@prologic@twtxt.net As have I. 🤔 I mean, since I left GitHub, I got basically 0 pull requests anyway.

Even during my time using GitHub, I noticed that “drive-by PRs” are rarely a good idea. People don’t really know/understand the code or the design principles/goals, so I often turned down PRs. Or I accepted them and was grumpy afterwards. 😅

What does work is having a team of maintainers/devs. The only question is: How do you build such a team if you don’t accept PRs? That’s going to be the interesting part.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I think I’ve been more-or-less maintaining my OSS projects this way for years hmmm 🤔

@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. 🤔

@bender@twtxt.net lol, no, please don’t send me a quackton of ducks. 😅 We use BIRD a lot at work, hence this bears some significance for me/us. 😅

@movq@www.uninformativ.de “You know what this is?” A mass produced, Chinese made, rubber ducky? LOL. Sorry, had to do it. I had no idea who Maria was/is (have a vague one now). If you collect those, I can send you some! :-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de enjoy your vacation! A nice read here: https://web.archive.org/web/20260603173839/https://www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2026/06/no-artificial-intelligence-is-not-conscious/687378/, if you get bored. :-P

@bender@twtxt.net Ugh, I don’t know. I’m having a long vacation now and I try not to think about this topic anymore. 🤣

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

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yes.

Maybe management should replace itself with AI…

@movq@www.uninformativ.de :-D

@movq@www.uninformativ.de It’s the “Lyse types the entire HTML by hand” generator. Yes, no kidding. I write articles so rarely, that I can do that once in a while. It’s fun to some degree, but also not.

After some time, I finally recorded some Vim macros to insert <b>…</b>, <var>…</var>, <span class=s>…</span> etc. around the tokens. This helped a little bit. But I was still questioning my mental state doing it like that. I also had to fix a bunch of the end tags by hand, because the word movement wasn’t enough or the end movement went too far. Quite the annoying process for sure.

But I think the HTML looks a wee bit nicer and is maybe even semantically a little bit better than having only <span>s everywhere. I find the <span class="whatever"> just soo awfully long. Of course, I never look at the code again, but knowing, that e.g. there is a <b> and it saves so many bytes in comparison, makes me happy. It is a more elegant solution in my opinion. Not by much, but better nonetheless. It’s a matter of simplicity. Admittedly, even I can’t avoid the <span>s alltogether. Oh well. On the other hand, I’m sure that this does not make any difference whatsoever. I bet, nobody and nothing, like a screenreader, analyzes the HTML for that, where this would be truly useful.

Oh! Maybe text browsers, though. It just occurred to me while composing this reply. :-) Haha, I lost my bet quickly. w3m picks up at least the <b> for keywords and builtin types, <u> for filenames and <i> for comments. Yey. No different styles for <var> and <mark>, unfortunately. elinks only renders the bold. It’s cool that I had the right intuition right from the beginning, despite being unable to pinpoint it. :-)

All the <span> hell with common syntax highlighters is a downer for me that keeps me from looking more into them. If I wrote more articles, I might rig something up with Pygments. At least that’s somehow positively connotated in my brain. Not sure if it actually deserves it, but I dealt with that in some loose form (can’t even remember) years and years ago. Apparently, it wasn’t too terrible.

To prepare the table of contents, I used grep and sed with some manual intervention in the end. The entire process can be improved. Absolutely.

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

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Nice find!

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org By the way, which site generator are you using? I kind of miss having code blocks with syntax highlighting and that generic yellow highlighting thing is pretty cool, too.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org lol, “garbo” 😅 Took me a moment. 🤣

@bender@twtxt.net Hahaha! :-D

@garbo@www.uninformativ.de What a story! :-D

@kiwu@twtxt.net I like your enthusiasm. Go, go, go! :-)

@bender@twtxt.net Hahaha! :-D

@bender@twtxt.net That certainly sounds much better in English, yeah. 😅

@movq@www.uninformativ.de hahahahaha! I’d say “Princess Grim Reaper” is more suiting. 😂

@bender@twtxt.net It started out as me calling myself “Princess Valium” because I’m so tired and braindead today, but then someone misheard that because a garbage truck drove by, and, so … one thing lead to another. 🤪 Sadly, it kind of fits, because I’m often the one who cleans up shit. 😬

@bender@twtxt.net LOL 😂

@movq@www.uninformativ.de but why? Are they that mean?! 😅

@kiwu@twtxt.net welcome, new slave! Err, I meant, beloved employee! 😅

@prologic@twtxt.net I do! I paginate usually 10 times on HN. Their algo is so messed up (but it works, I guess) that not doing that will make me miss a lot of good, interesting, things.

