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

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

”`python
import py5

def setup():

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

def draw():

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

def key_pressed():

py5.save('out.png')

py5.run_sketch()

”`

Image

Using #Python’s #pathlib to compare two repos and get back some missing files from a “recovered” version of a repo (mostly stuff in .gitignore that is handy not to discard right now).

from pathlib import Path

a = Path('sketch-a-day')
b = Path('sketch-a-day_broken')

files_a =  {p.relative_to(a) for p in a.rglob('*')
    if '.git' not in str(p)
    if 'cache' not in str(p)
    if 'checkpoint' not in str(p)
}
files_b =  {p.relative_to(b) for p in b.rglob('*')
    if '.git' not in str(p)
    if 'cache' not in str(p)
    if 'checkpoint' not in str(p)
}
missing = files_b - files_a

for p in missing:
    (b / p).rename((a / p))

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe it was a mess, we are better without it. Until a new mobile client comes (not holding my breath), Yarn is very usable on the mobile, just using the browser.

Webp, though it has been around for a long while, wasn’t fully supported on all browsers until recently. The other formats has been in use for such a long time, proving to work just fine, that the advantages Webp provides haven’t been seemingly enough to merit a switch.

Google is also the one behind Webp, and, well, people don’t trust, nor like, them much.

Webp, though it has been around for a long while, wasn’t fully supported on all browsers until recently. The other formats have been in use for such a long time, proving to work just fine, that the advantages Webp provides haven’t been seemingly enough to merit a switch.

Google is also the one behind Webp, and, well, people don’t trust, nor like, them much.

@zvava@twtxt.net I figure I will know when it is ready, the day I see you using it. Can’t wait! :-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de lovely, thanks for sharing! Now you know what I will be using today on a loop.

Conheço alguém que use os serviços da Infomaniak? Que tal a experiência?

Use more WebP, I guess.

• Lossless PNG, 635 kB: https://movq.de/v/b239c54838/scrot.png
  
• Lossless WebP, 469 kB: https://movq.de/v/b239c54838/scrot.webp
  
• Lossy WebP, 110 kB: https://movq.de/v/b239c54838/scrot%2Dlossy.webp
  
• Lossy JPEG, 110 kB: https://movq.de/v/b239c54838/scrot%2Dlossy.jpg

@prologic@twtxt.net Here you go:

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

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

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

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

Torvalds: No.

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

Torvalds: Oh. Apparently I was spot on.

But it is weird that none of the slot plates (that I can find) appear to have the correct pin order. 🤔

The two mainboards I have here use this order:

2468x
13579

But the slot plates use this:

12345
6789x

I tripped over this at first and wondered why it didn’t work.

Has this changed recently or what? 🥴

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

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

@prologic@twtxt.net Bwahahaha! I tried to establish some form of “convention” for commit messages at work (not exactly what you linked to, though), but it’s a lost cause. 😂 Nobody is following any of that. Nobody wants to invest time in good commit messages. People just want to get stuff done.

I’m just glad that 80% are at least somewhat useful – instead of “wip” or “shit i screwed up”.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I couldn’t agree more! I think good commit messages are very useful, however, and I’d much prefer the conventional mood style for Commit messages, but rather prefer telling a story rather than this weird syntax all over the shop!

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe Are you using your Gitea username instead of got@ ? Are you forwarding auth?

@prologic@twtxt.net he uses subdomains. Which do you think the identity be associated with? (hint, “it is not so hard!”).

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

@itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com Nice to see someone else also participating! 🥳

(Btw, they don’t want us to share our inputs: https://www.reddit.com/r/adventofcode/wiki/faqs/copyright/inputs/ Yeah, it’s a bit annoying. I also have to do quite a bit of filtering on my repo …)

FWIW, day 03 and day 04 where solved on SuSE Linux 6.4:

https://movq.de/v/faaa3c9567/day03.jpg

https://movq.de/v/faaa3c9567/day04%2Dv3.jpg

Performance really is an issue. Anything is fast on a modern machine with modern Python. But that old stuff, oof, it takes a while … 😅

Should have used C or Java. 🤪 Well, maybe I do have to fall back on that for later puzzles. We’ll see.

@bender@twtxt.net Nothing will make me use Discord, though. 😅 Not voluntarily.

