thecanine

twtxt.net

Czech IT doggo, tester, webdev, C# programmer and pixelart artist.

In-reply-to » Drawn based on a quick doodle, the canine returns victorious, from the battle of Hot Topic bargain bin, as smug as can be. Whoever will be the first to inform him, the spikes aren't real gold and it's most likely not even leather, meaning it's not what he's really been searching the universe for, better prepare themselves, to be jumped on, bitten and shredded by claws. Media

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org no, as mentioned this “diagonal arrow” eye shape, is usually used for a smug expression. The optional white part, is in this case, where the dogs sclera would be visible, while they have their eyes, like this.
Here is a comparison between a real dog, making the face it is based on, and the exaggerated drawn version.

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Drawn based on a quick doodle, the canine returns victorious, from the battle of Hot Topic bargain bin, as smug as can be.
Whoever will be the first to inform him, the spikes aren’t real gold and it’s most likely not even leather, meaning it’s not what he’s really been searching the universe for, better prepare themselves, to be jumped on, bitten and shredded by claws.

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In-reply-to » Since Google announced their intentions to heavily limit sideloading on Android, starting end of 2026, I've been looking for potential solutions, for this policy change, that threatens the majority of projects I maintain, in some way. Google already killed my browser project years ago, but I have no other choice, than to fight this, any way I can.

@bender@twtxt.net Believe me, I’ve never been more tempted to switch, than now, as Google is one by one, removing (or at last trying to remove) all the reasons why I chose Android, over iOS. In fact, many friends who were fellow “Android diehards”, ended up switching recently.

Sadly what I need is a headphone jack, ability to modify apps on device (decompile, change file, recompile), many specific mods, strong XMPP support, Pixel Station,… nothing switching to iOS, would give me.

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Since Google announced their intentions to heavily limit sideloading on Android, starting end of 2026, I’ve been looking for potential solutions, for this policy change, that threatens the majority of projects I maintain, in some way. Google already killed my browser project years ago, but I have no other choice, than to fight this, any way I can.

The best choice to deal with this, will probably be the Android Debug Bridge, which can be used not only to install apps unrestricted, but also to uninstall, or remove, almost any unnecessary part of the OS. Shizuku, combined with Canta Debloater, is the winning combination for now.

I’ve already removed most Google apps from my device: the annoying AI assistant, the stupid Google app adding the annoying articles, left of your homes screen, Google One, Gboard, Safety app… it’s amazing, no distracting Google slopware, like in the good old Android 2 days! And I absolutely intend to keep it this way, from now on, no new Google apps or services on my devices, unless Google can give me a good enough reason, to allow them there and whenever the app that verifies signatures, to block installing apps not approved by Google, I’ll just remove it from my device and advocate others do so too.

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In-reply-to » How about no longer using in-browser Git repo viewers? Make the AI bots do the work and actually clone the repo.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de this seems like a bit of an overkill, that would also harm modding and power users - who often need to see the exact implementation of new features and benefit from the ability to pull up the history of code changes, in their browser. Sure they could clone the repo and do that locally, but if it has dependencies, they’d also have to clone those, to see how those get updated and it’d soon be a mess.

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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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We use all the Microsoft programs at work - Teams and Outlook especially.

After all kinds of technical problems with Teams, that sometimes go unresolved for over a year, Microsoft shifted their priorities away from fixing things and towards adding an annoying AI Copilot button, that just takes up space and all it does, is loads the website in Teams, so I disabled it. Soon they just add it back, but in a different row of icons, therefore it’s now a different button, you have to disable (I think they added yet another one, to the Teams, on my work phone and I had to disabled that too). Not too long after, the desktop one just enabled itself, because of “an error” and I can disable it, but doing so activates a popup, that begs you to turn it back on, every once in a while. You can’t disable the popup and can only click “Yes” or “Not now” on it. I still keep it disabled, out of principle, but yesterday I noticed yet another Copilot button, this time in the top right corner of my Outlook and this one cannot be disabled, on the business version of Outlook and even on the personal one, it’s only possible to do it through hidden privacy settings, by prohibiting the program from connecting to Microsoft servers, for extra “features”.

There’s people complaining about it online, so it’s clear nobody really wants it, but at this point Microsofts position is that you will have at least one useless AI button on your screen, at any given time, and you will be happy. And yes, their AI sucks and if I absolutely have to use AI for something, there’s already 2 better options, we have access to, at work.