@kiwu@twtxt.net In-cred-ib-ly tired. 😂

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org LOL. Always ahead of times! Lyse, the man from the future! Sic mvndvs creatvs est!

@itsericwoordward@itsericwoodward.com Haven’t noticed anything either. These request numbers are well below some other software. :-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Interesting read! The current state is already a very great achievement. I felt honored being able to already have followed your development along here on twtxt. :-)

That’s a cool clock, I should remind myself of my working time, too.

@bender@twtxt.net The good thing is that it’s already pretty battle-tested. 😅 There was this dumpster fire a few years back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31114554 This was on their front page for quite a while, just look at the number of comments … 😂

@prologic@twtxt.net woot! 🎉🎉🎉

@bender@twtxt.net Yes, but I consider this to be a flaw in the human species. Think about it, what good does it serve? What possible reason do we have to have such traits today? Survival of the fitness? pffft 😅

@movq@www.uninformativ.de LOL. At least now you know your infrastructure and web server can handle some traffic. Consider it a test, in addition to the fleeting recognition. 🤣

@prologic@twtxt.net that possible in any profession. Contrary to what @prologic@twtxt.net’s think, I don’t think it is a human weakness. That some people are absolute and despicable assholes? Yep, I agree on that.

@rrraksamam@twtxt.net No 🤣 I think it’s a human weakness, someone born in the genes of some 🤔

@movq@www.uninformativ.de TLs is cheap, we built hardware encryption modules for AES-256 which TLS still uses so you’re fine 😅

@arne@uplegger.eu Indeed. I’m glad that it’s all just static HTML. The most expensive part about this is probably TLS. 🤷‍♀️

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Hacker News hug of death. :)

@bender@twtxt.net

oh, I knew it wasn’t you. It is just nice to see your hobby was noticed. :-)

Ah, I see! 🤗

@bender@twtxt.net Doing tail -f access.log looks like a Matrix screensaver at the moment. Whoooooosh …

@bender@twtxt.net … boom, 5500+ hits on that blog post. 🤣 Should I start monetizing this shit?! 🤪 (Don’t worry, I won’t. German law gets super annoying if you do that kind of thing.)

I mean, this is pretty awesome!

@movq@www.uninformativ.de oh, I knew it wasn’t you. It is just nice to see your hobby was noticed. :-)

@bender@twtxt.net Oh, well, thanks, I guess? 😅 (This “zdw” person isn’t me. I don’t even have an account at HackerNews. 😅)

@bender@twtxt.net upvoted too 👌

Upvoted, @movq@www.uninformativ.de! See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48331329

@itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com noticed absolutely nothing. Happy developing!

@itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com Excited to see twtxt tooling in the Node ecosystem! Any plans to implement the Twtxt v2 extensions? Things like Twt Hash + Subject (proper threading), Multiline, etc. — all documented at https://twtxt.dev 👀

@itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com All good here 👌

@itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com that second one… 😍! Shadow is such a handsome boy!

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Hahaha, a ride indeed. Exactly, this affected each and every Atom feed and only Atom feeds. All RSS feeds worked like nothing ever happened. This std::string to time_t to std::string to time_t dance only happens for Atom feeds. RSS feeds, on the other hand, go right from std::string to time_t and be done. That’s precisely what the second option is aiming to propose for Atom feeds, too.

I will clarify that tomorrow in the article.

It’s very interesting what kind of quirks accumulate in software over the years. Especially quirks, the basically noone knows of anymore. Until something explodes and gets rediscovered. Luckily, that doesn’t happen all that often.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh, nice. That was quite the ride. :-) And all that because of locales. 😳

But, did I understand that correctly? All Atom feeds were broken, right? Because they all use that same code path with that strftime/strptime dance in it?

@bender@twtxt.net No way, impossible! Which pattern could you have possibly spot? :-D

@bender@twtxt.net Doesn’t happen often. And when it does, it’s a matter of just a few minutes.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh yes, very cruel. Absolutely. But also beautiful sometimes.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Wow, quite the background noise! I like the birds, though. :-)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org love them! I hunt for those here. I enjoy watching it as it happens. Never that red, though.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I notice a theme here, but can’t quite place my finger on it… 🤭

@movq@www.uninformativ.de that was lovely! I especially liked the rain. I truly am a sucker for rain!

@prologic@twtxt.net you went to sleep so early! It’s barely 14:19. 😂

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Nature is cruel.

