-called ‘Golden Generation’ think they failed to deliver success? ⌘ Read more

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In-reply-to » DCF77, our time signal radio station, is a great public service. I really love that. It’s just a signal that anybody can pick up, no subscription, no tracking, no nothing. Much like GPS/GNSS. 💚

@bender@twtxt.net I guess most clocks don’t support that. 😅 My wrist watch can do it, you can select it in the menu:

https://movq.de/v/ccb4ffcbc5/s.png

In general, different transmitter means different frequency and different encoding, for example these two:

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AI advance helps astronomers spot cosmic events with just a handful of examples
A new study co-led by the University of Oxford and Google Cloud has shown how general-purpose AI can accurately classify real changes in the night sky—such as an exploding star, a black hole tearing apart a passing star, a fast-moving asteroid, or a brief stellar flare from a compact star system—and explain its reasoning, without the need for complex training. ⌘ Read more

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Surging price restores growers confidence in Australian merino wool
Amid a run of price rises at Australian wool auctions, the next generation of growers say global demand and fresh confidence could mark a turning point for the fibre. ⌘ Read more

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England’s Golden Generation ‘weren’t a team’ - Gerrard
Former England captain Steven Gerrard says he sometimes “hated” being on international duty and blames a lack of success with the Three Lions on a shortage of team spirit. ⌘ Read more

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10 Shocking Crimes Where the Perpetrator Walked Free
The legal system operates on a fundamental principle: a person is presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. For the general public, this can sometimes lead to jarring and controversial outcomes. In certain high-profile cases, the facts of a crime seem clear. Yet, the legal defenses and trial procedures result in a stunning [
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The post [10 Shocking Crimes Where the Perpetrator Walked Free](https://listve 
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In-reply-to » I got the magpie again this morning: https://lyse.isobeef.org/elster-2025-10-05/ 02 is at takeoff.

@prologic@twtxt.net I wouldn’t know where to look for little cockroaches, or roaches, in general! LOL. We buy seeds to feed them. But not around the neighborhood, otherwise we would have a problem. 😅

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Chemists create red fluorescent dyes that may enable clearer biomedical imaging
MIT chemists have designed a new type of fluorescent molecule that they hope could be used for applications such as generating clearer images of tumors. ⌘ Read more

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iPad Mini 8 on the Way: Expected Features and Release Timeline
A new iPad mini is “absolutely” on the way, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. So what should we expect from the successor to the iPad mini 7 that Apple released a year ago?

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Processor and Performance

Apple is working on a next-generation version of the iPad mini (codename J510/J511) that features the A19 Pro chip, according to in 
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After a lost generation, Australia looks to the past on drought-breaking Ashes tour
New Kangaroos coach Kevin Walters was part of an era where the green and gold jersey was the highest honour rugby league could offer and ahead of the return of the Ashes it’s a legacy he’s desperate to pass down to his players. ⌘ Read more

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Best Apple Deals of the Week: Apple Watch SE 2 Hits Ultra Low $179 Price, Plus Early Prime Day Deals
We’re gearing up for big Prime Day deals over the next few days, and this week saw multiple early Prime Day discounts arriving for iPhone 17 cases, the second generation Apple Watch SE, and more.

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_Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with some of these vendors. When you click a link and make a purch 
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Upcoming Apple Vision Pro Could Get More Comfortable ‘Dual Knit Band’
Apple is working on a next-generation version of the Vision Pro with an updated chip, and it could include a new Dual Knit Band that provides a more comfortable fit.

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Updated Apple backend code found by MacRumors includes a reference to a “Dual Knit Band,” which is not a band that exists at the current time. The [Apple Vision Pro](https://www.macrumors 
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Ultra-thin sodium films offer low-cost alternative to gold and silver in optical technologies
From solar panels to next-generation medical devices, many emerging technologies rely on materials that can manipulate light with extreme precision. These materials—called plasmonic materials—are typically made from expensive metals like gold or silver. But what if a cheaper, more abundant metal could do the job just as well or better? ⌘ Read more

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Apple’s 2026 Smart Glasses: Five Key Features to Expect
Apple is working on a set of smart glasses to rival the Meta Ray-Bans, and now that Meta has debuted glasses that include a display, Apple wants to speed up development on its first-generation model. Work has stopped on the next Vision Pro so that Apple can prioritize getting the glasses to market.

![](https://images.macrumors.com/article-new/2021/01/Apple-Glasses-Yellow-Featur 
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Powerbeats Fit Review: Apple’s New $200 Workout Earbuds Replace Beats Fit Pro
Apple’s Beats brand has a new set of fitness-focused earbuds available, the Powerbeats Fit. We picked up a set of the Powerbeats Fit to see how they compare to the prior-generation Beats Fit Pro and Apple’s AirPods Pro 3.

_Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more videos._

The Powerbeats Fit are designed for wo 
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Spec-driven development: Using Markdown as a programming language when building with AI
I coded my latest app entirely in Markdown and let GitHub Copilot compile it into Go. This resulted in cleaner specs, faster iteration, and no more context loss. ✹

The post [Spec-driven development: Using Markdown as a programming language when building with AI](https://github.blog/ai-and-ml/generative-ai/spec-driven-development-using-markdown-as-a-p 
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MacOS Tahoe 26 Feels Slow? Try These 6 Performance Tips
Some Mac users who have updated to macOS Tahoe 26 feel like the new operating system runs slower than their prior MacOS installation did. Reports online suggest there can be general sluggishness and lagging performance, sometimes with frame rate drops and stuttering animations on the screen, or even when typing. Other users in various forums 
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In-reply-to » Here is just a small list of thingsℱ that I'm aware will break, some quite badly, others in minor ways:

@prologic@twtxt.net I know we won’t ever convince each other of the other’s favorite addressing scheme. :-D But I wanna address (haha) your concerns:

  1. I don’t see any difference between the two schemes regarding link rot and migration. If the URL changes, both approaches are equally terrible as the feed URL is part of the hashed value and reference of some sort in the location-based scheme. It doesn’t matter.

  2. The same is true for duplication and forks. Even today, the “cannonical URL” has to be chosen to build the hash. That’s exactly the same with location-based addressing. Why would a mirror only duplicate stuff with location- but not content-based addressing? I really fail to see that. Also, who is using mirrors or relays anyway? I don’t know of any such software to be honest.

  3. If there is a spam feed, I just unfollow it. Done. Not a concern for me at all. Not the slightest bit. And the byte verification is THE source of all broken threads when the conversation start is edited. Yes, this can be viewed as a feature, but how many times was it actually a feature and not more behaving as an anti-feature in terms of user experience?

  4. I don’t get your argument. If the feed in question is offline, one can simply look in local caches and see if there is a message at that particular time, just like looking up a hash. Where’s the difference? Except that the lookup key is longer or compound or whatever depending on the cache format.

  5. Even a new hashing algorithm requires work on clients etc. It’s not that you get some backwards-compatibility for free. It just cannot be backwards-compatible in my opinion, no matter which approach we take. That’s why I believe some magic time for the switch causes the least amount of trouble. You leave the old world untouched and working.

If these are general concerns, I’m completely with you. But I don’t think that they only apply to location-based addressing. That’s how I interpreted your message. I could be wrong. Happy to read your explanations. :-)

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In-reply-to » @lyse i dont mind if the hash is not backward compatible but im not sure if this is the right way to proceed because the added complexity dealing with two hash versions isnt justified

@zvava@twtxt.net @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I also think a location based reference might be better.

A thread is a single post of a single feed as a root, but the hash has the drawback of not referencing the source, in a distributed network like twtxt it might leave some people out of the whole conversation.

I suggest a simpler format, something like: (#<TIMESTAMP URL>)

This solves three issues:

  • Easier referencing: no need to generate a hash, just copy the timestamp and url, it’s also simpler to implement in a client without the rish of collisions when putting things together
  • Fetchable source: you can find the source within the reference and construct the thread from there
  • Allow editing: If a post is modified the hash becomes invalid since it depends on [ timestamp, url, content ]

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wait why are so many of my post hashes not generating correctly ;w;

edit: i read the spec wrong :3 only +/-00:00 is stripped, not the entire timezone offset >.<

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In-reply-to » @zvava I never used any of the social media platforms, that's why I'm probably ignorant.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org retwts are a discovery feature! on federated platforms with no algorithm where you only ever see posts from accounts you explicitly follow, the element of “hey look at this!” helps users to find other accounts they might like organically

i agree quoting and replying forum-style is generally a much better way of doing things even though im a heathen and i revel in the dark patterns inspired by quote posts but when you have nothing to add and you just want to share a twt with your followers it’d be good to have a standardized way of linking to twt

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** Strata **

A Counterfeit - a Plated Person -

I would not be -

Whatever strata of Iniquity

My Nature underlie -

Truth is good Health - and Safety, and the Sky.

How meagre, what an Exile - is a Lie,

And Vocal - when we die -

– Emily Dickinson

I made another game! This one pretty much has one single verb:“move.” The game, like most games I make, is a roguelike that relies heavily on probabilities and rng (random number generation).

Each level is 
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Ni Hao; bīng qílín!
I’m just dropping in, to emphasize my love for ice cream and the Chinese crawler bots, allocating their time and resources, towards scraping my humble website.

To show my gratitude, I’ve even added a random little dog generator to https://thecanine.ueuo.com/sparkle.html so that everyone can pick up their own custom dogFT, on their journey through my site.