@prologic@twtxt.net I couldn’t find the exact blog post from before, one that used redirection directives in its nginx config. but I found [this one ](https://melkat.blog/p/unsafe-pricing#:~:text=Something%20else%20I’ve%20been%20doing%20this%20year,%20fine.) mentioning a similar process but done differently.

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

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

@prologic@twtxt.net
Interesting experiment for salty-chat, use the MQTT protocol instead of HTTP, in theory it shouldn’t make a difference, at least

Before smartphones people used to use the Sony Camcorders, but even though they still exist today, they’re uber expensive 😂

@prologic@twtxt.net Using your own language?! That’s really nice! I hope you get home soon so you can give the code a try. 😅

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

mu is:

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

Key syntax:

• Functions use fn and braces:
  

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

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

x := 10
x = x + 1

• Control flow includes if / else and while:
  

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

while x < 10 {
    x = x + 1
}

• Lists and maps:
  

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

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

Supported types:

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

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

“The Internet Used To Be A Place”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYlcUbLAFmw

@movq@www.uninformativ.de yeah, you fetched it too quickly, it was edited seconds after picking the wrong image. LOL. Which brings us back in a whole, huge circle, to twtxt edits, and how to handle them. 😅

Advent of Code 2025 starts tomorrow. 🥳🎄

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

Image

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Damn. That was stupid of me. I should have posted examples using 2026-03-01 as cutoff date. 😂

In my actual test suite, everything uses 2027-01-01 and then I have this, hoping that that’s good enough. 🥴

def test_rollover():
    d = jenny.HASHV2_CUTOFF_DATE
    assert len(jenny.make_twt_hash(URL, d - timedelta(days=7), TEXT)) == 7
    assert len(jenny.make_twt_hash(URL, d - timedelta(seconds=3), TEXT)) == 7
    assert len(jenny.make_twt_hash(URL, d - timedelta(seconds=2), TEXT)) == 7
    assert len(jenny.make_twt_hash(URL, d - timedelta(seconds=1), TEXT)) == 7
    assert len(jenny.make_twt_hash(URL, d, TEXT)) == 12
    assert len(jenny.make_twt_hash(URL, d + timedelta(seconds=1), TEXT)) == 12
    assert len(jenny.make_twt_hash(URL, d + timedelta(seconds=2), TEXT)) == 12
    assert len(jenny.make_twt_hash(URL, d + timedelta(seconds=3), TEXT)) == 12
    assert len(jenny.make_twt_hash(URL, d + timedelta(days=7), TEXT)) == 12

(In other words, I don’t care as long as it’s before 2027-01-01. 😏😅)

I have to say. A well designed Hypermedia Driven Web Application such as yarnd‘ using HTMX is just as good, i'd not better, than one written in React.

As someone that almost exclusively uses “Discover”, that is. If you do use it like I do, you know I mean.

I think i may have fixed threading too but can’t easily test now as i’ve left for my
holiday and don’t really use Mastodon 😂

I’m kind of tired of late of telling support folks, for example, ym registrar, how to do their fucking goddamn jobs 🤦‍♂️

Hi James,

Thank you for your patience.

There are several reasons why a .au domain registration might fail or be cancelled, including inaccurate registrant information, ineligibility for a .au domain licence, or issues related to Australian law.

For a full list of possible reasons, please see this article: https://support.onlydomains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/6415278890141-Why-has-my-au-domain-registration-been-cancelled

If you believe none of these reasons apply to your case, please let us know so we can investigate further.

Best regards,

Yes, so tell me support person, why the fuck did it fail?! 🤬

I have a question! I’m looking for a small personal camera(specifically good for videos because that’s what I’ll use it for) that’s cheap enough for a teen to afford but also actually good. Do any of you tech people have any good recs?

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

PSA: Just in case you start getting 5xxs on my end, I’m not dead 😂 (well, unless I am). Well be changing ISPs and hopefully get the new line up and running before the old provider cuts us off.

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Yeah and I think I can basically pull the crowssec rules every N interval right and use this to make blocking decisions? – I’ve actually considered this part of a completely new WAF design that I just haven’t built yet (just designing it).