And the humidity sucks. It’s been a horrible day. 🥴

@prologic@twtxt.net Jesus, that’s expensive. 🥴

@bender@twtxt.net LOL 😂

@prologic@twtxt.net my gosh, that’s some expensive lottery! I have the feeling I would win, but I never play. 🤭 Wife, on the other hand, does. East and west coast, with a bunch of her friends (a pool). They win nothing, for many years. 😅

@movq@www.uninformativ.de $95 🤣 So I’m down a fair bit 😳

@prologic@twtxt.net lol, well, better than nothing, eh? What did the tickets cost? 😅

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I came across that in some of these threads, too. I should probably give OpenRsync a shot.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I guess I’m not so lucky haha 🤣 Only won $32 AUD 😅

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @tftp@tilde.town Someone has pointed out that there’s OpenRsync:

https://www.openrsync.org/

Since I run OpenBSD on my servers, I actually do use that and have never noticed any incompatibilities with the “normal” rsync.

@bender@twtxt.net I’ll think about it. :-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Hah 😅

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Hah 😅 One thing I’ve learned in my life (as I’ve had many good manegers over the years teach me as much) is:

Strong opinions, held loosely.

I have my opinions too, but I also see positives and benefits and I am optimistic that we will collectively figure out a path forward.

@prologic@twtxt.net You actually did? 😅 Good luck. 😅 I never dared to, I’d probably get addicted. 🤣

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Amen 🙏

@prologic@twtxt.net Oh yeah, same here. 😞 Let’s all just win the lottery and stop with this damn work thing. 🤣

@movq@www.uninformativ.de All good, I’m tired too. Work has been burning me out lately 🥵

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yes 👍

@prologic@twtxt.net (I hope I’m not too incoherent. I didn’t sleep very well recently and have a lot of unrelated stuff on my mind. 🤣)

@prologic@twtxt.net Ah, so that’s what “Bob” is. I saw that popping up in email notifications. 😅

@prologic@twtxt.net

it’s “probabilistic” not “deterministic”

Yep, I know. And when I tell that to people and tell them “if we use AI here, we lose the ability to debug this stuff”, then all I get is: “But it’s good enough. We don’t need to debug this. Non-deterministic computing has its use cases.”

But that is just not how I’d like to model/implement our business processes. 🤔 I want something reliable, not “it mostly works”.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I’m kind of flag you bring thi sup, because you simply can’t. You wouldn’t even be able to in an atypical neural network either (which is what ehse things are anyway). The problem here really isn’t the so-called “AI” (I wish we’d stop calling it AI), but the flawed usage(s) thereof. I believe I even stated earlier in this thread that sometimes it may not do what you expect, it’s “probabilistic” not “deterministic” – those pushing for greater use need to understand this, those not happy with the “push”, should educate the ignorant here (especailly managers pushing for weak, insecure and bad uses).

@prologic@twtxt.net Ahh, I see. Okay, I’m with you there. On this high level, I can understand how the thing works.

Maybe my wording isn’t good. 🤔 Let’s take a real life example from what we do at work.

There’s this AI chatbot. It gets support requests from users, so the user says something like “I need access to a particular system”. This triggers the bot to “run” the instructions stored in a large Markdown file, like “check if the user is authorized to do this, then issue the following API requests”, and so on. This is essentially like running a little script, except it’s written in natural language (German) and there’s no “script interpreter” but just the AI.

Now, suppose that the AI doesn’t quite do what was intended. There’s some subtle bug. How do you debug this? How do you find out how the AI came to the “conclusion” to run step A instead of step B? And how do you find out how exactly you have to change your prompt so this doesn’t happen again next time?

If this was an actual script/program instead of AI, you could repeat the request and attach a debugger or throw in some printf() or whatever. How do you do that kind of thing with AI? How do you pinpoint exactly what the problem was?

(Or is this just a stupid idea? Do we have to give up that way of thinking when using AI? Is the era of debuggability over?)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I think your points are pretty clear to me, that’s fine. I’m just seeing if you can perhaps see things a different way maybe?🤔 I would challenge the assertion that you cannot understand how Claude Code generated an output; which I can demonstrate easily with a fairly trivial example by the input:

Write a program in Go that sums a list of numbers from stdin and prints the result.

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, it’s hard to get my point across here. I tried to address that a few paragraphs down.

Yes, I can tinker with AI techniques on a general level. That’s cool but not really my area of interest.

What I certainly can’t do is learn how specific AI products work. I can’t possibly find out why Claude Code produced that particular line of code. Claude is just a magic box that does something and I have to trust it.

@bender@twtxt.net So yeah, no, I do not have an inner monologue at all. Most of the time my inner mind is busy just replaying music or visuals (or at least it used to before I lost my sight, these days it just replays visuals and sounds), but there is never a time when I “talk to myself”, ever, I don’t ever think through something, a problem or an activity and have self-arguments. I just do.

@bender@twtxt.net Fine, Let me answer properly and concretely 😅

Would you want your children not to learn anything, because “they have AI”?