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In-reply-to » Joining the Clippy profile picture club, now that I finally finished my custom one. Media

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Thanks, it’s mostly following the Louis Rossmann thing https://youtu.be/2_Dtmpe9qaQ

- a symbol of protest, against the rapid enshitification the Internet is facing, accelerated to the extreme, during this year. It has reached a point where something really has to be done about it all. Obviously not just everyone changing their profile pictures, but also cataloguing all the consumer rights violations, invasion of privacy, censorship,… to shove it in the face of as many government officials, as possible.

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In-reply-to » @prologic @moveq I think it's mostly the serious lack of competition. All the Android phone manufacturers just use the Google version of Android, bundle in piles of Google bloatware and do whatever Google tells them to. If some of them installed Lineage, or any other versions, with their own stores and rules, or even just offer a less Googly version of their phones, as an option, for more experienced users, Google wouldn't be able, to push everyone around.

@bender@twtxt.net have you seen how many Google apps, get shoved into the new releases of Android. MicroG, Google Play, maybe Chrome is fine, but everything else, I can’t get rid of, is just bloatware to me.

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In-reply-to » RIP Android:

@prologic@twtxt.net @moveq@twtxt.net I think it’s mostly the serious lack of competition. All the Android phone manufacturers just use the Google version of Android, bundle in piles of Google bloatware and do whatever Google tells them to. If some of them installed Lineage, or any other versions, with their own stores and rules, or even just offer a less Googly version of their phones, as an option, for more experienced users, Google wouldn’t be able, to push everyone around.

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In-reply-to » RIP Android:

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @prologic@twtxt.net this is extremely concerning and I hope there is enough push back to stop this! The ability to modify apps, is one of the two biggest reasons, I’m still using Android. If they remove that option, I’ll be forced to switch to one of the de-Googled forks.

That might not be a good solution either, because I need banking and identity verification apps on my main device and already had to get a second device for work, which has tighter sideloading restrictions and I would very much not like to be forced into using three Android phones simultaneously, to do what should be possible, with just one.

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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

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Thanks, glad you like it, but sadly I’m not sure, if there’s still a way, for this particular project, to continue.

Reducing 38 pixels (previous smallest) to 27, inside of a 7x7 square canvas, is a result I’m really happy with. Now it seems I can only shave off single pixels and get a lot worse looking results - to the point it doesn’t even look like my mascot, to me.

There doesn’t seem to be a hard cap for drawing tiny dogs. It’s possible to arrange 5 pixels, in a way someone recognizes them, as some kind of a dog. The record for cats, is currently a single orange pixel: https://youtu.be/gzeK8NKuzmg

The only way to beat that, is either a monitor, with just a single red diode lit, inside one of its pixels, or an image file that’s broken and empty, on purpose.

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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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My website has 0 depreciated tags now and all identical IDs, were merged into a single class. This also improves, how the text on top of the page, is aligned on mobile.

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In-reply-to » QR codes, already posted about them in the last two posts, but I want to hear your hot takes: Should they only be black and white, are they even worth doing in 2025, incorporating them into things,..? Also, finally getting full screen view for avatars in XMPP - a better integrated one, after 25 years. Y@ay! Media

@bender@twtxt.net I think it’s actually a new XEP proposal ( https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0084.html#proto-info ), but it’s still a bit unclear. Sorry for the late and vague response, I’m still trying to test it and see what it’s even about, didn’t yet find a server, that supports it.

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Since Fastly acquired and recently shut down glitch.com, some of my ancient webapps are no longer available, nor do I have any plans to make them available again - all had either zero, or very few monthly visits, used outdated libraries and would be a waste of money, to continue hosting and updating elsewhere.

All art archives remain unaffected and all projects shut down before 2025, were already permanently deleted, but if there’s someone out there, still relying on the recently discontinued projects, somehow - you can reach out and request their source code.

These requests will only be honoured, until the end of this year, when we plan to permanently delete, all of this data (both webapps and files only hosted on Amazons CDN).

Canine out °_°

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In-reply-to » Felt the need to make this stupid reference - nobody will get, most likely. Feel free to guess (the file name and todays date, are both a hint), any other notes and opinions appreciated too, idk if I ever drew a standing one, from the front, before. Media

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Not intended as a vampire thing, at least not this time. 😅 His canine teeth are usually one pixel long, when visible, but on this one, he’s making a face, that makes them more exposed.

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Felt the need to make this stupid reference - nobody will get, most likely. Feel free to guess (the file name and todays date, are both a hint), any other notes and opinions appreciated too, idk if I ever drew a standing one, from the front, before.