@prologic@twtxt.net I remember reading a blog-post where someone has been throwing redirects to some +100GB files (usually used for speed testing purposes) at a swarm of bots that has been abusing his server in order to criple them, but I can’t find it anymore. I’m pretty sure I’ve had it bookmarked somewhere.

Anyone on my pod (twtxt.net) finding the new Filter(s) useful at all? 🤔

Tired to re-enable the Ege route to git.mills.io today (after finishing work) and this is what I found 🤯 Tehse asshole/cunts are still at it !!! 🤬 – So let’s instead see if this works:

$ host git.mills.io 1.1.1.1
Using domain server:
Name: 1.1.1.1
Address: 1.1.1.1#53
Aliases:

git.mills.io is an alias for fuckoff.mills.io.
fuckoff.mills.io has address 127.0.0.1

PS: Would anyone be interested if I started a massive global class action suit against companies that do this kind of abusive web crawling behavior, violate/disregards robots.txt and whatever else standards that are set in stone by the W3C? 🤔

Today during class we built a small example showing #random vs. #PerlinNoise
#Processing #Python py5

Image

@zvava@twtxt.net I am waiting for that v1, so that I can start using it. 🙏🏻

When I try to login to PayPal I now see:

Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker

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

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

#PayPal #Ads

construir coisas na internet passou a ter premissas tão complexas que uma pessoa se esquece de como se fazia. Ando a re-adoptar esta metodologia, que hoje em dia já soa a punk

(entrevista com o Joshua Schachter, criador do del.icio.us)

Image

I just noticed this pattern:

uninformativ.de 201.218.xxx.xxx - - [22/Nov/2025:06:53:27 +0100] "GET /projects/lariza/multipass/xiate/padme/gophcatch HTTP/1.1" 301 0 "" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
www.uninformativ.de 103.10.xxx.xxx  - - [22/Nov/2025:06:53:28 +0100] "GET http://uninformativ.de/projects/lariza/multipass/xiate/padme/gophcatch HTTP/1.1" 400 0 "" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"

Let me add some spaces to make it more clear:

    uninformativ.de 201.218.xxx.xxx - - [22/Nov/2025:06:53:27 +0100] "GET                       /projects/lariza/multipass/xiate/padme/gophcatch HTTP/1.1" 301 0 "" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
www.uninformativ.de 103.10.xxx.xxx  - - [22/Nov/2025:06:53:28 +0100] "GET http://uninformativ.de/projects/lariza/multipass/xiate/padme/gophcatch HTTP/1.1" 400 0 "" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"

Some IP (from Brazil) requests some (non-existing, completely broken) URL from my webserver. But they use the hostname uninformativ.de, so they get redirected to www.uninformativ.de.

In the next step, just a second later, some other IP (from Nepal) issues an HTTP proxy request for the same URL.

Clearly, someone has no idea how HTTP redirects work. And clearly, they’re running their broken code on some kind of botnet all over the world.

Bimbo Free Use (Agoppdki) [Original Character] ⌘ Read more

17, 21, and 22 are my favourites. Thank you for sharing! On 17, the pulley might be dangerously hanging, but if you manage to make it work, you will have a couple of nails to use! :-D

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

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

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

Reze deals with denji using her own methods(Totonito) [Chainsawman] ⌘ Read more

@arne@uplegger.eu @lukas@lukasthiel.de In fact, Yarn.social’s yarnd client implementation actually uses (or did, still kinda does today) PicoCSS 🤟 It was/is a good CSS library! 👍

Python Launches DEI Marketing Campaign
First Python refused to stop discriminatory policies & turned down $1.5 Million from the US Government. ⌘ Read more

Miku’s Holes Are Free To Be Used (to bari) [Vocaloid] ⌘ Read more

** SQL Injection: Listing Database Contents on Non-Oracle Databases**

Image

UNION-based SQL injection used to enumerate database tables, extract credential columns, dump usernames and passwords, and log in as the…

[Continue reading on I … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net oh dear god. Keep us posted! 😅

How to Find P1 Bugs using Google in your Target — (Part-2)

Image

Earn rewards with this simple method.

[Continue reading on InfoSec Write-ups »](https://infosecwriteups.com/how-to-find-p1-bugs-using-google-in-your-target-part-2-d37a9bb0b2e7?sour … ⌘ Read more

No, I was using an empty hash URL when the feed didn’t specify a url metadata. Now I’m correctly falling back to the feed URL.