No, children still need to learn. That will never change. What they learn however will over time.

Are you OK with your children using the AI for all of their homework?

Yes, frankly I am. Why? Because much of what we teach them in school is utterly pointless.
For example, learning to read Shakespear never taught me anything useful in my life. I regret much of my school years to be honest.
I leanred to read and write, sure. But I learned Math, Science, Computing and how things work on my own by being very curious.

What sense will it make?

That assumes I answered “no”, which I did not. So it all makes perfect sense :D

What kind of future would that bring for them?

This assumes I said “Yes”, which I did :D It will be an itneresting future that’s for sure. I don’t think we can just bury our heads in teh sand and pretend it’s all going to go away, It will not. It will make things very interesting for sure, as we’re already starting to see what’s possible and what’s changeing. For example; ordinary people are using these LLM(s) to write their legal suit and defense in courts with varying levels of success.

Even if AI were to become omniscient, what will it be of the human race then?

I’m not convinced it ever will. In fact, I am not convinced we know how to create true intellience at all.

What would we do?

What would be so different from say an Alien invasion from far superious beings?
What would we do that? Band together and defend humanity?

Serve the AI? Maintain the AI?

That assumes that “AI” will become intelligent and omniscient, which I don’t believe it ever will.

Would we have found the true meaning of life then?

If the meaning of life is to create our own sub-species liken to ourselves, sure, maybe. But is that even a reality? not sure, I doubt it. We barely understand ourselves at the best of times, let alone how our minds works.

To care for AI, Is that it?

How would this be different to caring for a friend, a family member If we could ever truly reate an actual sentient being with real feelings and intelligenace, is there any reason to worry? Could we not be freinds and have mutual goals and form relationships?

@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 don’t get mad at me, but the long block of text didn’t address any of my questions. 😜😅

@bender@twtxt.net Well no. Some of us don’t. Let me point you at some research on the subject 😅 Some people don’t have an inner monologue

@bender@twtxt.net Now that’s an interesting philosophical viewpoint right there. But this assumes that the “AI” we seemingly have available to us today is actually telligent, understands and has cognitive reasoning. It does not. All of these LLM models from big-tech companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta and Alibaba are all just very powerful, very large multidimensional neural networks with attention that are very good at statistical probabilities of ‘what comes next”. I think we get really upset over the wrong things sometimes. We need to continue to be upset that these 🤬 companies have basically destroyed any meaningful value of the concept of Copyright and Intellectual Property and Works of art. The so-called “AI” we have today is just a tool. Can you say for certain that the typewriter and the computer ruined our ability to write? Perhaps yes, but we still learn how to do so, likewise, I still think that learning to write code, research, read and write are all valuable skills to learn. Later on once you have the basics, you can defer some of the “tedious” work to these models, because frankly, they’re far better at inferencing and pattern matching than you or i will ever be, not because they’re better at pattern-matching per se, but because they have been trained on a very large corpus and they are much much faster at doing the same basic things we are far superior at.

@prologic@twtxt.net when you think, that’s you talking to yourself.

@bender@twtxt.net Nope. Trust me I do not. The only time I do is when I’m reading/writing. I otherwise have no inner monologue when doing anything.

@prologic@twtxt.net let me ask you this. Would you want your children not to learn anything, because “they have AI”? Are you OK with your children using the AI for all of their homework? What sense will it make? What kind of future would that bring for them? We need to analyse the repercussions from all angles, even if AI were to provide absolutely flawless answers every single time. Even if AI were to become omniscient. What will it be of the human race then? What would we do? Serve the AI? Maintain the AI? Would we have found the true meaning of life then? To care for AI. Is that it?

@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.

@arne@uplegger.eu This is interesting. Sorry I missed this, I just found this post of yours and wanted to contribute 😅 Here’s something interesting about me… I don’t ever talk to myself, like ever. I have no, what they call, “inner monologue”. Maybe I’m odd, but my wife asked me this very same question a while back and I said the same, there is never anything in my head except ideas, visuals or sounds, sometimes all at once, but never an inner monologue of “talking to myself”.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I’m very curious…

What I like about this whole computer stuff is that you can explore how
things work. You can dig through problems and solve them. Nothing is
more satisfying than finally understanding something after you scratched
your head for some hours.

Surely you could do the same with AI? Tinker with how it works, study it, understand it, build your own and realize what it really is (without all the big tech hype)?

@klaxzy@klaxzy.net TIL about “Board of Canada”. :-D

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I would take that as a step forward! :-D

@movq@www.uninformativ.de It already broke successfully: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@JeremiahFieldhaven/116654345332213390

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Hahaha! :-D

@bender@twtxt.net You mean to make it all blank? ;-)