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Of Pointlessware and CEOs
Had a moment, to check up on some of the companies, I stopped following, get to The Browser Company and see their newest product - it’s just Chrome, with an AI chat window pop-up and that’s it. Something Canary Chrome, come with already.
I see Theo from T3.gg, making fun of it on YouTube and promoting “his” product - an AI chat app, where you can choose from multiple models, by all the popular AI companies. Something I already have a worse version of, at work and I don’t even use it.
There’s also an interview, about the future of virtual keyboards, surely this is at least actually a real thing and not more pointless horse shit. I check the website of the keyboard SDK, and it’s around 20 identical apps, that just copy the same keyboard SDK/api and slap chatgpt features on top - in the App Store, these are surrounded by chatgpt clones, that just feed the users prompts, into the real thing and put ads, next to the answers.

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QR codes, already posted about them in the last two posts, but I want to hear your hot takes: Should they only be black and white, are they even worth doing in 2025, incorporating them into things,..?
Also, finally getting full screen view for avatars in XMPP - a better integrated one, after 25 years. Y@ay!

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In-reply-to » I sent you my QR code, please respond! Media *for context: long ago, there were some complaints, about some of my sitting drawings, where the legs are apart, not using dithering/more shading and one of my favourite artists, made a video, exploring the use of QR codes, in art P.S.: the code just redirects to my websites

Source of inspiration:
https://youtu.be/TlafDammd6s

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I sent you my QR code, please respond!

*for context: long ago, there were some complaints, about some of my sitting drawings, where the legs are apart, not using dithering/more shading and one of my favourite artists, made a video, exploring the use of QR codes, in art
P.S.: the code just redirects to my websites

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In-reply-to » @thecanine @movq So I actually agree with you! I think Dustin is taking a bit of a "deep and dark" path here (depression), and there are many parallels to other types of activities that we can all talk to. "AI" or "LLM"(s) here should be no different. Use them, Don't use them. I don't really see how it takes away our creativity or critical thinking.

@prologic@twtxt.net What I meant, is that I will not say that someone is not really a writer, if they choose to have what they wrote, ran through some spelling and sentence structure checker, like the one included in MS Word, the average phone keyboard, or on reverso.net - given that they look over the output and make sure the corrections make sense.

Similarly, I won’t complain much, if someone uses AI, to remove backgrounds from images, where the AI can preform this task, as well as a human would and makes sure to check it afterwards, or use ai as a way to sort large quantities of images - usually done for science. An example of this, would be having terabytes of plant photos, from some cities camera system and having an AI analyse them, in an attempt to detect notable changes, like mold, parasites, or the plants needing more water.

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In-reply-to » @thecanine @movq So I actually agree with you! I think Dustin is taking a bit of a "deep and dark" path here (depression), and there are many parallels to other types of activities that we can all talk to. "AI" or "LLM"(s) here should be no different. Use them, Don't use them. I don't really see how it takes away our creativity or critical thinking.

@bender@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net Jokes aside, I don’t think that’s the right approach either. We had spell checkers, since I can remember, as well as other tools, like the smart image select, used mostly to remove backgrounds. These are tools, that just simplify the process of either opening up a dictionary and looking up a word, you can’t remember the spelling of, or the process of placing a billion little dots around the part of an image you want to select - none of these are creative or enjoyable tasks, we already had tools for them, decades before AI. I don’t think we need to go back to cave paintings, to be free of AIs influence on our creative work.

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To follow up what I said minutes ago, they don’t even want you to think of the initial idea, they want you to be a mindless organism, the AI algorithm analyses and tells what you should make, down to the script, so that you get the highest number of people possible to click it and see some AI generated advertisement, blended seemly into what’s no lonher even your work.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/05/netflix-will-show-generative-ai-ads-midway-through-streams-in-2026/
https://youtu.be/dGA6sVaGveU

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In-reply-to » Wanna read something very scary?

@prologic@twtxt.net @movq@www.uninformativ.de I don’t even think the premise of this makes much sense. If an artist is convinced they cannot compete, with the “AI” learning models, we already have today, they must have some self esteem issues, strange opinion on what the purpose of art is, or just be someone mindlessly redrawing already established things and not be all that good at it.

It might be connected to some typically non-artists assumption, that the more time and effort the artwork took to accomplish, the more artistic it is - this can be further twisted in these peoples minds, into the “more pointless detail = more artistic art” meme. AI often ads pointless and illogical details everywhere, “so it’s obviously better, than the human artist, who drew the original”.

Some people just enjoy having the picture they wanted or having the status of an artist to brag about and don’t actually enjoy the artistic process of discovery and small decisions, made while drawing, that shape the outcome into something, only you could have created.