@prologic@twtxt.net And none of them use Yarn-style threading. I don’t think they’re aware of us, they’re probably using plain twtxt. Other than one hit by @threatcat@tilde.club a few days ago, I’ve seen no traffic from them. 🤔

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

I used Gemini (the Google AI) twice at work today, asking about Google Workspace configuration and Google Cloud CLI usage (because we use those a lot). You’d think that it’d be well-suited for those topics. It answered very confidently, yet completely wrong. Just wrong. Made-up CLI arguments, whatever. It took me a while to notice, though, because it’s so convincing and, well, you implicitly and subconsciously trust the results of the Google AI when asking about Google topics, don’t you?

Will it get better over time? Maybe. But what I really want is this:

• Good, well-structured, easy-to-read, proper documentation. Google isn’t doing too bad in this regard, actually, it’s just that they have so much stuff that it’s hard to find what you’re looking for. Hence …
  
• … I want a good search function. Just give me a good fuzzy search for your docs. That’s it.
  

I just don’t have the time or energy to constantly second-guess this stuff. Give me something reliable. Something that is designed to do the right thing, not toy around with probabilities. “AI for everything” is just the wrong approach.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Well, they say you have to build up stocks, don’t they? 😅

The font is fiamf3 (scaled up 2x, it would be too small when printed). It’s the same one that I use in my terminal and the status bars. 😃

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

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

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

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

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

Image

What a reporter found when she investigated US military strikes on Venezuelan drug boats ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net No plus-aliases, just aliases. The mailserver runs on my OpenBSB box and is managed using BundleWrap (we use that at work), so to create a new alias, I push a new BundleWrap config to the server.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de what do you use? Is it plus-aliased emails? I am curious to know how others are accomplishing this. I am currently using the “Hide my Email” feature, from iCloud.

Germany and the United Kingdom have warned of the growing threat posed by Russian and Chinese space satellites, which have been regularly spotted spying on satellites used by Western powers ⌘ Read more

Thank you for https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-11-09/0/POSTING-en.html, @movq@www.uninformativ.de! I never configured systemd timers, but I would have gotten it wrong, too. Good to know when I eventually stumble across that in the future. I’m still using cron. Yeah, its field order sucks and I always have to look it up (because I don’t deal with that all that often). Indeed, systemd’s order sounds more reasonable.

**How I Used AI to Become Someone Else (And Why Your Face Is No Longer Your Password) **

Image

Free Link 🎈

[Continue reading on InfoSec Write-ups »](https://infosecwriteups.com/how-i-used-ai-to-b … ⌘ Read more

Time-of-check Time-of-use (TOCTOU) Race Condition Leads to Broken Authentication | Critical Finding ⌘ Read more

White House denies Hungary’s claim of “indefinite” exemption from US sanctions on Russian energy ⌘ Read more

North Korea Vows “Offensive Moves” After US Carrier Docks in South Korea ⌘ Read more

Japan eyes nuclear subs after U.S. gives OK to S. Korea ⌘ Read more

I just successfully used my own SnipMail service with a real business, whoohoo! 🥳

US Exempts Hungary From Russian Oil Sanctions, Bloomberg Reports ⌘ Read more

Earth ‘can no longer sustain’ intensive fossil fuel use, Lula tells COP30 ⌘ Read more

@thecanine@twtxt.net looks good! Was the use of asterisks instead of <li> a concerted choice (it doesn’t look intended, but I might be wrong)? With CSS you can replace bullets on lists with whatever you want.

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!

@prologic@twtxt.net He’ll be probably back in a few days or weeks I reckon. It’s not the first time that his raspi (or what hardware does he use again?) is down. :-)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But it sure looks convincing, doesn’t it?

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

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

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.

Source: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Bavaria-wants-to-move-to-Microsoft-cloud-by-year-end-11066929.html

🎉🎉🎉

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@movq@www.uninformativ.de using gopher also limits tenth fold the amount of bystanders you will get. I think a finger .plan would probably have a bigger audience. :-D :-P

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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@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.

It happened.

Management asked me if I’m using enough AI and what I’m doing to learn more about it.

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