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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 » 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.

@bender@twtxt.net to work through both https and gemini, the site is not written in HTML, but in Gemtext, automatically converted to HTML, when needed. Gemtext is nicely explained for example here: https://garden.bouncepaw.com/hypha/gemtext . In short, it is so limited, no line can be more than one thing, so no links in a list are possible, othar than doing it through something like this primitive workaround.

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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.

Also, did you intended for the page title to be simply “home”?

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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.

Any feedback is welcome!

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Jeremy Renner Accused of Threatening to Call ICE on Chinese Filmmaker Yi Zhou After Misconduct Allegations. Chinese filmmaker Yi Zhou claims Avengers star Jeremy Renner threatened to call ICE after she confronted him over alleged misconduct and sending explicit images ⌘ Read more

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


 and now I just read @bender@twtxt.net’s other post that said the Gemini text was a shortened version, so I might have criticized things that weren’t true for the full version. Okay, sorry, I’m out. (And I won’t play that game, either. Don’t send me another AI output, possibly tweaked to address my criticism. That is besides the point and not worth my time.)

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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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In-reply-to » @prologic when I first "fed" the text to Gemini, I asked for a three paragraphs summary. It provided it. Then I asked to "elaborate on three areas: user experience, moral/political impact, and technical/legal concerns". The reply to that is too long for a twtxt.

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.

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In-reply-to » You do raise very good points though, but I don't think any of this is particularly new because there are many other examples of technology and evolution of change over time where people have forgotten certain skills like for example, changing a car tyre

@prologic@twtxt.net when I first “fed” the text to Gemini, I asked for a three paragraphs summary. It provided it. Then I asked to “elaborate on three areas: user experience, moral/political impact, and technical/legal concerns”. The reply to that is too long for a twtxt.

I then asked to counter the OP opinions—as in “how would you counter the author’s opinion?”. The reply was very long, but started like this:

“That’s an excellent question, as the post lays out some very strong, well-reasoned criticisms. Countering these points requires acknowledging the valid concerns while presenting a perspective focused on mitigation, responsible integration, and the unique benefits of AI.”

What followed was extensive, so I asked for a summary, which didn’t do justice to the wall of text that preceded it.

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In-reply-to » Thoughts/Opinions on Cap đŸ€”

@prologic@twtxt.net hehehe, yeah, it isn’t mine neither. Most obscure TLDs are in small registrars. I like to stick to one register (even though when Google Domains ceased to exist I was forced to have two, as Cloudflare doesn’t support the .ONE TLD).

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In-reply-to » Thoughts/Opinions on Cap đŸ€”

@bender@twtxt.net I think that’s where it sends the capture verification requests. It’s based on PoW, so it has to perform validation somehow. It actually looks pretty decent as far as a way to prevent spam/abuse of forms on the open web (e.g: Waitlist on SnipMail).

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Thoughts/Opinions on Cap đŸ€”

The modern, open-source CAPTCHA

Lightweight, self-hosted, privacy-friendly, and designed to put you first. Switch from reCAPTCHA in minutes.

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

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

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

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In-reply-to » Bavaria is moving to the Microsoft cloud: The state government intends to conclude a contract with the US corporation by the end of the year for the use of the cloud office package Microsoft 365.

@bender@twtxt.net It’s sad. Remember that Munich once ran the LiMux project. 😞

We could build a strong IT sector in Germany or the EU, but we just don’t want to.

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

@movq@www.uninformativ.de this I find more worrisome, and saw no mention of it on your text: Right-Wing Chatbots Turbocharge America’s Political and Cultural Wars (gift article).

Enoch, one of the newer chatbots powered by artificial intelligence, promises “to ‘mind wipe’ the pro-pharma bias” from its answers. Another, Arya, produces content based on instructions that tell it to be an “unapologetic right-wing nationalist Christian A.I. model.”

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In-reply-to » For the innocent bystanders (because I know that I won’t change @bender’s opinion):

And, one last missed:

  • AI is Forcing Legal Modernization: The copyright double standard is a failure of outdated law. AI provides the necessary impetus for legal reform to either create fair compensation frameworks for creators or establish a clear new definition of fair use for data-driven models.

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In-reply-to » For the innocent bystanders (because I know that I won’t change @bender’s opinion):

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Gemini liked your opinion very much. Here is how it countered:

1. The User Perspective (Untrustworthiness)

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

  • AI as a Force Multiplier: AI should be treated as a high-speed drafting and brainstorming tool, not an authority. For experts, it offers an immense speed gain, shifting the work from slow manual creation to fast critical editing and verification.
  • The Rise of AI Literacy: Users must develop a new skill—AI literacy—to critically evaluate and verify AI’s probabilistic output. This skill, along with improving citation features in AI tools, mitigates the “gaslighting” effect.
2. The Moral/Political Perspective (Skill Erosion)

The fear of skill loss is based on a misunderstanding of how technology changes the nature of work; it’s skill evolution, not erosion.

  • Shifting Focus to High-Level Skills: Just as the calculator shifted focus from manual math to complex problem-solving, AI shifts the focus from writing boilerplate code to architectural design and prompt engineering. It handles repetitive tasks, freeing humans for creative and complex challenges.
  • Accessibility and Empowerment: AI serves as a powerful democratizing tool, offering personalized tutoring and automation to people who lack deep expertise. While dependency is a risk, this accessibility empowers a wider segment of the population previously limited by skill barriers.
3. The Technical and Legal Perspective (Scraping and Copyright)

The legal and technical flaws are issues of governance and ethical practice, not reasons to reject the core technology.