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Buying a TV these days, means trying to avoid endless enshitification:
-Spyware and adware
-Shitty AI upscaling/ frame interpolation
-HW that breaks after 2 - 3 years
-One off OS, dead on arrival
-Android OS, that starts lagging after the third update
-8 buttons worth of ads, on your remote

You probably have to make some kind of a compromise. I thought that was buying from some other brand like Hyundai, but that one also felt into some of those categories and just broke, after less than 3 years of use. At this point I’ll probably go back to LG and hope their HW is still reliable and the rest manageable… It has AI bullshit and knowing LG, probably some spyware you have to try your best to get rid of, can buy a remote with “only” 2 ads on it, some web-based OS shared between all their TVs, that usually gets 4 - 5 years worth of updates and works decently enough afterwards.

At this point, I’ll probably settle for anything that doesn’t literally fall apart, not even 3 years in, like the Hyundai did.

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In-reply-to » We havet an AI assistant at work, new version came out today "nearby restaurant recommendations" mentioned. Gotta try that!

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz yes, both the newsletter and the podcast, from time to time.

@prologic@twtxt.net I was not expecting much, but since the list of restaurants near company buildings, was hard coded into it, I did expect it to at least copy the menu text, from the websites, in its database. Ironically, the only restaurant where it got something right, is the only one, where the websites has the text as a transparent PNG, the AI has to convert to text.

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We havet an AI assistant at work, new version came out today “nearby restaurant recommendations” mentioned. Gotta try that!

Ask it where I can get a burger, knowing there’s 3 spots that had it on the menu, AI says there’s none. Ask it to list all the restaurants nearby it can check… it knows 3, of the 10 or so around, but 1/3, even has a burger, on the menu.

Ask it to list the whole menu at restaurant 1: it hallucinates random meals, none of which they had (I ate there).

Restaurant 2 (the one most people go to, so they must have at least tested it with this one): it lists the soup of the day and ¾ meals available. Incomplete, but better than false.

Restaurant 3: it says “food” and gives a general description of food. You have to be fucking kidding me!

“BuT cAnInE, tHe A(G)i ReVoLuTiOn Is NoW”

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I do not agree with every decision the Internet Archive makes, but I consider it a very important tool, for Internet archival and preservation - to the point, it even influenced what licence I chose, for my media and websites.

Sadly they’re now facing another threat, in the form of litigious music labels, that they’re now trying to convince to stop, by collecting signatures here.

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AI problems, top to bottom:

1: Open AI nerds, believe fine tuning a language model algorithm, will eventually produce an AGI god.

2: Subpar artists and techbros who can’t code, convinced AI image bashing and vibe coding, will help convince the dumber parts of Internet, they are a real deal.

3: Parasites, using AI to scam people, because they just want passive income, selling crap, made by an automated process.

Side: Adobe&co, killing Flash/old web, pricing new artists and developers out, to face learning curves of free tools, or use AI, peddled as solution.

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In-reply-to » @lyse you must be loved by all the web developers in town! But ok, I have added all the missing semicolons, that should technically be there, but them not being there, does not make a difference.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I do agree “the rules of the web”, are far too loose - at least the syntax ones. I do think backwards compatibility is necessary.

As for my website, it might be visually very similar, to how it looked since its creation, many years ago, but it is frequently improved. Features that originally used JavaScript, changed to HTML and CSS components, code simplified, optimised to withstand browser updates and new screen resolutions,… Even a good chunk of the errors on your list, were already addressed and I plan to address the rest soon.

Just find it a bit depressing, that my attempt to bring back some of the old Internet spirit, by making a hidden easteregg page page for this years April 1st, was met with people complaining about April fools day jokes and you insinuating my website sucks.

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In-reply-to » There's a secret art easter egg thing, hidden on my website ( https://thecanine.ueuo.com ), for this years April fools event - it's been there for a few weeks, but now I can finally give hints.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org you must be loved by all the web developers in town! But ok, I have added all the missing semicolons, that should technically be there, but them not being there, does not make a difference.

Font color change inside every summary element, was a very deliberate choice, to color the text, but leave the arrow black (same as website background). But ok, I rewrote the CSS to hide the arrows and make all summaries white - since this also works better, with some dark theme enforcing browser extensions.

HOWEVER “p” as a child element of “summary” is a thing, that as far as I know, all browsers respect and if a font color is applied only once, I don’t think it matters, if it’s done through HTML or CSS, you smart ass.

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Bit of an update, there is now a general licence for all my stuff:

“Unless projects are accompanied by a different license, Creative Commons apply (“BY-NC-ND” for all art featuring the Canine mascot and “BY-NC” for everything else).”

It’s even included on my website, where most of the demand for a clear licence originated from:

In practice this changes nothing, as I was never enforcing anything more than this anyway and given permission for other use too. Now it’s just official that this is the baseline, of what can be done, without having to ask for permission first.

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