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In-reply-to » The bots have begun to access my website way more often. I’m getting about 120k hits on https://www.uninformativ.de/git/ now in a couple of hours.

Why do I care about this?

  1. The load will become a problem at some point.
  2. These crawlers and the current “AI” in general are breaking the rules. I am supposed to be paying for every little thing, I get sued for “piracy”. But apparently, these rules only apply to me. If I had more money, I could break them. Fuck that.
  3. I simply don’t want it. Period.

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Erlang Solutions: Healthcare Blog Round-Up
Healthcare is moving quickly, and technology is playing a big part in that shift. The way information is collected, the way patients are cared for, and the way hospitals run are all changing.

Over the past year, our team has written about some of the most important trends shaping the future of healthcare. In this round-up, we bring together three of those articles: remote patient monitoring, big data, and generative AI.

Maybe you have been following along, or 
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Dear @doctormo@doctormo, I’m a great admirer of your work in general and hopefully I won’t creep you out by telling everyone I’m your fan!

As a creator of digital vector-based art I find the color management stuff (trying to figure how to generate things to print “in CMYK”) mind boggling. I slowly try to read and acquire the concepts and vocabulary to understand more about this. I’m grateful for your work in this area. Thank you!

#FLOSS #CMYK #ColorManagement #inkscape

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In-reply-to » After around 3 years, I managed to make my "smallest recognizable canine", even smaller. So here's the all new, smallest recognizable canine 2.0: Media

@prologic@twtxt.net That’s fair, this version really is a stretch. Similar to old Atari game spirites, a lot is left to interpretation,especially by those who have not seen any of the more detailed ones, before.

On the other hand, some suggested I’m still wasting too many pixels on the tail, but removing those, makes it just a generic dog (at best), even to me.

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In order to publish my personal projects/pages (and most of my teaching materials, hundreds of pages) on #Codeberg, I need to convert #markdown files into #HTML and sprinkle some CSS & JS from a layout template, like #GitHub’s Pages #Jekyll does, but I dread the complexity of installing and tending to Jekyll or Hugo or other static site generators, and I can’t even imagine going near Forejo Actions or any sort of CI intergration.

Should I be brave and do the Jekyll /static generator thing? Any other ideas for poor, overworked, stressed out, clumsy people? :(

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Sam Whited: Notes
I’ve recently been using the Mixxx software for DJs. This page includes some
personal notes on my own use cases, what’s good, what’s bad, etc.
It is not really made for general consumption, but is thrown up here anyways.
It will be a bit rambling and/or ranty at times, most likely.

Let’s get my overall impressions of the software out of the way up front: it’s
absolutely great and I recommend it over the commercial alternatives for DJs of
all stripes (except maybe Radio DJs, it’s not really for 
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In-reply-to » What’s Missing from “Retro”: gopher://midnight.pub/0/posts/2679

@movq@www.uninformativ.de having to go to a gopher proxy to see a text document better served on readily available web servers
 đŸ€­, but I digress. Verbatim text:

What's Missing from "Retro"
~softwarepagan
------------------------------------------------------------------
You know, often, when I say I miss older ways of computing or
connecting online, people tell me "there's nothing stopping you
from doing that now!" and they are technicay correct in most cases
(though I can't, for example, chat with friends on MSN ever
again...) However, let me explain that while this type of thing can
*sort of* fill that hole in my heart, it isn't *the same.*

Say, for example, I wanted to connect with others over a BBS. This
wouldn't offer the same types of connections it used to. While
there are BBSes around with active users, they're no longer there
to discuss movies, Star Trek, D&D, games, etc. They're there to
discuss *BBSes.* The same can be said for Gopher, old-school forums
and all sorts of revival projects (such as Escargot, Spacehey,
etc.) Retrocomputing enthusiasts, while they have a variety of
interests, are often in these spaces to discuss the medium itself
and not other topics. This exists at a stark contrast from how
things were in the past, where a non-tech-inclined person may learn
the tech to connect with likeminded others (as I did as a
Zelda-obsessed kid.)

The same can be said of old media. People will say "well, nobody is
stopping you from watching old shows/movies now!" Again, they are
technically correct. I can go home right now and watch *Star Trek:
The Next Generation* to my heart's content. It will never again,
however, be current, or new. When something is new, it serves as a
shared cultural experience. Remember how "Game of Thrones* felt in
the mid-to-late 2010s? Yeah, that.

It's sad. I sustain myself on a mixed diet of old things, new
things, and new things intended for old millenials like me who like
old things. It can be bittersweet. 

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Here’s an example of X11/Xlib being old and archaic.

X11 knows the data type “cardinal”. For example, the window property _NET_WM_ICON (which holds image data for icons) is an array of “cardinal”. I am already not really familiar with that word and I’m assuming that it comes from mathematics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_number

(It could also be a bird, but probably not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinalidae)

We would probably call this an “integer” today.