  • Need for Better Bot Governance: Destructive scraping is a failure of ethical web behavior and can be solved with better bot identification, rate limits, and protocols (like enhanced robots.txt). The solution is to demand digital citizenship from AI companies, not to stop AI development.

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In-reply-to » @lyse believe it or not, I imagined the whole thing in my head, and kind of ROFLMAO. I am sure it was much, much less funny in real life. So, sorry! :-P

@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.

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In-reply-to » @lyse don’t German regulations require the country in which it was made to be clearly noted on the product? These days everyone is cheapening their craft. Don’t be surprised if it is, indeed, wholly Germanium.

@bender@twtxt.net Not sure, if we actually have a law like that. But I wish it was the case. The clamp doesn’t say anything like that, just that it is now cactus.

The glue takes three days to reach its final strength. Let’s see. I’m sceptical.

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In-reply-to » Winning animations (TkSol’s timing is screwed up): https://movq.de/v/92d7758740

Wow, the memories those brought! Thank you! Fo brief moments I was transported to the early 1990s.

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In-reply-to » sorry i haven't been working on bbycll or even hanging around twtxt much at all as of late -- gf was over for a few weeks, i turned twenty years old, and have been doing extremely unnecessary things to my website

@zvava@twtxt.net happy belated birthday! Also, I would love to see that website. I went to the one listed on your profile, and saw the old one, not this one. I like the current, and also the pink look of the one of the screenshot!

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In-reply-to » Grrrrr
eat, one of my Bessey spring clamps broke. Ripped the arm right in half. I wouldn't be surprised if it's just designed in Germany but actually made out of Chinesium. :-( I will attempt to glue it back together with two component adhesive tomorrow, but I don't have high hopes.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org don’t German regulations require the country in which it was made to be clearly noted on the product? These days everyone is cheapening their craft. Don’t be surprised if it is, indeed, wholly Germanium.

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In-reply-to » I'm building a service that lets you:

@prologic@twtxt.net I requested an invitation. There are many like this, so it will be interesting to see how it develops. I also hope you are not hosting this on your infrastructure, at least not once you decide to monetise. I know self hosting is fun and all, but it also introduces variables that directly collide with a business model.

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Trump Weighs Options, and Risks, for Attacks on Venezuela - President Trump has yet to make a decision, but his advisers are pressing a range of objectives — from attacking drug cartels to seizing oil fields — to try to justify ousting Nicolás Maduro. ⌘ Read more

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Grrrrr
eat, one of my Bessey spring clamps broke. Ripped the arm right in half. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s just designed in Germany but actually made out of Chinesium. :-( I will attempt to glue it back together with two component adhesive tomorrow, but I don’t have high hopes.

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Design trends I think will take off in 2026
but tierlist

S - move from flat design to more detailed, 3D, more complex logos.

A - glass, not just liquid, Windows Vista, 7, 11,
 accessibility concerns, but I like to see it.

B-/C+ - black and white icons, favicons. I did it before it was cool, but it’s getting overused.

E - gradientslop, barely started, already all blends together.

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In-reply-to » It happened.

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

There are going to be many discussions about this 


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

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I’m building a service that lets you:

create and manage disposable, brandable email aliases so you can track leaks, forward important messages, and keep your real inbox clean.

I’ve just finishing building it for the most part, and have cut a v0.1.0 release. It’s currently closed source (to be decided later) and now open to beta testers. cc @bender@twtxt.net 🙏 I fully intend to monetize and offer this as a paid service in teh coming weeks/months, but beta/invite-only testers and early adopters/users first đŸ€Ÿ

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The XMPP Standards Foundation: XMPP Summit 28
The XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF) is exited to announce the 28th XMPP Summit taking place in Brussels, Belgium next year - just before FOSDEM 2026.
The XSF invites everyone interested in development of the XMPP protocol to attend, and discuss all things XMPP - both in person and remotely!

The XMPP Summit

The XMPP Summit is a two-day event for the people who write and implement XMPP extensions (XEPs).
The event is no 
 ⌘ Read more

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sorry i haven’t been working on bbycll or even hanging around twtxt much at all as of late – gf was over for a few weeks, i turned twenty years old, and have been doing extremely unnecessary things to my website

work in progress

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** Autumnal week notes **
Someone I grew up with happened to go to the same college as me, and now we happen to live in the same relatively small city. We’ve been totally casual but pretty consistent mainstays of each others’ lives for going on 20 years at this point. She’s also one of the few people that I run into who knows that I can’t actually see well enough to reliably tell people apart from any further away than like 4 or 5 feet, and I always feel really appreciative whenever she waves that she also always says“hi” and who 
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In-reply-to » Scheduling the next Yarn.social Call for next month, a month in advance. Hope y'all can make the next one đŸ€ž

It is always awesome to have a few minutes to converse, at least once I month. I will not miss one, adding it to my calendar. I mean, if we were neighbours you (or wife) would probably have to kick me out of your house, so it’s good I am really far, and a once a month call suffices. đŸ€Ł

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