Ah, yes, it is!

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org 🎉🎉🎉 @movq@www.uninformativ.de’s is Atom?

This is also why @bender@twtxt.net’s Notes feed was unaffected. It’s an RSS feed.

Aha, yesterday’s newly added support for LC_TIME to render localized timestamps also broke the feed parsing with my LANG=de_DE.UTF-8 and LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 environment. :-)

Atom feeds make use of RFC 3339 timestamps. They are first converted into RFC 882 timestamp representation, which is the one that RSS feeds use. However, this conversion now results in localized RFC 882 timestamps, which cannot be parsed into Unix timestamp numbers via curl_getdate(…). I bet that it doesn’t know about the localization at all and expects English month and weekday names. Looking at its docs, I reckon that function was selected because of its myriad of supported timestamp formats: https://curl.se/libcurl/c/curl_getdate.html RFC 3339 is not included, though, hence the transformation up front.

The intermediate Item objects in the parser domain use std::string for the timestamp representation. This isn’t all that silly, because Newsboat supports all sorts of different feed formats with different timestamp formats. These RFC 883 timestamps are centrally parsed into time_t.

Speaking of time: It’s time to go to bed after this late bug hunting fun. :-)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org maybe the time has come to dust off that https://lyse.isobeef.org/ page? ;-)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org maybe you both are the bots! :-D That aside—which may, or may not be true, LOL—I agree too.

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

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

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

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

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

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh, I understand exactly what you mean. :-) I fully agree with you. And it also completely puzzles me why only so few people share our view.

On further examination, all the articles have the same timestamps. Whenever the feed was fetched. :-O

I might eventually post this on the Fediverse to get more feedback. (Or maybe not. Depends on my mood. 😅)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org (Do you want to be linked on that page? Do you want your name to be there at all? 🤔)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Thanks! There are a few points in there that I’ll add to my list.

Your very first point is obviously crucial. “Writing code” is just the means to an end for many people and they don’t really care about it or like it, so they love AI. I had this in another draft (it refers to the other list I posted):

https://movq.de/v/614f14c3ef/ramble.txt

And this right here is so important:

simplicity is the real art and much harder to achieve.

Finding an elegant, simple solution is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay harder than anything else. And here’s the thing: I don’t get why nerds/techies don’t get “nerd-sniped” by this. A lot of people love building big stuff and then brag about being clever/competent because they were able to build that big thing – but once you realize that this approach is the lazy one, shouldn’t you make finding the elegant solution your goal? Doesn’t that give you more bragging rights?

(Am I being clear? Do you understand what I mean? 😅)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Thanks. I noticed the <updated> of the feed, too. But for some reason, some articles were suddenly marked as new.

On some YouTube feed <entry>s, I noticed updated <updated> fields showing today’s timestamps. But unless there is no <published>, the <updated> is not even considered. I verified that in the source code. Yet, all the affected articles in Newsboat show today’s timestamp, not the years old publication timestamp. I generate the YouTube feeds from the original feeds myself once a day, so I doubt that this is cause by some YouTube shenanigans.

Very weird, it doesn’t make any sense at all. What is going on here? O_o It doesn’t appear that I have duplicates in the database either.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Uhhh, yes, I have one single script to build the website and I ran that while writing that noai.html page. Apart from the global updated field in my feeds (that one got changed), everything else should be stable, though.

Maybe this helps narrow things down? https://movq.de/v/a6b8a0d15f/feed.png

You didn’t change your Atom feed by any chance yesterday or today, @movq@www.uninformativ.de? Not only do I have a metric shitton of “new” old items in my YouTube feeds, but also a bunch of your old articles are shown as new.

I fear that this is a Newsboat bug. I rebuilt it yesterday from master.

Of course, @movq@www.uninformativ.de! Most of my points are also included in your list.

First of all, programming is what I really do enjoy the most. So, it doesn’t make any sense at all to not do this anymore. “But you could use your now free time to do something much cooler and more valuable!”, others might reply. Fuck no, I don’t want to waste my time with other shit that doesn’t fulfill me, why on earth would I want to do that?