EWMH says that icons are arrays of cardinals and that they’re 32-bit numbers:

https://specifications.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/latest-single/#id-1.6.13

So it’s something like 0x11223344 with 0x11 being the alpha channel, 0x22 is red, and so on.

You would assume that, when you retrieve such an array from the X11 server, you’d get an array of uint32_t, right?

Nope.

Xlib is so old, they use char for 8-bit stuff, short int for 16-bit, and long int for 32-bit:

https://x.org/releases/current/doc/libX11/libX11/libX11.html#Obtaining_and_Changing_Window_Properties

That is congruent with the general C data types, so it does make sense:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_data_types

Now the funny thing is, on modern x86_64, the type long int is actually 64 bits wide.

The result is that every pixel in a Pixmap, for example, is twice as large in memory as it would need to be. Just because Xlib uses long int, because uint32_t didn’t exist, yet.

And this is something that I wouldn’t know how to fix without breaking clients.

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gomdn: Yet another Static Site Generator
Yet another Static Site Generator (SSG), but this one is mine.

It’s a stupidly simple Go program ( wc says 229 lines), more like a
hack, really, but I don’t need something like Hugo. Most of the real
work is done by the goldmark package, of course. This is mostly just a
wrapper, deciding if something needs to be rebuilt.

I’ve been using a Perl script together with cmark (originally
Markdown.pl) since forever. And before that the old [txt2tags](htt 
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Desktop SSH->Pinephone->here. This is crazy. Sxmo is the best UI for the Pinephone, and maybe phones in general. Insane: basically dwm on a phone with gestures and built-in yt-dlp + mpv (among others).

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I have a Python script that transforms the original YouTube channel Atom feed into a more useful Atom feed by removing the spam description and replacing it with the video duration, filtering out videos by title, duration, etc. I just updated it to exclude the damn Shorts garbage more efficiently. Finally, YouTube updated their Atom feed generation, so that the video URL contains /short/ if it’s of this useless kind. Never thought that they ever actually will improve their Atom feeds. Thank you, much appreciated!

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In-reply-to » Thinking about doing “Wayland Wednesday”. Only use Wayland every Wednesday. Collect bugs, report bugs, fix bugs.

I give up.

Let’s try again next year. I don’t have the stamina. Death by a thousand paper cuts.

Can’t set up a meaningful taskbar: https://github.com/labwc/labwc/discussions/2924 (This is not a labwc issue, it’s a generic issue in the broader Wayland ecosystem.)

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TKey: The Next Generation
Not speaking for my employer, just as an interested developer in an
interesting open source project.

As you might have noticed, the platform repo of the Tillitis TKey has
some alpha tags for the next generation, Castor:

https://github.com/tillitis/tillitis-key1/tags

An alpha tag means that all planned features for the platform are in
place, but there’s not yet a complete audit and a lot of testing 
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** Om nom nom LLMs, in which I respond to Simon Willison’s analogy **
I am hesitant to wade into the tumultuous waters that are the discourse around generative AI and LLMs, but this morning I came across a thing that so thoroughly melted my brain I feel uncontrollably compelled to respond.

This morning, at evidently 4:10 AM (no mention of timezone), Simon Willison shared the following blog post, quoted here in full:

Quitting programming as 
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#Meta to the #EU: “the focus should be on creating a regulatory infrastructure that ensures any licence that is sufficiently permissive for the user is considered open source, rather than anointing specific licences as “open source”.”

Brilliant, sure, let’s ignore existing definitions and go with gut feeling (incidently, Meta has a gut feeling generator).

Source: https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say/initiatives/14625-Apply-AI-Strategy-strengthening-the-AI-continent/F3563576_en

#OpenSource

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Inquest for woman who died after fall from moving car on Bruce Highway
Queensland’s Attorney-General says Courtney Anderson’s family provided new information and shared their concerns that the case was not fully investigated. ⌘ Read more

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‘Buy a generator’, power provider tells WA hotel angry at blackouts
The owners of Bremer Bay Resort say Western Power told them purchasing a diesel generator was the only way to avoid the outages plaguing the small community. ⌘ Read more

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Scientists breed coral from ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ parents to stop bleaching
After one generation of breeding, scientists say they have been able to double the heat tolerance of Ningaloo Reef coral. ⌘ Read more

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Live tracking solution for OsmAnd
I previously shared my transition from Komoot to OsmAnd, and after some time, I’ve grown accustomed to its comprehensive capabilities. Whether for cycling, hiking, or general navigation, OsmAnd truly functions as a versatile “Swiss Army knife” for offline mobile navigation and tracking. ⌘ Read more

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Man mistakenly deported to El Salvador returns to US to face criminal charges
US Attorney-General Pam Bondi says Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador, has returned to the United States to face criminal charges. ⌘ Read more

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