All this hallucination reduces quality badly. In my experience, it’s also happening much more rapidly than I expected. Even though developers are still supposed to own and understand whatever has been generated under their name and even be responsible for that, the sad reality is that teammates often blindly trust the AI output. “But I asked the AI and it told me that $this was impossible”, “I’ve no idea either, but the AI just generated it” are responses I get more often. What really makes my angry is when I point out a flaw and suggest an alternative and this is the reaction. It happened several times that just trying it out and seeing it clearly work to proof my point only took me half a minute, but people still did something handwavy else instead.

The learning effect is drastically reduced. The more time I spend on a topic, the better the odds that whatever I learned actually makes it over into long-term memory. It’s like if a collegue just says “do it like that” or “this solves your problem”, but neither explains the why or how. Somehow, people are still convinced that it’s a completely different story when you replace the human counterpart with a computer program in this equation.

Skills are unlearned. It’s like with automation in general, just much worse. You end up in a state where you’ve no clue how anything works under the hood or how to actually find out important information that are needed to solve your problem. You’re screwed when a process breaks out of the blue. Even though it can become also rather terrible, with classical automation you’re typically still be able to decipher how exactly the thing was supposed to do something.

The energy consumption is sooo high, I absolutely do not want to be a part in burning down our planet. I’m sure I find (and probably have long found without knowing) other ways to contribute to worsen our climate crisis.

The scraper part is already covered in detail in your list. :-)

I’m convinced that license and copyright violations are only played down or even refused entirely because companies want to make big money quickly. With the work of others of course. Their double standards are obvious, they still try to actively keep their own stuff secret and out of any training sets. At most for internal use only. Virtually noone in charge is interested in good long-term solutions. Short-term for the win, when disaster eventually strikes, the causers are long gone, the responsibilities in other hands.

Vendor lock-in is something that lots of folks are only realizing very slowly. It’s completely crazy to me. This drug dealer routine should be well-known by now. It’s fucking everywhere. Yet, people are always surprised when they found themselves caught in it.

Adding new AI stuff only increases complexity. But complexity is the enemy that everybody should fear and reduce as much as possible. Of course, this is not limited to AI at all. And everywhere I look around, people in charge looooove to make things way more complicated than they ever need to be. Yet, simplicity is the real art and much harder to achieve.

I don’t understand why we have to go back full force to the ambiguity of natural languages. This alone should be more than enough to realize what a stupid idea all that is. Linked to that is that the “instruction set” is interpreted differently with newer model versions. I mean, is has to be. Why else would somebody want to upgrade in the first place than to get more Powerful™ Features™?

Some people argue that with AI the democratization is empowered. However, in my view, the exact opposite is the case. Models are getting so large that you can basically not run them locally or even train them. So, you have to rely on whatever the vendor offers you and runs for you. In the end, this only gives the owners more power, the multi billionaires. Not exactly what I understand by democratization.

Finally, technology assessments are missing completely. Or they are faked such that mostly only the (questionable) benefits are listed. But all the negative impact is just ignored.

Let’s keep some popcorn around for when this all explodes. :-)

We’re currently at about 28-30°C, but the relative humidity is at a crazy low level of 20%. 😳 This actually feels pretty nice. If it only were always like that …

@arne@uplegger.eu @movq@www.uninformativ.de Typically, I use “I”. But also “one” and, less common, “you”.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yes, this is the tricky bit for sure.

Of course, they say that totally convinced. Until it eventually explodes in their faces and let others clean up after themselves.

@itsericwoordward@itsericwoodward.com @bender@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net Hahaha, it’s working fine in mine. But I cannot use spaces in the nickname. :-)

https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/nick.png

@bender@twtxt.net I have no idea. Probably busy with life ya’know 😅 I’m just as guilty myself.

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

@bender@twtxt.net If you break it, I will fix it 😅

@itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com such a déjà vu! Breaking Yarn’s parser used to be a daily routine. Now it doesn’t happen that often mostly because I have learned what it will cause it to break, and hold myself back. But it is finicky! 😅

@arne@uplegger.eu Lol, indeed, now that you mention it … “You can’t do that!” “You really should $foo.”

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

LOL! You broke my link parser. 😄

https://itsericwoodward.com/images/89ddb9fc.png